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On Monday afternoon, dozens of people sat down in front of the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s Manhattan office. Shedding their casual-business attire, they revealed matching shirts that read “FUND PEOPLE NOT BOMBS”.

They were some of hundreds of protesters – including Chelsea Manning, actor Hannah Einbinder and artist Molly Crabapple – to tell Gillibrand and the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer that they disapprove of the US sending more weapons to Israel, as the two countries wage wars in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. Nearly a hundred protesters, including Manning, actor Hari Nef and New York congressional candidate Darialeza Avila Chevalier, were arrested after the group shut down traffic on Third Avenue.

The action, coordinated by Jewish Voice for Peace, About Face: Veterans Against the War and several other groups, called on the senators to back a vote scheduled for today on joint resolutions of disapproval, introduced by the senator Bernie Sanders in March, to block sending hundreds of millions of dollars in bombs and bulldozers to Israel. This is the fourth such vote; Schumer and Gillibrand have held out in the past. Another war powers resolution vote, which affects not just war on Middle East states but potential warfare against Venezuela, Cuba or Greenland, is also set for today.

Monday’s protest was one of hundreds across the United States – and around the world, including in Israel – against US war-making in the weeks since Trump and Israel’s war on Iran began. At the No Kings protests in late March, countless protesters held signs or chanted about the bombings on Iran. In recent months, protesters have consistently questioned the ballooning US funds put toward war amid the administration’s deportation spree, federal funding cuts to public benefits, civil rights rollbacks for immigrants and LBGTQ+ people, unprecedented income inequality and ongoing attacks on Palestine.

“New Yorkers are sick and tired of hearing that there’s not enough money for their childcare, their healthcare, and yet every day we wake up and watch billions of dollars being spent on slaughter,” said Chevalier, who has organized in the city around immigration and Palestine, at Monday’s protest.

Polling backs that up: the war is measurably unpopular, hovering at roughly 50% of people opposed since its start; many voters lack confidence in the president’s approach to Iran, doubting he has a plan to bring the conflict to an end.

“The phones in Congress were ringing off the hook when the US went to war with Iran,” said Bridget Moix, general secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is aligned with Quaker values of pacifism. On Tuesday, FCNL hosted hundreds of people from across the country for a lobby day on Capitol Hill, calling for “No War at Home or Abroad”.

Though the vote on joint resolutions of disapproval is unlikely to succeed, according to organizers, they hope to pressure Democratic holdouts to connect funding Israel’s arms sales to the unpopularity of the war on Iran.

Many election postmortems established that Democrats lost credibility with voters in the 2024 election due to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s support, including materially, for Israel. According to a memo shared last week with Democratic National Committee members citing recent polling from Data for Progress and the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, if Democratic leadership refuses to stand strongly against American war-making, including alongside Israel, they risk losses in future races.

Republicans face backlash for failing to come out adequately against the war and providing weapons to Israel, IMEU Policy Project communications director Hamid Bendaas said.

“Trump 2024 voters – which, yes, is Republicans, but it’s also right-leaning independents, irregular voters, people who might have voted for Biden in 2020 and then flipped to Trump, especially among young men – that’s the coalition that they would need to hold together to succeed in November and in 2028 as well, and I think that has completely shattered by this war,” Bendaas said.

Both Moix and Bendaas compared current antiwar sentiment to the era of the war in Iraq – and how that has drastically shifted in hindsight. “Many members of Congress came around and regretted their votes for [the Iraq] war,” said Moix.

Recent acts of civil disobedience have not been restricted to targeting elected officials on particular legislative efforts. Both the joint resolutions of disapproval and war powers resolution votes are scheduled for tax day in the US, where there is increasing interest in withholding income tax to protest government spending on war or federal immigration enforcement – a longtime form of antiwar resistance.

For Nef, Monday’s action was the first time she risked arrest. “I think you have to do a lot of mental gymnastics these days not to feel absolutely insane about what’s happening geopolitically,” she said. “Putting your body on the line is the most powerful articulation of your beliefs, and that’s what I’m willing to do today.”