The two holdouts, Sens. Maggie Hassan and Richard Blumenthal, have canceled meetings with activists and favored their districts’ weapons manufacturers.
The meeting was scheduled for August 11 at the Manchester, New Hampshire, office of Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. After numerous requests for a huddle with Hassan to demand that she change course in her unconditional support for Israel, a group of peace activists had finally locked in a time — not with her, but at least with one of her foreign policy staffers.
The group of 22, composed of professors, veterans, students, artists, and a farmer from New Hampshire, was prepared to give the staffer three demands for their senator to support: a ceasefire in Gaza, a surge in humanitarian aid, and an arms embargo on Israel. They also wanted answers for why, just weeks before, she had voted to send Israel more weapons.
“We were just a coalition of constituents and people who are concerned about the situation in Palestine,” said Chris Balch, a New Hampshire activist who helped organize the meeting. “We were going in there to try to reason with our representative.”
The weekend before the meeting, the staffer reached out to Balch and canceled it, citing a scheduling conflict, according to an email the staffer sent to Balch. “I was absolutely furious,” Balch said. “Maggie Hassan has essentially built a wall between herself and the constituents that is almost impossible to get over now.” A constituent who did manage to get a meeting described it as “useless.”
Hassan is one of only three of New England’s 12 senators who still unconditionally support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Peace organizers, drawing on the region’s strong history of anti-war activism, have had success lobbying New Hampshire’s senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, and have hopes of replacing Maine Republican Susan Collins with anti-war veteran Graham Platner.
However, Hassan and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s offices have canceled or ignored requests to meet with organizers.
Instead, Hassan and Blumenthal have favored relationships with New England’s weapons and military equipment manufacturing base.
“I cannot defend the indefensible.”
For the first time in recent history, a majority of Democratic senators have voted against sending more arms to Israel, a departure from years of unconditional party support.
On July 30, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders forced a vote on two Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) for the sale of 20,000 Colt automatic rifles to the Israel National Police, and tens of thousands of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel.
Alongside Senate Republicans, Hassan and Blumenthal were the only Democratic senators from New England who voted against both resolutions, allowing the sales to go forward.
“The United States must not be complicit,” said Sen. Ed Markey from Massachusetts, who had voted in April 2024 to send Israel $14 billion in weapons.
Sen. Shaheen of New Hampshire, the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, voted in favor of blocking the sales of rifles and 1,000-pound bombs in July. As recently as April, Shaheen had voted against a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that would have blocked a weapons sale to Israel.
In Connecticut, Sen. Chris Murphy also changed his position, voting in favor of blocking the weapons sales in July. “The images of children starving to death as a famine unfolds across Gaza shock anyone with a conscience,” Murphy said in a July release.
While Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the only Republican senator in New England, voted for the weapons sales, her Independent colleague, Sen. Angus King, voted to block the sales. “I cannot defend the indefensible,” said King in a July release, having previously voted in April to sell weapons to Israel.
Hassan, who declined a request for an interview on this story, wrote in a July 30 press release after voting against the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval that “blocking these arms sales would not end the starvation but would embolden Hamas and undermine Israel’s security.”
Amy Antonucci, the board chair of New Hampshire Peace Action, which has had meetings with both Hassan and Shaheen, said that while “Shaheen has drastically changed her position,” “Maggie Hassan remains extremely stuck in her position that we must support Israel at all costs, even if the cost includes the lives of Palestinians.”
New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan
Within weeks of taking office in 2017, Hassan sided with Israel by cosponsoring a resolution objecting to United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and occupied Palestine.
In May 2020, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was seeking unilateral annexation of the West Bank, Hassan sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in which she stated that she would “like to pass along my concern with certain provisions.” Her concern, as stated in the letter, was with “annexing key territories without bilateral communication and support.”
Hassan has gone to Israel to meet with Netanyahu twice, including in August 2023. Between 2019 and 2024, Hassan took $153,907 in campaign contributions from JStreetPAC, as well as $77,650 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and $43,300 from Pro-Israel America PAC, all pro-Israel lobbying groups, according to OpenSecrets. (J Street, however, is significantly to Hassan’s left when it comes to the genocide.)
Hassan also took nearly $128,002 in campaign contributions from the defense industry during that same time period. During that period, Shaheen took $88,599 from pro-Israel groups, as well as hundreds of thousands from the manufacturing of weapons and military equipment like BAE Systems, RTX Corporation, and Boeing.
Hassan’s foreign policy staffer, who canceled the August 11 meeting, attended an April 2024 ceremony at the Merrimack, New Hampshire, plant of Elbit Systems, the largest Israeli weapons manufacturer. The ceremony celebrated the 3,000th delivery of high-tech F-35 fighter helmets manufactured by Elbit Systems in New Hampshire.
An image of the ceremony shows Hassan’s staffer alongside New Hampshire Rep. Chris Pappas and an Elbit Systems executive, all gathered around a large cake with an F-35 fighter jet drawn into the icing; F-35 fighter jets have been repeatedly used by the Israeli military to kill dozens of women and children in Gaza in airstrikes using 2,000-pound bombs.
Karina Quintans, an organizer from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who has protested outside Hassan’s office, has managed to meet with Hassan’s staff in D.C. and New Hampshire. However, Quintans said these meetings “seem useless” since Hassan won’t change course, even as her Democratic colleagues do.
“Here I am begging for time, and then you get a staffer who just says that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that’s the end of the story. … Frustration is the bare minimum sentiment that I can express.”
The day before the cancelled August 11 meeting, Balch pointed out, the Israeli military had assassinated Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists.
Hassan, who has been an outspoken advocate for press freedom as a senator, has been silent on Israel’s mass murder campaign of Palestinian journalists and media workers, which has killed 278 journalists in Gaza, according to Al Jazeera.
On August 12, Balch and others gathered outside Hassan’s Manchester office to read al-Sharif’s final words out loud. “Israel continues to try to kill all the journalists so that the truth about what’s going on in Gaza can’t come out,” Balch said. The group held signs of al-Sharif and other journalists killed in the attack. “Reading al-Sharif’s last words was really an emotional thing.”
On August 25, when the Israeli military conducted a double-tap airstrike at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis that killed five journalists and 17 others, Shaheen was in the middle of leading a bipartisan delegation to the Middle East, where she met with officials in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.
While in Beirut, Shaheen quickly condemned the strikes, telling reporters that “I personally am appalled by the bombing in Gaza and by the killing of journalists, and think it needs to end now,” Shaheen said.
Hassan said nothing.
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal
Like Hassan, Blumenthal’s support for Israel throughout the genocide has been unconditional. While criticizing Israel’s actions, Blumenthal has met with Netanyahu several times, including since Netanyahu became an international fugitive in November 2024 when the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest.
In response to a request for comment, Blumenthal said: “I continue to advocate for a ceasefire enabling relief and a potential path toward peace. I do not believe that a Joint Resolution of Disapproval is an effective way to achieve these goals, which need even higher focus and priority in light of the continuing humanitarian crisis.”
Sarah White, an organizer at the Hartford Jewish Organizing Collective (HJOC), said Blumenthal’s office has consistently ignored requests for a meeting. They came close in January 2024, when a staffer for Blumenthal who was setting up a meeting between HJOC and Blumenthal stopped responding.
“We were going to meet with him as a group of Hartford and West Hartford Jews trying to make clear that there is Jewish opposition to continue to arm Israel as it commits genocide,” White said. Since then, “no matter how much organizing we do or how many people we win over, Blumenthal continues to support Israel.”
“We feel enraged,” White said. “It feels like a waste of time because he’s so dug in. It is so beyond frustrating.”
In 2023, the Biden Administration paused a transfer of 20,000 Colt Carbine fully automatic rifles to Israel, over concerns that they could end up in the hands of settlers in the West Bank. In April, the Trump Administration moved forward with the sale, worth $24 million. The July JRD concerned the sale of 20,000 Colt automatic rifles to Israel, manufactured in Hartford. Blumenthal voted for the sale.
Staffers from Murphy’s office, on the other hand, have met with organizers on multiple occasions, which White and others believe helped change Murphy’s vote. Although Murphy has consistently voted to send Israel weapons, he also has a history of opposing U.S. interventions supported by Democrats, like in Iraq and Syria.
“The fact that Murphy has spoken against this Colt deal and Blumenthal is for it is a red mark on Blumenthal,” said Éamon Ormseth, an organizer in Hartford, who noted that Blumenthal supported Israel’s recent bombing of Qatar. “Blumenthal is a war criminal.”
In his statement, Blumenthal said, “I am extremely disturbed by the senseless killing of innocent Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, where perpetrators must be held accountable and further lawless settler violence be deterred by Israeli authorities.”
HJOC and pro-Palestine activists have been holding vigils every Friday outside the Colt factory in West Hartford since Blumenthal’s vote. Nabila Alqadumi, a Palestinian American student from Connecticut, has been attending protests outside the Colt plant, where the rifles in the JRDs are manufactured.
Murphy’s change of course made her hopeful. “We still have a long way to go, but it makes me hopeful that things could change within our lifetime,” said Alqadumi, who has family in the West Bank.
Alqadumi holds hope that the pressure campaigns on senators like Blumenthal will eventually become unavoidable and materialize into changes in US policy.
“It would be emotional because my whole life I’ve grown up hiding that I’m Palestinian, I’ll say that I’m from Jordan or Turkey,” said Alqadumi. “If we were able to stop this that would be an incredible breakthrough. More and more people are changing their minds, and there could be real changes in our lives that we haven’t seen before. You have to remain hopeful.”
Elijah de Castro is an investigative reporter from New Hampshire on the health beat.
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