On November 20—just two days after a massive Hizballah rocket barrage killed an Israeli civilian and injured ten others—Senator Bernie Sanders led an effort to block arm sales to Israel. The three measures advanced by Sanders and his ideological allies naturally failed, but the real story, as Melissa Langsam Braunstein tell it, is about the growing divide within the Democratic party, and the feebleness of the centrist establishment:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer worked hard to avoid votes that would split his caucus during campaign season, but divided they are. There were nineteen votes to block mortar rounds, eighteen votes to block tank rounds, and seventeen votes to block bomb-guidance kits that help save civilian lives. This was a notable jump from the eleven senators—ten from Schumer’s caucus—who voted against stopping another anti-Israel resolution from Senator Bernie Sanders . . . in January.

Schumer didn’t vote for Sanders’s resolutions but also didn’t whip votes against them. Meanwhile, both Schumer’s deputy, the majority whip Dick Durbin, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who’s expected to be the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking Democrat come 2025, voted with Sanders.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.