No Respect: Bernie, Gaza, and Liberal Zionism
Jim Kavanagh
With a New York Times op-ed
on November 22nd, Bernie Sanders chimed in with his take on what’s
happening in Gaza right now, and what must be done to “balance our desire to
stop the fighting with the need to address the roots of the conflict.” It’s
worth examining his piece as an example of the liberal-Zionist framework of
thought, which begins with the assumption that Zionism is a necessary and
virtuous project that "we" must support and that takes priority over
everything else in the context, including the lives of Palestinians, and ends—after
conjuring a happily-ever-after version of Zionism that pleases the minds and
consciences of Western liberals like himself—right where it started.
Bernie begins by insisting that “we must first be cleareyed about facts” and immediately recounts the facts he finds relevant thusly:
On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, unleashed a barbaric attack against Israel, killing about 1,200 innocent men, women and children and taking more than 200 hostage.
Unfortunately, Bernie’s account of root facts is tendentious
and factually incorrect. It does not “address” but obscures “the roots
of the conflict,” by starting “On Oct. 7.” It is not clear-eyed but
tendentious in trying to pass off as fact the characterization of
Hamas as “a terrorist organization.”
Bernie’s use of “terrorist” here echoes the hypocrisy of all
Western mainstream politicians and media, and it’s worth delving into.
Reign of “Terror”
Of course, “terrorist” is a terrible word, almost always
used dishonestly—and Bernie knows it. Even
Ronald Reagan knew that “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”
Insofar as it can be used factually, the word “terrorism” denotes a tactic
used sporadically by virtually every state army and armed resistance group in
history.
Those who support a group’s objective never dismissively
use “terrorism” to describe its actions, let alone to condemn the group. They
accept such tactics as unfortunate and morally problematic, but non-dispositive,
elements of a legitimate struggle. On the other hand, when a group whose objective
they oppose uses the same tactics, they insist that group must be condemned and
eliminated. It’s never the tactic, always the objective, that’s the
deal-breaker, the thing that determines when and how “terrorism” will be used.
Nobody had more contempt for this hypocrisy than the proudly self-identified “terrorists” who were the vanguard fighting founders and, latterly, Prime Ministers, of the Zionist state—like Menachem Begin, who embraced the title of ”Father of terrorism in all the world,” and Yitzhak Shamir, who wrote an article forthrightly entitled “Terror,” saying:
Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war…We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle….First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today, and its task is a major one: it demonstrates in the clearest language, heard throughout the world including by our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war against the occupier.
Despite the West's cartoon villainization of Hamas, it cannot be dismissed as some “terrorist” gang. Hamas is an anti-colonial resistance movement with political and armed wings, like the ANC in South Africa or the IRA/Sinn Fein in Ireland. Indeed, in a contrary sense, like the Zionist movement, which was a comprehensive political movement that included “terrorist” tactics as it deemed necessary for its struggle to dislodge and replace the British as the “occupier” of Palestine. Every person in the world—including Bernie Sanders, who knows all this—who accepts and defends the result—Israel—is, precisely, accepting Zionist “terrorism” as an unfortunate and morally problematic, but non-dispositive, element of what they consider the fundamentally important struggle for a Jewish state.
Those of us who recognize that Hamas’s action on Oct. 7th—however
morally problematic—changed the course of history in favor of the fundamentally
important cause of Palestinian liberation from colonial rule will not brook any
moral posturing about “terrorism” from those who support the much worse actions
that enabled and enable that colonial rule. Even less will we brook passing off
that posturing as fact. However liberal Zionists like Bernie want to
fool themselves into believing otherwise, it’s not Hamas’s tactics, but the cause
it fights for, that they oppose.
Bernie’s description of Hamas’s October 7th attack
as “barbaric” is also a characterization, not a fact. Whether it’s a clear-eyed
or befogged characterization will, for many, depend on the accuracy of Bernie’s
assertion that it “kill[ed] about 1,200 innocent men, women and children.”
“Innocent” is, again, not a clear-eyed, unambiguous fact. For
the sake of present and future judgement of all military actions by all
parties, can Bernie clarify whether the word applies equally to the “more
than 350 troops, police, and security personnel” killed as to the other
men, women, and children? According to the Israeli government,
“Israeli soldiers and civilians killed about 1,500 attackers that day” [my
emphasis].
That’s right, bet you didn’t know that more Hamas fighters
than Israelis were killed on October 7th. Partly because, as Scott
Ritter describes,
“armed security teams of several Kibbutzes—drawn from the so-called ‘civilian’
residents…were able to mobilize [and] repel the Hamas attackers. The reality is
that every Kibbutz had to be treated by Hamas as an armed encampment, and as
such assaulted as if it were a military objective, for the simple fact that
they were—all of them.”
So, it’s clear that, including armed civilians, more than
350 of the 1200 people killed were fighting. Nothing wrong with that; it’s
just that they might not be considered as “innocent,” and their deaths as “barbaric,”
as if they were slaughtered while sleeping in their beds.
Bernie is picking up the “barbaric,” “terrorist” language introduced
by Israel to promote the diversionary narrative that the Hamas operation was
not an act of anti-colonial resistance, but a politically and militarily
senseless rampage motivated by nothing but the desire to kill Jews. But, as
Ritter says: “what happened on October 7 was not a terrorist attack, but a
military raid”—for him, “the most successful military raid of this century.”
Hamas breached
Israel’s “Iron Wall” in 29 places, took out observation and communications
infrastructure, fought and defeated “two battalions of the Golani Brigade [and]
other vaunted IDF units,” penetrated
at least three military installations, including the “headquarters of the Gaza
Division, the local intelligence hub, and other major command and control
facilities with brutal precision,” and seized and destroyed tanks and other
military vehicles.
Hamas’s purpose was not to kill Jews; it was to demonstrate its
power to fight the IDF successfully, to forcefully reassert Palestinians’
presence on the world stage, and to take hostages to exchange for some of the
thousands of Palestinians that Israel has held in indefinite administrative
detention.
The Hamas operation was a successful attack on the military
apparatus of Zionist colonialism that has been imprisoning Gazans in what, in
2004, Giora Eiland, then head of Israel’s National Security Council,
called "a huge concentration camp." In
response to the Hamas breakout after 19 years living in that concentration
camp, Eland now advocates “shut[ting] down everything that happens
economically in Gaza. Goods and gas, fuel and electricity and water and food…
the only way is to create a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” “Barbaric,”
Bernie?
We also know, it’s a clear-eyed fact, that Hamas did not
kill all those 1,200 people (if that’s the final number). An unknown number of
them were killed by Israeli helicopter and tank fire, per the Hannibal
Directive, “which dictates that Israelis taken captive should be killed by
the military rather than left in the hands of Palestinian militants.” As Israeli
pilot Col. Nof Erez says: “Hannibal Directive was probably deployed because
once you detect a hostage situation, this is Hannibal…What we saw here was a
mass Hannibal.” The kind and extent of damage—explosively burnt-down homes and
hundreds of burnt-out cars—confirms this.
Israeli spokesman Mark Regev has told us
that at least 200 burned bodies initially identified as Israelis were in fact
Hamas fighters. These fighters were burned along with Israelis in sites
that were demolished with powerful and incendiary weapons that Hamas fighters
did not carry with them on October 7th to immolate themselves with.
It’s not AK-47s and RPGs, but Hellfire missiles that do that kind of damage.
Indeed, Israeli police have acknowledged
that “helicopter pilots killed Israelis at or near the Nova music festival
[and] an Israeli tank killed 12 Israelis in just one home in Kibbutz Be'eri,” including
12-year-old Liel Hatsroni. Israel used its false claim that Hamas murdered Liel,
which the world’s media accepted, to rile up a global campaign supporting
ruthless revenge against the “terrorists.” Liel and 9-year-old Emily Hand, whom
Israeli also falsely announced
Hamas had killed, but who was returned home by Hamas
alive and well (after her father said her "death was a blessing" because it was better
than her being taken hostage), were used by the Israeli government to
promote the narrative of Hamas “barbarism” that Bernie repeats.
Bernie can judge Hamas’s actions any way he wants. He can
ignore “the roots of the conflict” and construe
all the armed fighters as “innocent” as babes in their cribs, and all the
Israelis burnt in their homes by IDF missiles as the victims of Hamas
“barbarism,” on the grounds that Hamas launched this attack. He can do this
honestly as long as he: 1) Obeys his own admonition to “first be cleareyed
about facts”—including the fact that Hamas did not kill those children, did not
behead 40 babies, did not bake a baby in an over, etc., 2) Acknowledges that the
Israeli version of events was carelessly or deliberately false, precisely and
emphatically on those elements most useful to establish Hamas’s “barbarism”; 3)
Acknowledges the clear-eyed fact that the IDF killed some unknown number of the
1200 (at most 850 non-combatant) Israelis on October 7th and we therefore
do not know how many unarmed, non-combatant civilians Hamas killed; and 4) Dismissing
all those false claims, states the clear-eyed facts that he thinks qualify
Hamas’s action as “barbaric” and applies the same word and judgement, using the
same criteria, to all military actions by all parties.
Bernie won’t do this. He and all pro-Zionist politicians and
media need to keep implicitly accepting Israeli falsehoods, and explicitly and insistently
repeating the narrative of Hamas ”barbarism” based on those falsehoods, because
they are necessary to keep attention from facts that support the other
understanding of this event on October 7th: that it is was an
extraordinarily successful military action of anti-colonialist resistance
against the Zionist regime. Their dedication is not to clear-eyed facts but to Israel.
The insistent narrative of Hamas’s terrorism on October 7th
is designed to hide the embarrassing story of Israel’s defeat on that day.
Hamas barbarism is a diversion from Israeli humiliation.
Proportional Representation
As he continues his op-ed, we can note how differently Barnie
treats Hamas vs. Israeli killing. He promotes Americans' identification with Israeli
Jewish over Palestinian Arab lives by translating Israeli casualties but not
Palestinian ones into US population equivalents.
The 1200 Israeli Jewish deaths on 10/7, at the hands of “barbaric,”
“terrorist” Hamas were, he takes pains to point out, “On a per-capita basis…the
equivalent of nearly 40,000 [American] deaths, more than 10 times the
fatalities that we suffered on 9/11.”
He then tells us that (non-barbaric, non-terrorist) Israel killed
“more than 12,000 Palestinians, about half of whom are children” in Gaza,
but he does not make the parallel observation that, on a per capita basis (updated
to today’s data—14,532 Palestinian deaths), that’s the equivalent of over 2,000,000
American deaths, more than 700 times the fatalities that we suffered on 9/11.
That difference in presentation makes a difference in how
concretely the American reader can identify with those killed, and Bernie knows
it. In his carefully written op-ed for the NYT, there is no possibility
that Bernie Sanders accidentally chose to avoid the obvious parallel
construction and make one group’s death toll more concrete to the American
reader than the other.
Free At Last
Like every liberal Western Zionist, Bernie drips with
concern for the “long-suffering Palestinians” who, he understands, must “have a
chance at self-determination,” as he then goes on to explain the limits of the
“self-determination” that “we”—i. e., liberal Western Zionists—will allow in
Gaza. Of course, “new Palestinian leadership will be required.” Hamas “must” be
“removed from power,” he declares—but only because he’s so concerned about the
long-suffering Palestinians: “Gaza must have a chance to be free of Hamas.” We can “hopefully giv[e] the Palestinian
Authority the legitimacy it needs to assume administrative control of Gaza.” Rest
assured, though, he is also declaring: “There can be no long-term
Israeli occupation. [my emphasis]”
In other words, “we” must rearrange the situation in Gaza to
alleviate Palestinian suffering within a new political framework that eliminates
Hamas (and, I presume, any other armed resistance movement), installs some
magically re-legitimized PA, and ends Israeli occupation after some not-long
time—i.e., when Israel thinks it’s secure. Gazans will be so grateful to be free at last
of Hamas, and, coincidentally, it will be good for Israel too.
The level of supercilious arrogance here is astonishing.
Even more astonishing is that so few Americans recognize it. This is quite
evidently an attitude that treats the Palestinians as unruly children who need
to have their affairs managed by “us” for their own good. For Bernie and
“concerned” liberal Zionists, Palestinians are sympathetic when they're
suffering in peace, “barbaric” when they're fighting for justice.
This attitude is absolutely not respectful—indeed, it is
contemptuous—of the Palestinian people.
It's nice that Bernie recognizes: “The only way these
necessary changes will happen is if the United States uses the substantial
leverage we have with Israel… The blank check approach must end.” And it’s nice
that some Democrats in Congress are advocating
to “attach conditions to an emergency infusion of security aid for Israel.” But
guess what: “No Democrats have said they would not back the package.”
Continuing their decades-long charade, they will all repeat their verbal
expressions of “concern” for the plight of “long-suffering” Palestinians, but
they will not actually do what’s in their power to deprive Israel of the
weapons to bomb the crap out of Gaza, and anywhere else it wants. They are much
too respectful of the Israelis to do such a thing.
Being respectful would mean really taking account of “our”
failures and the “need to address the roots of the conflict,” and recognizing
that Palestinians themselves have the right
to fight to end their long suffering from colonial domination “by all available
means, including armed struggle.” Respectful would be to understand that the
Palestinian Authority, as even the NYT recognizes, is “deeply unpopular and widely seen as a
subcontractor to the Israeli occupation,” as will be any “leadership”
selected by the U.S. with Israel’s approval. Respectful would be to understand
that Hamas is now more popular among the people of Gaza and the West Bank than
ever, because it did change the course of history in one day, and it “and other
armed groups are the only ones they can trust to protect them,…to achieve
tangible results and [have a] willingness to fight for the Palestinian cause.”
Being respectful means accepting that Palestinians have the right to choose any
political leadership they wish—including Hamas, and it’s none of “our” goddamn
business to tell them otherwise. You know, like the respect we give Israelis.
Really respectful, and maybe even capable of gaining some
respect, would be to recognize and renounce this posture of supercilious
arrogance that “we” have been speaking from for decades, and recognize and
renounce that “our” ostensible concern for the Palestinians in all this was
always subject to, and superseded by, concern for saving the Zionist project.
The Good New Gaza Bernie and Western liberal Zionists are
trying to conjure is a Gaza that must, first of all, be good for Israel. They're
trying to replace the real Gaza and real Palestinian people, who fight for liberation
from colonial subjugation, with a fantasy version that will agree to accept that
subjugation in order to ease the minds of Western Zionists.
No Country for Old Bernies
In their fevered delusion that they can rearrange the world in
their own image, alongside the imaginary Palestinians they conjure up, Bernie
and Western liberal Zionists replace the reality of Zionism with a fantasy
version that fits, and ratifies, their version of themselves. They think
there’s some kindler, gentler version of Zionism that some Israeli government,
wished for by nice people like them, will adopt and some faction of nice,
Zionist-accepting Palestinians like them will graciously accept.
In Bernie’s world, if only the Israelis would get rid of “right-wing
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,” and replace him with a liberal Zionist
like the sainted Yitzhak Rabin, all could be fixed. You see, Bernie recognizes
that there are “extremists” on both sides. Of course, Bernie and his “we”
cannot demand that Israelis “must” eliminate popular even blatantly fascist political
parties, and arm a military force to bomb the crap out of them until they do.
Much too respectful of Israelis for that.
What Bernie and liberal Zionists don’t want to know (or
admit they know) is that Zionism is a different country than the Upper West
Side simulacrum they’ve concocted in their minds. They think and do things
differently there. There is no good, liberal Zionism lurking in the wings, just
waiting for the right nudge from peace-and-equality-loving Americans like Bernie.
And, however Bernie deludes himself, the
Palestinians know it. Yitzhak Rabin ordered
the Israeli army to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. He would never
have done that to Israeli Jews. No Israeli leader would ever demolish the homes
of Jewish families whose one member was charged with a crime, as every
Israeli leader has done to Palestinians for years. Israel isn’t liberal
Manhattan; it’s, at best, Jim Crow Mississippi. And it has to be.
Today, behind Netanyahu are the even more fascist Ben-Gvir
and Smotrich. Because the Israelis elected them. Today, the Zionist leaders,
with the backing of at least many of its Jewish citizens, are determined
to demolish as much of Gaza as possible, kill as many Gazans as they want, and
force the remnant to leave, finishing the work of eliminating non-Jews from
Greater Israel that every Israeli leader has been doing—sometimes with
constant, gradual pressure, sometimes with bursts of ruthless violence, always
with the help of Bernie and his ilk—since 1948.
Bernie and Western liberals do not recognize, and will
probably resist to their death recognizing, the actual framework that clear-eyed,
clear-thinking Israelis and Palestinians have always recognized: it's Jewish-supremacist colonialism—per B’Tselem, “A
regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” in
which “All Palestinians living under Israeli rule are treated as inferior in
rights and status to Jews who live in the same area.” As such, it requires
extermination, expulsion, and subjugation of Palestinian Arabs, who are the
inconvenient majority
of the population in that area.
Bernie and Western liberal Zionists do not want to recognize
they are killing and expelling Palestinians because they are not Jews. And they
do not want to recognize that they are supporting colonialists and fascists because
they are. The Israeli Zionists know exactly what they're doing.
None of the horror in that is going to be, or has ever
been, washed away by Western liberals who want it to be something else.
Same As It Ever Was
No matter what Palestinians think, Hamas is barbaric and
terrorist and must be forcibly removed and excluded from power by “us” because
it understands and acts on a clear-eyed understanding of those facts and that
colonialist framework. Israeli political factions that also, as they all do, understand
and act within that framework, in ways that are orders of magnitude more
barbaric and terrorist than Hamas, can be criticized and regretted, but “we” can
never presume the right to remove and exclude them from power, if that’s what
Israelis want. That’s Bernie's stance. That's the Zionist stance. That's the
stance in which Israeli Jews are respected as a people in a way that Palestinian
Arabs are not.
With his banal discourse of “barbarism,” and “terrorism,” Bernie
has not made a considered judgement about the ethics of political violence. In
using these words to oh-so-sympathetically demand control of Palestinian lives
and abet their slaughter, all Bernie and Western liberal Zionists have done is
picked a side—the side of the colonialists who are exterminating and expelling Arabs—and
supported it, pretending (to themselves, first of all) they were doing
something else. That's all they've ever done, and that's what Bernie is doing
here.
I think this pretense is a deep psychological and political necessity
for Bernie and Western liberal Zionists, but at this point it’s ridiculous,
insulting to everyone’s intelligence, and deeply dishonest to keep it up. It
deserves no respect.
Everyone knows what’s going on. In order to “finish ’48,” Israel
is carrying out an ethnic cleansing war in Gaza (and in the West Bank), has deliberately
killed over 20,000 people including 8,000 children, targeted and killed doctors
and journalists and their families in their homes, targeted and destroyed
hospitals, schools, and UN refuges, driven over 1.5 million people out of their
demolished homes, and will continue and intensify doing that. None of this is
accidental or collateral damage, or has the purpose of fighting Hamas or saving
hostages. And anyone of Bernie’s stature who pretends not to know that is
lying.
There’s nothing more dishonest than Bernie hiding his
support for Jewish supremacist colonialism behind: “we must grapple with the
complexity of this situation that too many people on both sides want to wave.” Honest
would be to say: “Yes, I know it’s Jewish supremacist colonialism, and I know
that Israelis are exterminating and expelling Gazans, and, while I don’t like
and will try to mitigate how nasty it is, I will support it—will not use
my power to stop it—because…”
Bernie may object to the slaughter taking place in Gaza now,
but he has already accepted and ratified the slaughter on which Israel was
built. He knows, but doesn't want to acknowledge, what the Israelis and the
Palestinians know and say: it's the same slaughter.
__________________
If you like this post, you can Buy Me A Coffee (or a Bourbon) or make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, or Zelle (preferred). Or you can become a free or paid subscriber to my Substack, where I publish everything, including media appearances.. Thanks for your support!
Related articles: Israel’s Solution to Gaza: War on Iran, First and Foremost, Colonialism Must End
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments will be lightly moderated, with disfavor for personal attacks and stunning irrelevancies, and deference to the trenchant and amusing.