Sanders has made clear all along that he isn’t actually disagreeing with the tenets of Zionism, as much as distancing himself personally from the revisionist Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke against the $740.5 billion National Defense Authorization Act, June 25, 2020. (C-Span screen grab)
By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News
In a recent interview, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders responded to a question by an interviewer with the declaration that he is not a Zionist. Asked directly if he was a one, Sanders said: “No. Not within the terms of what Zionism means.”
He did not elaborate on what he thinks those terms are, although the phrase “of what Zionism means” is most likely a reference to the Zionism of the age of Netanyahu, and not of his past Israeli heroes, like Yitzhak Rabin or Golda Meir.
It was a rather confounding answer to anybody who has followed Sanders’ career because looking at his rhetoric one can clearly discern an emphatic and consistent support for the Zionist state.
In the interview with Axios, Sanders said that as a youth he spent about four months in Israel on kibbutzim and was “very excited … about the formation of the state of Israel. I’m proudly Jewish, but that does not mean … that I will support a rightwing, extremist government that is doing horrific things to the Palestinian people.”
On Sept. 17, Sanders finally called what is happening in Gaza a genocide, after it had become more politically safe to do so —and after the base of the Democratic Party was overwhelmingly of the view that the Israeli war in Gaza amounted to genocide.
Sanders has made clear all along that he isn’t actually disagreeing with the tenets of Zionism, as much as distancing himself personally from the revisionist Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu.
During the past two years of war, starvation and genocide, Sanders has blamed the Israeli Holocaust in Gaza on one man, and one man alone. He has in no way tried to find flaws in the ideological foundation and practice of the Jewish state of Israel – and never drew links between the on-going Israeli war crimes in Gaza with past Israeli war crimes under both, Labor, Likud or Kadima.
Instead, Sanders has couched his rhetoric with the assertion that Israel has the right to defend itself. He consistently prefaced his remarks about Israel with that statement thereby bestowing legitimacy on Israeli war crimes.
He was widely criticized after a tweet in October 2023 in which he called for only a humanitarian pause in Gaza and repeated that Israel has a “right” to “defend itself.” One commenter responded:
“NO, IT DOES NOT! Israel is the aggressor. What part of that don’t you understand? And Hamas’s attacks on military personnel? Are you claiming that Palestinians have no right to defend themselves or resist occupation? Why aren’t you calling for Israel to abide by its obligation under international law? Why is Israel’s discriminatory state something you insist on supporting? Why can’t all people have full equal rights?”
Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas. But innocent Palestinians also have a right to life and security. I’m calling for a humanitarian pause by all parties so that critical aid can be delivered to the suffering people of Gaza and for the immediate release of all…
— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) October 25, 2023
Does He Know What Zionism Is?
Sanders says he not a Zionist according to what it means, but it’s not certain that he, or Joe Biden, the first U.S. president to publicly identify as Zionist, know what Zionism means. I will hereby define it by identifying elements in Sanders’ policy positions and rhetoric to illustrate how Zionist he actually has been since entering public office.
Despite decades of repression against Palestinians and violations of international law particularly in Gaza, Sanders said in March 2016 that Israel has “a deep commitment to democratic principles, civil rights and the rule of law.” Even when Jimmy Carter and multiple human rights organizations in the West — and even in Israel — categorized the Israeli system of occupation as apartheid, Sanders avoided the term.
And Sanders always blames Palestinians, or other Arabs, for any occurrence of war or violence in the Middle East. Throughout his entire career, Bernie Sanders — along with most Republican and Democratic senators — has blamed wars, bombings and massacres in the Middle East exclusively on Arabs.
Only Israel Can Defend Itself
For him, the initiation of violence is always Arabs’ fault, and Israel is always in the mode of justifiable self-defense. His exclusive acknowledgement of the right of Israel, and only Israel, to defend itself against Arabs points to a favoritism that suggests Israel’s racial superiority.
No matter how many massacres and war crimes are inflicted upon them, Sanders, like other American and Western Zionists, has never accorded the right of self-defense to Palestinians. When you recognize the political, international, and legal rights of only one side in a conflict, you are drawing a civilizational and racial distinction between two groups of people.
The Gaza war has lasted for over two years and has resulted in the death of over 70,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and yet Sanders cannot speak on the subject without invoking the right of Israel to defend itself. That bestows an immoral right upon the Israeli Holocaust in Gaza.
Another manifestation of Sanders’ Zionism lies in his inability to consider Palestinians and other Arabs as victims of terrorism. Just like other Zionists in American politics – such as the other 99 senators — Bernie Sanders applies the word terrorism to only one side, the Arab side.
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Sanders — no matter how how many massacres and war crimes Israel inflicts upon the Arab population — cannot get himself to describe Israeli violence as terrorism. In other words, he finds that Israelis are incapable of committing acts of terrorism no matter how random and indiscriminate their violence is.
On the other hand, when Palestinians resort to acts of violence, even against armed Israeli occupation soldiers, Sanders finds their acts to be terrorism. By virtue of his contempt, condescension and outright denigration of the Arab population, Sanders cannot perceive that the inferior population is capable of being victims of terrorism.
Sanders believes in the fundamental tenets of Zionism, i.e. the notion that Zionist Jews have the right to a homeland in the Holy Land even if that right comes at the expense of an existing national homeland for the native Palestinian population.
Zionism as Racism
U.N. General Assembly’s Third Committee adopts draft resolution that will equate Zionism with racism, Oct. 17, 1975. (U.N. Photo/Michos Tzovaras)
The U.N. General Assembly in an enlightened November 1975 resolution declared that Zionism equals racism.
The resolution said the Assembly “Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It passed with 72 votes in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstentions.
The measure recalled the U.N.’s 1963, Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, affirming that
“‘any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous’ and expressed alarm at ‘the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures.'”
The Assembly had already condemned in December 1973 the “unholy alliance between South African racism and zionism.”
In August 1975, the Organization of African Unity considered
“that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being.”
The foreign ministers of the Non-Aligned movement also in August 1975 “condemned zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology,” according to the General Assembly resolution.
Under intense American pressure, the General Assembly resolution was revoked in 1991.
Sanders’ essential racism towards Palestinians can be discerned by comparing his stance on South Africa’s liberation from apartheid and his stance on Israel. For one, he does not acknowledge that there is an apartheid system inside Israel itself and not only in the West Bank and Gaza.
The racial discrimination that offended him in South Africa has failed to offend him against the Arab population of Palestine. Secondly, Sanders, when speaking on South Africa’s liberation, never insisted that South African blacks should be denied the right to self-defense or resistance.
Yet, he is categorical in denying the Palestinian population any rights of resistance or self-defense. He is blinded to the full reality of Israeli injustice against Palestinians.
The crux of Zionist racism is that the political rights of the immigrant European Jewish population supersede the national claims of the Palestinian population who are not entitled to any political rights.
If Sanders was not a Zionist, as he claims, he would not defend Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. Zionism by its very definition is the political movement to create and maintain a Jewish homeland on the land of the indigenous people of Palestine, and that the political rights of Jewish immigrants supersedes the rights of the Palestinians (very much like the thrust of the Balfour Declaration).
As he has always supported this position, Sanders is undoubtedly a Zionist.
Sanders & Revisionist Zionism
Menachem Begin (r) with Vladimir Jabotinsky (c) in Pinsk, Belarus, December 1933. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Photography dept. Government Press Office)
Sanders is not a supporter of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of extreme Zionist Revisionism, although he has never criticized him nor his many followers who became prime ministers of Israel.
Sander’s position, held by both liberal and right wing zionists alike, of treating Palestinian and Israeli lives differently can be explained in terms of a “racial recipe” that Jabotinsky invoked.
Led by Jabotinsky, revisionist Zionism split off from the mainstream Zionist movement in 1935 over tactics. Inspired by Mussolini, Jabotinsky advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, in other words in all of historic Palestine without a state for the Arabs.
As a supporter of a two-state solution, Sanders says Palestinians should have political rights but only subject to parameters set up by Israel and the superior political rights of Jewish immigrants. He never fully articulated a vision of the political rights of the Palestinians. He is for a two-state solution in the same way that George W Bush was for the two-state solution.
Sanders has reconciled himself not only with Labor Zionism over his entire political career, but by never distancing himself from earlier Israeli prime ministers, he has tacitly tolerated revisionist Zionism prior to the Netanyahu era. For instance he voted for a resolution extending congratulations to the war criminal, Ariel Sharon.
When Sanders first started his political career, Likud was already in power in Israel, and Sanders never expressed public disapproval or condemnation of the leadership of Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir or Ehud Olmert or any other Likud figures.
In fact, during the ongoing Israeli Holocaust in Gaza, Sanders publicly expressed nostalgia for the era of Golda Meir. Meir presided over a government which incinerated Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and launched vicious wars on Gaza and the West Bank only because they were resisting a savage occupation.
Meir was the prime minister who ordered campaigns of global terror in order to avenge Israeli athletes in Munich (many of whom were actually killed by German police).
For these reasons Bernie Sanders qualifies as a full-fledged Zionist in the same mode of traditional American congressional Zionists like Scoop Jackson, Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.
That it took two decades for Sanders to speak out against a sitting Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, albeit in highly reserved and qualified terms, indicates not so much revulsion against Zionism but reading the mood of the Democratic Party base where sympathy for the Palestinians now exceeds sympathy for Israelis.
For this, his recent stance against the Israeli government should be seen as opportunism, not opposition to Zionism.
As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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I knew Sander’s history way back when Obomber was running for pres. I told my dem. brother who supported Sanders & he wouldn’t believe me. Later, he said he’d seen the same voting I had on C-SPAN & watched Sanders Vote in Support of Funding for Israel. He Supported Every time another Funding Bill for Israel came up for a vote! Now, people believe he’s changed his tune because his pic is on so many sites to sign petitions against Israeli Genocide. He’s a Hypocrite & a Liar!
It is important to understand that Zionism began as an English Protestant sect in the 1800s. In time, the eschatological vision of Christian Zionism became very popular. Theodore Herzl et al shoehorned Judaism into this vision because it called for the return of Jews to the Holy Land, prominent Christian Zionists voted with the antisemite Balfour to establish the Zionist State of Israel.
When Joe Biden said he was a Zionist, it was not metaphorical. There are millions of Christian Zionists in America whom the state of Israel counts on for support. In my opinion, both Christian and Jewish Zionism are theological perversions, abominable heresies—know them from their fruits.
Thank you for this article, As’ad. I’d already concluded that Sanders is a Zionist, but I appreciate your historical take.
Sanders voted for EVERY Funding Bill for Israel. I used to watch the voting on C-SPAN.
Here’s an erudite insiders explanation of what Zionism is:
xxx.youtube.com/watch?v=AKzAzbjKNF0
Bernie Sanders has often referred to the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—a highly dubious claim.
More positively, he gave cautious support to President Trump’s efforts to reach agreement with North Korea. I hope Trump will try again.
A good article on that insufferable fraud Sanders. In a massive irony, the Dem Party’s honchos despise Sanders, despite him being thier most loyal servant. He recently stood up for another contemptible Zionist, the Senator from Citibank, Schumer, while other “progressives” began the call for Schumer to step down over his incompetence.
Excellent article.
Back in the 1990s I remember Cockburn writing a couple of harsh critiques against Bernard. I was favorably inclined to like Sanders bc of some of his otherwise good populist proposals. After looking into Alex’s critiques I realized how correct he was in leveling his swipes against Bernard.
Cockburn has been proven correct in spades.
Either we attack (via positive activism and enlightenment) and defeat the Zionist power configuration in all of its guises or we’re through!
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.