With the Democratic primary in full swing, the outlines of public debate are pretty much entrenched. Common wisdom on the left says that all of the candidates are bad on Palestine except for Bernie Sanders. Despite some problems, pundits declare, Sanders is still the best. Is the statement true, though, or is it a convenient truism?
It’s both, really. Sanders appears to be better than his counterparts, but the advantage doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A lot of mythologizing has helped Sanders’ reputation. He’s proved skillful at sounding the right notes without actually transcending a dull foreign policy consensus. For example, I don’t see how anybody can read Sanders’ responses here next to those of his opponents and objectively conclude that they’re superior (or even meaningfully different). In fact, billionaire Tom Steyer’s answers are arguably better, or at least equivalent.
Moreover, Sanders almost always introduces support for Palestinians by professing devotion to Israel’s security and right to exist. He has a long history of funding Israeli war crimes. (His claim that he’ll condition aid to Israel on a better human rights record is a sucker’s bet; Sanders has had three decades to apply that principle.) All the candidates are Zionist. I don’t care to parse the nuances of their Zionism. Seeking—or, worse, celebrating—a kinder colonizer is a waste of time.
In short, Sanders is similar to his opponents around Palestine, but his reputation around Palestine is far better. That reputation doesn’t correspond to the substance of his legislative history or his public comments. Supporters project onto him what they hope or assume he’ll do, but hasn’t done throughout his long career in office. The myth of Sanders being “good” or “the best” has made it so that supporting him isn’t merely a pragmatic concession; it can now be passed off as devotion to Palestine.
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen an image circulating on social media that epitomizes both the process and outcome of Sanders’s mythologization. It shows a man holding a handwritten sign that says, “I’m Palestinian, and I’m voting for the Jewish guy!” To his right, a woman holds a companion sign: “I’m Israeli, and I’m voting for the guy who will fight for Palestinians’ rights!” It’s a cute idea, I guess. The execution of that idea is troublesome, however.
Try to extricate yourself from the hullabaloo of electoralism and consider a straightforward question: when have we ever witnessed Bernie Sanders fighting for Palestinians? Many of his supporters have taken up the fight, but Sanders hasn’t joined them. Instead, he gestures toward vague ideals of justice without committing to what Palestinians in struggle repeatedly profess to be their version of freedom (the right of return and equality in their ancestral homeland). He’s happy to let supporters fill the vagueness with their own suppositions.
Was Sanders fighting for Palestinian rights when he fondly recalled living on a kibbutz (in other words, a racialized settlement)? When he voted in favor of a Senate resolution (introduced by Mitch McConnell) that recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital? When he yelled at constituents protesting the war crimes Israel was committing with weapons he voted to provide? When he fired a campaign staffer for criticizing Netanyahu? When he went on a Zionist diatribe in an interview with a Palestinian journalist? When he blamed an Israeli massacre of 50 civilians on “Hamas”? When he suggested that Palestinian parents train their children to become suicide bombers?
All of these things happened since Israel’s 2014 destruction of the Gaza Strip, one of the century’s most vicious events.
How about when he calls himself “100 percent pro-Israel”? Or opposes BDS? Or offers “both sides” pabulum in response to yet more Israeli war crimes? Or declines to support the right of return (Andrew Yang accidentally provided the model for a good answer)?
Sanders occasionally exhibits empathy for Palestinians and regularly highlights the difficulties of life under Israeli occupation (1967 only), but he doesn’t use a fighting vocabulary. He never speaks of colonization, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, apartheid, or land theft. “Occupation” is the strongest word he deploys. He also has a habit of reserving sharp criticism for Netanyahu, usually positioned as a Trumpian aberration from a more benevolent norm. In Sanders’s lexicon, the problem isn’t Zionism, but Netanyahu’s Israel.
(Please note: I’m not arguing that Sanders ought to speak like a Palestinian nationalist; I’m objecting to narratives that make it sound as if he’s a faithful proponent of Palestinian nationalism.)
If the Palestinian in the photo wants to vote for “the Jewish guy,” I won’t argue with him, although I wish he wouldn’t volunteer himself as one of the good Arabs, the sort who isn’t innately hostile to Jews, as evidenced by—what else?—his eagerness to vote. Trading decolonization for electoralism is one of the cheapest ways to accumulate respectability in the United States. Voting for “the Jewish guy” isn’t objectionable in itself. One might make a strong case for doing it. But implicating national identity in the decision elides longstanding forms of resistance that are less agreeable to centers of power.
It’s more bothersome seeing the Israeli uphold Sanders as a champion of Palestinian rights. It’s discomfiting that a settler so breezily appoints herself arbiter of the native’s struggle, and does so by promoting visions of relief that don’t threaten her own standing. By tethering activism to a presidential campaign, she can claim space unavailable to recalcitrant natives. She needn’t adhere to their sensibilities because she inhabits a political culture that treats the colonized as raw material. Her language tells the story. She deploys a nebulous framework of “rights,” the classic idiom of state-sanctioned activism. Liberation is off the table. Resistance is sanitized. Armed struggle is unthinkable. The photograph is the spirit of Oslo repurposed for the social media age.
Sanders has made his platform clear. By this point it’s not changing. He’s a two-stater who dislikes conservative Israeli politicians and frets about the government’s excesses. He won’t affirm the right of return. He won’t consider a one-state solution. He opposes BDS, but also opposes its criminalization. For all his talk of conditioning aid to Israel on its behavior (something George H.W. Bush also proposed), it will require more political capital then he’s willing to use. (An overlooked feature of this pledge is that Sanders also threatens to withhold aid from Palestinians.) Palestine will fall by the wayside. Sanders’ most vocal supporters will accept that result as the cost of doing business.
They’ll talk about holding him accountable, of course, but nobody should take it seriously. Accountable to whom? Actual Palestinians or the mass of dim brown trinkets manufactured on an electoral assembly line? Electoralism doesn’t allow for the kind of responsiveness its advocates imagine. Anybody who tries to hold Sanders to account will be shouted down. To lift Palestine from its subordinate position will be seen as an invitation to social death, a puritanical effort to unleash rightwing barbarism on an intrinsically virtuous polity. (Electoral common sense always leads to liberal orthodoxy.) Accountability to the people is the most anti-human myth of this entire spectacle.
Attempts to prioritize the Global South simply can’t compete with fetishes of enfranchisement in the imperial core. (The Global South, uncoincidentally, manifests the world’s greatest revolutionary potential.) Like other colonized nations (inside and beyond North America), Palestine exists in electoral discourses as an abstract geography, something to be extracted for capital among the politically ambitious, or a delicate inconvenience to overcome. What the system lacks in substance it replaces with myth. Electoralism is a heatsink of revolutionary politics. We select representatives actually seated by the elite. There’s no real system of accountability to the disempowered. Everything that sounds nice about electoralism in fact reinforces the false promises of settler colonization.
Aren’t Sanders’ boosters setting themselves up for disappointment? Not really, because the logic of electoralism provides for delirious hope in the incredible. It also renders Palestine’s freedom (at best) a secondary concern. The nation, obscure and abstracted, expedites presidential electioneering. Sanders isn’t serving Palestine; Palestine is his surrogate.
Sanders says “respect and dignity.” His fans hear “liberation.” They’re not listening closely enough. (We’re incentivized to mishear by so many promises of minor celebrity.) Nothing in Sanders’ record as a politician suggests that he’ll fight for anything but the tired “international consensus.” And nothing in decades of US brokerage indicates that the “peace process” will result in anything but continued suffering for Palestinians.
Note: An earlier version of this essay highlighted Andrew Yang’s unambiguous answer supporting the right of return. Yang has confirmed that his answer was a mistake.
It seems your only choice is to re-elect President trump as he always tries to keep his promises. At least he kept his promises to the 100 million Christian evangelists who support Israel. Of course, you could vote for a pipe dream and four years of another spineless Obama or Carter.
Gee, Jack. Vote for pipe dream or vote to wipe your people off the map. Good times.
The Palestinian Arabs are not my people. Regardless, I would never vote to wipe the Palestinian Arabs off the map.
your insulting crowing that accepts enslavement of the oppressed to 2 oppressive choices that work well with each other, R and D,
perfectly matches when Joe Biden crowed at the Mexicam American activist who spoke against his 3 million deportations with Obama and challenged him to say he wouldn’t do it again “Vote for Trump then,” clearly filled with self righteous contempt and glee
zionism is the worst strand of imperialism. Bernie can’t be a zionist and real socialist at once. that’s just a depraved zionist liar talk. but it fits comfortably in your way of thinking, it seems.
Enslavement? really? Care to point out the Israeli salt mine with its thousands of Palestinian arab slaves? How about the Israeli cotton plantations with all of the slave quarters inhabited by all of those Palestinian Arab slaves?
Perhaps your choice of wording is ill-conceived?
The only enslavement and oppression of the Palestinian Arabs is at the hands of Fatah, hamas, and Palestinian Arab President-for-Life Abbas, as it was under Egyptian Arab President-for-Life Arafat.
It seems Jack Sigman is caught up in the “hullabaloo of electoralism” as Steve Salaita puts it. Then Sigman throws in a tidbit based on the so-called thinking of those who push “the lesser of two evils”. Why are you even following steve salaita’s writing?
It may seem like it to you, but that is you. I am not pushing the “lesser of two evils.” I am pushing for what I believe to be the better path for the American people.
I read Salaita to see what the opposition thinks. Every once in a blue moon, there is actually a good idea.
get lost, trash. you’re not wanted or valued.
I do not believe that any of the democratic candidates would be good for Palestine. Whoever makes it to the White House, Trump or a democrat, will just continue to be lackeys for AIPAC and Israel.
It appears that they are lackeys for AIPAC and Israel because no matter how drunk they get, nor how much they want to support Arabs, they cannot stomach the Palestinian Arab genocide mantra.
They are lackeys for AIPAC and Israel because they are, to put it simply, bought and paid for. Nothing to do with genocide.
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/03/22/the-best-congress-aipac-can-buy/
You are actually referencing a borderline antisemitic publication written by an amateur with no credentials save a BA in communications? Considered one of the most worthless degrees offered?
This is a joke, right?
The joke is on the American electorate who are served by a Congress subservient to the Israeli State.
The International Zionist Conspiracy.
It poisons everything it touches.
Article by Philip Giraldi.
So you are standing by an absolutely worthless article written by an incompetent borderline antisemite and then doubling down with a reference to another source with zero credibility?
“And nothing in decades of US brokerage indicates that the “peace process” will result in anything but continued suffering for Palestinians. ” But that doesn’t seem to bother those who support the Palestinian policy of rejection and continued refusal to seriously talk peace. It will mean continued suffering for the Palestinians while Israelis enjoy a wonderful life. We can afford to wait. So can you in your ivory towers. It’s only the Palestinians that get screwed.
Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister wrote the Ben Gurion doctrine in 1938. He said that any peace treaty with the Arabs would be temporary. He made it clear that they intended to take every inch of the promised land. The Palestinians knew this before the 1947 partition. All the talk about Palestinians not wanting peace is just insult on injury.
Yes, I recall seeing the pictures of the illiterate Arabs who lived in British Mandate Palestine reading Ben Gurion’s doctrine. I have also seen the Jews, who were quite literate, who lived there, reading the newspapers that contained the genocidal desires of the Arab leadership.
However, a citation would be helpful.
well put, Steven. the zionists are only proving how devious and manipulative psychopaths they are. the populace knows the truth in their guts, and Bernie the trusted zionist who pretends to be progressive will NEVER win the general election unless the zionist machine rigs the whole thing as they always have, except in 2016 when their hubris caught them off-guard. People want this zionist system to go down with Trump. implosion is so much better than explosion for humanity.
People? What people? People like you?
Then we should hope those who support Islamist nationalism, as exhibited by the current Palestinian Arab cause, implodes. It appears not to work anywhere.
However, conspiracy theorists appear not to understand the reality that surrounds them.
good article also appeared in Counterpunch… describes the blather and the actions, the myths and the hearing what you think should be said… hoping that the AIPAC effect doesn’t pollute all discussions – however the Demo party is loaded with Zionist Clones. Jeff B. pointed out Nancy (don’t mess with) proudly described all the pro Israeli Demos heads of committees she appointed. If that’s true, then Sander’s position with or only half with the Palestinians will face the Demo party Zionists.
Question I put in an article: If the Demos side swipe Sanders again will the DSA understand their needs to be somewhere else to operate then inside the Demo party?
Stev explains as we always remember and know the electoral system is loaded reloaded against….
wow, lots of nutcases in here, where everyone that’s not a swastika flying supporter of Eichmann and Husseini is a ‘Zionist shill’…
That is the common thread. When you get to define the enemy, you will find more and more criteria.
The American voter is so low-info on the history and reality of the Occupation that the mildest most tepid deviation from our decades of intensive programming regarding Israel sounds, to our dim ears, like full-throated championing of liberation for the Palestinians.
We want the Palestinian Arabs liberated in their own state with their own democratic leaders. However, it does not appear that it is what the Palestinian Arabs want.
But I agree, American voters, and I am sure you include yourself, for the most part are ignorant of the history of the conflict. Those championing the Palestinian Arab side seem to think the conflict started in 2000.
This Palestinian man sets out clearly what he wants.
You stole the home of a people and you’re not even willing to say ‘sorry’
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/08/stole-people-willing/
Again, you reference borderline antisemitic material written by those with little actual knowledge. The Palestinian Arabs, with the assistance of the Arab league, launched a genocidal war against the Jews. They lost. The majority of Palestinian Arabs became internal refugees with 700,000 moving into areas of British Mandate Palestine that did not become Israel.
Those refugees were entitled to compensation for their lost homes but because accepting such meant recognizing Israel, the vast majority refused.
I am so sorry that you Palestinian Arabs lost your genocidal war. Really.
Was talking to a friend who fought in the Gulf war. When I mentioned the occupation in Israel he thought I was crazy. He’s even married to a beautiful Jewish wife but didn’t know the first thing about the conflict. They get their info from people like John Hagee.
When he reads the truth, he will still think you are crazy.
Ilan Pappe’s book ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ is the best book to read if someone wants to know the truth about events in 1947/48.
Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens book, ‘Blaming the Victims’ Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, will tell you who are the real victims are in this conflict.
Henry Siegman’s article in The London Review of Books, tells us about, The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam.
The ethnic cleansing has never stopped, blaming the victims has never stopped, peace deals always favouring Israel have never stopped.
I used to fall for that old tactic. It’s a never-ending rabbit hole of distraction.
As long as people are sucked into 70 year old arguments they never get around to
talking about the present actions of Zionists in Israel and America.
There’s no rebuttal to the present.
Pappe’s reputation as Israel’s worst and/or sloppiest historian suggests your lead in is that you are recommending some wonderful propaganda that supports your bad choices.
Israel will always propose peace treaties that favor its needs. After all, 73 years ago, the Palestinian Arabs, with the help of the Arab league, launched a genocidal war against the Jews (Genocidal in intent. Incompetency is never a legal defense), and they lost. The eventual treaty will never meet Palestinian Arab demands.
As for ethnic cleansing, 90% of the Arabs who departed what is now Israel remained within the borders of British Mandate Palestine. It was quite common in that day and age to deport an enemy people. It occurred in Czechoslovakia and Poland after WWII when 12 million ethnic Germans were “peacefully” and legally deported with upwards of 1 million deaths. It occurred during the “peaceful” partition of India and East/West Pakistan with over 1 million deaths. In British Mandate Palestine, while regretful and during a war imposed by those same Arabs, there were less than 6 thousand deaths making that episode of “ethnic cleansing” the most humane in history.
“It was quite common in that day and age to deport an enemy people.”
There’s some hard evidence that Zionist ideologues arrived on the scene viewing population removal as a basic necessity to building their eventual state – they were certainly considering ways to coerce non-Jewish persons into leaving. Many of these remarks predate WWI, nevermind “that day and age”.
Herzl to Joseph Chamberlain (he was trying to obtain Cyprus): “Once we establish the Jewish Eastern Company with 5 million pounds capital, for settling Sinai and El Arish, the Cypriots will begin to want that golden rain on their island, too. The Moslems will move away, the Greeks will gladly sell their lands at a good price and migrate to Athens or Crete.”
(Herzl Diaries vol. 4, 1362)
Ruppin: “We are considering a parallel Arab colonization. Thus, we are planning to buy land in the regions of Homs, 257 Aleppo etc. which we will sell under easy terms to those Palestinian fellahin who have been harmed by our land purchases.” 258
(to Victor Jacobson, 12 May 1914; quoted in Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Modern Hebrew Culture, 363)
“Land is the essential condition for putting down economic roots in Palestine […] wherever we purchase land and settle people on it – its current workers [the Arabs] must of necessity be removed, whether they be owners or tenants […] in future it will be much harder to purchase land, because sparsely settled land is no longer available – what is left is land settled with considerable density” (ibid.).
(to Hans Kohn, 30 May 1928; Bloom, 379)
Israel Zangwill in 1905: “[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population.”
In 1919: “We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction… And therefore we must gently persuade them to ‘trek.’ After all, they have all Arabia with its million square miles… There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometers. ‘To fold their tents and silently steal away’ is their proverbial habit: Let them exemplify it now.”
(quoted in Morris, Righteous Victims, 140)
Moshe Shertok/Sharett: “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture… Recently, there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about “the mutual misunderstanding” between us and the Arabs, about “common interests” [and] about “the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples.” [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes… for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate – all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.”
(letter to “friends”, 12 Feb. 1914; quoted in Morris, Righteous Victims, 91)
It’s kind of interesting how Sharett begins that passage by admitting they were attempting to conquer a country from its present inhabitants, then at the end warns against letting a partner onto their “estate”. Right-o.
Yes, there is ‘some” hard evidence that some leaders of the Jewish nationalist movement considered the need to move populations as was done in the past by the Ottoman Empire. There were also some leaders who considered other methods and had different ideas. So what?
The main issue is that the Palestinian Arabs, with the aid of the Arab League, fought a genocidal war. The rhetoric on the Arab side suggested that their goal was genocide of the Jews.
Lovely remark….perfect example, of how to, in a Trumpian way, twist what happened, into the opposite of what happened.
It is hard to twist: An October 11, 1947 report on the pan-Arab summit in the Lebanese town of Aley, by Akhbar al-Yom’s editor Mustafa Amin, contained an interview he held with Arab League secretary-general Azzam. Titled, “A War of Extermination,” the interview read as follows (translated by Efriam Karsh): Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha spoke to me about the horrific war that was in the offing… saying: “I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars. I believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine’s Arab population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and China to win the honor of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine … You might be surprised to learn that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews… it will be impossible to contain the zealous volunteers arriving from all corners of the world to avenge the martyrdom of the Palestine Arabs, and viewing the war as dignifying every Arab and every Muslim throughout the world … The Arab is superior to the Jew…” David Barnett and Efraim Karsh, “Azzam’s Genocidal Threat,” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2001, 87-88.
They fought against the people who expelled them, who happened to be Jewish people.
They fought against the people living with them and then they were expelled. Do not put the cart before the horse. It just doesn’t work that way. Revising history is never a good idea. You always get bit in the end.