Dissident Veteran For Peace: Bernie Sanders: Retrograde on Palestine

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Monday, August 08, 2016

Bernie Sanders: Retrograde on Palestine

Bernie Sanders is no longer running for president but he still continues to inspire false hope in some folks on the matter of Palestine-Israel. Sanders' retrograde positions on Palestine-Israel should not be surprising. He is, after all, an old kibbutznik. Like Noam Chomsky, Sanders was involved with the Stalinist Hashomer Hatzair.

The Hashomer Hatzair was also "active in the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish community in Palestine. Together with the other kibbutz federations, its members formed the nucleus of the Palmach, which served as the shock troops in the war for Israel's independence."

Sanders and his wife worked at the Jews-only Kibbutz Sha'ar Ha'amakim near Haifa. Kibbutz Sha'ar Ha'amakim was built on land inhabited by Palestinians for generations but Zionist Jews made a deal with the infamous Sursuk family, absentee landlords in Beirut, to sell the land out from under the fellaheen.

Sanders has also aligned himself with a rabid religious Zionist, the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and his Chabad movement. According to Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre was also affiliated with Chabad (see page 61 and chap. 6 in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2004)).

Chabad is also known for erecting giant menorahs on public property during Hanukkah and Sanders helped out with that, too. In County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union , the case Sanders helped advance, the US Supreme Court decided that a nativity scene had to go but a menorah was okay.

The foundations of Sanders' socialism (and Jewish identity) are troubling to say the least. If Sanders had publicly and fully repudiated his ties to Stalinism, the violent, Jewish supremacist Hashomer Hatzair/kibbutz movement, and Schneerson and Chabad or at least denounced their most problematic aspects then that would one thing. As far as I know Sanders has done nothing of the sort.

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