Call It a Genocide, Bernie
Sanders refuses to say what we all know to be true about Gaza. That's unacceptable.
No one who looks honestly at what is happening in Gaza can really deny anymore that Israel is committing genocide. The world’s leading human rights organizations have come to this conclusion. So have the world’s leading scholars of genocide. Now, as Israel’s campaign of starvation, slaughter, and ethnic cleansing deepens further, even some prominent Israelis are beginning to admit the truth. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—no man of peace—wrote in Haaretz earlier this week that, while he had previously pushed back on “accusations of genocide and war crimes,” he was “no longer able to do so.”
All of this is to say that the fact of the genocide is no longer up for debate. There’s no question about it. The only question is whether powerful people will acknowledge this reality and act accordingly.
Which brings me to Bernie Sanders.
Sanders has been better on Gaza than just about any other senator—not a high bar to clear, but still. He’s rallied support for an arms embargo against Israel. He routinely uses harsh language like “despicable” and “unspeakable” to describe Israel’s actions. He condemns “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes.”
But Sanders still—even now, with over 19 months of evidence and against the backdrop of an ever-deepening global consensus—will not call what is happening in Gaza a genocide.
Sanders was in Ireland on Sunday, where he was confronted about this issue. From the Irish Times (emphasis mine):
Two people were ejected from an event at Liberty Hall on Saturday night for heckling United States senator Bernie Sanders for refusing to describe the Israeli assault on Gaza as a genocide.
Mr Sanders and his wife Jane O’Meara Sanders, who joined him on stage for a questions and answers session with Second Captains and Irish Times journalist Ken Early, roundly rejected the criticism.
“What we should be focusing on is ending the destruction and changing policy,” he said. “Let’s be clear, 52,000 people have been killed, mostly women and children. Over 100,000 have been wounded with the entire infrastructure destroyed. That is horrible. That is barbaric. That is the concern we have but some people want to argue about a word which the United Nations is now working to define.”
Ms O’Meara Sanders said calling the current events genocide would alienate significant allies in the US, of which, she suggested, there were already too few, and provide opponents with an opportunity to shift the focus of the debate.
“The fact we’re spending billions of dollars on weapons for Israel would be just falling on deaf ears,” she said. “[Mr Sanders] wouldn’t have gotten 15 votes [for a recent Bill he introduced in the Senate to curtail military support to Israel] if he could be marginalised by a word.”
Yeah, no. That’s not gonna fly.
Despite what Sanders and his wife appear to believe, genocide is not just “a word.” It’s a legal threshold that every reputable observer agrees Israel has met. And, just as importantly, it’s a signal that something beyond the normal horrors of war is happening. It sends a message that a particularly calculated and terrible form of barbarity is being carried out. There’s a reason that people call genocide “the crime of crimes,” after all.
Bernie Sanders, as I’ve written before, occupies a unique place in American politics. Polls routinely show him to be the most popular US politician by some distance. He has a devoted, broad base of followers—people who listen to him and are inspired by him. (At a time when the Democratic Party is roughly as beloved as cancer, Sanders is drawing massive crowds in places like Utah. This is not normal.) And, last but not least, he is a proud Jew.
So it would really matter for someone like Sanders—again, the most popular politician in the country—to say what we all know: that Israel is committing genocide. It would matter that the most famous Jewish politician in America stood with the Palestinian people in that way. It would matter, at a time when Palestinians and their allies are facing the full force of fascism merely for speaking up in favor of peace, that someone in Sanders’s position gave that kind of support. It would matter that people who want to end the genocide could point to Sanders in their campaigns. It would matter that such a person had decided to tell the truth.
And that’s also why it matters so much that Sanders refuses to do so. It is simply not acceptable, this long into the genocide, with this much suffering, with Israel operating with this much uninhibited cruelty, with this much repression of the Palestine movement, for someone like Sanders to talk so casually about “a word,” as if that word means nothing. That word means everything. And every day that Sanders denies that is a day he is failing to fully meet the moment.
So Bernie: tell the truth. Call this a genocide. Now.
How can he look his ally, Rashida Tlaib, in the face and not call it what it was. Love ya Bernie but this ain’t it. Call a spade a spade.
Yet another reminder that the Democratic party never was, and never will be, a vessel for meaningful change, but rather a busybox and pressure-release valve for centrists and left-liberals in lieu of direct action.