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Bernie Sanders faces blowback as progressives urge cease-fire in Gaza [1]

['Liz Goodwin']

Date: 2023-11-14

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) blazed his way through two presidential primaries by simplifying progressive policy into clear and catchy terms — inveighing against “the billionaires” he wanted to tax on behalf of the “99 percent” of Americans who stood to benefit. Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays. ArrowRight But when it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, the senator has explicitly eschewed slogans and taken a more nuanced and cautious approach that has alienated many of his former staffers and supporters. The gap between their calls for an immediate cease-fire as the civilian death toll mounts and Sanders’s push for a humanitarian pause in the fighting is one that’s bedeviling his Senate Democratic colleagues as well, as progressive activists corner them in restaurants and their offices, demanding more.

Sanders’s status as a progressive icon — known simply as “Bernie” to a generation of liberal voters he organized — has made his current position particularly painful for some who want to see him leading a burgeoning antiwar movement. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, Sanders has said a cease-fire agreement with such an organization is impossible, even as he raises alarms about the more than 11,100 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, many of them children.

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“I really think Bernie has such a beautiful legacy to uphold, and this is really risking it,” said Daniela Lapidous, who directed the help desk on Sanders’s 2020 campaign and was one of hundreds of former Sanders staffers to sign onto an open letter pushing him to call for a cease-fire. Sanders’s former campaign spokeswoman, Briahna Joy Gray, called him the “biggest political disappointment of our generation” in a social media post.

Sanders, who is Jewish and briefly lived in Israel as a young man, has been one of the loudest critics of Israel’s right-wing government in the Senate in recent years, decrying conditions for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not pushing for a two-state solution that would give Palestinians their own country. That iconoclasm was part of what attracted some Muslim voters to his campaign.

“It feels like a betrayal,” said Nusaiba Mubarak, who organized Muslim and Arab American voters for Sanders’s campaign. She said that Sanders-affiliated group text chains had changed their names to remove his name. “Illinois Muslims for Bernie,” for example, is now “Illinois Muslims for Palestine.”

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“A lot of us had Bernie paraphernalia and posters in our homes and our living rooms, and now we can’t bear to hold them up; we have to pull them out,” she said.

Several of Sanders’s mentees and friends, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), have joined 15 other House Democrats to sign onto a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. Meanwhile, some antiwar protests across the country have swelled to thousands of participants, and a recent Associated Press poll found nearly half of Democrats believe the Biden administration is not sympathetic enough to the Palestinians.

Sanders declined interview requests to discuss his views, but in written answers to questions provided to The Washington Post, he said the “tragic reality” is that Hamas wants “permanent war and the destruction of Israel” and would not abide by a cease-fire.

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“I wish there was a simple solution,” he wrote when asked to respond to his progressive critics. “There isn’t.”

He believes that instead of a cease-fire, Israel should stop bombing and allow for an “extended” humanitarian pause — though he did not say how long exactly that should last — to allow the United Nations to rush in humanitarian aid and for hostage negotiations to continue. “Israel has a right to defend itself and go after Hamas, but they can’t level whole city blocks and bomb refugee camps to hit one target,” he wrote.

On Monday, he and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) visited the United Nations to meet with Secretary General António Guterres and other officials to discuss the humanitarian needs in Gaza.

And the senator suggested he would not support sending security money to Israel without some requirements on how the money can be spent by Israel — a position that so far has not been voiced by Sanders’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate. He mentioned an end to “indiscriminate bombing,” allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza, no long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza, the right of displaced Palestinians to return to their homes, freezing West Bank settlements and a commitment to “broad” peace talks to advance a two-state solution as concerns he’d like to see addressed.

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But Sanders’s position against a cease-fire has earned him praise from unexpected quarters. AIPAC, the pro-Israel group that Sanders has repeatedly slammed for giving a platform to those he says do not support Palestinian rights, tweeted a video of Sanders explaining why he did not believe in a cease-fire at pro-cease-fire House Democrats. “Thank you @SenSanders for your clear and principled opposition to calls for a ceasefire with Hamas,” the group said.

Sanders is not the only liberal senator facing pressure from activists who are dissatisfied with their stance on Israel. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was confronted last week while eating dinner with her husband by a woman who said she was a refugee from Gaza and that many of her relatives had been killed in the conflict.

“How many more of my family has to die for you to call for a cease-fire?” she asked.

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Last week, activists also confronted Democratic senators in the hallways of their office buildings.

“Senator Baldwin will you end the genocide?” one asked of Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin as she kept walking. And Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) was accosted in the quiet car of an Amtrak. On Tuesday, thousands of pro-Israel demonstrators were expected to march at the U.S. Capitol.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, is so far the only senator to signal support for a cease-fire. He told an activist last week he supported a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas if Hamas first released the Israeli hostages it took. “I am for a cease-fire — a mutual agreement,” Durbin said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, has led Democrats in pushing the Biden administration to get Israel to commit to abide by international law requiring the protection of civilian lives in Gaza as well as pushing for billions in humanitarian aid to be included in any Israel funding.

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Sanders’s supporters say they wish they saw him taking a bigger role in the nascent movement to push President Biden on the issue.

“I think someone of his experience and principled stances needs to put forward a vision of how this stops,” said Wa’el Alzayat, the CEO of Emgage, a Muslim American advocacy group that endorsed Sanders’s 2020 campaign.

Ari Rabin-Havt, who served as deputy campaign manager for Sanders in 2020, said he believes Sanders’s position is consistent with his past rhetoric, despite supporters’ disappointment.

“He was talking about the horrific conditions in Gaza long before most other members of the Senate,” he said.

Sanders proposed blocking a $735 million weapons sale to Israel during the 2021 war with Gaza and has pushed for making the billions in foreign aid the United States sends each year contingent upon the government improving conditions for Palestinians.

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A former Sanders adviser who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations said that he believes the senator was deeply affected by the gruesome and hate-filled nature of Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, as a Jewish person whose father’s family died in the Holocaust. Sanders had called for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel during earlier hostilities in 2021, but the events of Oct. 7 changed his view of that possibility forever.

“I really feel he is cognizant of his identity in a very keen way,” the adviser said. “I think the Hamas attack on Israelis and knowing that the animus was, ‘I want to extinguish all Jews’ hit him in a very different way.”

At a presidential town hall in 2020, Sanders said being Jewish was one of two major factors that affected his worldview. (The other one was growing up without a lot of money.) He also recalled weeping as a child when he read about the Holocaust, appearing emotional when discussing that memory. “The pain that my family, my father’s family suffered in Poland is something that has impacted my life, absolutely,” he said.

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“He’s someone who has relatives who [were affected by] the Holocaust,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the former co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 campaign. “He’s lived in Israel. He has an understanding for the need for a state of Israel given history. And he has clearly expressed deep sympathy and understanding of the humanity of the Palestinian people. He’s been at the forefront for calling for equal rights for Palestinians of any politician in Washington, D.C.”

But Sanders said his identity is not affecting how he’s viewing the conflict.

“For me, this is not a religious issue,” he wrote in response to questions from The Post. “It is about our common humanity and every person’s right to live with peace, security, and dignity.”

Sanders said he has some disagreements with Biden’s approach to the war, but that he believes Republicans’ responses have not gotten adequate attention — specifically their widespread opposition to providing any aid to Palestinians and the “ugly rhetoric” some GOP presidential candidates have used about Palestinians.

The senator also dismissed criticism of some progressive activists for not showing more empathy for the Israelis who died or were taken hostage in the immediate aftermath of the attack. “I am certain that the overwhelming majority of progressives who are demonstrating against the war understand that Hamas began it with their terrorist attack against Israel and were outraged by the killing of 1,300 innocent people,” he wrote. “But now, they are extremely disturbed by seeing the Israeli displacement of over a million Palestinians from their homes and the deaths of 11,000 people, half of whom are children.”

Sanders also called the four-hour daily pauses in the fighting Israel established to allow Palestinians to flee to the south inadequate, and said he agreed with the United Nation’s assessment that both Hamas and Israel are likely to have committed war crimes with their harm to civilians.

“Israel must learn from our response to 9/11,” Sanders wrote. “A policy based on blind hatred does not lead to good results.”

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/14/sanders-israel-gaza-cease-fire/

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