(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Bernie Sanders’s Incoherent, Pernicious Gaza Cease-Fire Position, Explained [1]

['Adam Johnson', 'Hugh Kinsella Cunningham', 'Nicolas Niarchos', 'Katrina Vanden Heuvel', 'Pablo Calvi', 'Bécquer Seguín', 'Sebastiaan Faber', 'Nan Levinson', 'Spencer Ackerman', 'John Nichols']

Date: 2023-12-18 15:15:34+00:00

World / Bernie Sanders’s Incoherent, Pernicious Gaza Cease-Fire Position, Explained Instead of demanding that we end the war that actually exists, Sanders is lobbying for a humane war that Israel has zero interest in.

Senator Bernie Sanders arrives for a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on unions on November 14, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

There’s been a lot of confusion over Senator Bernie Sanders’s position on the Gaza war. On the one hand, few elected officials have been more harshly critical of Israel’s siege and relentless bombing of Gaza. On the other hand, he refuses to join global calls—by everyone from Oxfam to Amnesty International to Doctors Without Borders, along with a growing number of his congressional colleagues, including both of the other elected federal officials from Vermont—for a longer-term cease-fire. Instead, Sanders has stuck to his demand for something fairly boutique and not backed by any major human rights or Palestinian organizations: a “temporary” cease-fire—ostensibly, so aid can get into Gaza and Israel can propose a plan for a more humane strategy to “eliminate Hamas.”

Note this from The Post today: Bernie Sanders is calling on President Biden to support the United Nations ceasefire resolution because he thinks it would be *temporary.* https://t.co/PLLnKZRs0d pic.twitter.com/CtRBEYd2Ib — Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) December 13, 2023

In and of itself, another temporary pause is not a bad thing. But it’s neither a useful or morally sound larger strategy. The week after the November 24–December 1 “humanitarian truce,” Israel, according to the Euro-Med human rights monitor, increased the rate of daily killing 40 percent, effectively just making up for lost time. And the number of Palestinian prisoners released from prison ended up being dwarfed by the total number of Palestinian civilians Israeli occupation forces has arrested in the West Bank since October 7. Hamas freed more than 100 Israeli hostages, which is great news, but in the face of over 18,000 dead Palestinians, that is a relatively small humanitarian victory.

If Sanders were only refusing to call for a longer-term cease-fire, it would be reputation-tarnishing but perhaps not worthy of a column-length rebuke. But Sanders—either because of partisan or personal loyalty to the president or a misguided belief that neat and clean regime change is a realistic option—is doing something far more harmful: He’s actively lobbying against the logic of a longer cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. As someone viewed by many in Congress and media as the furthest left pole of “acceptable” left-wing opinion, this has undermined the big tent demand among Palestinian groups, aid groups, and human rights groups for a longer-term cease-fire.

Sanders has repeatedly argued on national TV that a permanent cease-fire with Hamas is not only inadvisable but impossible. He told CBS’s Face the Nation on December 10, “I don’t know how you have a permanent cease-fire with Hamas, who has said before October 7 and after October 7 that they want to destroy Israel.” Such statements have been gleefully clipped and shared by the right-wing American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC):

Thank you @SenSanders for your strong opposition to a permanent ceasefire with Hamas.@FaceTheNation pic.twitter.com/78PdsAKm1D — AIPAC | Text ISRAEL to 24722 | #StandWithIsrael (@AIPAC) December 10, 2023

On their face, Sanders’s comments about a cease-fire with Hamas being impossible because of its desire to destroy Israel make sense. If one doesn’t look too hard, it has the right tough-guy War on Terror vibes. But upon further examination, what Sanders is saying is ahistorical demagoguery. Far from spurning negotiations with Hamas, Israel has entered into cease-fires with the group over a dozen times since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2006. Both sides have broken the cease-fires, but some have lasted several months or even several years. These cease-fires have historical precedent, and this is one major reason most of the human rights, medical, and humanitarian world has rallied around this demand. It’s happened many times before, and there’s a framework for it to happen again. Now, these longer-term cease-fires are not the same thing as “peace”—no indefinite military occupation and blockade can ever be the same as peace—but they are a necessary antecedent to any step toward a resolution to the conflict, no matter how far off the prospect seems right now. What comes after a cease-fire is a complex and difficult question, but “stop killing a kid every 10 minutes” ought to be a baseline demand for any positive outcome.

The reason Sanders opposes a longer cease-fire is that he explicitly supports the logic of Israel’s stated aim to overthrow Hamas. In doing so, he is advocating what is effectively a time-out so that Israel can present Congress with a more humane alternative to its current strategy of what President Joe Biden himself calls “indiscriminate bombing.” (It’s rare for a sitting president to casually admit that he’s a party to a war crime, but we live in strange times).

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/bernie-sanders-gaza-cease-fire-israel-palestine/

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/