I Won’t Vote for Bernie Sanders:
His feeble position on Israel is a serious progressive problem

Bernie has run a smart campaign and I admire his economic platform. But his foreign policy lacks moral vision

By Steven Salaita

February 15, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "Salon" - Bernie Sanders has run a smart and spirited campaign. Even if he eventually loses the Democratic primary, his rise from virtually nowhere to threaten Hillary Clinton from the left offers much-needed optimism in a time of dismal inequality. His invective against Wall Street is accurate and often courageous. He is the rare candidate who doesn’t traffic in patriotic or religious platitudes.

But I won’t be voting for him.

Sanders has long supported Israeli colonization, including the worst elements of its military occupation. I’ve had numerous arguments with friends about the extent and character of that support. Is it fair to call Sanders an adamant Zionist? Is he a Zionist at all? Does it even matter? How bad is he, really, in the spectrum of U.S. politics, where kowtowing to Israel has long been a prerequisite for the presidency?

We learn useful things about Sanders’s positions on Israel in relation to his competition, but comparison is unnecessary. Sanders periodically comments on Israel-Palestine. Here’s what we know: He’s not a raging ideologue. He doesn’t extol Israel. He hasn’t kissed Netanyahu’s ring. He recently declined to call himself a Zionist. Last year, though, he yelled at pro-Palestine activists and his platform on Israel-Palestine sounds agreeable but reproduces a failed status quo.

Sanders also has a record of funding or rationalizing terrible violence. We shouldn’t whisk away that record. It’s a material example of Sanders’s performance as a senator and has direct consequences on the lives of millions in the Middle East.

Supporters of Sanders say he’s not that bad, certainly not as bad as most contemporaries. This statement has no universal veracity. Sanders may not be bad according to a particular standard, but one cannot proffer this claim without subsuming Palestinians to an arbitrary pragmatism. Comments like “he’s not that bad” or “he’s better than most” are value judgments that shouldn’t be divorced from dynamic contexts of power and perspective. Those value judgments shift according to conviction, point of view, and geography.

Consider those who suffer the brutality of the Israeli military occupation Sanders has funded. In what way would they make sense of the notion that Sanders is worthy of support because he’s better than other politicians who fund their suffering?

When we’re asked to be pragmatic, the first question should be, “Pragmatic according to whose interests?” The second question should be, “Who determines the conditions of pragmatism?” Just because sucking up to Israel is a compulsion for politicians doesn’t mean it should be compulsory for voters. To say that we must accept a presidential candidate’s adulation of Israel for pragmatic reasons is to reinforce the normative power of Zionism. And to dismiss Sanders’s record on Israel as unimportant is to devalue Palestinian life.

Supporting Israel—by which I mean an unwillingness to criticize its ethnocratic structure—often sounds abstract. We do well to remember that human beings experience tremendous harm because of American economic and military aid to Israel. Thousands remain hungry and homeless in the Gaza Strip. Millions endure the daily indignities of life as occupied subjects. Refugees cannot return to their ancestral land. Children sustain psychological trauma. It is, in all, an ugly situation made worse by the cowardice of American politicians.