Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders: A Jewish Statesman with Conscience and Integrity

It is Jewish-descended American politicians and statesmen like Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders, of the tiny US State of Vermont, a former Democrat turned Independent but with liberal and social-intervention oriented sympathies like the Democrats, who make it extremely difficult to bear down hard on the unspeakable atrocities being perpetrated daily against Palestinian women and children, for the most part, by the Benjamin Netanyahu-led Likud Coalition Government of Zionist hardliners.

So far, it is the 82-year-old humanist and humanitarian former Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, who has come closest to calling the genocidal war launched by Israel against the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip for what it veritably is (See “Sanders: ‘No More Money to Netanyahu’s War Machine to Kill Palestinian Children” CBS News 3/10/24). During a recent appearance on CBS-TV’s popular Sunday current affairs program “Face the Nation,” the Brooklyn-, New York, born Senator called for the suspension of military assistance to the Zionist Likud Party Coalition Government until a swashbuckling Prime Minister Netanyahu withdrew his Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) slaughter machine from Gaza and all occupied Palestinian lands and territories.

According to the former Presidential Candidate of the Democratic Party (DP), the wanton and sanguinary activities of Mr. Netanyahu in Gaza is in gross violation of the United States’ Foreign Assistance Act, especially with regard to the callous and the deliberate blocking of American Humanitarian Aid by the Israeli government. So far, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been adamantly and mischievously insistent that his publicly declared determination to wipe out the leadership of the democratically elected Hamas regime on the Gaza Strip, which the Netanyahu government has staunchly backed and financially supported in the recent past, is in retaliation for the October 7, 2023 Hamas-engineered assault on the southern Israeli border with Gaza that reportedly culminated in the deaths of an estimated 1,200 Israeli citizens and residents.

In language eerily and strikingly reminiscent of Germany’s Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Prime Minister Netanyahu indicated that he has absolutely no intention of relenting until the last official and/or operative of Hamas has been liquidated, as a means of ensuring that “October 7 does not happen again.” In this, Mr. Netanyahu appears to have borrowed at least a page, if not several chapters, from the Hitler-authored book of “The Final Solution” or “Mein Kampf,” I forget which.

But that US President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., would quickly order the blockading of the territorial waters of the Gaza Strip in the wake of the Hamas attack, a proforma act based on the longstanding defense pact struck between the United States and Israel, may very well have encouraged the Israeli leader to overreach himself. Faced with a plethora of criminal charges verging on official corruption, the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister may very well have envisaged the Hamas-staged attack as a prime opportunity to distract attention from his personal problems and his sharply increasing unpopularity, especially following his epically failed strategically self-serving attempt by the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations to drastically reduce the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court by subsuming the latter third arm of the country’s democratic government under the executive branch of the Israeli government.

The preceding notwithstanding, what cannot be gainsaid is the fact that President Biden’s hands were tied by at least three generations of military bond between the Jewish State of Israel and the United States of America. Which simply means that Mr. Biden’s decision to quickly dispatch US troops to the Mediterranean and the Gaza environs would have pretty much been the same or perhaps even worse, if another US President happened to have been at the helm, especially a Republican Party (RP)-sponsored opportunistic President like Mr. Donald John Trump, the Aryan Supremacist Wannabe Kim Jong-un style of dictator.

Interestingly and significantly, what is not being publicly discussed and/or debated, for the most part, is the fact that the Hamas assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, had obviously been in direct response to the age-old mistreatment of the Palestinians by the leadership of the Jewish State as second- and third-class citizens, as well as the routine and the rampant occupation of Palestinian lands by Israeli settlers with impunity and the blind and staunch backing, actually the open encouragement, of the government in Tel-Aviv.

For Senator Sanders, however, the “retaliatory” activities of the Netanyahu regime have created a historically “unprecedented crisis” on the Gaza Strip which requires prompt defusing, especially the apparently deliberate use of the barbaric instrument of death by starvation as a principal strategy of the Netanyahu war machine and war game. As well, for Senator Sanders, the Israeli government cannot genuinely talk about bringing peace to both the Palestinians and the Israelis, when the more heavily armed IDF is hellbent on achieving its own version of Hitler’s Final Solution.

Ultimately, in the expertly informed opinion of Senator Sanders, both the Hamas government and the Netanyahu regime need to be effectively and definitively decommissioned, if the long proposed but mutually rejected Two-State Solution is to see the light of day or lasting peace is to be achieved in the region.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 11, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]