By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, April 09, 2016
Can he take a mulligan? Bernie Sanders’s interview with
the editorial board of the New York Daily
News revealed a candidate more interested in platitudes and dreams than in
specifics and realities. He couldn’t even explain how his signature policy — breaking
up the big banks — would work. His campaign might as well have sent Larry David
in his place. The comic is better informed.
The entire transcript is embarrassing. But when the
subject turned to the Middle East, Sanders crossed the line that separates the
daft from the dangerous. He not only smeared the Jewish state, he betrayed an
ignorance of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that would, if he were president,
lead to the loss of Jewish and Arab lives. Naïveté is fine for Vox.com. But it
is absolutely unacceptable for the Oval Office.
The subject was Israel’s 2014 war with Gaza. Sanders said
Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’s shelling of civilian population centers was
disproportionate. “Anybody help me out here,” he said, “because I don’t
remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were
killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?”
No Bernie, it doesn’t. A civilian death toll of more than
10,000 sounds the very opposite of right — it sounds like a gross exaggeration,
a calumny, like disinformation coming from Marx knows where. Certainly not from
the speech on the Middle East that Sanders delivered last month, where he
criticized “Israeli counter attacks that killed nearly 1,500 civilians and
wounded thousands more.”
This lower figure comes from the United
Nations, which makes it just as suspect. Civilian deaths are reported by
the local authorities, which in Gaza’s case are members of a terrorist
organization devoted to the end of the Zionist enterprise who have no problem
building military headquarters in the basements of hospitals, hiding weapons in
schools, attacking from civilian areas, refusing ceasefire after ceasefire, and
starting the war in the first place. I’d take their claims with a grain of
salt.
Sanders is ignorant of more than just the 2014 war. Not
only does he want the Israeli government to halt settlement activity. He wants
Israel to pull “back settlements in the West Bank, just as Israel did in Gaza.”
When the Daily News asked him merely
to “describe the pullback that you have in mind,” the senator flinched. He
dodged the question. He invoked Palestinian suffering for which Israel, not
Palestinian elites and institutions, presumably is to blame. And finally, after
the paper would not stop pressing him on the issue, Sanders said, “Well, again,
you’re asking me a very fair question, and if I had some paper in front of me,
I would give you a better answer.” Since the authors of the paper most likely
would be an
employee of J Street or James Zogby,
I sincerely doubt that. Points for honesty though.
“It’s quite clear that Bernie Sanders has a weakness — by
the way, a weakness shared by Donald Trump on the Republican side,” said the
Democrats’ man in Israel, “that his forte is domestic and not international
affairs.” You’re telling me. And this is supposed to be an apology for Sanders
— that we should ignore his glaring weakness because, well, he’s occupied by
other things and, by the way, Donald Trump has the same problem. If you share
Donald Trump’s problems, you shouldn’t be president. I suspect not a few voters
in the New York Democratic primary might agree.
So Sanders’s policy is clueless. But it is also a
security risk. Why? Not only because he plainly hasn’t thought enough about
these issues to be seriously prepared for making the judgments necessary as
commander-in-chief. But also because his view of the conflict is so fanciful,
so heavily weighted toward the Palestinian narrative of grievance and
victimization, that a Sanders presidency would repeat all of the deadly
mistakes of the last six years.
We’ve tried calling for settlement freezes, for direct
negotiations, for proportionality, and for evenhandedness while ignoring
Palestinian incitement, Palestinian terror, Palestinian corruption, Palestinian
incompetence in the provision of even the most basic public services. What has
that gotten us? Hamas remains in Gaza as knife-wielding terrorists murder
wantonly in Jerusalem. Some legacy.
It’s one thing for Sanders to call for “ending the
economic blockade of Gaza.” It is another to recognize why, exactly, the
blockade is in place. Does he think Bibi Netanyahu just dreamed it up one day
on a lark? The blockade isn’t there to punish Palestinian children. It’s there
to prevent Turkey and Iran from restocking the Hamas war machine. The blockade
is but a symptom of the problem of Hamas’s revisionism, of its genocidal
ambitions. Israel abandoned Gaza a decade ago, yet Hamas’s war continues. Would
it overly bother Bernie Sanders to ask why?
What the Daily News
interview revealed was that Sanders is nothing more than a politician who
excels at the outside game of earned media, of purist stances boldly announced
in the most moralistic terms, of professional indignation at whichever
injustices most upset the subscribers to The
Nation on a given week. He hasn’t considered matters of foreign and defense
and diplomatic policy as deeply as he might because, up till now, he hasn’t
needed to. His “political revolution” works the same magic as Donald Trump’s
wall: It makes all the world’s problems disappear.
And, as with Trump, when someone has the gumption
actually to ask Sanders about details, to point out the logical consequences of
his ideas, he filibusters, gets angry, shifts direction. “You’re asking me now
to make not only decisions for the Israeli government,” he told the editorial
board at one point, “but for the Israeli military, and I don’t quite think I’m
qualified to make decisions.”
Here, at last, Bernie Sanders got something right.
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