By Seth Mandel
Wednesday, April 02, 2025
There he goes again. Bernie Sanders is hoping to force a
vote to withhold arms to Israel, Captain Ahab once again chasing his
blue-and-white whale as rage and obsession consume him.
There is another classically tragic aspect to this:
Bernie is living in a time and place entirely removed from our own. The war he
is raging about on the Senate floor is not the war that is actually being
fought in the Middle East. It’s a relic—much like Sanders himself—that is best
left behind.
Citing Hamas’s statistics with an emphasis on the claim
that “more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed,” Sanders announced
that this week he “will force Senate votes on two Joint Resolutions of
Disapproval I have introduced to block certain offensive arms sales to Israel.
These sales, proposed by the Trump Administration, would provide $8.8 billion
in bombs and other munitions to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s extremist government
to continue its destruction of Gaza.”
Unfortunately for Sanders, we are now at a moment when
these anti-Israel talking points can be debunked with Hamas’s own stats.
As Salo Aizenberg, a leading analyst of the Gaza
authorities’ fatality documents, posted, “Hamas’
new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths”
among whom were “1,080 children. These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers
were falsified—again.”
Hamas is playing a familiar game here. The terror group
will inflate casualty figures and go so far as to “name” and “identify” each
one on the list, which will be reported immediately. Following the reports,
Israel will be criticized for using excessive force and for endangering
civilians. After that round of reporting has faded from the headlines, Hamas
will edit the list, revising the total figure down and deleting thousands of
fake entries so the permanent record appears more in line with the facts. The
monthly numbers that media had been using become, at that point, irrelevant—but
only in retrospect. No changes will be made to stories, no corrections
appended, no apologies made.
Crucially, even after the adjustments, the March numbers
aren’t accurate either. For one, Aizenberg notes, they
include over 8,000 natural deaths, which is around 15 percent or so of the
total—a huge chunk of the list.
Further, Hamas doesn’t distinguish between combatants and
noncombatants. The deaths from war, Aizenberg wrote, are about 41,000 once the
natural deaths are removed. Israel has reportedly killed about 20,000 Hamas
fighters, which means nearly half of the war casualties have been Hamas
combatants. Last, 72 percent of fatalities aged 13-55—the traditional age range
of soldiers used by Hamas—were men.
Hamas’s list is thus inaccurate in the extreme but still
quite useful, if you are willing to actually read the material. Sanders &
Co. are trying to ban the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel just at the
moment when Hamas has proved the unprecedented accuracy of Israel’s urban
warfare.
Sanders can complain about the Israeli government all he
wants—Israel has been acquitted of Sanders’s charges by the Palestinian
government itself.
But let’s not stop there. To speak in progressive
Democrats’ own language, the vibe has shifted. Gazans are out in the streets to
oppose what Sanders would most like to do: enable Hamas to survive the war and
keep charge of the enclave. Moreover, Gazan clans are striking back—very
publicly—at Hamas in retaliation for its violent repression and mafia-like
control tactics. Bernie speaks not for innocent Palestinians but for their
tormentors.
According to videos on Telegram,
tens of thousands of Palestinians are demonstrating against Hamas today in Beit
Lahia. Another recent video
out of Gaza shows injured Gazans, several of whom are children, exiting an
ambulance and shouting that Hamas were hiding among them, causing them to be in
the line of fire.
Bernie Sanders and his merry band of Hamas propagandists
are behind the times. Hamas is so yesterday. Bernie isn’t speaking for
Palestinians, he’s speaking over them—and further endangering their lives for
his own political crusade.
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