No Respect: Bernie, Gaza, and Liberal Zionism
Jim Kavanagh
With a New York Times op-ed
on November 22nd, Bernie Sanders chimed in with his take on what’s
happening in Gaza right now, and what must be done to “balance our desire to
stop the fighting with the need to address the roots of the conflict.” It’s
worth examining his piece as an example of the liberal-Zionist framework of
thought, which begins with the assumption that Zionism is a necessary and
virtuous project that "we" must support and that takes priority over
everything else in the context, including the lives of Palestinians, and ends—after
conjuring a happily-ever-after version of Zionism that pleases the minds and
consciences of Western liberals like himself—right where it started.
Bernie begins by insisting that “we must first be cleareyed about facts” and immediately recounts the facts he finds relevant thusly:
On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, unleashed a barbaric attack against Israel, killing about 1,200 innocent men, women and children and taking more than 200 hostage.
Unfortunately, Bernie’s account of root facts is tendentious
and factually incorrect. It does not “address” but obscures “the roots
of the conflict,” by starting “On Oct. 7.” It is not clear-eyed but
tendentious in trying to pass off as fact the characterization of
Hamas as “a terrorist organization.”
Bernie’s use of “terrorist” here echoes the hypocrisy of all
Western mainstream politicians and media, and it’s worth delving into.
Reign of “Terror”
Of course, “terrorist” is a terrible word, almost always
used dishonestly—and Bernie knows it. Even
Ronald Reagan knew that “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”
Insofar as it can be used factually, the word “terrorism” denotes a tactic
used sporadically by virtually every state army and armed resistance group in
history.
Those who support a group’s objective never dismissively
use “terrorism” to describe its actions, let alone to condemn the group. They
accept such tactics as unfortunate and morally problematic, but non-dispositive,
elements of a legitimate struggle. On the other hand, when a group whose objective
they oppose uses the same tactics, they insist that group must be condemned and
eliminated. It’s never the tactic, always the objective, that’s the
deal-breaker, the thing that determines when and how “terrorism” will be used.
Nobody had more contempt for this hypocrisy than the proudly self-identified “terrorists” who were the vanguard fighting founders and, latterly, Prime Ministers, of the Zionist state—like Menachem Begin, who embraced the title of ”Father of terrorism in all the world,” and Yitzhak Shamir, who wrote an article forthrightly entitled “Terror,” saying:
Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war…We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle….First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today, and its task is a major one: it demonstrates in the clearest language, heard throughout the world including by our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war against the occupier.
