Bernie's thoughts on the choice, including Gaza and Lebanon

 

How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she supports Israel’s war? Here is my answer

Bernie Sanders

The West Bank

I was pleased to discover recently that I can once again access magazines online from the Albuquerque Library through my old Kindle Fire tablet.  Even though the long-outdated tablet is slow and cumbersome it is still a nice way to read (at no cost) the two magazines that I follow, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

This last issue of the NY Review has some particularly good book reviews and articles, including an extraordinary account of the the atrocities currently taking place in the West Bank against the Palestinian population by right-wing Israeli settlers with the full cooperation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

An 'Unlawful Presence' is by David Shulman, an Israeli human rights activist who works on the ground to try to combat the endless, horrific persecution of the rural Palestinian people.  He also, in this article, describes how it is that so many of his fellow citizens have become numb to the facts of the genocidal assault in both Gaza and the West Bank. He mentions in regard to that skewed perception of reality that it is attributable in part to the dereliction of the Israeli news sources, with the sole exception of the Haaretz newspaper; how that paper's willingness to persevere in the country's climate of right-wing terror is another story that needs telling.

The Convention

 My expectation for the Democratic Party Convention is that there will be a lot of balloons and confetti.  Beyond that, I'll be surprised if there are any really new policy initiatives.  Harris will mostly be careful not to step on any toes, the foremost of those being the American Israel Public Affairs Committee(AIPAC) which has already deployed millions of dollars against progressive Democrats supporting Palestinians facing Israel's genocidal war in Gaza. At the same time Kamala will need to signal some willingness to push for a ceasefire as soon as possible. A lot will depend on the numbers of pro-Palestinian delegates and demonstrators who show up and how the protestors are handled by the Convention's security and Chicago police forces.

Joe Biden could have taken action to avoid Harris' dilemma over Gaza by demanding an immediate ceasefire.  He did not do that and it is unlikely that he will make that part of his convention message, or even that he will push effectivly on Israel for a movement toward peace during his remaining months in office.

The pro-Palestinian demonstrators, of course, have their own dilemma to confront as Trump's pro-Israeli record has been even more radical in some ways than Biden's decades-long unconditional support of Israel and the resultant disaster.

Time for Action to End the War

 Biden keeps making vague complaints that Israel has not produced a plan for what comes after the Gaza war ends.  Why not get more specific and initiate the process with requirements and sanctions that are in the power of the U.S. and its allies to undertake?

Thomas Piketty describes the dilemma and its possible resolution in his blog:

...The challenges may seem immense, but what’s the alternative? To wait peacefully for the open slaughter of Palestinian civilians to reach 40,000 dead, then 50,000 dead, then 100,000 dead? The moral and political cost of Western inaction is exorbitant. It can be explained first and foremost by the navel-gazing of European and American societies, too preoccupied with their own divisions to take any real interest in constructive solutions in Israel-Palestine...

Netanyahu clearly wants to stretch out the war as long as possible to forestall corruption charges.  That cannot be allowed.

ICC's arrest warrant request

* Bernie Sanders breaks from Biden and Blinken to support ICC's arrest warrant request *

Biden has chosen to not withhold arms shipments to Israel which have contributed substantially to the deaths of 35,000 Palestinians.  He is now also trying to obstruct the effort of the International Criminal Court to hold those responsible on both sides for their actions in the war in Gaza.

Biden needs to be held accountable.

A message for Joe

 Robert Reich, in today's Guardian, has a few suggestions for what Biden might want to say in this evening's State of the Union address.  Reich's list is essentially an outline for a coherent Democratic Party platform based on FDR's 1936 summary of his first term accomplishments.  I thought it was a good list as far as it went.  Missing was any mention of Gaza, or the complicity of the U.S. military-industrial complex in the ongoing Genocide.  We'll see what Joe has to say on those topics.