In their attempt to win the American Jewish vote and its money, candidates for the US presidential elections typically pledge their affection and support for Israel. While Israel is the country that has been dismantling Palestine, demolishing the homes of Palestinians and destroying their lives, the US presidential elections contenders constantly intone that the Palestinians are dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The US government, the media and the candidates maintain their virtually unilateral support for Israel's policies and its rejection of the international consensus. Yet Israel has made the decision to choose expansion, apartheid and the abuse of Palestinian human rights over abiding by international law and finding an enduring solution to the Palestinian issue. The norm in Israel is to continue the illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure in the West Bank and Jerusalem, integrate whatever might be of value, deny Palestinian refugees the right of return, consign the Palestinians to unviable cantons and subject them to repression. In Gaza, the norm is to ensure a miserable life for its residents under a cruel siege that permits no more than bare survival. This relentless siege is punctuated by savage attacks that are normally followed by ceasefire agreements under which Israel maintains its siege and the Gazans observe the ceasefire. Israel also engages in “mowing the lawn,” its euphemism for the regular shooting of Gazans. Israel and its supporters claim that its military is “the most moral army in the world” because it informs residents of Gaza that their homes will be bombed 10 minutes before they are bombed and their lives are shattered. But Israeli journalist Amira Hass has described the recorded warnings ordering hundreds of thousands of civilians to leave their already targeted homes for another equally dangerous place eight miles away as “an act of sadism”. There is nowhere in the Gaza Strip that is safe from Israel's savagery and sadism. When the attacks on Gaza are called off and Israel pursues its expansion and confiscation policies in the West Bank and Jerusalem, those Gazans who have survived the attacks are free to return to the norm in their Israeli-controlled prison. When Republican and Democratic Party presidential elections candidates debate Middle East foreign policy in the US, they rarely mention the Palestinians except as a threat to Israel. They usually support Israel's hard-line policies and downplay any compromises that might be necessary for Israel to live in peace. Ironically, the first Jewish presidential elections candidate from any major US political party, Senator Bernie Sanders, has dared to also be the first to express his sympathy for the Palestinians in his speeches and in debates with fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton. “Bernie Sanders just shattered an American taboo on Israel,” wrote US journalist Zack Beauchamp following a televised debate between the candidates. “[Sanders] did something previously unheard of in last night's CNN debate. He stood up for Palestinians' humanity.” Sanders suggested that US policy towards the Palestinians was wrong and should be changed and argued that the US should take a more active role in championing Palestinian rights. He dared to say, “We cannot continue to be one-sided [on dealing with the Palestinian issue]. There are two sides to the issue.” Sanders told the moderator and the nation something that had never been said before in a US presidential debate: “In the long run, if we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.” He supported his argument by describing Israel's attacks on Gaza in 2014 as “disproportionate and leading to the unnecessary loss of innocent lives”. He added, “In Gaza — not a very large area — there were 10,000 civilians who were wounded and some 1,500 who were killed.” Sanders is a liberal Zionist, but he spoke against anti-Muslim rhetoric, likening it to the prejudice his Jewish parents faced in Europe before the Holocaust. According to the American journalist and author Harry Jaffe, when Sanders was a younger man in the 1980s “he would occasionally take the position that Palestinians deserve their own state and achieving that end might require that the US withhold arms from Israel”. Who is Bernie Sanders, this 74-year-old New Yorker who wants to be US president and change the course of history by putting economic, racial, and social justice in the spotlight? His biographers describe him as being unlike typical American politicians running for president, since these try to write autobiographies that give voters rosy glimpses of their past. Sanders is the author of Outsider in the White House, which describes his life in politics. He practiced radical politics before running for public office, studied at the University of Chicago and even worked on an Israeli kibbutz. When he is campaigning among his mostly young audience, many are thrilled by his call for a “political revolution” that he would lead if elected president. The two words that best describe Sanders's personal and political history are “surprise” and “shock,” according to Jaffe. His audience likes him because of his message and for his being who he is — a Brooklyn-born man on a political crusade. Dearborn, in the US state of Michigan, whose population is 40 per cent Arab, voted overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary elections for Sanders, a Jew, over his rival Hillary Clinton. The story of Sanders winning in Dearborn made the national news, with many US political commentators, including Brian Lehrer, Chuck Todd and Lawrence O'Donnell, wondering how a predominantly Arab constituency, most of it Muslim, could support a Jewish candidate. The US magazine Newsweek wrote that the result was “just one more strange data point in an election overflowing with them”. If there is a “strange data point,” it is in the racist US media that has been wrongly stigmatising the Arabs for allegedly hating Jews because of their Jewish faith. Arab Americans want justice for the Palestinians, and they support the political, social and economic reforms that Sanders calls for. However, the US media has been treating them unfairly as a group with presumed prejudices and only one issue, rather than as individual citizens exercising their civic duties. The next question is what that same media will find to say if Sanders loses the vote in his native Brooklyn. The writer is a political analyst and author of Is the Two-State Solution Already Dead?
