Bernie, Zionism, and a Democratic UN
Today, Al Jazeera published an interview with Bernie Sanders on the heels of a letter to the United Nations, signed by Sanders and all 99 other US Senators, criticizing the UN for what they see as needless, and possibly anti-Semitic, attacks on Israel.
In the brief interview, Sanders gives his views on 3 topics: UN criticism of Israel, the Boycott Divstment Sanction (BDS) movement, and the two-state solution. The interview makes clear that justice and peace for Palestinians and Jews cannot be considered without confronting neo-nationalism and imperialism. It also makes clear that in order to confront those issues, the UN must be fundamentally, democratically, transformed.
The Israeli military is occupying the West Bank, and controlling the airspace and water around Gaza. The Palestinian people are occupied by a foreign military, and suffer as all occupied peoples suffer. Everything else has to flow from that.
But Bernie Sanders, like a great many Jews of his generation, have trouble seeing that suffering. Because for most of his life — beginning at the leftist kibbutz where he stayed in 1963, built on land taken from Arab farmers— he’s been told by the Jewish community that Zionism, aka Jewish nationalism, is the only interpretation of Judaism that counts.
The nationalism that shaped Bernie’s youth also shapes the American Jewish community’s response to BDS and UN criticism of Israel. Many Jews, like me, have been relentlessly taught to fear BDS, since it opposes Zionism. So we can’t see that BDS activists are heirs to the Mongtomery bus boycott of 1956 and the anti-Apartheid movement aimed at South Africa.
The United Nations could be the forum where the Israeli occupation and other affronts to human rights are addressed. But there, too, nationalism prevents real action. The UN Charter begins with the words “We the Peoples”, but the UN as it stands now is controlled by governments, not peoples. Since the US government has long seen the state of Israel as a major strategic partner — for reasons that ultimately have as much to do with oil politics as with the Jewish people — the US does everything it can to suppress talk of justice for Palestinians. The emphasis on the Israeli occupation at the UN is likely driven in part by similar neo-nationalist tendencies by other member countries.
The fear of Bernie and other progressives about a “one-state solution”, or a democratic state shared by Israelis and Palestinians, is based on a fear of thinking about Judaism after settler Zionism. We need to confront that fear. We need to recognize that, while nationalism is almost always rooted in struggles for liberation, Zionism has become a weapon of US imperialism and a means to oppress Palestinians. We need to confront neo-nationalism in Israel, in the US, and, perhaps most importantly, at the UN. We need to make the phrase “We the Peoples” into a reality. We need power to come from the people. We need our UN delegation, our representatives to the world, to speak for us.
Interview with Bernie:
