If Sanders has some unique insight that Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Against Hunger, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Red Cross, and the International Federation for Human Rights doesn’t have, he should share it. If Sanders feels he knows better than his labor allies at the American Postal Workers Union, United Auto Workers, and National Nurses United, he should explain why.
“But October 7 changed everything” is a common retort to those pointing out that a cease-fire framework exists and ought to be used as a basis to end the current slaughter. “Israel simply cannot let Hamas survive after what they did,” one often hears.
Again, this is one of these Very Serious statements people make without really thinking it through. It just sort of sounds profound and meaningful. But Israel cannot and will not “eliminate Hamas” from Gaza in any meaningful sense. Even the most generous estimates show Israel killing two civilians for every Hamas fighter—a ratio that suggests that Hamas would not be wiped out without an even more intolerable level of civilian death than exists already. Israel cannot kill 9,000 children, create 25,000 orphans, and expect the remaining population to renounce violence and all become compliant fishermen and NGO employees. This is an underlying reality of the conflict even the former head of Israeli security service Shin Bet, Yaakov Peri, acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times on November 9, “We’ll be fighting [the Hamas fighters’] sons in four or five years.”
Israel
cannot bomb its way out of the underlying issues of apartheid,
dispossession, and occupation, and more indefinite slaughter won’t
change this fact. That is, unless Israel’s goal is to remove all or most
Palestinians from Gaza. Sanders’s clarity about the folly of endless war was one of his main selling points during his presidential campaigns. Now that clarity appears to have deserted him.
-- Adam Johnson, "Bernie Sanders’s Incoherent, Pernicious Gaza Cease-Fire Position, Explained" (THE NATION).
