Krauthammer:
Sanders’s anti-Israel sentiment stems from his old-Left roots.
Part of
Bernie Sanders’ charm is that for all of his arm-waving jeremiads, he appears
unthreatening. He’s the weird old uncle in the attic, Larry David’s crazy
Bernie. It’s almost a matter of style. Who can be afraid of a candidate so
irascible, grumpy, old-fashioned and unfashionable?
After
all, he’s not going to win the nomination, so what harm can he do? A major
address at the party convention? A say in the vice presidential selection? And
who reads party platforms anyway?
Well,
platforms may not immediately affect a particular campaign. But they do
express, quite literally, the party line, a written record of its ideological
trajectory.
Which
is why two of Sanders’s appointments to the 15-member platform committee are so
stunning. Professor Cornel West not only has called the Israeli prime minister
a war criminal but openly supports the BDS movement (boycott, divestment and
sanctions), the most important attempt in the world to ostracize and
delegitimize Israel.
West is
joined on the committee by the longtime pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby.
Together, reported the New York Times, they “vowed
to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.”
This
seems a gratuitous provocation. Sanders hardly made Israel central to his
campaign. He did call Israel’s response in the 2014 Gaza war “disproportionate”
and said “we cannot continue to be one-sided.” But now Sanders seeks to
permanently alter — i.e., weaken — the relationship between the Democratic
Party and Israel, which has been close and supportive since Harry Truman
recognized the world’s only Jewish state when it declared independence in May
1948.
West
doesn’t even pretend, as do some left-wing “peace” groups, to be opposing
Israeli policy in order to save it from itself. He makes the simpler case that
occupation is unconscionable oppression and that until Israel abandons it,
Israel deserves to be treated like apartheid South Africa — anathematized, cut off, made to bleed morally
and economically. The Sanders appointees wish to bend the Democratic platform
to encourage such diminishment unless Israel redeems itself by liberating
Palestine.
This is
an unusual argument for a Democratic platform committee, largely because it is
logically and morally perverse. Israel did in fact follow such high-minded
advice in 2005: It terminated its occupation and evacuated Gaza. That earned it (temporary) praise from the West. And from the
Palestinians? Not peace, not reconciliation, not normal relations but a decade
of unrelenting terrorism and war.
Israel
is now being asked — pressured — to repeat that same disaster on the West Bank.
That would bring the terror war, quite fatally, to the very heart of Israel —
Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport. Israel is now excoriated for declining
that invitation to national suicide.
It is ironic
that the most successful Jewish presidential candidate ever should be pushing
the anti-Israel case. But perhaps not surprising considering Sanders’
ideological roots. He is old left — not the post-1960s, countercultural New
Left. Why, the man honeymooned in the Soviet Union — not such fashionably cool communist paradises as
Sandinista Nicaragua where Bill de Blasio went to work for the cause or
Castro’s Cuba where de Blasio honeymooned. (Do lefties all use the same wedding planner?)
For the
old left, Israel was simply an outpost of Western imperialism, Middle East
division. To this day, the leftist consensus, most powerful in Europe (which
remains Sanders’ ideological lodestar), holds that Israeli perfidy demands
purification by Western chastisement.
Chastisement
there will be at the Democratic platform committee. To be sure, Sanders didn’t
create the Democrats’ drift away from Israel. It was already visible at the 2012 convention with the loud resistance to recognizing Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital. But Sanders is consciously abetting it.
The
millennials who worship him and pack his rallies haven’t lived through — and
don’t know — the history of Israel’s half-century of peace offers. They don’t
know of the multiple times Israel has offered to divide the land with an
independent Palestinian state and been rebuffed.
Sanders
hasn’t lifted a finger to tell them. The lovable old guy with the big crowds
and no chance at the nomination is hardly taken seriously (except by Hillary
Clinton, whose inability to put him away reveals daily her profound political
weakness). But when he makes platform appointees that show he does take certain
things quite seriously, like undermining the U.S.-Israeli relationship, you
might want to reconsider your equanimity about the magical mystery tour. It
looks like Woodstock, but there is steel inside the psychedelic glove.
