Arguing About War: Bernie Sanders and Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

10 October 2025

Bernie Sanders’s utter moral and political failure in responding to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Biden administration’s complicity in it is a case study in traditional political opportunism and emotional attachment to a colonial and apartheid country and society. After serving as mayor of Vermont, Sanders was elected to Congress as a House Representative and subsequently as a Senator. He is a native of Brooklyn, New York, and his politics are informed by socialist values and anti–war activism stemming from the days of the Vietnam War that produced two influential intellectual figures on the American left: Noam Chomsky and Michael Walzer. He is an independent member of Congress who often represents the views of the progressive anti-war movement in the United States.

Before the Genocide in Gaza, Sanders’s approach to Palestine was characterized by willful ignorance and refraining from addressing AIPAC’s national convention to appease the growing animosity among progressives to this dominant organization in American politics that paralyses any decent policies towards Palestine either by Congress or by the American president who leads the U.S. Army, the G7, and NATO.

Caught between his New York upbringing and the mythology that captures many American Jews in the form of Golda Meir’s ordinary erasure Zionism and the 1956 epic Hollywood film The Ten Commandments, Sanders was destined to fail Palestine during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As a lone member of Congress, Sanders has adapted through the years to the modus operandi of the Democratic Party, particularly its establishment. Sanders would not cooperate with AIPAC, but would not criticize Biden for adhering to his Hollywood donors during the genocide. With his long-time strategic adviser and partner on his side, Sanders would welcome Biden’s maneuver to silence him about the Gaza genocide by offering loan waivers to college students. Attacks the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos (who has a love and hate relationship with Trump), but spares the New York Times and addresses poor white Americans through the Fox channel, which serves as an influential galvanizer for these communities. Traditionally defiant with incisive criticism that supported American-led NATO humanitarian intervention against the crime against humanity of forcible displacement in Kosovo, but could not propose a similar one against Israel’s genocide.

Like many informed Americans, Bernie Sanders did not understand the events of 7 October 2023. Led by the New York Times, Fox News, and much of the mainstream American media, Sanders for several months supported Israel’s onslaught and refused to align himself with the progressive movement and the large-scale demonstrations that demanded a ceasefire or understood the Palestinian liberation struggle. His political priorities aligned him with the Biden administration, the Israel lobby, the New York Times, and Fox News.

It was a courageous resistance operation carried out from an occupied and besieged Gaza is in line with international law. The minor aspects that do not fit a strict interpretation of international law can and should be justified by the logic of the ‘battered woman defense.’ Contrary to the reporting in the New York Times, no rape was committed during or after the resistance operation. Most of the Israeli civilians who were killed that day died as a result of Israeli forces’ intentional shooting according to Israeli military procedures. Israeli military and government censorship prohibit to this day revealing the true nature of the 7 October 2023 events. Many Israeli captives died as a result of Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment. Throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the resistance fought marvelously against an assault that was too abhorrent to deserve the title of war.

Only in September 2025 did Sanders acknowledge that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza in a statement filled with factual and legal errors, perhaps to absolve the Biden administration from any responsibility. However, his political savviness failed him also in this case, because: a) Israel did commit genocide from 7 October 2023; b) even if it had not, the atrocities perpetrated are crimes against humanity that also capture members of the Biden administration in the widening net of complicity.

What should have engaged Sanders, and is missing naturally from the American political discourse and from the writings of usually Democratic party-affiliated American legal scholars, is what measures for accountability should be put in place regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and how the Biden administration’s complicity ought to be framed and pursued. The crackdown by the Trump administration on American universities that targeted also research and activism regarding Palestinian rights exacerbated already hesitant critique of Israel’s genocide and its apartheid and colonial nature as a result of the deviant push by the Israel lobby.

Sanders belongs to a generation of American Jews that harbors emotional ties to Israel at times shrouded with inapplicable ideological terms. That generation has not faded and is reproduced today in the images of Sarah Silverman, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, and Alexander Soros notwithstanding Israel’s self-inflicted accusatorial terrorism and maybe because of it. A sensational sense of power. Sanders has not reflected yet on the appropriate comprehension of Zionism and Israel, nor has his admission of Israel’s genocide in Gaza been significant or relevant. Throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Sanders could not provide an analytical understanding in populist concepts as he usually does. That alone should locate him in the banal space of political mediocrity and unscrupulousness.

Bernie Sanders on CNN.  6 November 2023.