Manufacturing Distress: The Problem of Bernie Sanders

18 July 2026

"قلت لنفسي الغريبة في الظل: هل هذه بابل أم سدوم؟"

محمود درويش، الى ادوارد سعيد.

Bernie Sanders has failed to stand up to power, the most destructive of all, genocidal carnage. Among all individuals with some kind of influence and a certain positive familiarity with the Palestinian condition, he ranked the worst during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, backed by a complicit Biden administration. The awkward reality is that to this day he continues to advance Biden’s narrative about the act of resistance from occupied and besieged Gaza on 7 October 2023, denying that at least most Israeli civilians killed that day died as a result of deliberate shooting by the Israeli army shielded by its censorship and a collaborative Israeli society.

Sanders is the unflattering image of Ralph Nader. A supposed outsider to the Washington Consensus of American politics, he nevertheless seeks its acceptance by adhering to the parameters defined by the leadership of the Democratic Party and Murdoch’s Fox News. He maintained a steady critical approach towards American foreign policy in the past, which utterly collapsed during the Biden era. Sanders has traditional emotional feelings for Israel, and was part of the Anglo - American left that expressed admiration for the bizarre colonizing Zionist communes in Palestine following Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the country that also imposed a military regime against the remaining less than third non-ethnically cleansed Palestinians. Sanders developed some awareness about Israel’s policies throughout the years, but has never reached the reasonable conclusion that Zionism and Israel in Palestine are colonial and apartheid in thought and practice.

Critical of powerful American institutions, Sanders’s approach to the Israel lobby and Fox News is perplexing and unpersuasive. While he utilizes the latter to appeal to poor white Americans, his silence on the Israel lobby’s grip over the American president, particularly Biden, is an exercise in problematic prioritizing. The former mayor of and Senator from Vermont has a long-time adviser who sought to advance the cause of indebted poor college students, an issue granted by Biden that contributed to Sanders’s complacency with the White House's disastrous approach to Israel’s genocide. Sanders’s active support for Israel’s actions was legally and factually baseless and stood at odds with information available in the public domain. The fact that he ignored the mass protests that developed throughout the United States exacerbates his culpability. Sanders’s acknowledgment in September 2025 that Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is genocide was late and void of any political or moral significance.

Beyond Sanders’s grave failure, he poses the challenge of alliances with the cause of Palestine in the United States in particular. Since the early days of Palestine colonization, various American Jews played a substantial role in providing political backing in the United States and financial support to the formation of a colonial and apartheid regime in a distant territory, making them part of the illegitimate Israeli political construction. After the destruction of their social, political, and economic existence in 1948, Palestinians did not constitute a political entity or idea until the inauguration of their national liberation movement in the mid- 1960s and the accompanying intellectual research and writing.

Palestinians gained the support of other liberation movements and the non-aligned countries, but in the United States, Britain, and France, Israel was considered a geopolitical asset given strategic interests in the oil-rich Gulf area that required bestowing moral legitimacy on an inherently illegal and illegitimate entity. In Britain, British Jews wholeheartedly supported Zionism and Israel, practically handing Palestine to colonial settlers on a silver platter. In France, Jean - Paul Sartre could understand Frantz Fanon, but not the Palestinian condition.

In the United States, Palestine’s stature was the worst. The writings of Abu Lughod, the Khalidis, and Said triggered the beginning of a change, at least in the academic perception of Palestine. Cold War diplomacy kept Israel close to the United States despite its military setback in 1973 salvaged by the United States that followed its 1967 aggression against Egypt. The emergence of Palestine’s suppression by Israel in the American public sphere, such as following the massacre in refugee camps in 1982 Lebanon, or the brutalization of the unarmed uprising in the 1967 occupied territories between 1987–1992, contributed to growing awareness about Palestine, but the dominant politics of the United States and its foreign policy remained Israel-centered.

Undoubtedly, the nature of American politics and the role of financial contribution as key to sound judgement has benefited Israel, which enjoyed the shielding of the world’s superpower with its military superiority, financial might, and U.N. Security Council veto.

To gain moral, political, and legal leverage over Israel’s apartheid and colonialism, Palestinians have had the tough luck of facing an adversary with very few genuine progressive individuals and no serious group, let alone a movement of solidarity with their rights and struggle. The Palestinian predicament worsened given the decisive presence of the United States with its troubling influential American Jewish community that combines ruthless interventions on behalf of Israel while advocating the status of the unique victim because of the events of the Second World War.

How, in such a difficult circumstance, should Palestinians form their discourse and actions towards others? Should Jews, either in Israel or the United States, take center stage as potential allies and interlocutors? The deplorable experience of Bernie Sanders during Israel’s genocide and earlier demands a negative answer. The task of Palestinians is not to fall into the trap of American Jewish victimhood on the one hand, and on the other demonstrate their cause fully and unapologetically to whoever is willing to listen and understand. In such an endeavor, even Norman Finkelstein’s frequent bogus advice ought to be disregarded.  

Israel’s place under the sun and among nations should be challenged constantly. Its damage to Palestinians before the genocide in Gaza is worse than the conduct of many dark regimes in the past, including apartheid South Africa. Its persistence in acting as a wild plant (כמו צמח בר) from the lowest place in Tel-Aviv (במקום הכי נמוך בתל-אביב) through its domestic and regional accusatorial terrorism is sufficient to diminish its fraudulent quest for normal political existence. Palestinians should advocate for no less to realize their justified rights, seeking the transformation not only of Israel, but also of Israelis.

Sanders and Biden at the White House. Source: New York Times, 13 July 2024.