Bernie Sanders has been repeatedly uttering the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, which in the year 2025 can only be interpreted as blatant genocide apologia.

Israel does not have “a right to defend itself” against an occupied population in a giant concentration camp. Under international law it has a right to end the occupation, and that’s it. “Israel has a right to defend itself” is just a slogan people say when they want to justify supplying an ongoing genocide.

At one point in the tour Sanders stood passively watching as police dragged off rally attendees who draped a Free Palestine flag over the US flag during his speech. He just awkwardly continued monologuing as their flag was confiscated and they were forcibly removed, even as the crowd booed and eventually began chanting “Free Palestine”.

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Sanders has been mixing his support for Israel in with periodic criticisms of Netanyahu and the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza, always taking care to make his criticisms about the behavior of Israel’s current leadership and not the nature of the racist apartheid state itself.

Sanders is doing this for two reasons. Firstly, he is working to galvanize a big tent inclusive coalition of Democrats in opposition to Trump, and he wants that big tent to include people who think genocide is bad and people who think genocide is fine. He doesn’t want to offend the pro-genocide liberals.

Secondly, Sanders is doing this because he himself is a Zionist. Like other liberal Zionists, Bernie Sanders upholds a vision of an Israel that has never, ever existed: one which remains an ethnostate dominated by Jews, but which conducts itself in a kind and just manner, without constantly murdering and abusing Palestinians.

This iteration of the state of Israel is a fiction. An imaginary fantasyland, like Narnia. Everything about Israel is stacked against the possibility of such a status quo ever emerging, and Israel has always done everything it can to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. By pretending it is possible to have the Zionist entity and also have peace and justice, liberal Zionists help manufacture public consent for continuing to feed weapons to the genocidal apartheid state of Israel.

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When liberal Zionists want to support Israel’s actions, they talk about Israel as a nation, e.g. “Israel has a right to defend itself”. When liberal Zionists want to criticize Israel’s actions, they make it all about Netanyahu, e.g. “Netanyahu’s war machine.”

The framing is that when Israel deserves our sympathy it’s a collective, but when Israel is naughty the responsibility lies solely at the feet of one bad apple. This ensures that the weapons can keep flowing to Israel (because Israel as a whole is virtuous and worthy of support) while the liberal Zionist still gets to wear their progressive humanitarian clothing (because they wagged their fingers at Netanyahu).

And it’s just a complete and utter lie. Netanyahu didn’t create Israel’s genocidal tendencies, Israel’s genocidal tendencies created Netanyahu. His entire political career has been made possible by Israel’s collective racism and psychopathy upon which he rode into office.

This is nothing other than the classic Obama-style tactic of using attractive progressivish language to advance the most destructive agendas of the US empire.

In other words, it’s Democrats being Democrats.

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Featured image: U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders speaking with attendees at a “Fight Oligarchy” rally at Mullett Arena in Tempe, Arizona. (By Gage Skidmore / Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

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