Sanders ‘hardly radical’ on Israel, should still be given ‘credit’
US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders should be given “credit” for skipping an AIPAC conference earlier; however, the Vermont senator is “still imagining that there will be a two-state solution” to the conflict in the Middle East, says a political commentator.
Sanders was the only 2016 presidential candidate who did not address the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Monday and instead called on Tel Aviv to end construction of illegal settlements.
“We have to give Bernie credit for not speaking to AIPAC and for saying it’s time to stop the expansion of these settlements,” Kevin Barrett told Press TV on Tuesday.
However, the progressive candidate who calls himself a socialist “is not saying that the Israelis have to go back to the pre-1967 borders, which is in fact the official position of the entire world,” he noted, calling Sanders’ stance “hardly radical.”
The senator believes that the regime should stop “expanding” settlements instead of handing over the “recently stolen land” back to Palestinians, Barrett said.
“But the problem is –with the half a million settlers already on those lands—there’s essentially no prospect for an actual two-state solution, which will require all of those half a million plus settlers to go back home and allow that land to become part of Palestine.”
“So Bernie is still imagining that there will be a two-state solution; that there is a peace process; and that the peace process will ultimately lead to this two-state solution. It’s not happening and it will never happen,” said the political commentator.
Sanders’ depiction of the conflict as “being between equals with Palestinians being more responsible for the violence… is ludicrous,” given the atrocities the regime commits against Palestinians, he noted.
Barrett concluded that the Vermont senator’s “position is far from reasonable but compared to the other candidates it’s perhaps the least worst that we’ve heard and one has to wonder whether a President Bernie Sanders would have to step back a bit from the aggressive policies that his predecessors are taking in the Middle East.”
More than half a million Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem).
The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.
Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinian state with East al-Quds as its capital.
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