Bernie Sanders Will Push Democrats to Pledge More ‘Evenhanded’ Approach to Israel-Palestine Conflict

[Purveyor]

Five days before the most Jewish state in the union held its primary, Wolf Blitzer questioned Bernie Sanders’s commitment to Israeli security. The average politician would not have seen this as an opportunity to attack his or her opponent for caring too little about Palestinian suffering. But Vermont’s socialist senator is not your average politician.

“I read Secretary Clinton’s speech before AIPAC. I heard virtually no discussion at all about the needs of the Palestinian people,” Sanders said at the Democratic debate in Brooklyn. “Of course Israel has a right to defend itself, but long-term, there will never be peace in that region unless the United States plays an even-handed role, trying to bring people together and recognizing the serious problems that exist among the Palestinian people ... There comes a time when, if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”

Until that moment, the Israel-Palestine conflict — like every other issue of foreign affairs — had received scant attention in Sanders’s populist campaign. But now the Washington Post reports that changing American policy toward Israel will be one of the senator’s top priorities in the looming convention fight over the Democratic platform:

Sanders is seeking a more “even-handed” U.S. approach to Israeli occupation of land Palestinians claim for a future state. The current platform does not address the nearly five-decade occupation directly, but it endorses “a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian accord, producing two states for two peoples.”

Sanders's decision to contest this part of the platform is surprising, both because domestic issues enjoyed pride of place in his campaign, and because even the most anodyne shifts in the Democrats’ official position on Israel is likely to inflame intra-party tensions. In 2012, whether the party would explicitly recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel prompted days of infighting. The resolution ended up passing on a voice vote that had to be taken three times, as supporters of the measure tried to drown out a chorus of “noes.”

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/bernie-sanderss-surprising-platform-priority.html

[Meteor Man]

1. War Powers Act Debate Too?

The belligerent war policies of the Democratic Party need to be formally debated in full. At every level.

It is obscene that the probable Democratic nominee has been endorsed by Max Boot and rubs elbows with Henry Kissinger.

Obama's trillion dollar modernization of our nuclear weapons program is oscene. U.S. military aggression is a bigger threat to civilized global detante than ISIS.