One Jew Speaks Of This Other: Bernie Sanders: Enemy of Israel

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

No, I didn't pick the worst picture of Bernie though I'm very angry with him.  This is a photo of his official website.  He has an angry appearance, a reflection of his personality, evidently.  He's not only angry with the Republicans and Trump, but with Israel and Netanyahu specifically. He's telling the Senate not to allow Israel any ammunition!

Born on September 8, 1941, I beat him by being born September 5, 1934, so this 83 year old seems to reflect an actual cracked pot that is impossible to mend.   CNN tells about the kibbutz he visited for a few months.  

 

Israel CNN---A small collective community in northern Israel,

modeled after the communist ideals of the Soviet Union, may hold

clues to the development of U.S. Presidential candidate

Bernie Sanders' political beliefs. It was the kibbutz he was on.   

We're both Jewish, but I have dual citizenship with Israel, having lived there over 5 years (1980-1985) studying for a year in Haifa which led to teaching English in Safed (Tzfat) to a Jr. High.  I went over with my husband, another teacher, and we started a Yiddish in English Theater starring us!  We played all over Israel, which is really a teeny state.  In between gigs and teaching, I learned to shoot an M1 rifle standing, sitting and lying down so I could ride around with some youngsters in the IDF on their days off in Haifa on patrol.  They really wanted my female German Shepherd with us, who wouldn't let me go without her, of course, who was so glad to get to ride in a car again.  

Sanders says he became interested in politics at an early age due to his family background. In the 1940s, many of his relatives in German-occupied Poland were murdered in the Holocaust.  So he's now doing everything he can say to turn the USA against Israel and not help them in their time of need.  I should think his ancestors are in shock!! I just heard him on TV and was in shock, though I know his feelings, but this was too much.  

Sanders supports Palestinian rights and has criticized Israel on several occasions. In 2020, he called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee a platform for bigotry and said he would not attend its conference. He condemned Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, saying, "It would dramatically undermine the prospects for an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement, and severely, perhaps irreparably, damage the United States' ability to broker that peace." During the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, he criticized Hamas for its attacks on civilians and criticized Israel for its bombing of Gaza. He first called for a pause in fighting, saying that he "doesn't know if a ceasefire is possible with an organization like Hamas", but later called for a humanitarian ceasefire and urged Biden to withhold military aid to Israel.  So you can imagine that he's hysterical now that Trump is doing a 180 and helping Israel .  

Has Sanders done any serious investigations as to why there is a war going on between Hamas in Gaza when Israel gave  Gaza to the Palestinians in the name of Peace?  Or why Hamas started shooting 5 minutes after receiving such a peace offering?  I would say that his decisions about Israel show he has not. He was only 22  when he was volunteering at the kibbutz.   

With people like Sanders, it is my waste of time to try to change his frozen mind, but he, being an important personality in our government during Biden's service, can cause more anti-Semitism than anyone can.  Hamas must love him !  With his catholic wife today, his spiritual guide seems to be Pope Francis more than anything Judaism offers him as he's paying attention to the Pope's issues that he brings up, which are perfectly good issues, if you ask me, but he's ignoring important facts about the Jewish people of Israel, only 6 million of us, who are being attacked on 7 fronts!  The poor Palestinians he favors are being backed by Iran whose goal is to wipe out all Jews and take over Israel for another Muslim country since they only have 49 or 50 already.  If you really don't care to find something, you won't see it even if it bites you on the tuches.  How can he still think this way after October 7th?  

    Bernie Stayed Here;  kibbutz  Shaar Ha'amakim

In 1963, in cooperation with the Labor Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, Sanders and his first wife volunteered at Sha'ar HaAmakim, a kibbutz in northern Israel. His motivation for the trip was as much socialistic and very little was Zionistic since he's against Israel now, speaking against her and not wanting to allow her any weaponry to be used against Hamas.  He's what I call a real meshugana!  

Bernie didn't seem to have a good experience on the kibbutz he chose.  I wrote a book about mine, called "Letters From Israel."  Israeli newspaper Haaretz dug up a 1990 interview with Sanders. In the article, Sanders claimed he spent several months in 1963 volunteering at Shaar Ha’amakim.The kibbutz was a cornerstone of Israeli society in the decades before and after the nation was founded in 1948. They were a way for Jewish immigrants from all over the world to work together, growing crops and building a sense of community. Shaar Ha’amakim is a kibbutz near Haifa, a 90-minute drive from Jerusalem near the northern border with Lebanon. The small community, population around 800, is nestled amongst green hills and is located just minutes from modern retail stores and restaurants. It was founded by Jewish immigrants in 1935 on land purchased from Arab landowners.

Landowners saw that Jews had arrived and were buying land and paying ridiculously high prices for it, as it was holy to them.  That's what the Arabs did; sold their land and went to such places as Paris or Beirut with their money as they couldn't afford to pay the taxes to the Ottoman Empire.  Bernie probably didn't know the history of how this came about.  Here's the exact history:  The area was acquired by the Jewish community as part of the Sursock Purchase. In 1925 a Zionist organization purchased 50 feddans in Hartieh from the Sursock family of Beirut. At the time, there were 60 families living there. In the 1931 census, the Arab Zubeidat was counted under the Shefa-'Amr suburbs.

From 1931, and lasting several years, the Jewish Agency struggled to evict the Arab El Zubeidat, who were tenant farmers at Hartiya. According to Avneri, Hartiya land was to become Sha'ar HaAmakim. According to the Department of Statistics, however, Sha'ar HaAmakim had previously been part of Sheikh Bureik.  Sheikh Bureik, locally called Sheikh Abreik or Sheikh Ibreik in recent times, was a Palestinian Arab village located 10 miles southeast of Haifa.

 Kibbutz Sha'ar HaAmakim was founded in 1935 by immigrants from Romania and Yugoslavia. One of its founders was Aharon Cohen, later to be convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Its name was derived from the nearby confluence of the Jezreel and Zevulun valleys. By the 1945 statistics it had a population of 360, all Jews. 1935 was when Jews were feeling the effects of Hitler, and were prohibited from living a normal life anymore;  thrown out of jobs, etc,  in Germany.  Then German troops marched into Poland in 1939, and the Holocaust was in full swing till 1945.  The British held the mandate over Palestine and wouldn't let hardly any Jews in while they allowed Arabs entrance.  

      The Exodus:  In July 1947, the ship "Exodus 1947" carried over 4,500 Jewish refugees, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, from France to Palestine. 

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jewish refugees, including Holocaust survivors, arrived in Palestine by ship, and some of them, along with existing Jewish residents, participated in armed resistance against British authorities and Arab populations, as part of the broader Zionist movement's struggle for a Jewish state that was legal with League of Nations and later, the United Nations (UN).   

The senate did something wonderful on Thursday.  The US Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly rejected a pair of resolutions by Senator Bernie Sanders aimed at blocking the transfer of weapons to Israel, with the minority of Democrats voting in favor of it. since the last time such an initiative was advanced several months ago.

Sanders’s motions were virtually guaranteed to fail given the Republican majority in the Senate and the still small minority of Democrats willing to vote against Israel. However, such votes are often framed as a litmus test on how much the Democratic Party is shifting in its support for Israel, and in particular, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Bernie's desire to end it all for Israel has its effect on many of these Democrats who are now also listening to the squad, which is also trying to grow larger and is made up of very Palestinian oriented leaders.

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharon_Cohen  *****Aharon Cohen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOoK9e2HW78  Bernie's speech to Senate

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-206581/#:~:text=Much%20of%20the%20immigration%20had,on%20the%20Palestinian%20Arab%20population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Bureik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha%27ar_HaAmak

https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/09/politics/bernie-sanders-kibbutz-volunteer-israel/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

Senator Bernard Sanders-Presidential Democrat Candidate

Nadene Goldfoot                                                     

The Junior Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, Independant Democrat and a Socialist,  was born on September 8, 1941 to  to Dorothy (née Glassberg) and Eli Sanders  and raised in the borough of Brooklyn, in New York City, so he'll be 75 years old in September.  He would be good for one term, starting at age 75 and finishing at age 79.  His father was born on September 19, 1904, in Słopnice, Poland  to a Jewish family, and emigrated to the United States in 1921. Eli's family was killed in the Holocaust.  His mother was born  on October 2, 1912 in New York City  to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland and Russia.  He attended Hebrew school in the afternoons, and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954 at age 13.  Growing up during the days of Nazis and the Holocaust shaped his interest in politics.  He spent several months on an Israeli kibbutz.  

Bernie graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 with a BA in political science. While a student, Sanders was a member of the Young People's Socialist League and an active civil rights protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  In 1963, he attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

After settling in Burlington, Vermont in 1968, Sanders ran unsuccessful third-party campaigns for governor and U.S. senator in the early to mid-1970s. As an independent, he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont's most populous city in 1981. Burlington's population in 2013 was 42,284.  It has several synagogues.  

In 1985, Burlington City Hall hosted a foreign policy speech by Noam Chomsky. In his introduction, Sanders praised Chomsky as "a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America" and said he was "delighted to welcome a person who I think we're all very proud of."

Noam Chomsky, yes, also Jewish, is one of the worst Israel bashers that I have run across besides his good friend, Norman Finkelstein. Noam has his degree in Linguistics but thinks he's the last word on Israel and the Palestinians.   If Bernie is going by what Chomsky thinks, no wonder he hasn't been very vocal about Israel.  I'm proud that he has retained some feeling for even being Jewish or that he evens has some feeling for Israel.   

  In 1988, Sanders married Jane O’Meara Driscoll (née Mary Jane O'Meara), who then became president of Burlington College, in Burlington, Vermont.  Their wedding trip was to Yaroslavl in the Soviet Union.  

He has one son.   This son, Levi Sanders, was born in 1969 to Susan Campbell Mott. He considers Mary Jane O'Meara's 3 children like his own, however.  She is his present wife.  

"Sanders has said he is "proud to be Jewish" but "not particularly religious.  His wife is Roman Catholic, and he has frequently expressed admiration for Pope Francis, saying that "the leader of the Catholic Church is raising profound issues. It is important that we listen to what he has said." Sanders shares Francis's beliefs on economic equality and has described him as "incredibly smart and brave."

As for his views on Israel, he has been critical but supportive.  He has been quite non committal about Israel to the press, but  is best friends with Richard Sugarman, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the University of Vermont who champions Zionism to his left-leaning students. His other best friend – and former chief of staff – is Huck Gutman, a University of Vermont professor of literature who is a passionate aficionado of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai.

When in Los Angeles campaigning on August 10th, he had  the comedian, Sarah Silverman, introduce him, so she left out her caustic Jewish attacks that she considers funny.  Sanders sees himself as "an old Jew."  

"Sanders’ well-known pique surfaced in June when Diane Rehm, the NPR talk show host, declaratively told him he had dual US-Israel citizenship, citing an anti-Semitic meme circulating on the Internet.

“Well, no, I do not have dual citizenship with Israel,” Sanders said. “I’m an American. I don’t know where that question came from. I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I’m an American citizen, period.”

He backs Israel, but he believes in spending less on defense assistance to Israel and more on economic assistance in the Middle East. Of all the senators who do back Israel, why does it have to be a Jewish one who is ready to cut the important defense assistance?  

"Do I think Israel has the right to exist? Yeah, I do. Do I believe that the United States should be playing an even-handed role in terms of its dealings with the Palestinian community in Israel? Absolutely I do.  He had been asked if he considered himself a Zionist and questioned what that was.  

He went on to explain to the Jerusalem Post newspaper that,  "Again, I think that you have volatile regions in the world, the Middle East is one of them, and the United States has got to work with other countries around the world to fight for Israel’s security and existence at the same time as we fight for a Palestinian state where the people in that country can enjoy a decent standard of living, which is certainly not the case right now. My long-term hope is that instead of pouring so much military aid into Israel, into Egypt, we can provide more economic aid to help improve the standard of living of the people living in that area." 

Ugh, it is the uninformed that think poverty is the cause of all problems.  Bernie should only know how much money the friends of Palestinians have given them only to see it spent on making and buying bombs and creating tunnels in order to bring in weapons and to use to kidnap Jews.  Israel has even had to pay their electricity bill!  

Perhaps the reason Sanders said this is  that Sanders is a self-proclaimed Socialist and is very naive about Jewish and Israeli history and facts. He knows very little about what Israel has done or the problems they face from this response, even though he lived on a kibbutz for a few months long ago.  He's 74 years old now and like he said, his interests are the USA and obviously they  haven't been on Israel.    He sees problems only through a socialist's eyes.  This is sad if he becomes president and must make decisions that gravely affect Israel.      

                                                        
What is socialism?  The Webster dictionary defines it as any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.  It's a  system of society or group living in which there is no private property.  Socialism is in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.  It is also a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done. 

Russia, of course, is a communistic country.  Germany was a socialist state.  The Nazi Party was from "The National Socialist German Workers' Party."  which fought against the communist uprisings in post-World War I Germany.  The party was created as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkischnationalism.   Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric, although such aspects were later downplayed in order to gain the support of industrial entities, and in the 1930s the party's focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.  Of course, Sweden has a king, but it is socialistic and many feel it is not an example of successful socialism.  Israel has the kibbutz, which is a socialistic way of life, but they also are into individual success, too, having more business start-ups than most other countries.    

Yes, I question the difference between Communism and Socialism.  I'm not the only one. "The majority of self-declared socialist countries have been Marxist–Leninist states inspired by the example of the Soviet Union. They share a common definition of "socialism" and they refer to themselves as socialist states on the road to communism."
                                                             
This is the exact opposite of the Republican party who believes in small government and feels that the Democratic government of Obama has grown too large.   It could be too small for Sanders.  

Resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Where-does-Bernie-Sanders-the-Jewish-candidate-for-president-stand-on-Israel-412448
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states
http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/11/scandinavia-isnt-a-socialist-paradise/