Sanders correct in calling AIPAC a platform for bigotry

Bernie Sanders was right to skip AIPAC.

If elected, Sanders would be the first Jewish president. He once lived in Israel. But he refused to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference this week because, he said, the pro-Israel lobby has become a platform for those who “express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.” He added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “reactionary racist.”

AIPAC, and Netanyahu, seemed intent on proving Sanders’ point.

As the conference opened in Washington on Sunday, Netanyahu, speaking to the group via satellite on the eve of Israel’s elections, derided the Palestinians as “the pampered children of the international community.” The AIPAC audience applauded.

In his Sunday remarks, Netanyahu told AIPAC he was moving forward with plans to annex Palestinian territory — a move that would make the long-sought twostate solution all but impossible.

Netanyahu previously championed a law that demoted the Arabic language, promoted Jewish settlements and declared that only “the Jewish people” have “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel, which Arabic members of Israel’s parliament called “apartheid.” Even AIPAC scolded Netanyahu last year for aligning with an ultranationalist, racist party.

Some may dispute whether that’s “bigotry,” but AIPAC is increasingly becoming a platform for the Republican Party — and a platform against anyone critical of Netanyahu’s treatment of Palestinians.

“We don’t want Sanders at AIPAC,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said at the conference Sunday. “We don’t want him in Israel. Anyone who calls our prime minister a racist is either a liar, an ignorant fool or both.”

Netanyahu, referring to Sanders and those like him as “radicals who seek to weaken” U.S.-Israel ties, said “these libelous charges are outrageous.”

AIPAC’s chief executive, Howard Kohr, in an another apparent Sanders reference, said “the pro-Israel community will work to defeat those who try to harm our friends.”

Mike Bloomberg, who is Jewish, spoke at AIPAC against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, said there should be no conditions attached to military aid for Israel and called Sanders’s views on AIPAC “dead wrong.” But Bloomberg also spoke about the importance of a two-state solution.

This is what Netanyahu, with AIPAC’s acquiescence, appears to be walking away from. With Netanyahu’s apparent victory in Monday’s election, it seems likely annexation will soon proceed — and Israel will find it increasingly difficult to remain a Jewish state unless it suppresses Palestinians’ rights.

That’s not a good look for AIPAC, which finds itself not only at odds with Democrats but also with most American Jews. Instead of its tradition of representing strong, broad support for Israel, AIPAC is becoming about as bipartisan as the National Rifle Association.

Even Netanyahu reportedly regards AIPAC as just another right-wing American interest group. “We don’t need AIPAC anymore,” Netanyahu reportedly told one of his advisers. “We have enough support in the United States from the evangelicals. I’d happily give up on AIPAC if we didn’t need to counteract J Street,” a liberal pro-Israel group.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., made an appeal to AIPAC “to reaffirm the truth that America’s support for Israel is common ground. America’s partnership with Israel has never been and must never become a Republican issue or Democratic issue, it must always be an American issue.”

Sprinkling his speech with Hebrew words and the names of Jews who died in the civil rights movement, Booker said that standing for Palestinians’ human dignity and human rights are “Jewish values.” He spoke movingly of a time when “Muslim children and Christian children and Jewish children will finally join hands and sing in a chorus of love that we are free at last.”

Unfortunately, Netanyahu is heading in a different direction. And AIPAC is following.