Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) criticized Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, prompting condemnation from Israeli and Jewish leaders who noted that he ignored ongoing rocket attacks by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah against Israeli civilians.
“It’s not just Iran. It’s Lebanon,” Sanders stated. “In less than two weeks, Israel has killed 570 people and displaced 750,000—over 10% of the entire country. Residential buildings are being bombed with no warning. The U.S. cannot continue to be complicit in Netanyahu’s wars.”
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, wrote that rockets fired from Lebanon were striking Israeli communities at the same time Sanders issued his criticism.
“While Senator Sanders was treating us to his racist stupidity, Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon were raining down on al-Ba’ina, an Arab town in northern Israel,” Menken wrote. “Sanders does not value Arab lives. He simply detests Jewish ones.”
Yair Zivan, an advisor to Israel opposition leader Yair Lapid, stated that he was writing “from a bomb shelter with my children.”
“Israel is under attack by fanatical terrorists who want to murder us,” Zivan wrote. “It never ceases to amaze that your humanity never seems to extend to Israeli lives.”
Nadav Pollak, a Middle East lecturer at Reichman University in Herzliya, called the omission of Hezbollah from Sanders’s post “insane.”
“It’s insane, just insane, that the senator is tweeting on the war without even mentioning the name Hezbollah,” Pollak wrote. “It’s like the war started out of thin air. Hezbollah started it.”
