Bernie Sanders kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign on Saturday with a speech at Brooklyn College in New York City. It was a homecoming: Bernie was born in Brooklyn to working-class immigrant parents, and he began his undergraduate study at Brooklyn College before moving to Chicago.

The crowd of about thirteen thousand was mostly young and working class. Roughly half of the attendees were people of color, and roughly half were women.

Bernie’s speech hit the usual notes about economic inequality, social justice, and the need for unity across lines of difference. But there were some unique additions, including an interlude about the working-class values of fairness, compassion, and solidarity that his Brooklyn upbringing instilled in him.

He contrasted this upbringing to Donald Trump’s: Trump was handed a $200,000 a year allowance, even as a child, while Bernie was given 25 cents a week. As a young man Trump built a fortune on housing discrimination, while Bernie protested it. Trump became famous for going on television and telling workers, “You’re fired,” while Bernie grew up in a house and community where he understood the extreme and unfair power that employers have over their employees’ lives.

AIPAC’s supporters have never concealed the fact that the group holds enormous power in Washington. In 2011, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” AIPAC itself boasts that “the United States Congress has provided Israel with the strongest support of any institution in the world” in large part because of the “involvement in the political process” of its donors.

snip...

The connections between US imperialism and Zionism should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but it needs to be emphasized at moments like this when progressives (especially Muslim progressives) like Omar are being attacked with outrageous claims of Jew-hatred. The fact is, this latest episode has very little to do with antisemitism. The Israeli government is a significant booster of antisemitic governments and movements in Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, and the United States (and its relationship with Jair Bolsonaro’s new government in Brazil flirts with antisemitic strands as well).

This history goes back at least a half century: Israel has often been happy to join the United States in backing antisemitic governments and movements across the world, specifically in Latin America, provided it fulfilled their settler-colonial or imperialist aims. During my AIPAC years, I watched from the inside as America’s most powerful “pro-Israel” organization hobnobbed and glad-handed numerous elements, especially segments of the Christian right, that were actively or passively complicit in antisemitic politics and networks.

snip...

People like Omar are not being repeatedly (and most likely systematically) targeted because they are antisemitic. They’re not even being targeted because they’re critical of Israel per se. They’re being targeted because they challenge an eighty-years-long bipartisan imperialist consensus that is finally showing signs of fraying. The goal is to prevent the very kind of subversive moments Omar elicited last week during her questioning of unrepentant war criminal Elliot Abrams — moments that, if they added up, would have a real shot at finally moving us toward a vision of America beyond empire.