Sanders gets MidEast advice from anti-Israel crowd

Based on what he said during Sunday’s Meet The Press, if Sen. Bernie Sanders becomes our next president, supporters of Israel may feel the burn instead of the “bern.” When Chuck Todd asked Sanders what is his source for foreign policy advice, Sanders responded that he met “recently with people like Larry Korb, who actually worked in the Reagan administration, we talked to people like Jim Zogby, talked to the people on J Street, to get a broad perspective of the Middle East.”

Neither Zogby nor J Street provide a broad perspective on the Middle East, since each has one perspective: that of the anti-Israel activist.

Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, has referred to Israelis as “Nazis,” and has called Israel’s actions in protecting herself from terrorism “a Holocaust.” 

In 2014, he tried to sell the falsehood that Arafat never turned down an offer from Israel. Zogby’s proof was a column by Robert Malley, who has a history of anti-Israel advocacy. Dennis Ross, one of President Clinton’s negotiators on the deal that Arafat rejected, disputed Zogby’s account and said the basic principles of an agreement were laid out at Camp David in 2000, but “Arafat could not accept any of that.”

“On borders, there would be about a 5 percent annexation in the West Bank for the Israelis and a 2 percent swap,” Ross said. “So there would be a net 97 percent of the territory that would go to the Palestinians. On Jerusalem, the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem would become the capitol of the Palestinian state. On the issue of refugees, there would be a right of return for the refugees to their own state, not to Israel, but there would also be a fund of $30 billion internationally that would be put together for either compensation or to cover repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation costs.”