In a long statement released Friday, Sanders said that the Biden administration is on the wrong path if it truly wishes for “full accountability” for Eygi’s killing in the occupied West Bank, as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have called for. He called on the Department of Justice and the FBI to open their own independent investigations into the attack and the many others in which Israel has killed American citizens.
“Let’s be clear: there will be no accountability if the United States defers to the extremist Israeli government to investigate its own actions,” Sanders said.
The senator directly refuted Biden and Harris’s false claims that Eygi’s killing was an accident, and pointed out numerous incidents in the past two years in which Israeli forces have killed Americans with “no accountability” for their deaths.
Indeed, as many advocates for Palestinian rights have pointed out in recent days, Israeli forces have killed at least five Americans in the occupied West Bank since Biden took office, including 17-year-olds Tawfiq Ajaq and Mohammad Khdour; Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh; retiree Omar Assad; and now, Eygi. Sanders brought up Israel’s targeting of American journalist Dylan Collins, who was shot at by Israeli tanks while reporting in Lebanon in October.
The DOJ/FBI won’t probe police killings in the US. What makes Sanders think they’ll fuck with Israel?
I mean, I’m pretty sure Sanders is well aware, but this is who he has always been his entire political career. He will try to make it an issue, try to make a stink about it, be ignored, and then later be remembered as being on the right side of the issue.
I have to say, I would have given up long ago, so it seems to me he’s a good egg for continuing to fight the good fight of trying to bring attention to these issues despite how often he has been ignored.
Do I think his way of doing things is working? I’m pretty sure it’s not, it could if there were more people like Sanders, but as he’s a minority of being on the right side of these issues, there’s only so much he can do to raise the issue and get others to care. While it’s commendable, you’re not wrong in seeing it as foolhardy and pointless because, well, it pretty much is. (At least not without a significant number of others at his back, which he does not have, politically.)
But it’s how Sanders has chosen to fight his fight, and it’s at the very least respectable, if unsuccessful.