Bernie Sanders Must Defy the Pro-Israel Lobby and Reinstate His Anti-Occupation Jewish Advisor
BY MARC DAALDER
Bernie Sanders new Jewish outreach coordinator, hired just three days ago, is almost out of a job. The Sanders campaign announced late Thursday that Simone Zimmerman was to be suspended pending an investigation of critical Facebook posts she made about Israels Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sanders has submitted to the media firestorm that followed the discovery of the posts, but he can still turn back from a course that will ultimately result in surrender to the pro-Israel lobby. He must not only reinstate Zimmerman, but also state that he fully supports diversity of thought among Jewsespecially millennialsconcerning Israel/Palestine and the occupation.
Zimmerman first came under fire just a day after she was hired, when the Washington Free Beacon posted a Facebook post from March 2015, in which she wrote that Bibi Netanyahu is an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative a**hole. She continued, referencing the Operation Protective Edge, 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza, F**k you, Bibi
you sanctioned the murder of over 2,000 people this summer. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 1,483 Palestinian civilians were killed in the war.
Since the Free Beacons report on Wednesday, dozens of members of the American Jewish establishment and media have lined up to condemn Sanders and Zimmerman and to demand that Zimmerman be fired. This despite the fact that Zimmerman edited the profanity from her Facebook post well before being hired by the Sanders campaign, in what essentially amounts to a rescindment of the offensive language she used. Nonetheless, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman, said that No amount of word changes can cure [Zimmermans] ugly characterization of the Prime Minister of Israel and the Israeli army and people defending themselves.
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http://inthesetimes.com/article/19063/bernie-sanders-israel-palestine-gaza-simone-zimmerman-democratic-debate