Bernie Sanders Is Willing to Move American Embassy from Jerusalem

After decades of debate, successful votes in Congress, and repeated pronunciations that Israel and the United States are inseparable allies, the Trump Administration moved the American Embassy in Israel to its capital city of Jerusalem. It was and still is seen as a strong and “courageous,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, move in support of a close ally by the United States.

In December of 2017, Bernie Sanders said that he was “extremely concerned” by plans to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and thereby move the embassy to the city. This belief runs contrary to a vote Sanders took earlier in 2017 stating that “Jerusalem should remain the undivided capital of Israel.”

Fast forward to a May 2019 NBC interview with Chuck Todd of NBC, Bernie Sanders expressed that he would be willing to move the embassy back to Tel Aviv. Sanders’s rhetoric regarding Israel has sharpened over the past year as he has made a concerted effort to become more involved in foreign policy in preparation for his now ongoing Presidential bid.

The focus comes out of necessity after Bernie Sanders was repeatedly and effectively criticized by Hillary Clinton for his positions on Israel in the 2016 primary. Even after Clinton sewed up the nomination, divisions ran deep between Sanders and the party’s establishment over the party’s Israel platform. Slight adjustments were eventually made, but activists have carried along with the progress made at the 2016 convention to 2020 where views more hostile to Israel are now more widely accepted within the party.

During a CNN Town Hall in April 2019, Sanders called the democratically elected government of Israel “racist,” in response to a question “of how he would maintain the strong relations between the United States and Israel, despite his criticism.”

Bernie Sanders’s history opposing Netanyahu and his elected government isn’t limited to the 2020 Presidential primary. Bernie Sanders was one of the Democratic legislators who boycotted Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional address in 2014.

That show of defiance has more appeal in the modern Democratic party that has grown more and more hostile to Israel’s government. Controversial comments by House Freshman Ilhan Omar have opened up rifts within the House Democratic caucus between factions that have varying levels of support for Israel. Bernie Sanders is one of the most prominent Democrats to have backed up Ilhan Omar.

These disagreements partially caused a significant amount of Democrats to boycott the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s 2019 policy conference. Sanders was one of those Democrats who chose to boycott the policy conference under pressure from dark money group MoveOn.org. A Sanders staffer noted that the candidate was concerned that AIPAC was providing a platform for bigotry.

Bernie Sanders isn’t the only person within his operation that has had controversial things to say about Israel. In 2016, just hours before a primary debate with Hillary Clinton, the Sanders campaign’s national Jewish outreach coordinator Simone Zimmerman was suspended by the campaign for vulgar social media posts about Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders’s staffing problems haven’t relented since the embarrassing moment in 2016. In March 2019, a spokeswoman for the campaign apologized for questioning whether the “American-Jewish community has a dual allegiance to the state of Israel.” The same anti-semetic trope drew backlash against Illhan Omar.