Asked about the reaction by CNN, he repeated that Israel’s actions were “disproportionate”.
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“And I know that in America, in politics, maybe this is not something that is said very often”.
“Israel has 100 per cent – and no one will fight for that principle more strongly than I will – has the right to live in freedom independently and in security without having to be subjected to terrorist attacks”, he said.
On the same program, Hillary Clinton, who said she expects to be the Democratic Party nominee for president, criticized her party rival for his comments on Israel’s response to rocket fire from Gaza.
More than 75,000 Palestinian families internally displaced in the Gaza Strip as a result of the 2014 escalation of hostilities continue to live in fraught conditions and are in need of homes, the United Nations relief coordination wing for the Occupied Palestinian Territory reported on Monday.
The survey, carried out by the the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and published on April 4, found that 60 percent of Palestinians support “armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel”, while 65 percent think that escalating the current wave of violence into an armed intifada would help Palestinian national aspirations in a way that negotiations could not.
The Democratic presidential candidate complained that public figures were focusing on his initial response in a New York Daily News interview that 10,000 “innocent people” were killed in the Gaza conflict, noting he said he did not know the exact number.
Indeed, a look at the transcript of his interview with the editors of the News reveals that Sanders brought up the death toll to argue that Israel’s use of force had been “indiscriminate”.
But the claim attracted the attention of the Anti-Defamation League, whose CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, released a statement on Thursday saying he had spoken with Sanders and that the senator had clarified that his recollection was “inaccurate”. (The accusation about lack of proportionality was of course at the heart of the infamous Goldstone Report, subsequently recanted, that Israel had committed war crimes.) He did not so much as say he regretted the error.
He lashed out when informed of the criticism by Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, who called the Sanders statement a “blood libel”.
“Who is Mr. Oren?”
As for Sanders, he has clearly stated that he would take “a balanced position” on Israel rather than throwing his support behind the Jewish state outright, as Republican opponents Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have done. “I’ve got enough problems trying to be a United States senator or maybe president of the United States”.
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Clinton said during a speech to influential Jewish lobby group AIPAC last month that America “can’t ever be neutral when it comes to Israel’s security or survival”. I would hope every person … wants to see the misery of conflict end in the Middle East. …
