Bernie's statement opens with this:
"Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this war with its brutal attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages. Israel, as any other country, had a right to defend itself from Hamas."
His statements make zero mention of the decades of Israeli occupation, siege, massacres, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that preceded Oct. 7th.
His claim about "1,200 innocent people" killed on Oct. 7th is doubly false: several hundred of those people were not innocent civilians; they were soldiers enforcing the siege of the Gaza concentration camp. Moreover, not all were killed Palestinian militants: some were killed by Israel's enactment of the Hannibal Directive.
Only by erasing and whitewashing Israel's barbaric occupation of Palestinians can you claim, as Bernie does, that Hamas "began this war" and that Israel has "a right to defend itself from Hamas" by bombing Gaza.
It took Bernie way too long to acknowledge that this is genocide. While I appreciate some of his efforts to challenge it, it's unfortunate that he still parrots some of the Israeli propaganda used to wage it.