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.
Sanders on the right side of history, as usual.
The only slight hope that has been raised is that for the first time in my fucking lifetime, the US electorate isn’t lockstep behind Israel’s latest genocidal phase.