Actually yes. Nazis had a very anti-intellectualist slant and they used a lot of verbal imagery and bunk beliefs that in period would have seemed kind of like listening to flat earthers or Q-anon conspiracy theories.

Maybe not Trump levels of crass baby diction but close enough.

Not saying Israel is complex. Dealing with the victims of the propaganda is complex.

Compassion isn’t just good praxis, people who fall back on feeling victimized double down on whatever their base investment is. If you want people to accept facts and actually change their minds you have to engage the person’s feelings first.

It’s a complex issue Bernie is alluding to. There are a lot of Jewish people who think of Israel of sort of “Their place” in the world where they are centered and the controlling stake of culture. People who are raised to think this way feel critism towards the place as an attack on their Jewishness. Those feelings can override and get in the way of treating Isreal as a country, with a political agenda and make it feel as though it were a criticism of Jewish people.

You know that whole “facts don’t care about your feelings” thing the right gets on about? It’s actually backwards. Feelings do not care about facts and if you don’t adequately explain your purpose you can make people feel victimized even when they aren’t. Jewish people who feel victimized by critism of Israel are responding to a mix of cultural programming because the idea of Israel is their security blanket. Problem is the security blanket isn’t actually securing them from anything, it was just a tool to soothe anxieties about having a place to retreat to free of persecution… and now that the security blanket has been proven to be woven out of asbestos and warcrimes the trauma of prying peoples attachment from it is causing damage amongst a historically persecuted group. This is Bernie’s reminder - to be sensitive to the process of individual trauma while detangling them from the genocidal regime it’s emotionally fuzed to.