Israel is a strong strategic partner that provides a lot of value to the United States in terms of intelligence and military support, which is not a bridge we want to burn if there are other options.
What exactly do they provide in terms of military value? They’re a counter to Iran and other regional powers that are in part pissed off because Israel is there, constantly trying to steal land from its neighbors. The region would hardly become the pinnacle of peace and stability if we magically removed Israel from the map, but Israel’s actions are a major contributing force destabilizing the region and ramping up tensions. Even if we concede that they provide enough military and intelligence value to offset how much they also stir up problems in the region, at what point do we have to cut our losses and admit that continuing to merely be associated with Israel and the atrocities it perpetuates, much less enabling them, does damage to the US that far exceeds any benefits they offer?
Aside from that, Israel has a lot of backing from Americans across the political spectrum. Since America isn’t a dictatorship Biden has to rely on congress if he wants to get anything done. Since Biden has to rely on congress to get anything done, and Israel has broad support from American voters
Israel has broad support from older voters, White Protestants (White Protestant Evangelicals in particular) and Jewish Americans. Outside of these groups, they have lower support and it’s continually eroding as the current conflict goes on. This is a shrinking number of Democrats and Republican voters holding the rest of the country hostage, as they do on so many issues.
So if the United States stops arms sales to Israel, and they don’t stop the invasion of Gaza, we don’t really have anymore carrots left to influence Israel.
If the carrot doesn’t work, maybe it’s time to try the stick. The US could literally just stop blocking UN motions intended to punish Israel for its violations of human rights and international law, or even impose some heavy sanctions of its own. Start imprisoning US citizens who are trying to buy up Palestinian land being sold off at synagogues, while we’re at it. If that still doesn’t do the trick, I imagine that if the next arms shipment came via shots fired at settlers trying to massacre another Palestinian village, or a nice bomb dropped on Netanyahu’s head, Israel would shape up real quick.
Continuing to enable them is just perpetuating more suffering in Palestine and further damaging what little remains of the US’ reputation in the international community.
I’m not encouraging or discouraging support for Israel, just pointing out that there’s no “Gaza genocide” switch on Joe Biden’s desk that he can flip off. Foreign policy is incredibly complicated and needs careful and deliberate action.
I didn’t make any value judgements about the efficacy of the steps we’re taking to stop this genocide, but if I have to judge our efforts I would say they are barely nonexistent and the United States needs to do better.
Israel’s actions are a major contributing force destabilizing the region and ramping up tensions.
This reads like the people who blame Obama ‘ramping up’ racial tensions after 2008.
The tension was ramped up before Israel even existed. Muslims have been murdering and oppressing Jews in the Middle East for literally thousands of years. They were vowing to wipe Israel off the map before it was even on the map, since the idea of Jewish state first came up.
Maybe a Jewish state was an unsustainable idea? It’s there now, though and magic isn’t real. I hope Israel solves its right wing nationalist problem at the ballot box, and I am very optimistic that it is going to.
The tension was ramped up before Israel even existed. Muslims have been murdering and oppressing Jews in the Middle East for literally thousands of years. They were vowing to wipe Israel off the map before it was even on the map, since the idea of Jewish state first came up.
I can’t fathom why. It’s almost like planning to take over a land where you’re a decided minority by just having other people of your religion pop up, start a war and kick out a few hundred thousand people in the majority group doesn’t ingratiate your new nation with its neighbors. Israel’s founding was an act of violence, predicated on the idea that, somehow, Jewish people are uniquely more deserving of having their own nation and place to feel safe, regardless of what that means for anyone else who lives where they want to. That they’ve continued carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing and violence ever since that’s all too similar to the sorts of antisemitic violence that inspired a good deal of the initial wave of Zionist thought hasn’t really done anything to help the situation in the region. Jewish people have undoubtedly suffered persecution in Europe, the Middle East and pretty much everywhere else they’ve lived, but that doesn’t justify or excuse the Zionist project in any form, as it has existed since its inception. If anything, backing it post-WWII to try and assuage their guilt for letting Jewish people be massacred in the Holocaust was an awful move that let Western powers feel a little bit less terrible about the horrific consequences of their own inaction until the Holocaust was already well underway, to say nothing of the outright collaboration in many parts, but it also conveniently swept the problem away to a part of the world where there was primarily just brown Muslims who would have to deal with the fallout of the whole thing.
Maybe a Jewish state was an unsustainable idea? It’s there now, though and magic isn’t real.
Israel doesn’t have to be there forever, though. Somehow, no matter how awful it acts, there’s this idea that the existence of Israel is simply inevitable. Israel isn’t self-sufficient, and would likely be wiped off the map without constant military support and diplomatic cover from other states like the US, yet they keep provoking their neighbors with state-backed colonization efforts as settlers displace more and more Palestinians as the years go by. Without this support, they could not exist, between being unable to win all the fights they’ve started with their neighbors without constant ongoing military backing, and their economy likely tanking if Israel got hit with the economic sanctions it rightfully should be facing for its absolutely criminal behavior.
Israel has no more right to exist than any other nation does, and absolutely does not have the right to exist at the expense of entirely eradicating another nationality. If they want to try and argue otherwise, we ought to cut them loose and leave them to their own devices to sort out the situation they’ve created. There’s absolutely no reason for the US to continue to enable Israel or get involved with fights Israel goes looking for themselves.
Wasn’t it in the nature of reparations from the treatment of Jews by Muslims under the Ottoman empire, which ended in 1922, and wasn’t it created on land Hebrew speaking Israelites and Judites originally inhabited before the Ottomans pillaged all their cities and killed nearly all of them?
Without French support in the revolutionary War, the United States would not exist. The French didn’t let democracy die as a concept on this Earth, for the good of humanity, because colonies did an inhumane thing by keeping slaves. Was the founding of America not an act of violence also? By that standard isn’t the founded of every place an act of violence? Is there literally any significant land in the world still inhabited by its aboriginals?
Bottom line, the western world is not going to let a democracy get wiped out by actually far right religious fanatics, no matter how flawed the Guardian and Al Jazeera make Israeli democracy sound.
You agree magic isn’t real so what’s you’re proposal to protect all the Israelites that are there. Are you saying “hey they are not self sustaining so they deserve to have Iran genocide them.”
Wasn’t it in the nature of reparations from the treatment of Jews by Muslims under the Ottoman empire, which ended in 1922, and wasn’t it created on land Hebrew speaking Israelites and Judites originally inhabited before the Ottomans pillaged all their cities and killed nearly all of them?
In the aftermath of the first World War, there were less than 100,000 Jews living in Mandatory Palestine. In 1917, the Balfour declaration promised support for a Jewish homeland from the British, regardless of promises made to local Arab populations about respecting their claims for independence. The declaration was the product of efforts by Zionists in the UK lobbying for it. This in no way justifies exiling 700,000+ Palestinians from their homes and stealing them. It’s a case of claiming Jewish people are somehow exceptional in that their need for a homeland and safety trumps the needs and human rights of any other group impacted by their pursuit of this goal.
Without French support in the revolutionary War, the United States would not exist. The French didn’t let democracy die as a concept on this Earth, for the good of humanity, because colonies did an inhumane thing by keeping slaves. Was the founding of America not an act of violence also? By that standard isn’t the founded of every place an act of violence? Is there literally any significant land in the world still inhabited by its aboriginals?
I don’t disagree, but it’s disingenuous to expect other powers of the time engaging in the same practices at the time to suddenly call out the US on it. France didn’t abolish slavery until 1848, for example.
You agree magic isn’t real so what’s you’re proposal to protect all the Israelites that are there. Are you saying “hey they are not self sustaining so they deserve to have Iran genocide them.”
Israel loves to assert it’s a sovereign nation, so why is defending Israelis from the consequences of their many governments anyone’s responsibility except for that of Israelis? This isn’t a case of a rogue right-wing government derailing Israeli policy, it’s a continuation of the same colonial apartheid state that the UN has been calling on Israel to stop perpetrating since the 1970s! If Israel wants to play stupid games, let them get smacked around some. If they can’t actually stand on their own as a sovereign nation and there is a credible possibility of residents facing a genocide as a result, they can apply for refugee status, the same as any other group coming under threat. If they didn’t want this, they’ve had more than 40 years to come to that realization as a nation and correct course, and they have chosen not to. If these policies haven’t been broadly popular all this time and the Israeli people have just been getting dragged along, well, that’s not exactly the bastion of democracy in the Middle East that Israel likes to cosplay as, now is it?
Or, if they really want to stay under the US’ wing, how about we just make them a territory. No exemption from prosecution for their war criminals and settlers, no exceptional autonomy, the IDF gets brought under the jurisdiction of the US army and they can be like a Middle Eastern Guam. The US government can clean up their mess, they pay taxes to fund it, their politicians get muzzled and deprived of chances to stir up more conflict without being accused of insurrection and branded terrorists if they try to manufacture more conflicts. Real stupid idea, right? I can’t say I see anyone else volunteering to take on perpetually defending Israel with money, and potentially non-Israeli troops, so I think we can discard this one.
Well, maybe, just maybe, Israel should shut the hell up, dismantle all their settlements, stop engaging in offensive conflicts with the nations around them when they pre-emptively assert their right to defend themselves and try to actually cohabitate. Wild idea, but perhaps it’s time to put to rest the idea of a Jewish colonial ethnostate and admit that Israel is going to have to join us in modernity if they want a shot at survival.
What exactly do they provide in terms of military value? They’re a counter to Iran and other regional powers that are in part pissed off because Israel is there, constantly trying to steal land from its neighbors. The region would hardly become the pinnacle of peace and stability if we magically removed Israel from the map, but Israel’s actions are a major contributing force destabilizing the region and ramping up tensions. Even if we concede that they provide enough military and intelligence value to offset how much they also stir up problems in the region, at what point do we have to cut our losses and admit that continuing to merely be associated with Israel and the atrocities it perpetuates, much less enabling them, does damage to the US that far exceeds any benefits they offer?
Israel has broad support from older voters, White Protestants (White Protestant Evangelicals in particular) and Jewish Americans. Outside of these groups, they have lower support and it’s continually eroding as the current conflict goes on. This is a shrinking number of Democrats and Republican voters holding the rest of the country hostage, as they do on so many issues.
If the carrot doesn’t work, maybe it’s time to try the stick. The US could literally just stop blocking UN motions intended to punish Israel for its violations of human rights and international law, or even impose some heavy sanctions of its own. Start imprisoning US citizens who are trying to buy up Palestinian land being sold off at synagogues, while we’re at it. If that still doesn’t do the trick, I imagine that if the next arms shipment came via shots fired at settlers trying to massacre another Palestinian village, or a nice bomb dropped on Netanyahu’s head, Israel would shape up real quick.
Continuing to enable them is just perpetuating more suffering in Palestine and further damaging what little remains of the US’ reputation in the international community.
I’m not encouraging or discouraging support for Israel, just pointing out that there’s no “Gaza genocide” switch on Joe Biden’s desk that he can flip off. Foreign policy is incredibly complicated and needs careful and deliberate action.
I didn’t make any value judgements about the efficacy of the steps we’re taking to stop this genocide, but if I have to judge our efforts I would say they are barely nonexistent and the United States needs to do better.
This reads like the people who blame Obama ‘ramping up’ racial tensions after 2008.
The tension was ramped up before Israel even existed. Muslims have been murdering and oppressing Jews in the Middle East for literally thousands of years. They were vowing to wipe Israel off the map before it was even on the map, since the idea of Jewish state first came up.
Maybe a Jewish state was an unsustainable idea? It’s there now, though and magic isn’t real. I hope Israel solves its right wing nationalist problem at the ballot box, and I am very optimistic that it is going to.
I can’t fathom why. It’s almost like planning to take over a land where you’re a decided minority by just having other people of your religion pop up, start a war and kick out a few hundred thousand people in the majority group doesn’t ingratiate your new nation with its neighbors. Israel’s founding was an act of violence, predicated on the idea that, somehow, Jewish people are uniquely more deserving of having their own nation and place to feel safe, regardless of what that means for anyone else who lives where they want to. That they’ve continued carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing and violence ever since that’s all too similar to the sorts of antisemitic violence that inspired a good deal of the initial wave of Zionist thought hasn’t really done anything to help the situation in the region. Jewish people have undoubtedly suffered persecution in Europe, the Middle East and pretty much everywhere else they’ve lived, but that doesn’t justify or excuse the Zionist project in any form, as it has existed since its inception. If anything, backing it post-WWII to try and assuage their guilt for letting Jewish people be massacred in the Holocaust was an awful move that let Western powers feel a little bit less terrible about the horrific consequences of their own inaction until the Holocaust was already well underway, to say nothing of the outright collaboration in many parts, but it also conveniently swept the problem away to a part of the world where there was primarily just brown Muslims who would have to deal with the fallout of the whole thing.
Israel doesn’t have to be there forever, though. Somehow, no matter how awful it acts, there’s this idea that the existence of Israel is simply inevitable. Israel isn’t self-sufficient, and would likely be wiped off the map without constant military support and diplomatic cover from other states like the US, yet they keep provoking their neighbors with state-backed colonization efforts as settlers displace more and more Palestinians as the years go by. Without this support, they could not exist, between being unable to win all the fights they’ve started with their neighbors without constant ongoing military backing, and their economy likely tanking if Israel got hit with the economic sanctions it rightfully should be facing for its absolutely criminal behavior.
Israel has no more right to exist than any other nation does, and absolutely does not have the right to exist at the expense of entirely eradicating another nationality. If they want to try and argue otherwise, we ought to cut them loose and leave them to their own devices to sort out the situation they’ve created. There’s absolutely no reason for the US to continue to enable Israel or get involved with fights Israel goes looking for themselves.
Wasn’t it in the nature of reparations from the treatment of Jews by Muslims under the Ottoman empire, which ended in 1922, and wasn’t it created on land Hebrew speaking Israelites and Judites originally inhabited before the Ottomans pillaged all their cities and killed nearly all of them?
Without French support in the revolutionary War, the United States would not exist. The French didn’t let democracy die as a concept on this Earth, for the good of humanity, because colonies did an inhumane thing by keeping slaves. Was the founding of America not an act of violence also? By that standard isn’t the founded of every place an act of violence? Is there literally any significant land in the world still inhabited by its aboriginals?
Bottom line, the western world is not going to let a democracy get wiped out by actually far right religious fanatics, no matter how flawed the Guardian and Al Jazeera make Israeli democracy sound.
You agree magic isn’t real so what’s you’re proposal to protect all the Israelites that are there. Are you saying “hey they are not self sustaining so they deserve to have Iran genocide them.”
In the aftermath of the first World War, there were less than 100,000 Jews living in Mandatory Palestine. In 1917, the Balfour declaration promised support for a Jewish homeland from the British, regardless of promises made to local Arab populations about respecting their claims for independence. The declaration was the product of efforts by Zionists in the UK lobbying for it. This in no way justifies exiling 700,000+ Palestinians from their homes and stealing them. It’s a case of claiming Jewish people are somehow exceptional in that their need for a homeland and safety trumps the needs and human rights of any other group impacted by their pursuit of this goal.
I don’t disagree, but it’s disingenuous to expect other powers of the time engaging in the same practices at the time to suddenly call out the US on it. France didn’t abolish slavery until 1848, for example.
Israel loves to assert it’s a sovereign nation, so why is defending Israelis from the consequences of their many governments anyone’s responsibility except for that of Israelis? This isn’t a case of a rogue right-wing government derailing Israeli policy, it’s a continuation of the same colonial apartheid state that the UN has been calling on Israel to stop perpetrating since the 1970s! If Israel wants to play stupid games, let them get smacked around some. If they can’t actually stand on their own as a sovereign nation and there is a credible possibility of residents facing a genocide as a result, they can apply for refugee status, the same as any other group coming under threat. If they didn’t want this, they’ve had more than 40 years to come to that realization as a nation and correct course, and they have chosen not to. If these policies haven’t been broadly popular all this time and the Israeli people have just been getting dragged along, well, that’s not exactly the bastion of democracy in the Middle East that Israel likes to cosplay as, now is it?
Or, if they really want to stay under the US’ wing, how about we just make them a territory. No exemption from prosecution for their war criminals and settlers, no exceptional autonomy, the IDF gets brought under the jurisdiction of the US army and they can be like a Middle Eastern Guam. The US government can clean up their mess, they pay taxes to fund it, their politicians get muzzled and deprived of chances to stir up more conflict without being accused of insurrection and branded terrorists if they try to manufacture more conflicts. Real stupid idea, right? I can’t say I see anyone else volunteering to take on perpetually defending Israel with money, and potentially non-Israeli troops, so I think we can discard this one.
Well, maybe, just maybe, Israel should shut the hell up, dismantle all their settlements, stop engaging in offensive conflicts with the nations around them when they pre-emptively assert their right to defend themselves and try to actually cohabitate. Wild idea, but perhaps it’s time to put to rest the idea of a Jewish colonial ethnostate and admit that Israel is going to have to join us in modernity if they want a shot at survival.