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Israel cancels diplomatic visit to U.S. after U.N. vote demanding cease-fire
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Oh stop.
Look, the two frontrunners for president were born in the 50s. For them the 1967 war on Israel is living memory, with Israel only having been formed as a state in 1948. For most of their lives, Israel has been a priority in US foreign politics.
For most of what I imagine is much of your own life, Israel has been aggressively expanding at the expense of the Palestinians. Mine too.
Without condoning it, our elder statesmen and stateswomen understand the middle east differently, and are looking for distinctly different outcomes. That ship doesn't turn on a dime, but it's fucking turning.
People are dying and its maddening. I also assure you that nothing the US does either way will appreciably change anything over there. That conflict is baked into the very earth itself. Does that justify the arms deals? No. Do I have a point? Probably also no. But that's how it is and it sucks.
You get used to it, I guess. That also sucks.
If the US turned off the spending taps, stopped blocking Security Council Resolutions, and stopped acting as Israels lawyer, arms dealer, propagandist, and bully things would change pretty damn quickly.
Israel is effectively an American colony. It would turn into a pariah state very quickly without US backing.
Is the creation of a nuclear-armed North Korea in the Middle East with an effective ballistic missile program the change you wish to see in the world?
Israel's vanity is that it's part of the Western family of civilised democracies. Its also a lot more economically integrated than North Korea. Shunning and boycotting it would be more analogous to South Africa.
Biden has gone record multiple times saying his unwavering support for Israel is from when he was a very small child his dad said they were the good guys...
I believe him when he says that, and I believe someone like that should not be anywhere near a political office. He's clearly mental unstable if that's the truth, and a liar if it isn't.
An entire lifetime has passed by since then. It's just absolutely fucking insane, but that's what he says.
...
You don't think if Israel got billions of dollars a year less for defense spending and didn't have the biggest kid on the block defending them nothing would change?
If they acted like this without the US behind them, they'd be wiped off the map.
If the US left them, even for a brief period like a year, they'd be forced to actually pursue peace.
No. It just leaves a geopolitical power vacuum into which another opportunistic state would step in and supply them with some equally deadly munitions and financial guarantees. Nothing would change for the Israelis or the Palestinians.
Also, we probably stationed some Really Massive Ordinance over there that we can't just evacuate on a Hercules or a Galaxy or 10. Its not like the US will just walk away from that. (Yes, like we did Afghanistan. Twice.)
Basically "if we don't support their genocide then someone else will"?
Yeah, I suppose that's one read if you completely disregard the rather startling drift in US policy in Israel from October 2023 to now. We abstained from a UNSC veto on a ceasefire. SoS Blinkin is going more aggressively at Netanyahu than I've ever seen a US official go at ah Israeli PM in my lifetime ("cohesive plan" quote), Biden called out Bibi in his SOTU when there are DIRE domestic issues at hand.
Look, I'm not saying we're clean here, and aren't complicit. We're walking a line of "being supportive" and bringing unorecedented diplomatic pressure on Israel to knock it off. Things are happening "really fast" on the scale of decades old policy, and that means something. Keeping hold on those ties means (a) yes, we're complicit in the eyes of history, but (b) we are using those ties to try to minimize further bloodshed.
It's slow. Its maddening. It's also real politics on an international scale which, I am sorry, marginalizes death. I'm not OK with that and I'm struggling to make sense of it myself, but among other likely outcomes it's probably the best play the US can make given the alternatives.
People with a lot more information than me are making the decisions. I'm trying to trust that.
Ding ding ding!
People are looking at it from a moral perspective, which is admirable and good but does nothing to explain why it's happening or how to stop it. Geopolitics is about power, not morals. I wish it weren't so but that's the world we live in. When you look at it through the eyes of power, it will still be complicated but it will be honest and constructive.
Geopolitics can also be painfully slow:/
Yup. Think of a country like a large freighter. It takes a lot of time between turning the wheel and the ship actually turning. Especially when there's something wrong, like we've seen in Baltimore...
Who? Russia who is buying weapons from North Korea? China who's trying to win over the Middle East? This is a needlessly pessimistic assumption.
Because they want the Middle East on their side. They've been posturing that way for a while now. Israel is inherently a regional pariah state and that's not changing anytime soon., so I don't see China making that decision. It works for the US because it has both "needs" for hard power projection in the region and frankly ridiculous amounts of soft power, but China lacks both of these things.
Edit: Russia is impossible because they don't have the soft power necessary to keep Iran satiated (I think at this point it's impossible even for the US, but for Russia doubly so) if they make such a step. At least personally, even from a geopolitical perspective if I had to choose between Iran and Israel I'd choose Iran, for a lot of reasons.
I significantly doubt this. Netanyahu isn't suddenly going to grow a heart or morals. I fear he'd do just as bad, if not worse, and prompt the question of if we should get involved against them.
Remember, AIPAC funds US politicians. Not the other way around. They want the US to support Israel's goals. Those goals won't change if the US declines.
Could not disagree with you more on this.
Stop sending them billions of our taxpayer dollars, and stop sending them any more bombs being used to slaughter civilians. At the very least, this would force them to spend their own capital to produce their own bombs. That alone would make a massive difference.