politics

If the only thing Biden ever does is keep Trump from office it will be a net win.

What’s project 2025?

His finger is dangerously close to wagging.

Wrote this before and I'll write it again. People need to understand the broader context here:

Tough for Biden to balance between:

• Leaning too heavily into Israel and siding with genocide.

• Leaning too heavily against, and being accused of being pro-Hamas.

Worse, if Biden withdraws all aid to Israel and then Israel is hit with another terrorist attack, manufactured or not, that's the end of Biden. I think we can all agree that right-wing media propaganda is very effective and the ads would write themselves.

Within the electorate resides Jewish Americans who still largely support Israel by the polling, and the progressives and Palestinian Americans (a far smaller voting bloc).

The best Biden is going to manage in toeing the line is singling out Netanyahu (who himself is unpopular in Israel) instead of Israel itself and actions like this.

The risk obviously being that if Biden loses this election, the guy who wouldn't just indirectly but likely directly commit genocide against Palestinians would come in and you certainly wouldn't hear the words, "indiscriminate bombing" from Trump's facial sphincter.

But look past your nose before you jeopardize our key alliances. Diplomacy is slow and frustrating, but it is better than more war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Israel_in_the_2023_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war

There's a genocide happening right now with USA support where thousand of childrens have already been murdered. Israel is bombing neighbor countries and the whole middle east is boiling as a result. They are not seeking diplomacy they are seeking war.

If genocide isn't a red line for sending military aid then our alliances are already useless. We are the country and the country is us; not some third entity. So a moral failure of this magnitude being forced on us "for the good of our country" just opens the door to more moral failures. And we're the ones that will have to live in that system.

Furthermore, allies who do have moral standards are now looking at us wondering if our moral failures will extend to keeping our word when it's not a country that's entangled itself with our religious conservatives. They are very aware of why we support Israel. And very aware that they do not share Israel's unique political position.

It's that enough big picture stuff for you or would like to attempt to rationalize sending weapons to a genocidal regime some more?

I'm never leaving lemmy. I love the way it's common to see normal sane views being widely accepted. I can breathe here.

You're not entirely wrong, but Biden has bipartisan backing on this as it's part of the whole funding bill, which makes most of the repesentatives and senators complicit with Biden which this bill also gives Israel $3B, and Ukraine $0.3B.

Still, like how a massive frigate turns slowly, the actions of the State Department are showing a change of tune, and the US is nearly fed up with covering for Israel's genocide. The first steps are to abstain from ceasefire resolutions and then to give the protestors attention and credibility. There are many more steps to go.

Except he completely missed the point.

"We need to get more aid into Gaza" is very much not "we need to stop arming Israel so much."

posts something the Biden did not say

1. the US sees Israel as the only thing it can control in the middle east. it was always meant to be one of a few "pro-democracy beachheads" in the area, with the US attempting to make iraq work the same way in the 2000s. The idea was to put Israel in a position where they were powerful compared to their enemies but dependent on foreign aid, so that they could do whatever they want as long as they also did whatever we want. This is straight out of the British post-colonial hegemonic playbook - you don't send people to take over, and instead you elevate one local group from second or third place to the top and then make sure they never develop enough power that they can remain on top without your help. If you do this successfully, you can control them completely because all you have to do to send them tumbling from power is nothing when they're counting on your support.

2. Up until now, the impact of helping Israel didn't have to be all that massive because the impact of Israeli violence against Palestinians (edit: ON THE OPINION OF THE AVERAGE AMERICAN) wasn't either. What you're seeing is a replay of the US allowing anyone with a camera to report from Vietnam - the narrative used to be pretty tightly controlled but between Palestinian social media updates and Israel's internal jingoistic propaganda being leaked to the western world it's becoming harder and harder to sustain the whole 'most moral army in the world engaged in a limited defensive operation that respects the right of all law-abiding people to live in peace' narrative. We see them shooting at people gathered around aid trucks now. We hear them talking about "children of light vs children of darkness", "every Palestinian is a terrorist because they all support Hamas" and seizing all of Palestine to build beachfront condos. Americans tend to like war in theory, but we have a strong sense of fair play and we'll only stay on board up to a certain amount of video of unarmed people being mowed down by soldiers. This is why they're simultaneously softening their position on Palestine and moving to seize the only major social media outlet that isn't US-based (and therefore isn't able to be pressured about 'misinformation' the way that FB, X, reddit, etc are). It's a matter of appeasing us in order to stay in power now while moving behind the scenes to ensure that they control the narrative in future so that they're never again put in a position where they're beholden to the will of voters who think that foreign people are people.

Israel uses a significant amount of the $$ the US gives them to lobby (IOW, bribe) members of the US political parties to support them. Including giving them more $$, in a positive feedback loop. The lobbied polits in effect give themselves money along with what Israel keeps.