I was thinking some more about yesterday's comment that Joe Biden had given Israel 95% of what it wanted. So what's the other 5%? It's certainly not any kind of concrete support, which Biden has never even momentarily withheld. It's mostly just some occasional mild requests. In the approximate order he made them, here they are:
Maybe think about not immediately going into full bloodthirsty savage mode?
Maybe think about allowing some food in?
Maybe think about giving just a tiny shit about civilian casualties?
Maybe think about telling your religious fanatics in the West Bank not to casually murder people?
Maybe think about telling your coalition partners not to publicly muse about resettlement and genocide?
Maybe think about not killing humanitarian aid workers?
Maybe think about not starting World War III with Iran?
And I'd add: Maybe think about showing just a smidgen of gratitude toward a guy who's taken huge political risks to provide you with unquestioning support?
Not so unreasonable, wouldn't you agree?
Netanyahu wants to put Trump back in the White House. He isn't going to do anything to help the United States while Biden is president.
The Israeli right, like Trump, likes to humiliate its negotiating partners. For example: pull out of Gaza, but make sure that the Palestinian leadership gets no credit for it. The PA polices the West Bank as Israeli settlers steal more land.
At this point, I think the Israelis simply want to make Israel unlivable for the Palestinians, so that they find some way to emigrate. Bibi is taking the 10/7 attacks and using them as cover to brutalize the ordinary Palestinians as much as he can.
Not sure what it will take for Biden to move against Bibi. Biden doesn't do public negotiations, but whatever he's doing behind the scene hasn't been enough to stop Netanyahu.
Bibi meanwhile seems to be trying to start a war with Iran, figuring the US would come in to support him after 10/7.
I don't think Netanyahu is actually trying to start a war with Iran, but he's definitely trying to draw everyone's attention toward the possibility of war with Iran and away from famine in Gaza and internal Israeli protests. Yesterday's attack was much like Iran's previous attack: big enough to draw a ton of attention, but designed to be small enough that it doesn't require real escalation. I expect there to be more rounds of limited tit-for-tat. Iran doesn't want war, but the regime also can't afford to look weak. Netanyahu wants a distraction and a way to galvanize public opinion in Israel, but can't afford to open up a huge new front (which would only make the internal Israeli diviseness about the draft even worse).
Specifically, Bibi's domestic situation looks much better if Iran and the US were fighting. It would be a huge, threatening distraction from both is incompetence and legal exposure and provide a frame-change to wind down the Gaza adventure on terms he likes. The fact that he withheld information about the consulate strike until it was happening seems to confirm this - it was a typical dirtbag "let's you and him fight" play.
It does sound like he badly miscalculated on that, ended up dependent on Biden to save both him and Israel the from the "find out" part of that equation, and now will have to try to think of another gambit to tie up Biden and distract from the fact that he's not only corrupt, but also an incompetent piece of shit so compromised that he cannot provide the security Israel needs.
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"At this point, I think the Israelis simply want to make Israel unlivable for the Palestinians, so that they find some way to emigrate. "
I don't doubt this is true, but it's also impossible. No matter how unlivable places get, the poor don't have any other options but to put up with it. See North Korea for an example. Nobody left in Gaza has the means to emigrate to anywhere else, even assuming anywhere else would voluntarily take them in.
Correct. Never forget Bibi went out of his way to publicly ally with the congressional GOP to spit in Obama’s face during very delicate negotiations with Iran over the nuclear treaty. Bibi (and also MBS in SA) are full-on Trump/GOP allies.
Joe should consider that Joe’s support of Bibi may lose Joe the presidency. Maybe Joe should ask Bibi to step down immediately.
Not supporting Israel is more likely to lose Biden the election than doing so. The people calling him Genocide Joe simply don't understand the extent to which this is a coalition fracturing event for Democrats. They refuse to grasp that there remain a lot of Democratic and uncommitted voters who would punish him as severely if he cut Israel loose. More severely, since they would be likely to vote for Trump rather than a 3rd party candidate that cannot win.
Politically, there isn't a good answer for him to take.
"They refuse to grasp that there remain a lot of Democratic and uncommitted voters who would punish him as severely if he cut Israel loose."
This is true, but only in the sense of "there are a lot of old people still alive and kicking in the Democratic party." Younger Democrats, even younger Jewish Democrats, don't really have much affinity with modern-day Israel, partially because to them it's "always" been properous and powerful and partially because they can see that modern-day Israel does some pretty horrific things to Palestinians, things like "seizing their land" and "murdering them with no consequences." I know of nobody younger than me (and I'm in my mid-40s) who cared at all about Israel's existence until October 2023. Some of their lack of interest in Israel might be antisemitism and some might just be horror at seeing Israelis treat other people the way Americans used to treat Native Americans. But it doesn't bode well for Democratic Party support of Israel that younger people see older people defending literally everything Israel does, even the stuff that looks really bad. (To me, it's very similar to how older Americans also defend the Catholic Church, while younger people are like "wait a minute, there's an organization that shuffles pedophiles around instead of calling the cops, and everybody's cool with that?")
We obviously know different sets of young people. While those that I interact with skew towards supporting the Palestinians, it is far from zero.
I'd dearly wish the US could cut Israel loose, at long last. However, should Biden even be insufficiently supportive, powerhouse pro-zionist organizations like AIPAC would immediately step up to defeat him, and defeat every other Democrat possible.
Remember, AOC related the story that AIPAC approached her and demanded buy-in for the zionist entity. They promised lavish funding for her campaign -- and if she said "no", they had $1 million ready to go for a primary opponent to take her down.
It's a complicated and very ugly situation. I don't like Biden's policies, but fear another trump admin even more.
Biden has publicly withheld support of the Likud policy to mass murder Palestinians in order to depopulate Gaza for colonization. Biden's recommendation to disguise the policy has not received cooperation from Netanyahu.
Is there any doubt Netanyahu is DESPERATELY hoping Iran strikes back in response to the latest Israeli operation, in the hopes of blowing up the Middle East into a wider war?
I doubt the mullahs will be smart enough to refrain from taking the bait, but here's to hoping....
In evaluating all this, while we can make some assumptions and inferences, most of which are probably true, there is probably another layer of information which we have no access too, and won't. At least until Biden Administration officials start writing memoirs or Rob Woodward publishes a book about the Biden Administration (but the dude is 81, so that is less likely).
The U.S, once the “leader of the free world” wasn’t informed when Israel broke international law attacking an Iranian Embassy. It failed to convince Iran to not respond to that atrack and again failed to convince Israel to not respond to Iran. Meanwhile the killing continues in the Gaza ghetto and, adding insult to injury, Israel is planning to send settlers into Gaza as it has done for the past 50 years in the West Bank. Israels own river to sea movement. We really really need to get Israels attention and stop sending money and arms.
Israel will soon achieve what at one time seemed impossible, alienating its supporters. They are losing by “winning.”
Israel didn't break international law with its missile strike, because they didn't attack the Iranian embassy. It was a consular building. That's covered by a different set of rules. Israel broke a norm, but not actually the law.
There are two major problems with that attack. The first is that, for the second time in less than a year, Israeli intelligence had no idea what it was doing. They completely failed to predict how Iran would respond. The Mossad is clearly a lot less competent than its reputation.
The other problem is that Israel's actions, as has become very typical, is disconnected from any strategy. They had no plan for converting operational success into anything of value.
A part of that is that a lot of countries, and especially Israel, drastically overestimate the value of assassinating their enemies' individual leaders. They've killed at least five senior scientists within Iran's nuclear program, without even slowing it down appreciably. As for military leaders, assassinating anyone, even as competent a commander as Isoroku Yamamoto, doesn't materially change the course of a war, except maybe in the most immediate short term as the other side repopulates its chain of command.
Israel justifies its assassinations as creating a deterrent to other Iranian leaders. The idea is that making it clear that generals will be killed changes the incentives for other Iranian officers, making them less inclined to attack Israel. There's no evidence that it does so. It's an exercise in what I call the "We are strong; our enemies are weak" fallacy. It's self-evident to Israelis that they would not stop military activities if someone killed a couple of IDF generals, but they are absolutely convinced that Iran will.
The funny thing is that this belief implicitly assumes that, contrary to the Israelis' public rhetoric, Iran is not an irrational actor ideologically committed to the elimination of Israel and dedicated to the idea of martyrdom. If they were, then there couldn't be a deterrent effect. I think that this assumption is correct, and that Iran's leadership is is rational, calculating, and non-suicidal, but a lot of Israeli propaganda depends upon getting that wrong.
It’s the whole “maybe think” that’s the problem. It needs to be backed by cutting off military support for the first offense, cutting off diplomatic support for the second, sanctions for the third, blockades for the fourth, and an escalating number of JDAMs and ballistic missiles thereafter.
Bibi would come to heel soon enough.
Whatever it is, Bibi is at it again with new shots taken inside of Iraq. Is he trying to provoke Iran or is he calling their nuclear bluff?
Israel is a country of 10 million people, 2 million of whom are specifically excluded from having the state's primary purpose promoting their interests. There are another 8 million Jews around the world whom Israel claims to represent.
Meanwhile, there are around 5 million Palestinians in Israel/Palestine and another 9 million elsewhere in the world, and there are around 400 million Arabs in various countries -- many of them adjacent or near to Israel -- and around 2 billion Muslims.
And Israel has charted its course on the basis of superior strength, driving out and generally subjugating the Palestinians, continually attacking Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, and keeping peace with other Arab countries mainly by arrangements with authoritarian regimes.
It gets away with this for now almost entirely due to American support, both in direct military aid and access to military technology and to American funding for authoritarian regimes at peace with Israel, mainly Egypt and Jordan. Total cost around $7 billion a year.
Israel has basically committed itself to its path of continued aggression, which is sort of in an escalating cycle because as they are more brutal to the Palestinians and Syria and Iran, they draw the ire of populations sympathetic to those countries, including most Arabs and a lot of Muslims.
This path probably cannot be sustained without (a) continued superpower support and (b) maintenance of authoritarian regimes friendly to Israel ... neither of which is, to my thinking, a great thing to base your future on.
And the Palestinians -- particularly Hamas -- seem to be aware of the weaknesses in this arrangement. First of all, American support for Israel is largely based on false or concealed information for the general public, as in the romanticized understanding that most Americans have of Israel and their ignorance about how heavily we subsidize them. Israel seemed to be planning to slowly take over all of the West Bank, without every making the news in America ... but their response to the October 7 attack -- which I think Hamas fully expected -- raised the blinds on some things. The West Bank illegal settlements aren't particularly in the news yet, but Americans are much more aware of our aid to Israel and to the fact that they aren't the perpetual good guys that they tend to be portrayed as in our media.
And also the populations of Egypt and Jordan (... and Saudi Arabia) are much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than their governments are, so the authoritarian regimes there become less stable when Israel abuses the Palestinians and they do nothing; it will be interesting to see what the reaction in Jordan is to their air force helping to down Iranian drones.
Ultimately, Israel is weak; see population numbers above. Their economy has taken a beating and apparently they have run through a lot of their arsenal destroying Gaza ... in spite of facing no serious resistance. If too many adversaries decide they aren't as strong as they portray themselves as, they're in trouble. So they sort of have to do the over the top things that they hope will instill fear, like destroying Gaza. It's probably not effective; they create more enemies than they destroy doing things like that.
But their fear seems to be that if they aren't brutal, THAT'S what will inspire their adversaries to move against them.
I don't see what their endgame plan is, if they even have one. It is a little difficult to see what peaceful outcome they imagine that doesn't involve a fairly thorough genocide of the Palestinians.
Israel is a country of 10 million people, 2 million of whom are specifically excluded from having the state's primary purpose promoting their interests.
Your numbers are off, I think. It's more like "14 million with 5 million specifically excluded."
Probably your source is including Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in its figures.
Probably your source is including Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in its figures.
Your "two million" figure presumably refers to Israeli Arabs. But they have full civil rights as far as I can tell (that is, they can vote, buy/sell property, serve in the armed forces, go to public schools, etc). So I'm not sure what "excluded" refers to. The "excluded" are the 5-odd million Arabs who lack Israeli citizenship, ie, those living in Gaza and the West Bank.
Your numbers, in other words, muddy and understate the extent of Israel's human rights violations.
No, ProbStat is referring to Israeli Arabs, with Israeli citizenship, rather than those in the territories. Israel's supporters will fight with you tooth and nail when you point out that Israeli Arabs don't have the same rights that Jewish Israelis do, but that's true.
Non-Jewish Israelis face discrimination, sure. But his numbers understate the problem. More than 1/3rd of the population governed by Israel lacks even the most basic civil rights. They're not citizens!
Jewish fanatics have been murdering Palestinians in the West Bank since at least the Begin administration. In fact, for some years, it was impossible to be arrested for murdering a Palestinian and orthodox teens used to joyride up from Jerusalem searching for people to kill.
Arab and Jew by former New York Times Jerusalem correspondent David Shipler is a somewhat dated history at this point, but you should read it anyway. It is frequently shocking and will blow away any idea that Israel has ever held the high moral ground.
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