It’s Time for Democrats to Break With Biden’s Addled Gaza Policy
Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election, thankfully. He is not withdrawing because he’s being held responsible for enabling war crimes against the Palestinian people (though a recent poll does have nearly 40 percent of Americans saying they’re less likely to vote for him thanks to his handling of the war). Yet it’s impossible to extricate the collapse in public faith in the Biden campaign from the “uncommitted” movement for Gaza. They were the first people to refuse him their votes, and defections from within the president’s base hollowed out his support well in advance of the debate.
The Democrats and their presumptive nominee Kamala Harris are faced with a choice: On the one hand, they can continue Biden’s monstrous support for Netanyahu, the brutal IDF, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That would help allow the party to cover for Biden and put a positive spin on a smooth handoff, even though we all know this would mainly benefit the embittered president himself and his small coterie of loyalists. Such a choice would confirm that the institutional rot that allowed the current situation to develop still characterizes the party.
You seriously think the Israeli state could survive a loss of US support? They are just as much a vassal as they were then, if not more. They are completely isolated on the world stage and surrounded by geopolitical rivals. Their society is crumbling as we speak. Without the US playing defense, the international community would have come down on Israel decades ago. Do you remember how much they freaked out when Joe Biden kinda sorta hinted that he might possibly not send them all the bombs they wanted?
The US gives israel what, like 3-4billion a year? Their defense budget was like 24b in 2023. They'd be fine without us.
Ok, deal, let's do that and find out
That's not the issue. In fact, if the US didn't pay their bills, we already know what will happen, and it's a national security scenario that is gamed and updated regularly.
So say Israel is like "fuck you, pay me" to the US, and we cut them off. They are surrounded by hostile territories that will immediately put all their resources into attacking them and trying to wipe them off the map. Russia and China will probably proxy war this out as well. Then what? Maybe a coalition is made from a few of the Middle Eastern countries, groups hostile towards the US are fully enabled and encouraged to fuck with us, so now you have a new Middle East united group aligned with Russia and China to fuck around with Europe and Africa. Doesn't sound super great to me. You're pretty much kicking off a precursor to another world war, and Israel knows this. I'm sure they've probably just flatly said it behind closed doors.
"According to our simulations that we ran for ourselves, very bad things will happen if we are not in charge. Therefore anything we do to maintain hegemony is justified."
Forgive me for sleeping on some sort of Orson Scott Card geopolitics fantasy, based on assumptions that other countries will be just as imperialistic as the USA. I'm much more concerned about the current ongoing genocide of the Palestinians that has continued for over 50 years.
That is delusional. Israel has a shitload of nuclear weapons and they have already expressed complete willingness to use them against Innocent civilians. If Israel is ever going to be destroyed by its neighbors they will try to nuke everyone they can on their way out. It's called the Samson option.
When they lost the Yom Kippur war, they openly armed nuclear weapons and used them to force Nixon into replacing their Air Force and help recover from the loss.
Israel has in many ways closer ties to Russia today than to the US. Roughly a million Israelis are from Russia.
And almost 3 million Americans are from Russia. What's your point?
1 million out of 11.4 million = 8.7%
Or 3 million out of 335 million = 0.9%