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.
At this point it’s very clear it’s not Biden’s policy that is holding things up. It’s very clearly Netanyahu and his cabinet. This isn’t even a question anymore as Benny Gantz straight said so when he resigned, and then Netanyahu dissolved his war cabinet, so he’s basically acting in direct control of Israeli forces it seems.
Biden and team had a ceasefire agreement, Israel said they agreed, Palestine said they agreed, yet Israel refuses to sign or stop military assault. As far as the “undecided” voters go, they aren’t going to get their way. The US as a nation is not going to jeopardize ties with Israel as a proxy military force and ground position in the Middle East for a small percentage of voters. It is what it is, but put the blame where it belongs in the here and now.
The United States should throw Israel under a bus.
The United States would be throwing its own strategic interests under a bus.
I know this may come as a shock, but the US government is well aware what is happening over there, and knows considerably more that the average person. They aren’t doing nothing because of lack of evidence, or death, or allegations (both proven and otherwise). They do nothing because its in their interests to do so.
I use the example of “no blood for oil”. They only said that because they still had oil - start losing access to key parts of your strategic access and absolutely we would be crying for war.
There is no strategic interest in Israel that isn’t better done by another country.
What country would be better suited to support the Carter Doctrine that is vital to US interests?
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, Djibouti, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Turkey.
Just to name a few countries with large American military bases, extant militaries, and intelligence agencies.
So none better, only other bad options
Better than Israel. We weren’t getting half of the stuff from Israel that we get from our other Middle Eastern allies.
The US has little to no influence over Israeli domestic politics. Pretending that Israel is a puppet state of the US is… delusional.
Well then they won’t mind when we stop providing US made weapons to continue their aggressions, cutoff the billions in annual support, and stop blocking international efforts at holding them accountable. Why would Netanyahu be addressing our government if we had no skin in the game?
You’re either uninformed or trolling, we are Israel’s largest ally and we constantly shield them from international repercussions.
Cope
You don’t understand, this is the only chance for the east to eradicate Israel AND the USA.
It doesn’t matter if their moral stance is built on lies and dishonesty. Morality was never their lynchpin.
Ronald Reagan made one phone call and the Israelis immediately stopped bombarding Lebanon. The vassal state has to do whatever the fuck the US president wants. It’s a complete joke to think otherwise. Joe Biden could go on TV right now and publicly withdraw support for the occupiers and their government and military would collapse overnight.
Oh, awesome. Let’s time travel back then and act like it’s now, OH WAIT.
The Israeli state of 40 years only existed due to the US and it’s money. That’s not necessarily the same situation now. They can buy their own toys, and not be a puppet of the US if they didn’t want to now.
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%
A lot has changed in 40 years. Jewish money in politics, for one.
I wouldn’t personally go with “Jewish Money” as the terminology…😬
That aside, certainly the effect of AIPAC and friends is a part of the pathology. That doesn’t change the fact that Joe Biden could end the genocide anytime he wanted. The Zionist entity cannot survive without US hard power backing.
I mean, it comes from people who identify as Jewish and who support the state of Israel. How is that not correct?
Joe Biden cannot stop Israel. They have openly and repeatedly made known their plan to conquer Gaza. They’re already allowing “settlers” (terrorists) in to attack the local Palestinians and steal their land. American citizens, including many who donate to AIPAC, are getting involved in land deals for the conquered territory.
The entire powerbase of the western world is either taking part in the genocide and/or profiting from it or unable to do the right thing because of the political and financial power of the former.
Even if that wasn’t the case, Israel is the only friendly nation in the middle east for western powers. Iran regularly starts shit and Saudi Arabia committed 9/11 (which we ignore because they have oil). A Jewish state is much friendlier to the (mostly white, Christian) government of the US.
Joe Biden could order a blockade on the single functioning port. Joe Biden’s Treasury department could instantly destroy the occupier economy with sanctions, as they should be doing under US and international law. Joe Biden could signal to the Iranians and Hezbollah that Israel is no longer allowed to operate with impunity.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing pretend impotence for true impotence.
I agree that the entire West is complicit in the genocide.
Regarding “friendly nations,” what happened to make the Iranians unfriendly to the United States?
I want to agree with you. I’d be with you if you’d at least mentioned the impact this has on actual American citizens.
My understanding is plenty of people have been silenced for expressing their support for Palestine. I mean, hasn’t Congress literally proposed/passed bills saying they can’t even talk about the number of people dying?
It’s fascinating how people are so eager to sweep it all under the rug Americans themselves are ignored just to protect Israel, and more importantly, to protect American politicians that refuse to even learn about the situation. That’s not even mentioning the absolute infuriating trash that passes as corporate news nowadays (including anything pushed to the masses by large social media publishers). It’s like in order to protect Israel… err I mean, stop caring about this issue because it makes us uncomfortable, we’re entirely willing to allow news organizations to be straight-up propaganda, feeding blatant misinformation. It’s weird how we have zero criticism for them because that might invite someone to mention Gaza
And do you know how many American lives are being saved by letting Israel fight Iran as a proxy rather than letting it fall and having to deal with the headache afterwards?
Israel is a strategic asset in a larger war, and a lot of people are clearly missing that concept because they don’t think the US and Iran are actually at war with each other. It’s the same reason why the embargo of Cuba still exists.
Geopolitics is complicated, and most of it is not out in the open for the public to see.
Wow, what an argument. Look the other way and prop up the genocidal apartheid state because otherwise we might have to use blood in addition to treasure to defend imperial interests in the Middle East. Just…wow.
What reason is that exactly?
I mean, yea. You think the world is some happy go lucky place where people don’t fight each other?
The US dropped two nuclear bombs on civilians in Japan to end a war quickly, and despite the backlash they’d kill civilians again in a heartbeat if it was beneficial to America. The number of civilians that died from the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 shows that very clearly. The current Palestinian death toll is less than 10% of that 20 year conflict, and it was done by Americans directly.
Cuba is being used as a pawn by other countries to threaten the US, the same as it was during the cold war. Russia and China didn’t write off $40 billion dollars for free over the last decade.
Umm…lol no. I think the world is run by military forces and their obedient governments.
Vaporize civilians for peace!
If by America you mean imperial warmaking and profits then yes, “they” have, would, and will continue.
This point is really confusing but…yay America?
Wow what a take. Other countries support Cuba, so the USA gets to perpetuate invasions, assassination attempts, terrorism and eternal economic warfare. The Cubans have no autonomy but also they brought this on themselves.
What happened the next day?
There would certainly be peace the day after a nuclear apocalypse too
Oddly enough, there wasn’t after the bombing of Pearl harbor.
Tit for tat. Sorry our tat was bigger.
If you want to compare casualties then you need to compare the same periods. The average monthly casualties for the period we had data was far higher than the war on Iraq. Which is kind of to be expected since we were there for 10 years. It’s also a much larger country with more people exposed to proportionally larger forces fighting.
So let’s do this the right way. According to the Iraqi Body Count project around 200,000 civilians were killed. Or 0.8 percent of civilians in Iraq. In Gaza that number is 2 percent. More than double. And that’s just the bodies that made it to a morgue while the health ministry was still capable of accurately counting bodies. Estimates of people who are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble are in the six figure range. So let’s be generous and set the total at 100,000, so 60k under rubble, far below the estimates. That’s 5 percent of the civilian population dead.
This is not a road you want to go down. Any analysis beyond the most shallow reflects extremely poorly on Israel.
Percentage of the total population is a bad stat, a dead person regardless of how many people you started with.
The point I was trying to make is that the US is clearly okay with killing civilians.
Right. Those two ratios are clearly the mark of countries with the same attitude towards civilian deaths.
If you only murder one person, does it not matter?
Death percentages do not matter to the families involved.
Dude, I don’t think you understood my comment.
If politicians/corporate media came out and said, it’s unfortunate but there’s too much money, power, assets on the line, we have to let Israel’ genocide continue and we have to continue to support them for X, Y, and Z reason I’d actually feel respected.
My understanding is that those groups have regularly dismissed any evidence that the genocide is happening, they’ve claimed protests by student and university faculty are stupid and due to them being brainwashed, and most-improtantly they’ve claimed anyone that doesn’t support Israel hates Jews.
Can you please respond with a slightly better understanding of my comment? Please ask if something’s not clear.
Do you even care how their lies erode the trust Americans could/should have in there leaders and institutions?
They CAN’T come out and say it or it turns into a real war rather than a background proxy war and that ends up causing more problems. The world is not a nice place, there are a lot of people (and governments) out to try to gain an advantage, including the US itself.
The Truth can be extremely offensive, and offending certain people can be dangerous. Some things need to remain a secret, or at least somewhat hidden, even from the American people.
American people don’t want to know how much their individual life is valued at for example. The government makes that decision every single day when it sets regulations or funds various programs, but people would be extremely pissed off to find out. That doesn’t help people, and it doesn’t help the government, so they bury that information under piles of statistics.
Gotta admit, it’s interesting how I specifically mentioned politicians and media networks and you responded by alluding to a vague “government” entity that seemingly acts on its own.
In my mind, the government is just a name for the politicians people elected. It’s like saying corporations seek profit like they have feelings and desires or something, and not like they’re falling explicit laws and instructions set forth by politicians, which again are human beings that we’ve specifically elected.
That said, at least you answered my question, albeit without ever actually considering it
SA would like a word.
I mean, yeah, that’s largely true with regard to who’s holding progress on peace talks up, but I want to see any and all military aid that’s not purely defensive that we’re sending to Israel cut off, like, yesterday. There is zero reason why we should be selling and delivering new F-35s and JDAMs to the IDF when they’re just using them to flatten the Gaza Strip.
Biden doesn’t have to give them weapons to do it though.
While at the same time pursuing policies and choices that will actually stand some chance of benefiting the Palestinian people – among them, being vocal with congress, doing direct demonstrations, doing things like the “uncommitted” vote to make it clear to those in power that the minority that wants decent treatment for the Palestinians is also not a trivial constituency, oh and also:
MAKE SURE HARRIS WINS IN NOVEMBER SO THAT THE IDF DOESN’T START GETTING UNEQUIVOCAL US SUPPORT AND AMP UP THEIR WAR CRIMES TENFOLD
The others are optional; the last one is critical.