I’m pretty sure that’s true, regardless of who America votes for and whether any particular allegation against the IDF is accurate. At least the ones in Gaza. I think there may still be hope for Palestinians in the West Bank, although matters aren’t looking great there, either.
Some here should consider the alternative.
Let’s say Trump wins and pulls the rug out from under Israel (as some suggest…I do not think so but for the sake of argument).
Do some people here think Israel will get good treatment as they are attacked? Will they protest in support of Israel then or instead say they have their comeuppance and celebrate their downfall?
I just went back to the original thread and I realize you didn’t say I was hijacking, that was a moderator describing what you did. OK, I’ll withdraw from this thread!
Re: Biden. As mentioned part of his problem is that anything other than being seen actively stopping Netanyahu just plain and simply loses the Palestinian and Palestinian-aligned vote, period. His bigger problem is if that is used to remind the “progressives” that yeah, he’s an old school centrist Dem and you’re again being asked to defer to the immediate avoidance-of-worse instead of trying to get what you really want.
Re: Trump/Israel , Donald will do whatever he thinks he can use to wave in front of AIPAC to demand their applause and loyalty. Even if he does bask in contradictory chants from his crowd of fools. He wants to go before EVERYONE and say “hey I oppose the same things YOU oppose, you OWE ME your support” (and unmentioned: “meanwhile I owe YOU jacksquat”) without being questionec. And domestically since as things stand the situation is leaning in the direction of leftist-demonstrations-are-unwelcome-here he’s happy to let it go on.
Tens of thousands are being sacrificed so Netanyahu can say “you can’t kick me out of office while we’re at war” …a war that went hot because of his own security fuckups leading to Oct7. Bibi seriously doesn’t care what this does to US democracy and from his POV why should he, he doesn’t even care about Israeli democracy.
Biden really doesn’t have a great choice politics-wise. IMHO. He can either back Israel fully, back Israel reluctantly and do what he can to pressure Bibi, or dump them and lose the vote/open up a huge opportunity for the MAGA Republicans to hit him. There’s no “perfect” solution that will make everyone happy.
Quoting a Washington Post news story is so radically different from saying that Israelis tie the hands of children before shooting them in the head that I’m not sure I should respond in a negative way.
I said before, without providing evidence, that Hamas doesn’t allow civilians to shelter in their reported hundreds of miles of tunnels. Thinking about it again, maybe that was my own incitement. It is hard not to dehumanize the enemy. So, given the level of bombing damage documented by the Washington Post, I hope I was wrong there. If not, their method of casualty estimation is reasonable, and this has been one of the world’s highest casualty wars over the past year (Sudan, Sahel, and Myanmar all deserve threads, just as Ukraine and Gaza do and have).
The Israelis did try somewhat less deadly methods to stop the near-daily attacks, over many years, on southwest Israel towns, and they did not work. The hatred of Israel, in Gaza, being attacked reasonably causes, almost surely was a contributing cause of the October 7 tactics (with atrocity story incitement being another cause). I thought the IDF was wrong not to protect their southwestern Israel civilians in a more effective way before October 7, and now see why a more radical solution was not chosen sooner.
This whole dynamic comes from Jewish residents (who had lived as a Gazan minority since ancient times, except for the 1940’s to 1960’s), and the IDF, unilaterally leaving Gaza to the Gazans in 2005, in hopes, quickly dashed, of peaceful relations. That epic failure helped push Israeli politics to the right for reasons I personally sympathize with. If I was an Israeli, it would have pushed by voting preferences to the right as well.
Congress did that, not Biden. Yes, Biden could have vetoed it, but the that would have left Ukraine in the lurch, and the humanitarian crisis there is way worse than Gaza. Around 500,000 Ukrainian civilians dead.
Why aren’t students protesting against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Way worse than Gaza. I think a lot (but not all of course) of the Palestinian protest is based upon anti-semitism.
It is to Laugh (sadly and ironically). Okay, sure, 20K Palestinian dead- vs 500,000 Ukrainian dead. The destruction in Ukraine is an order of magnitude higher than Gaza.
Then they are idiots, who want Democracy to end her in America.
Yes, it will.
Yes, YOU have said that- no one else thinks that. Gaza now is bad- Gaza if trump wins would be an order of magnitude worse.
The US Military is building a pier in gaza to allow aid to come in safely and more easily- and some of that humanitarian aid is American. None of that would happen under trump. That pier and that aid is significant and material.
Yep. UNRWA USA also takes into consideration the fact that the Biden Administration has reportedly been actively urging other countries to resume funding and has continued to speak supportively of UNRWA in its public statements. But the Pro-palestinian protesters are ignoring that.
Not to mention the US Seebees building a pier for the aid to come in safely.
Thank you.
Oh, and OP? You still have not answered my question- Exactly what would you have Biden do that he isnt doing now- considering the limits of his office.
No, AFAICT B_B is correct in his subsequent explanation to me that the 501(c)3 nonprofit organization UNRWA USA, which contributes something like several million dollars a year to UNRWA, is not at all the same thing as USA federally allocated funding to UNRWA.
The latter typically contributes on the order of $400 million annually to UNRWA, AFAICT, and as of today, the US funding that was suspended in January remains suspended pending the outcome of an additional UN oversight review, according to this Washington Post article.
So yeah, B_B is correct that the US government has not yet restored its regular UNRWA funding, and I agree that this is a bad decision that is going to have devastating consequences for Gazans if not reversed soon.
Yes, because UNRWA was infested with terrorists. However, the US has authorized $1billion usd in direct humanitarian aid to gaza, not to mention having the US military build a pier so that aid can actually get to the people who need it.
And
https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/news-releases/unrwa-usa-resumes-funding-un-agency-palestine-refugees-providing-5-million
08 April 2024
After careful consideration and in close consultation with legal counsel, UNRWA USA National Committee (UNRWA USA) is pleased to announce the resumption of its financial support and active fundraising for the vital mission of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), as it carries out its life-saving humanitarian mission. This financial support, starting with an immediate disbursement of US$ 5 million, will contribute directly to saving refugee lives, as a population of 2.2 million in Gaza faces a man-made famine.
So is seems the USA is funding UNRWA.
I agree with you overall on this (read that bit again) but don’t pretend Biden had no involvement in helping craft the aid package that was passed (every president does).
I concur, and I think Biden pushed in that extra $1Billion of humanitarian aid to Gaza. But yeah, Ukraine is high on Bidens list- as it should be.
I think Kimstu is distinguishing funds that come from the USA and funds from the US govt.
UNRWA USA and the $5m it sends to UNRWA being non govt.
US govt sends $0 to UNRWA.
~Max
Well, according to the independent review commissioned by the UN, Israel never provided any evidence to support its allegations that a significant number of UNRWA employees had terrorist connections. Pending any such evidence, those allegations appear to have been just the Israeli government dropping a turd in the humanitarian-relief punchbowl in order to exacerbate chaos and destabilization for Hamas as part of its conduct of the war.
Dude. This is just a repeat of the cite I originally provided, and again, it’s about the nonprofit 501(c)3 organization called “UNRWA USA”, not about the two-orders-of-magnitude-larger funding to UNRWA typically provided by the US government and currently suspended in response to the Israeli allegations.
You are mixing up the nonprofit organization called “UNRWA USA” with officially allocated funding for UNRWA from the USA as a nation-state. [ETA: As Max_S notes above.]
Which I can’t fault you too much for doing the first time, since as also noted above, I made the very same mistake myself. But at least I only needed my mistake explained to me once.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that Biden doesn’t have any options here. I don’t think the problem is that Biden hasn’t phrased the question correctly. The answer is always going to be no from Israel. I don’t think there is any action or combination of actions (cutting off aid, sanctions, asking nicely, asking not-nicely, etc.) that compels Israel to do what the US wants. All Biden can do is wreck the relationship between the US and Israel, losing any opportunity to take part in discussions about what to do after the war.
I know some believe that if this is how Israel is going to act, the US should abandon them as friends and allies. But a principled stand does not solve this conflict. Israel isn’t going to stop the war because of the disapproval of others, no matter who they are.
In theory, Israel could not continue their aggression without US backing.
Israel has a very capable military and they have some domestic ability to make their own weapons but not on the scale they need. They are still heavily reliant on the US and other western nations to prop up their military.
However, that is not up to the Office of the President. Congress approves the budget for aid.
Their Military budget is $24B, they get $3B+ in US Military aid , of course that depends a lot.
So, yeah, they could run quite nicely without us.
? For one thing, did you not notice all the campus pro-Ukraine activism at the time of the invasion? I, personally, have had a student who went to eastern Europe to help ferry medical supplies to the Ukraine border. Of course there was a boatload of campus concern about the Ukraine invasion.
For another thing, once again, a huge difference in the two situations is that there’s already a massive and robust consensus among American liberals (and many conservatives too) that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is bad. Russia is not demanding that the US “stand with them” in their invasion of Ukraine, or expecting us to send them munitions and aid. On the contrary, the US has imposed sanctions on Russia, and is actively aiding Ukraine.
Liberal campus activists don’t want to change the official US position and actions on Ukraine. They like the fact that the US government is supporting Ukraine, at least as much as the Howler Monkey Caucus in the House will let them. No popular protest is required to shift the American consensus on Ukraine to a position that campus activists like: they already like it.
The attacks on Gaza, on the other hand, are being actively supported by the US government and much of American civil society (along . Obviously activists trying to change US minds and policies are going to be much more engaged with protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza than with protesting Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I would have thought that that would be pretty self-evident.
How do they feel about US (in)action in Sudan?
Oh, pretty much the entire US and most of Europe is criminally ignorant of/indifferent to human suffering and atrocities not only in Sudan, but in northern Ethiopia, Congo and many other places, and campus activists tend not to be much more tuned in to those issues than the general public, IME.
Once again, it comes down to what you know about and who you have ties to. Congolese and Sudanese governments and militants aren’t expecting the US to commit billions of dollars to arming them. Almost no American highschoolers know anybody who took a graduation-year trip to Mozambique or Ethiopia. The New York Times isn’t running daily articles and op-eds on what’s going on with those conflicts. And so on.
But Israel’s war in Gaza is very close to home for a lot of campus activists. Mainstream media and political campaigns have saturated them with pro-Israel messages and with awareness of US ties to Israel. They, like most other Americans, may still not know much about the details of situations in Israel and Palestine, but they know a hell of a lot more about them and US connections with them than they do about conflicts in Sudan.