Try not to genocide anyone on your way from… not going to Washington.
Looking forward to seeing you in the ICC
By abstaining from the ceasefire vote, the U.S. was still kissing Netanyahu’s ass, and even that wasn’t good enough for him. What an entitled brat.
The ceasefire vote passed, and just like everyone predicted it will have zero impact on the genocide in progress. The only impact it has was to further limit the ability of the US to pressure Israel to not advance into Rafah. You got your resolution, and now the situation is worse. Yet, here you are doubling down.
I totally appreciate (and share) your zeal in wanting the slaughter to end (assuming that is actually your objective), but this development clearly illustrates the deep flaws in this kind of criticism, and how little you understand about foreign policy and negotiation tactics.
The US has one negotiation point left to keep Israel out of Rafah, and that’s the weapons. Once that is played, the only other choice would be to allow the genocide to continue, or intervine militarily. Thankfully the US didn’t play that card already, and the Biden administration is sending clear signals to Israel that it’s on the table.
Israel has other options for aid and weapons, but they only become viable if the relationship with the US is severed. Once that happens, Palestine is done.
BTW: Abstaining from the vote was, if anything, kissing Putin’s ass, not Netanyaho. There were sticking points between Russia and the US, and the US blinked. Anyone who actually followed the negotiations would understand that abstaining means the US decided the resolution was too important to hold up over specific language.
This is very similar to the last such resolution to pass. Russia and America couldn’t agree on language, so both agreed to abstain. This time, Russia got their way while the US took the high road.
Israel has other options for aid and weapons
Not in the short term they don’t. You don’t just switch from US standards at the drop of a hat and think everything is good. That’s why the West was initially trying to scrounge up old Soviet equipment for Ukraine. They’d have to retrofit or junk a lot of their current hardware and retrain their army on the new stuff. And that includes the Iron Dome keeping them safe-ish from rocket fire.
Yet Ukraine has been successfully armed by the west, so it’s clearly manageable. The scale between Ukraine and Israel/Gaza is also a huge difference.
The one thing that Russia couldn’t replace would be the iron dome. I’ll agree that’s no small thing.
Two years in they have. That’s a better timescale for Gaza than “next month”. And scale is irrelevant to the problems for the armed nation. They have fewer weapons, but also fewer resources. The problem with arming Ukraine was never that the West needed time to find enough weapons, it was integrating weapons with their armed forces.
I agree with some of what you said, but as for this:
You got your resolution, and now the situation is worse. Yet, here you are doubling down.
and how little you understand about foreign policy and negotiation tactics
Yikes, where did that come from? Get over yourself.
Maybe it’s a reaction to the ignorant self righteous ignorant fury that’s been flooding every discussion on Palestine for months. That kind of mass delusion doesn’t respond to carefully parsed polite responses. In any case, I’ve gotten tired of pretending it’s not idiotic.
Popping in because this comment got reported- a reminder to you and everyone in this thread to do your best to be nice to each other. If you’re getting heated or exhausted over this discussion it might be a good idea to step away. 💜
carefully parsed polite responses
Displaying a condescending attitude toward others whom you disagree with is not “polite”.
Hamas just rejected a ceasefire that would have seen around 800 hostages held by Israel swapped for 40 hostages held by Hamas. Hamas have probably murdered/brutalised thrir hostages, thus negating their usefulness in swaps of this kind. Fuck Hamas and their leadership’s willingness to hole themselves away in Qatar and prolong the Palestinian suffering. The IDF should clear out and stop bombing every vaguely upright structure. It’s a lost cause, fuck colonising vultures and developerd. The IDF needs to realise you can’t kill and idea amd concentrate on just defending themselves, not trying to eradicate a terrorist group.
It’s not about the hostages though, not really. It’s about the same thing it’s ever bern; seizure of land for settlements and the elimination if Gazans.
Israel has other options for aid and weapons, but they only become viable if the relationship with the US is severed. Once that happens, Palestine is done.
what other options though? china and russia won’t give them anything, and especially not iran.
Definitely not Iran, but Russia and China are definitely possibilities. The only reason it seems impossible is that Israel has been a US satellite since it’s founding. If that tie is severed, what’s possible changes.
There are three real powers in the Middle East, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Two are in the US sphere, and one is in Russia’s. Russia would live to pull ahead, and China desperately wants a solid foothold in the region.
Russia specifically would see a lot of tangible benefits. Israel has a top-notch defense industry with many technologies that Russia is missing. Protecting “the Jews” would also play into Russia’s narratives about fighting Nazis in Ukraine and elsewhere.
I don’t think Russia can spare the weapons.
China, on the other hand, could.
If Russia gave Israel weapons, I’m sure Iran would absolutely love that. What do you think the blowback from that would be? Now China on the other hand.
I doubt there would be much. Iran is almost as dependent on Russia as Israel has been on the US. There would be some token diplomatic protests, but I doubt it would be anything more than signaling. Countries don’t have friends, they have interests. Iran’s interests are far better served by Russia than by supporting Palestine.
Hamas’s entire strategy in launching their attack was to provoke Israel to overreact, which would then prompt Palestinian allies like Lebanon and Iran to get involved. The first part worked beyond their expectations, but Iran and Lebanon haven’t taken the bait.
Iran and Israel can not be maintained in the same sphere of influence without copious amounts of hard and soft power that only the US and maybe China possess. So the Russia route is out unless they wanna lose Iran and they probably don’t want that. China is more viable, but the thing is: China wants the Middle East on its side. They’ve been posturing for that for a while now. Taking in Israel would destroy all that in a second.
Once that happens, Palestine is done.
Are you arguing that the US is protecting Palestinians?
The US has been pressuring Israel to spare civilians since before they went into Gaza. That’s just reality. They haven’t followed the disastrous strategies that critics have demanded for exactly the reasons I explained.
Netanyaho is a far right maniac who’s popularity was based entirely on national security and who was facing multiple criminal allegations. There was no way that he wasn’t going to go hard into Gaza. The US could have pulled all aid and weapons deals on day one, and it wouldn’t have changed a damn thing - except that Israel would now be a Russian satellite state.
Ramping pressure over time is/was the best available strategy. That doesn’t mean I think the US did everything right. That doesn’t mean that Biden’s personal positions on Israel aren’t deeply troubling.
I’ll say it again. You got exactly the resolution you were demanding, and exactly the result that people like me said you would get from it. Take the L and learn something.
You got exactly the resolution you were demanding
Please show me where anyone has “demanded” a resolution that will in no way be enforced, as the totality of action needed to stop Israel?
Netanyahu is thumbing his nose at everyone because he knows no one is going to actually do anything about his genocide. Stopping weapons isn’t about stopping the genocide, it’s about not actively contributing to it.
Actively stopping it would probably require a hell of a lot more than cutting off our weapon shipments, and no one but Netanyahu (yourself included) can quantify what that actual line would be. Maybe it would require international sanctions. Maybe it would require military intervention. Neither of those is actually on the table though, realistically, so not being active contributors is probably the best we can do right now.
We’re I at my PC I might dump a boatload of links to lemmy comments but, since I’m not, I’ll just tell you to do your own search. It’s incredibly prevalent in the more “tankie” subs, but they show up pretty much everywhere the subject is discussed.
The frustrating thing is that there are two groups doing it. There are right wing trolls pretending they care but actually just taking advantage to damage Democrats, but there are also good people arguing for the best of causes, but not understanding the dynamics at play.
But so, not actually the person you were responding to when you said “You got [what] you were demanding”?
When someone says that an abstention from a vote is “kissing Netanyaho’s ass”, it seems pretty apparent that the consider a lack of a yes vote as a moral failing.
So, you are arguing that the US has been protecting Palestinians throughout.
Words fail me.
Words fail me.
I don’t doubt it.
Ramping pressure over time is/was the best available strategy.
I don’t see it working. Pressure only matters when there’s real leverage at play, otherwise you get the current mess.
Fucking fifty years too late
75,000 people dead in a decades-long state sponsored murder, out of a population smaller than Wisconsin
Billions upon billions of dollars, weapons every year, vetoes at the UN to give Israel diplomatic cover
And it’s fucking not enough for him
What he should be signaling his fury about is a US-enforced no fly zone and UN peacekeepers on the ground outnumbering the IDF, and the CIA inside Israel tracking down members of his cabinet to take them to the ICJ. He should be thanking his lucky stars that he’s getting “abstain” at the UN and “only” $3 billion worth of aid, and people are still trying at this stage to provide cover for his slaughter operation for some fucking reason. But no.
and the CIA inside Israel tracking down members of his cabinet to take them to the ICJ
Unfortunately that won’t happen because of this.
Also (from 2019):
UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Protests in Gaza Presents its Findings – Press Release
“The Commission has reasonable grounds to believe that during the Great March of Return, Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and must be immediately investigated by Israel,” said the Chair of the Commission, Santiago Canton of Argentina.
…which, of course, may have inspired Hamas to retaliate on Oct. 7.
Yeah. I was talking purely about what should happen.
The US’s failure to move forward on supporting the ICC under Bush 2 was one among many great betrayals of justice by the US. Under Clinton it was actually moving towards happening. The absolutely phenomenal documentary Prosecuting Evil touches on it near the end, and Ferencz’s work towards making it happen.
It’s also a gesture to his voters. He has the incentive to get angry at smallest inconveniences.
Fine. Good.
