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Free Gaza / Palestine supporters: I have a question for you (Discussion about media)
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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The cutting off aid statement was meant to show how easily Biden could have threatened them to make them stop. I even gave the Ronald Reagan example as a historical one. It can happen with a single phone call. It just doesn't.
2/3rds of Americans support a ceasefire along with 80% of Democrats. It was not an unpopular opinion to say we should make a ceasefire happen. Even before becoming president Biden was staunchly pro-Israel for all, or majority, of his political career. Like I said in my previous comment, he's gotten a lot of money from groups like AIPAC. I don't think the hypothetical threat of impeachment is what was stopping him.
Thereby letting Netanyahu do whatever he wants. So he's not really holding them back now is he? Where's the difference between him and Trump then? The fact that Trump wouldn't bother calling Netanyahu asking him to please not kill civilians? This distinction matters very little to the innocent lives Israel has claimed.
Harris has made the some generic statements and empty platitudes that Biden has made and nothing more. Tim Walz himself went on the VP debate and the only real comment on the topic was him saying he supported Israel's right to expand their borders. Couple these along with her doing incredibly stupid things like campaigning with people like Liz Cheney, silencing Democrat-Arabs trying to speak up, refusing to even meet with them other than a few private meetings with some Arab leaders that went nowhere. And it's not a stretch to think she would have been the same. It's pretty clear where she stood on the topic. And this inaction definitely cost her swing states like Michigan and maybe even other states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Yet again, you’re conflating “support a ceasefire” with “support letting Israel get destroyed if Netanyahu gives the middle finger to the idea of a ceasefire.” Everyone “supports” a ceasefire, in the abstract.
You’re also vastly overestimating how much most Americans care about the Palestinians, sadly. I’m not trying to defend Biden’s atrocious way he handled this. I’m saying that if he’d done perfectly and threatened Netanyahu like you said, played hardball, then the exact same social media campaign that played the young left like a piano about it for the last 8 months wouldn’t have had a word to say about it, and would have been banging the drum about record oil extraction and how much he betrayed us on the climate, and would have been playing up how badly be betrayed Israel the to centrists, and the person who is not him and didn’t make the decisions would have lost even more badly than she did.
I’m not saying Biden did good, and I’m definitely not saying anyone who thinks Israel’s committing a monstrous horror is wrong. I am saying that America’s enemies foreign and domestic have gotten real good at playing up real issues into their desired electoral outcomes, and their desired electoral outcomes are 10 times more horror. Maybe more.
Israel will not get destroyed if Biden tried to enforce a ceasefire. At the end of the day America still has a gun to everyone's head daring anyone to try anything they don't want them to do. There's a reason why America is called the "World Police". The danger to Israel is if America pulls its support from Israel entirely, not stopping a few arms shipments. Israel would still have the arms to fight, they would just not be able to do the mass killings they currently do. The US has covered 70% of the cost of the Israel's current war, just to give you an idea of how much help Israel gets in this conflict. At the end of the day, both Trump and Biden will allow Netanyahu do whatever he wants for the sake of political convenience and foreign lobbying. This is why I say there is no difference between the two, and that it's not just a meme. I know a lot of people will say that Trump will help expedite the process or let it become a regional war. But at the end of the day, a genocide is still a genocide, regardless of the pace. Israel is not being slowed down or stopped in the slightest currently. And the escalations leading up to a regional war have already started. So when people say Trump will be worse a lot of the Arab-Americans just looked at what's happening and said "How?".
The ceasefire was overwhelmingly popular with Democrats. The ones who didn't want one were traditionally Republicans (for the most part) and that's who Harris tried to court. The Republican voters. The end result she got next to no actual Republican votes and disenfranchised a lot of progressives through this decision, and a few others. There have been studies to show that Harris would have actually gained support if she took a firmer stance and said she would enforce a ceasefire.. Was it the singular issue that cost her the election? Probably not. But it definitely hurt her in key swing states.
I think we're both repeating ourselves at this point.
If you want to say anything about what I said about how it translated into social media, which was to me the main point of both OP's question and what I was saying, I'm open to it.