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The DoJ is currently sitting on 500 documented cases of war crimes by Israel while using American weapons. They have a legal standing to halt arms shipments on a whim. If there's even a whiff that America would stop arming Israel they would stop. Israel would not be able to exist let alone fight this war without American support. Also, keep in mind that even Ronald Reagan was able to talk down Israel with a single phone call when they tried the same thing in the 80s.
I don't think Biden likes to see dead Palestinian children, but I also don't think it's a coincidence that he has received more money from pro Israel lobbyists than any other Senator in history. No other president in history has emboldened Israel the way Biden has.
The domino's have been falling consistently for the past 13 months. The escalations we are going to see over the next few months would have happened regardless if Trump won or lost. It's abundantly clear there's little to no red lines when it comes to Israel's actions, regardless if it's Democrats or Republicans in charge.
I'd also like to point out that Biden campaigned on certain promises for Arabs concerning Palestine that he never fulfilled. Biden has been ignoring the Arab demographic for longer than 13 months.
You're not being hostile IMO so don't worry about appearing that way. If I didn't want to to discuss politics I wouldn't be in this community. I know this
I'm not saying Biden wanted it to happen. I'm saying he let it happen, just as Trump would. When all is said and done a genocide is a genocide, the pace of it matters little. And the conflict is also already boiling over to the rest of the middle east. All while a Democrat is President. Harris would have been better than Trump on virtually every other topic, but for this one there is little to no difference. Both vocalize staunch and unwavering support of Israel. Just one side vocalizes it a bit more politely.
So now we’ve gone from one phone call, to cutting off aid and letting Israel get destroyed. The US can do that, sure. No problem. If Biden did that, no Democrats would win elections for the next 20 years. He’d probably get impeached, with the full support of all those AIPAC Democrats in congress, and then they’d get their aid from his replacement.
I think he had the phone call, said Rafah was a red line, Netanyahu went in anyway, and that’s the choice he faced. Like I say, you’re claiming that he just randomly decided not to do anything when it would have been incredibly easy, for reason that don’t make the slightest bit of sense for Biden even in terms of his own self-interest.
Besides that, Kamala is at least an unknown quantity in it. There’s a middleeasteye article comparing the two somewhere in my history. We don’t know she won’t continue Biden’s policies, but she also wasn’t the one in charge at the time, and we don’t know that she will continue them. With Trump, we know we’re getting a monster.
You fired the babysitter because when her brother was in charge, your kid got bit by a dog. Now, you’re saying it’s no different if a known vicious dog is the babysitter, because what’s the difference. To me that makes no sense.
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.