r/politics • u/Particular_Log_3594 • 6d ago

No Paywall Obama: Israel 'took the land' from Palestinians, 'ceded moral ground' in Gaza

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-911851
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u/Rain_43676 6d ago

Looks like the Dems are finally realizing just how hated Israel is.

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u/ReneDiscard Illinois 6d ago

When you think about it it's pretty insane (and overdue) for a former president to finally say this.

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u/monocasa 6d ago

This was basically every president's position until Clinton.

Carter literally wrote a book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheidm

And an extremely rare Reagan win had him calling Israel an expansionist regime and suspending arms deals and military cooperation when they started formally annexing the golan heights.

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u/GrumpyCloud93 5d ago

Didn't George H W Bush tell Israel they weren't getting any help from the US? I recall something where he said "they know my phone number when they figure it out..."

The trouble is, every government said "don't do it" and every government basically ignored that the Israelis were expanding into the West Bank. The longer you put stuff off, the harder it is to actually do something about it.

Apologists will say "Israel offered them 96% of their land back". No they didn't. They offered swiss cheese control spots inside an occupied territory. Then the apologists complain "they didn't want to settle, they wanted to keep fighting." They just wanted the pre-67 borders back, and no IOF oppression. They were never offered that. In fact, Netanyahu allowed money to flow to Hamas to ensure the PLA was weakened.

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u/ImOnlyHereForTheCoC Florida 6d ago

The fact that even Ronald Reagan could land on the right side of the Golan Heights issue, and yet you still had ostensibly pro-Palestinian folks deciding “even though Donald Trump made ‘GH belongs to Israel’ official U.S. policy in his first term, I see no appreciable difference between him and Kamala” is fucking insane to me.

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u/GrumpyCloud93 5d ago

When 20% of Michigan primary voters picked "none of the above" it was probably a bad idea to expect them to vote Democrat just because "the other guy is worse". I'm glad the dems are figuring this out now.

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u/ImOnlyHereForTheCoC Florida 5d ago

It’s always a bad idea to expect people not to be fucking idiots, excellent point

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u/Ursa_Solaris 5d ago

Instead of asking millions of voters to change, why not ask the democratic party to change?

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/Viciouscauliflower21 5d ago

No. Into a party with enough sense to see that enabling a genocide, besides being morally reprehensible, is gonna carry a heavy political cost. One they really can't afford to pay considering everything they say is on the line

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u/GrumpyCloud93 5d ago

Voters following like sheep is the Republican way.

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u/Specific-Parsnip9001 5d ago

So stopping even more Palestinians from dying isn't a good enough reason for the pro-Palestine folks to vote for someone? Sort of begs the question then, are they really pro-Palestine?

The options (simplified) were as follows:

A) let 10k Palestinians die

or

B) let 100k Palestinians die and let Israel annex Gaza and Trump put a new resort on the strip.

The "pro-Palestine" folks chose the latter. Very principled stance y'all found there.

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u/GrumpyCloud93 5d ago

This presumes an administration that had shown little effort in reigning in the destruction in Palestine would suddenly change course... maybe they would float 2 docks up to the shore?

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u/Specific-Parsnip9001 5d ago

No it presumes that Trump would make it worse, which he did. He lifted the partial arms embargo and made an AI video of him and Bibi chilling on a new Trump resort on the Gaza strip laughing it up. You got played by the hasbara and they made a video mocking you for it.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/Specific-Parsnip9001 5d ago

So I guess Bibi celebrating Trump's win and that AI video they made about annexing Gaza and turning it into a Trump resort was the same thing that would've happened under Harris. Smart.

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u/SapientTrashFire 5d ago edited 5d ago

Always always boils down to this ridiculous misleading argument: that people voted for Trump based on Palestine and thought Trump and kamala were the same. The people who were worried about Palestine did not vote for Trump, they just didn't vote, and for good reason. If your choices as a Palestinian American are a person who is currently supporting the Israeli war on your province with absolutely no commitment to walk it back, or an insane fascist who will also support Israel's war on your province, you don't have a "lesser evil" choice. You have no choice. They didn't vote.

This is the tactic over and over again by centrist dems: "it's crazy that people thought OUR war monger was the same as THEIR war monger! They must have voted for that war monger and fucked us!"

Look. I can accept that Kamala Harris would be broadly better than Trump in the same way that I can accept that a sickness wiping out a huge portion of the population is better than the planet getting hit by an asteroid. AND ALSO you should be able to accept that this is a pretty awful choice. Kamala Harris was a fucking horrible choice for Palestine, and this would not have motivated Palestinians to vote for her, losing her a significant portion of the vote. This does not mean these people voted for Trump directly or even by proxy. This means these people were put in a fucking impossible situation. The dems VERY often do this and then blame those people for not voting.

It's extremely unfair and absurd. If they want people to keep voting for "good but not perfect," then good needs to be defined as something other than fully ass-fucking us marginally less than the guy with the thumbtack covered dildo.

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u/barryvm Europe 5d ago

It's really weird to watch people blame non voters from abroad.

Personally, I think most people who don't vote where I live are irresponsible and are shirking their duty. But where I live you have at least five or six choices across the entire political spectrum to choose from. The same reasoning doesn't hold up regarding those who have only two choices that then, for life-or-death issues they feel strongly about, turn out to be two bad choices.

If politicians see fit to artificially limit choice then that also reduces the legitimacy of the electoral process and thereby reduces the responsibility of the voters to engage with it. Conversely, when entrenched political parties take more control over the scope of the political debate, then they are more responsible for selling the options they do offer to the electorate. This becomes even more acute when it's an issue with a very clear moral high ground that somehow both fail to take.

I get the argument that it is in a way accelerationist and self-defeating, but I can understand why people could decide that they won't vote for either of them.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/SapientTrashFire 5d ago

I just gave you four paragraphs of a good reason not to vote. Sometimes political systems fail people and their vote stops mattering. It does happen. Your vote can sometimes not matter.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 5d ago

So instead of having a voice you fall silent. He's not an unbelievable asshole, you just chose to make a symbolic choice that did absolutely nothing except for let you sit on your high horse.

How many times in life are you faced with no good options, just the least bad? Let me guess...your symbolic non-vote is the sum total of your political participation? Now we have Jake Lang running around Dearborn too arousing more anti-Middle East sentiments

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u/Tyranitardis 5d ago

You are an unbelievable asshole.

Non-voters are, you're exactly right.

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u/Tyranitardis 5d ago

No, you didn't.

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u/torrinage Oregon 5d ago

Yes but its easy to delude oneself about how the american system works

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u/ImOnlyHereForTheCoC Florida 5d ago edited 5d ago

Then I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t say a word about people actively voting for Trump. The whole “sitting the election out” was, I thought, sufficiently implied by the whole “see no difference between the candidates” thing, but I shouldn’t be surprised that someone still attempting to justify the wrongheaded political calculation that brought us to this godforsaken moment would blow right past it in order to deliver this same basic screed that keeps cropping up every time this topic is raised.

That said, yes: I will stand by the fact that, when confronted with two established records on I/P—one of which was held by a candidate that did (admittedly insufficient) things like limit the strength of armaments sold to Israel, offer public pushback on the scope of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza (despite lacking the courage to correctly label it as such), and attempt to establish and safeguard humanitarian supply efforts; and the other put forth by a former president who, along with encouraging Netanyahu to go harder on the Gaza campaign also took acts like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as a sop so Eschaton-obsessed Christofascists as well as the aforementioned Golan Heights pivot (a move that you will recall so delighted Israeli hardliners that they named a fucking subdivision in the freshly-annexed GH territory after the guy)—that it was indeed an incredibly self-defeating move to view the two candidates as functionally identical.

This is of course leaving aside the most painfully obvious indicator that there was a glaringly obvious preferable choice-indicator, namely that Netanyahu himself wanted Trump to win. It shouldn’t take a poli sci degree to figure out that if Palestine is your breaking point, you should probably do what you can to block the favorite pick of the Israeli president actively waging the genocidal campaign against it.

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u/SapientTrashFire 5d ago

You didn't listen. You just looked for ways to feel right. Waste of words.

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u/Mid_Mulberry352 5d ago

If you don’t vote you are implicitly supporting the worser evil mathematically.

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u/Specific-Parsnip9001 5d ago

They don't like to think about the real world implications of their actions. They did what felt right to them and washed their hands of it. They thought, "less Palestinians dying isn't good enough, if I can't stop them all from dying then what's the point?". That felt good and easy to them so they did it.

And I will admit, ignoring the evil being perpetrated is much easier than working to save who you can.

It's like that part in Schindler's List where he laments, "I could have saved more". They didn't want the mental anguish and trauma of saving some but not all so instead of being a hero like Schindler they became the equivalent of a German peasant pretending the Holocaust wasn't happening.

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u/Mid_Mulberry352 4d ago

They want their cowardly inaction to be perceived as righteousness.

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u/Tandy2000 5d ago

They literally named the Golan Heights after Trump. The promise to do that is all it takes when you are dealing with a narcissist like him.