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/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/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/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.