Blinken told Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development and others had determined that Israel had broken the law.
Election campaigning. She’s trying to win over voters, and while we like to think she could do that by just going full-on progressive, it’s just not backed up by the numbers. Suburban moderates are necessary to achieve victory, so she’s courting them, along with any conveniently available gop defectors. They lean more pro-Israel than we do, so, so does her election strategy.
Not everyone in the electorate cares much about the plight of Palestinians, a significant number of people remember the Intifadas not as some sort of just campaign for liberation, but as a widespread rash of suicide bombings on civilians just trying to live their day-to-day. They don’t want to see the US cave to that by turning our backs on an established ally.
This is why it remains important to continue grassroots efforts to bring light to the difference between innocent Palestinians and Jihadists, incidentally. Mainstream America isn’t going to jump on any sort of reclaim-Palestine-from-the-colonial-oppressors rhetoric any time soon. Peaceful co-existence by pressuring the Israeli government, supporting Israeli peace protestors and reminding people not all Palestinians are hostile militants is a different story though, that’s potentially achievable. If the electorate continues to swing, more of the politicians will get room to follow. Especially since we don’t actually need Israel’s geostrategic position any more, as of the past decade or two. We have more leverage than we used to.
You’re right, and none of that gives me hope that Harris will pivot.
The re-elect Harris campaign will start on January 20th, and the political reality you just described will still exist.
Changing stances on Israel’s genocide will take leadership, which is something we haven’t seen from the Harris campaign. It is not Harris leading a campaign on principle, it is the polls leading the Harris campaign, just as you described it.
Those suburban moderates’ views can be changed, they just have never been exposed to an opposing message. The news says Israel is the good guys and Hamas is the bad guys; only those on the fringes say otherwise. If Harris would show leadership and take a principled stance on the side of humanity, she could bring most of these low information moderate voters with her.
This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, “deep state” (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn’t another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.
But she also didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech and actually has been quite critical of the war in Gaza. But yes, don’t expect miracles. I still think she will be more critical of the Israelian government and whether this leads to a ceasefire or not is to be seen.
We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.
So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.
Election campaigning. She’s trying to win over voters, and while we like to think she could do that by just going full-on progressive, it’s just not backed up by the numbers. Suburban moderates are necessary to achieve victory, so she’s courting them, along with any conveniently available gop defectors. They lean more pro-Israel than we do, so, so does her election strategy.
Not everyone in the electorate cares much about the plight of Palestinians, a significant number of people remember the Intifadas not as some sort of just campaign for liberation, but as a widespread rash of suicide bombings on civilians just trying to live their day-to-day. They don’t want to see the US cave to that by turning our backs on an established ally.
This is why it remains important to continue grassroots efforts to bring light to the difference between innocent Palestinians and Jihadists, incidentally. Mainstream America isn’t going to jump on any sort of reclaim-Palestine-from-the-colonial-oppressors rhetoric any time soon. Peaceful co-existence by pressuring the Israeli government, supporting Israeli peace protestors and reminding people not all Palestinians are hostile militants is a different story though, that’s potentially achievable. If the electorate continues to swing, more of the politicians will get room to follow. Especially since we don’t actually need Israel’s geostrategic position any more, as of the past decade or two. We have more leverage than we used to.
You’re right, and none of that gives me hope that Harris will pivot.
The re-elect Harris campaign will start on January 20th, and the political reality you just described will still exist.
Changing stances on Israel’s genocide will take leadership, which is something we haven’t seen from the Harris campaign. It is not Harris leading a campaign on principle, it is the polls leading the Harris campaign, just as you described it.
Those suburban moderates’ views can be changed, they just have never been exposed to an opposing message. The news says Israel is the good guys and Hamas is the bad guys; only those on the fringes say otherwise. If Harris would show leadership and take a principled stance on the side of humanity, she could bring most of these low information moderate voters with her.
This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, “deep state” (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn’t another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.
I swear this Trumpian deep state crap somehow seeps into everything.
But she also didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech and actually has been quite critical of the war in Gaza. But yes, don’t expect miracles. I still think she will be more critical of the Israelian government and whether this leads to a ceasefire or not is to be seen.
But in any case she will be harder on them than Trump, who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem during his presidency and offered the “peace deal of the century”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_peace_plan#:~:text=The stated purpose of the,both parties to the conflict.
We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.
So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.
Me not understand. Me single issue Lemmy voter. Why Kamama not shit on own constituency for paltry gesture that change nothing? Why Kamama?! Why?!