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Notes -
This is all Monday morning quarterbacking but:
Try to get their American cousins to not launch a 20 year long pogrom against the demographics that most strongly supported Israel
Try to get their American cousins to not spend 50 years pumping up and covering for all the demographics that hate Israel the most
Realized that their public relations campaign was going the way of Harley-Davidson* sometime in the early 2010s
Done something different regarding October 7, somehow. This is the hardest one, it’s like saying “why not simply prevent 9/11?”
I take the opposite analysis of a lot of this board, I think most of Israel’s flagging support is the result of the American cousins and not Israel itself. Were it not for them, Israel would just be one of many, many foreign countries with a somewhat questionable human rights record.
*Harley-Davidson is a motorcycle company that monomaniacally focused their marketing and product lines around boomers, to the detriment of appealing to any other demographic. The minute boomers got too old to ride, the company’s sales collapsed.
Israel could've gone into Gaza, wrecked shit, and left before it became a years long humanitarian crisis, and only lefty weirdos that also think kids can change their gender would've gotten all bent up out of shape about it.
Domestically, not until they got the hostages back. That's what the hostages were for -- to keep Israel pummelling Gaza.
They could trade umpteen zillion prisoners for the hostages. That’s what they wound up doing anyways.
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Very clever argument, and for a certain species of American conservative, I think it's true. However this doesn't explain European anti-Zionism, which historically has been much more pervasive both on the left and the right than in America (at least until recently).
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This reminds me of some article I read ages ago on The American Conservative which, in the context of some other mostly unrelated subject, argued that the main cultural force actually driving popular support for Israel in the US is Reaganist boomers picturing Israel as a second Saigon. Their attitude being: we abandoned Saigon like traitors and cowards in the face of the conquering enemy, so we owe it to ourselves to always support Israel, because reasons. The author then argued that the one thing we can surely state about this sentiment is that it has zero relevance to any American born after 1960 or so.
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I'll note, with minimal Monday Morning Quarterbacking as I said this 10/8, Israel did not have to invade and level the Gaza strip, which made Palestine front page news again. They could have used targeted strikes against individuals, and diplomatic leverage following the attacks, to normalize relations with more Arab nations and destroy Hamas' global funding base.
This strategy worked extraordinarily well against Hezbollah and Iran and in Qatar, none of those interventions created significant backlash, and the civilian casualties were never obviously photogenic enough to harm Israel internationally (despite murdering a Qatari cop/soldier/whatever along with a bunch of kids elsewhere).
Now maybe they're able to get the Abraham Accords back on line now, but we'll have to see. If nothing else, Hamas created significant space for the Palestine dead enders, who were about to be permanently sold out by the gulf states and made more or less irrelevant permanently.
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Why would we assume that Ezra Klein class of Jews give a fuck what the mostly right wing current rulers of Israel do?
Especially without some inciting event.
If right wing white Gentiles can't prevent their own progressive brothers from championing that alleged ethnic cleansing why should we assume that progressive Jews could be talked down?
But, if I would raise a criticism myself, maybe Netanyahu's treatment of Obama and his lining up behind his American opponents, was slightly unwise.
We can argue that most of the outcome is baked in because of immigration but the absolute last thing you want as a foreign nation is to be seen as an ally to one side of America's culture war. It's a demented game with no clear rules but always two sides and it's insane to play it for real stakes.
Taking the invite from Republicans and rejecting any attempt by Obama to slow down on settlements didn't play well on the left, especially since Netanyahu seems to have the hardiness of a cockroach.
I think the Israelis could have tard-wrangled them if they made a serious effort. But like all the rest of us, they didn’t realize the significance of the SJW threat and how fast the ideology would metastasize.
Additionally part of the problem was that Israel spent years presenting an overly white-washed version of themselves, so people didn’t realize how awful Israel was going to look through the lens of decolonialist ideology.
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