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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24370 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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The MOU Homesick Blues

Over the last two days, Donald Trump and JD Vance have been selling their embryonic Iran Deal to the American public and to the world. Trump has said, among other things:

  • Hamas is behaving very well these days.
  • Iran should have missiles. Why not?
  • We're going to unfreeze Iran's money. It's their money. Why should we steal their money?
  • If the war kept going there would have been an economic catastrophe. So we had to end it.
  • Some of the guys in the Islamic regime are really nice.
  • If Iran didn't open the Strait of Hormuz our oil reserves would have run out in 4 weeks. We had to make a deal.
  • Netanyahu is crazy. They keep killing innocent civilians. He needs to be more responsible.
  • Without me and America, Israel wouldn't exist.

Directly he states:

“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people. The Strait of Hormuz would never have been opened."

Along with this banger

“I think [Israel] could do better … I'm not saying they shouldn't protect themselves. I'm saying when two drones are shot into the desert and drop harmlessly, you don't have to knock down buildings in Beirut. They could behave better…”

JD has said:

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have left. 2/3 of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars. The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”

"Do I think there are people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state with 90 million people? Probably."

"What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have."

Israeli ministers have been striking out against the deal

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn! With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF, and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration. I told the Prime Minister, even in our private meetings: For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

The entire first line of Lebanese villages has been destroyed. We are destroying all the houses. The residents will never see them standing before their eyes again.

Now reports are coming in that Israel does not consider itself bound by the MOU, and intends to keep bombing Lebanon without reference to it.

The IRGC has stated today:

“Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the complete lifting of the naval blockade, and the withdrawal of American terrorist forces from the Persian Gulf and the region are among the main conditions of the agreement between Iran and the United States. The Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until these conditions are met. All ships are requested, for the sake of their security and safety, not to approach the Strait of Hormuz. Any vessel that defies this directive will be targeted.”

With the United States executive committed to the MOU, and Israel committed to the opposite policy, Yeshiva World News reports:

Israeli officials told Maariv that Trump’s demands are not merely theoretical and that issues concerning Lebanon, Syria, and the Syrian Hermon were raised in recent discussions with Netanyahu, adding that the prime minister made it clear that Israel will not agree to withdrawing from its security positions in the north. A senior Israeli official told Reuters that Israel is carrying out “stubborn negotiations” with the US on maintaining its military presence in southern Lebanon and has no intention of backing down. The officials warned that the messages coming from Washington are no longer limited to difficult discussions. The US is signaling that if Israel continues to insist on its position, it will consider practical measures, ranging from delays in weapons shipments to restrictions on operational assistance, and even more severe steps that could potentially amount to a de facto arms embargo.

So, what now?

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

Part of me feels very strongly, the patriotic Toby Keith, regardless of your feelings about US policy or about this administration, that we can't have our president get cucked like that on the world stage. Trump has publicly signed, endorsed, justified, sold the MOU. He's stated clearly that it is necessary to the interests of the United States in maintaining the global economy. If Israel is our ally, our greatest ally, then they can't be allowed to do this to us. They can't insult and undermine the clear foreign policy of the POTUS and be allowed to do so. From the beginning I've said that Israeli forces, inasmuch as they are allied to the USA, should be under the command of an American general, Spartan style. They can't be allowed to go against us and continue to suck off the teat of the American taxpayer.

So plan trusters, antisemities, pro-Palestinians, shitlibs, anyone. Where do we go from here with Israel? What happens next? How can you, as the American President, allow your ally to undermine your own clearly stated foreign policy goals and, in your own opinion, wreck the world economy? At this point in the process what pressure can even be put on Iran?

This feels bad.

FWIW to me it kinda looks like to me that Trump is attempting to Venezuelize Iran (this seems extremely under-discussed in this thread, which I suppose is my fault for not chiming in sooner) and getting shall we say "varying degrees" of support from Iranian factions for this.

Obviously Trump pulling the same routine with Iran that he pulled with Venezuela (decapitation strike, pivoting immediately to "we're their new best friends" and economic partnership) would be a big coup for the Trump admin. I don't think it's "all gone according to plan" and I certainly think it's too soon to tell if this routine will work. But I think the "300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran" details tbd is the tell here.

And keep in mind the MOU provides explicitly that Hormuz will be governed according to international law (point 5) and (point 8) the downblending of Iran's enriched uranium. This doesn't seem like a big W for Iran to me, although it certainly might be a case where the US blustered and blundered its way to a salvageable situation.

Either way, I still think it's too soon to tell, there's still plenty of time for negotiations to break down.

Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days.

The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

That only means that the wolf and a few sheep will decide on tax rates for the farm. Sovereign rights of coastal states reads like code for 'Oman can hustle in on the racket too'.

Also negotiations have already broken down as you predicted with more Trump threats, fighting in Lebanon continuing, the Israelis openly ignoring this and the straits being formally reclosed. They were never really open in the first place, fighting in Lebanon never really stopped...

That only means that the wolf and a few sheep will decide on tax rates for the farm. Sovereign rights of coastal states reads like code for 'Oman can hustle in on the racket too'.

I think you could just as easily read it as "lol no toll but you guys can have a therapy session with your neighbors to make you feel better."

negotiations have already broken down as you predicted

I would strain myself patting myself on the back for this prediction if it hadn't already happened dozens of times in the past month.

And keep in mind the MOU provides explicitly that Hormuz will be governed according to international law (point 5)

And that is means that the strait is explicitely not going to be tolled period, as it's not according to international law. Note, yes, there are points that are potentially contradictory in the MOU, because it had to be accepted by two sides that care about keeping face. What will be important is what end up actually happening.

International law is based heavily on what actually happens, it's not like real law where the rules are written down explicitly and there are at least attempts to implement them impartially. While Iran controls the straits de facto, opening and closing them as they see fit, 'international law' there bends in their direction. So there may not be a toll on transiting the straits, only administrative fees and insurance regulations. They can whip up some framework to get what they want pass a surface-level legal review.

It might be what he's up to, problem is that while the remaining Venezuelan dictators think that deal is fine, the Iranians don't. They seem to think that the deal is that the US hold Israel's arms while Hezbollah hits them, and when the US didn't do that, they called it off by announcing the re-closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Since Trump is never going to do that, I don't see how a final deal can be reached that won't be scrapped within a week.

Yep, it seems quite plausible to me that exactly this occurs. Frankly I'm not sure that either the Iranian or the American governments are all on-the-same-page enough to commit to anything that will stick at the moment.

Iran will never agree to any treaty which explicitly guarantees Israel's right to peacefully exist. Most of the time the Iranians can't even bear to call Israel by its proper name; it's always "the Zionist entity".

I doubt this is necessarily true, but even if it is true, I don't think that such a treaty is necessary to end the war conflict high-intensity ceasefire between Iran and the United States.

The Iranian deal is also unlikely to cure cancer and pause AGI research. Better people than Trump have tried to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The way I see it, the current incursion into Lebanon was likely a response to Hezbollah attacks which were a response on the US/Israeli bombing of Iran. If three years down the road, Hezbollah has recovered enough to decide to send rockets towards Israel, it is unlikely that Iran will close the Strait over Israel returning fire.

"Recognizing the right to exist" is overrated anyhow. Northern Cyprus is not recognized by anyone (except Turkey), yet they do not get invaded. Ukraine was recognized as a state by Russia, did not stop them from getting invaded. I am sure the PRC is reluctant to use the official name (Republic of China) of Taiwan (and they may or may not invade eventually, but how much they recognized them beforehand makes little difference.

If Iran could "drive all the Jews into the sea" at little cost to themselves, they would do so. Likewise, if Israel could turn Iran into a failed state a la Somalia at little costs to themselves, they would also do that in a heartbeat. Luckily, neither is in the position to do either.

As an aside, "Israel's right to peacefully exist" is very much moot because their current government is not trying to exist peacefully. They fully support settlers taking over the West Bank (where the Palestinians are ruled by less murderous organizations), and pretty much leveled Gaza to destroy Hamas. If Netanyahu and his even-further-right ministers had consistently destroyed illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, you could argue that Israel is just trying to exist peacefully. But instead, their plan seems to be to create a Greater Israel consisting of whatever territory they can grab.

Better people than Trump have tried to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

This isn't about the Israel-Palestine conflict; that would exist without Iran, though the Palestinians would do even worse than they are. It's about the Hezbollah/Israel conflict.

If Israel is our ally, greatest ally, then they can't be allowed to do this to us. They can't insult and undermine the clear foreign policy of the POTUS and be allowed to do so. From the beginning I've said that Israeli forces, inasmuch as they are allied to the USA, should be under the command of an American general, Spartan style. They can't be allowed to go against us and continue to suck off the teat of the American taxpayer.

But that is not how it works. Usually, when allies go at war against a common enemy is that none of them will end the war until both agree to end it. Israel is a sovereign nation, and it was not even represented during the MOU negotiations. Why would they feel bound by the resulting MOU?

Donald Trump and you seem to both assume the US can decide whatever, including starting or stopping a war with Iran, without consulting any of his allies, and those allies will just obey. But they are free countries, it just does not work this way.

When Rome went to war with her allies against their enemies, it was expected that the allies would cease warring when terms were signed by Rome, no? What kind of alliance do we have with Israel if they are willing to plunge us into an economic catastrophe for the sake of bombing Lebanon?

First, barbarians doing barbarian things has always been the case. You can read up on plenty of stories of this or that place getting ravaged by this or that tribe, which frequently has some kind of relationship with Rome that would nominally require them to not do so. Frequently they even plundered other roman allies. The reasons varied, both for why the tribe was doing it and also why Rome was tolerating it.

Second, if Rome really wanted to make sure that the allies kept the promise, they'd in fact have to crack down on them regularly, or at least threaten to do so. Can you imagine the US invading Israel and going all decimatio? No? Then don't expect them to feel bound by a piece of paper they didn't even sign.

Rome has no real allies by modern standards. The so-called allies were not sovereign states, most of the time they were bound by a treaty saying they would have same allies and same enemies as Rome. And also, I don't know how it is relevant. The roman world is long dead, and its customs with it.

Who of our allies are sovereign states moreso than the barbarian tribes in Roman?

The power gap between the US and everyone else besides China (not an ally) is equally large. We can if we wanted to debank and cut energy consumption in Europe atleast 50% if we wanted to. Probably can’t just kill them like the Romans could but even then we may be overestimating how easy it would be for the Romans to do that.

I could argue about the power gap, because some of those countries could also hurt the US if they wanted to. And also where does this 50% number come from?

But more importantly, sovereignty is not about the power gap. Vatican and Luxembourg are sovereign states, yet the power gap with their neighbors (let alone the US) is not good.

And if you wonder why those states can remain sovereign, it's because of the balance of power in the world. Geopolitics is not a zero sum game. If you let your allies down, nobody wants to be your ally anymore. If you threaten your allies, you might get what you want because they have no other choice right now, but suddenly, they are not your allies anymore. They are slaves, and they won't like it.

The US has built its alliance network on the premise that the allied would remain sovereign countries. The US are free to change their mind, but if you assume it will go unchallenged, they are just wrong.

The 50% of European energy supply comes from a rough guess of European inputs that are shipped in by sea which the US dominates the high seas. The US can basically cut off all trade Europe does with any other country besides Russia.

I have zero idea what Europe provides US as an ally today. They don’t have any fighting men or tech we need.

The lithography machines for semiconductors are built by ASML in Europe, and Facebook AI research as long as Google AI (DeepBrain) have labs in Europe. I'm sure there are other examples.

But more importantly Europe provides the US with scale. Software and weapon systems are conceived once in the US and sold all over the world.

And also Europe provides the US with logistics. The military operations in the middle east could simply not happen without logistics centers in Europe (unless the US finds reliable allies with Africa, but good luck with that).

This has been an overall issue with the Trump administration. The assumption that any decision made by the US is law, and that everyone else will follow regardless of whether they were present at negotiations or not.

You saw it as US reduced aid to Ukraine, assuming the EU would follow suit.

Next during peace negotiations when America decided to not invite Ukraine, and instead assumed they would acquiesce to whatever decision the two great powers came up with.

In the initial phases of the Iran war, Trump assumed the rest of NATO would help. Even though it was not in their interest and they had not been involved with invasion plans in the first place. This war was notably a surprise for almost all interested parties, yet the US expected help as if they had all agreed on a plan together.

Now you have these Iran peace talks in which one of the parties to the war is not involved. Then everyone acts surprised when said party ignores the terms of a deal they never agreed to.

It's like watching an asshole watch a 20 minute video on realism and then try to implement it IRL.

On the other hand, it does allow him to go back to one of his campaign messages: "everyone is a freeloader that won't help America when we need them."

This has been an overall issue with the Trump administration. The assumption that any decision made by the US is law, and that everyone else will follow regardless of whether they were present at negotiations or not.

Why would they? Trump is an egotistical fool who believes the flattery coming out of any dictators mouth but it doesn't change that nations like China and Russia are our enemies and have no actual reason to listen to him. Putin might have kept whispering in his ear during those late night gossip calls that "I never would have had to start the war under you Trump, this is Biden's war absolutely", but anyone with a brain knows that this isn't true. Putin started it because he wants Ukraine, the same reason he's not ending it now despite years of stalemate and a drain on his country's resources and population.

And Ukraine along with the rest of Europe doesn't want to be taken. You can get a lot out of allies as the top dog, but they're not going to the grave for you, allies doesn't mean chained up slaves.

Those make sense to fail, it's an egotistical idiot believing the lies of any adversarial tinpot who tells him nice things and wondering why his orders to our friends to jump off a cliff aren't being followed. Even the best and most powerful presidents would not succeed here, allies wouldn't kill themselves for a Reagan either.

But Israel is engaged in an offensive war in Lebanon! They're moving large populations out of their homes in mass genocide. And their constant attacks are directly screwing with the US plans to surrender and restore the world economy. If we can't even pressure the nation with no other allies but us, that directly relies on the US, into not engaging an offensive war to save the world economy then it seems the Trump admin has little influence anywhere when it matters.

Start threatening things like Magnitsky sanctions for all the war crimes and human rights abuses they do or cutting aid or whatever. Trump of course won't because he's a weak man who can't stand up to the Zionist lobby even if he wanted to. And Israel knows this, there is nothing Trump is willing to do to bring them to heel. The same thing Iran has learned. The same thing many of Trump's opponents targeted by political warfare have learned. The bark is louder than the bite, you push back against the bully and he eventually flees.

I think Trump is Jewish and it’s not that he can’t stand up to the Zionists. And the US economy is heavily ran by Jews. Israel is a rival tribe as well as an ally but they are practically the only other civilized nation in the world.

They're moving large populations out of their homes in mass genocide.

Is this meant to be satire, on people claiming everything is genocide?

“ The assumption that any decision made by the US is law, and that everyone else will follow regardless of whether they were present at negotiations or not.”

  • This has been 90% of international law for decades. The US decides and everyone else has to follow the US decision.

I don’t agree with your Ukraine point. The US decided they didn’t want to pay for Ukraine because it’s not America first and largely not a US interests. The Trump administration has been consistent in wanting Europe to spend more on their military. My understanding of the MAGA position is MAGA never had a problem with the EU paying for a European war.

As far as both countries on the same side needing to agree to continue a war it’s generally not that both countries need to agree to end it. Either can continue or end the war when they want to but when the stronger nation decides to end it usually the weaker ally has to follow the big dogs decision. If Israel keeps dragging us back into the war I honestly would have no problem with Trump bombing Israel. Remind the Jews whose daddy in this relationship. Might even be fairly popular in domestic politics.

This has been 90% of international law for decades. The US decides and everyone else has to follow the US decision.

France and Germany did not join the US in Iraq, so the US ability to dictate to its allies is at least somewhat limited. They aren't obligated to join everything the US decides to do.

Yes, the US got away with smashing a sovereign nation with no criminal charges or serious reprisals. But:

  1. Did America really get away with it? One can think of all sorts of negative outcomes that followed, both internationally and domestically.
  2. Being able to escape consequences is not the same as achieving your objectives. The point of the game is not actually to show that the US Can Just Do Things, despite what the Elite Human Capital keep telling you. It's to prove that doing them actually achieves your goals.

I'd have thought we'd be clear on this after this whole mess. Yes, the US doesn't have to go with its allies into Iran. Yes, the US can just kill a leader of a formidable nation and Trump will likely retire to golf in peace. What did you achieve though?

We basically won the war so we won’t agree. Their leaders are dead. All aims were not achieved like complete regime change but the reason we failed at that is primarily domestic US politics and an unwillingness to cause a lot of Iranian civilian deaths.

Whether the War was worth it is a much different question than whether the US is in charge.

Their leaders are dead.

  • Harry G. Summers: You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.
  • Colonel Tu: That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.

All aims were not achieved like complete regime change but the reason we failed at that is primarily domestic US politics and an unwillingness to cause a lot of Iranian civilian deaths.

How America chooses to cope is irrelevant. It's especially irrelevant because, for all of the talk that the US would see red bro and just crush if it really wanted to, the supposed wildcard President backed down. You can't even blame it on the effeteness of some Obama-style figure drunk on dreams of liberal internationalism. This is the most vocally ruthless Presidency in a while, that ran around threatening to wipe out their entire civilization and...what happened?

Maybe don't start wars you can't win without massive casualties you're not willing to inflict? Especially don't threaten it if you won't go through.

In any case, I don't see how this isn't a loss. The strait isn't open. The IRGC is still functional enough that the US has to negotiate with it to open it. The US is apparently going to have to pay danegeld and Trump has downplayed disarming them. Iran just now suspended talks again and is working (successfully) to drive a wedge between the US and Israel*

The reason regime change was such a central pillar of the thinking (not some sort of stretch goal) was that it was the only path anyone could see to stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions decisively. That failed.

* Regardless of how one feels about Israel, your enemy being able to do this to you is a sign of weakness.

People like you make me want to just kill every Palestinian and Iranian to prove a point we won because we can.

Iranian Nukes are pushed back a decade minimum. We can bomb then again in the future because easily because their air defenses don’t exists anymore. Their conventional military is degraded.

You are setting the win conditions to Iranian statehood or turned into glass. We don’t want that.

Can I see if we have any agreement on certain factual questions:

  1. Did Trump seek regime change in Iran?
  2. b. More of a question: what was the win condition of the regime didn't collapse? Would anyone have considered this deal it? Was that reported by anyone beforehand?
  3. Did Trump say that Iran's stockpile had to be destroyed and has it now been left out of the deal for a later negotiation?
  4. Did Trump continually threaten to destroy Iran if it didn't open the strait and then back down?
  5. Did Trump say they have to give up their missile stockpile and has now walked that back?
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People like you make me want to just kill every Palestinian and Iranian to prove a point we won because we can.

Yes, but people like you make me want to defect to China. Going full psycho is not just another move you can pull out of your repertoire like you're playing blackjack and deciding whether to hit or stay. When you are in protracted legal wrangling over a breach of patent costing 10m USD, the reason you don't just pull out a gun and waste the judge, plaintiff and opposing council isn't because it won't work, it's because making it clear that you are a psycho with no switches except 'kill' and 'don't kill' acts as a strong signal to everyone else that they need to drop everything and focus on killing you now.

Case in point: all of Israel's former allies now loathe them. To the extent that there is any support for Israel remaining, it is that senior politicians manage to temporarily squeeze it out whilst avoiding increasingly bipartisan pressure from all the up-and-coming politicians. Whatever the provocation, going straight to 'kill everyone' is not a good move unless you are obviously so desperate that there is no other choice. America is very clearly not in that position.

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Perhaps this is a sign of poor understanding of international relations on my part, but I would assume that you would at least want to present a shared front with your allies during formal negotiations. Make sure you have pressured your ally before negotiations if need be, so that you know ahead of time that they will officially support the deal you sign.

It seems that Trump just skips this entirely. He simply ignores his allies during negotiations, then expects them to support a decision that blindsided them completely.

Lipstick on a pig stuff. Yes Trump ignores the genuflecting to Europe etc to make them feel good that their opinion matters. But realistically the US opinion has been all that matters for decades.

Except that yet again, the gap between “the US is vastly more powerful than its allies” and “US opinion is all that matters” is biting the US in the arse.

How is it biting us in the arse? Ever since the rise of American Tech and Energy Independence what happens in the rest of the world just doesn’t matter to us.
The consequences to the US is a bunch of French men angry tweeting us they are freezing and can’t drive their cars because no petrol.

In this particular case, because America's ally Israel's opinion differs from America's and it's mucking up American diplomacy.

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I had several hypothesis regarding Trump choices. I thought there was some secret plan explaining his behaviour. For example, asking NATO for help without consulting them could have been a plan to undermine and ultimately dismantle it. But unless he also wants to alienate Israel, I think he has no plan beyond what we see.

But that is not how it works. Usually, when allies go at war against a common enemy is that none of them will end the war until both agree to end it.

Part of the problem with starting this war to begin with, and both the government of Israel and that of the United States are equally to blame here, is that the war wasn't sold to the American public beforehand in favor of launching a duplicitous surprise decapitation strike. This means that a lot of infrastructure that should have been set up before the war started still isn't put together by the end of the war. There is no combined command. There is little love between the peoples to allow for that kind of cooperation.

duplicitous

What was duplicitous about it? Everyone has known that the relevant aspects of the US Deep State have wanted to bah-bah-bah-bah bah-bah-bomb Iran for like... forty-ish years?

"Surprise" I could live with (although, it wasn't exactly surprising!), but nobody was saying "nah, we love Iran -- we'd never bomb them!"

What was duplicitous about it?

Everything I was taught growing up that made Pearl Harbor "a day which will live in infamy."

It goes against my basic sense of Americanism.

I don't know enough about the prelude to WW2, but unless the Americans had been using insurgent movements in the Far East to attack Japan, its interests and its allies, funding and directing them more like an irregular part of their military than an ally, for decades, then the situation is not quite the same (I know the US did try to strangle Japan economically, but I think there's something different about economics and waging indirect warfare). Clearly Iran's been poking the bear constantly so getting a reaction at some point is to be expected. The situation more like a bully getting sucker punched after years of abuse; sure he can claim it came out of the blue and was unprovoked and that it wasn't him just his cronies that were doing the violent bullying and some dumb teachers might care, but he damn well deserved it and in a just world it would have happened sooner.

The US did fund Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists in the late 30's.

The technical term for attacking a country you are at peace with without declaring war, or for resuming attacks when a valid ceasefire is in place without publicly announcing you are revoking the ceasefire, is "perfidious". The US attack on Iran should qualify (I won't argue the technicalities), either on basis that the US and Iran are not at war, that the US was a de facto party to the ceasefire ending the 2025 12-day war or because there was an implied ceasefire for the duration of the ongoing nuclear talks in Oman.

If any of the Iranian officials directly involved in the Oman talks were the subjects of a targeted killing this would also be a separate war crime (attacking diplomats) - although it now looks like this was a mad social media threat that was not carried out, rather than something that happened.

The US and Iran have been at war since about 1979 -- and Iran started it! Invaded sovereign territory, took hostages (diplomats!), the whole bit... seriously, I'm pretty sure there was never a truce declared or anything like that?

"Perfidy" AFAIK specifically refers to violating a flag of truce or wearing enemy uniforms -- surprise attacks don't qualify.

No, the US and Iran were not at war since 1979. Reagan and everyone else involved in Iran-Contra would have been executed for treason if that were the case.

Words have definitions, and war is one of them. If you seriously believe that the United States and Iran have been at War for 47 years, Oliver North is still alive. I suggest we get that treason trial started.

The US hasn't been at war with anyone since 1942, and 1979 was forty seven years ago. And... look, there is no possible way you would have accepted this reasoning if Iran had shot Donald Trump at a speech or had his secretary blow him up with a briefcase bomb in 2017. No way. Which to me just makes your reasoning look like, "America gets to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime as long as we don't like them and we didn't explicitly promise not to". That's not even perfidy. Perfidy implies the possibility of honour.

The fact is that any country can attack any other country at any time -- as you point out, formal declarations of war haven't been a thing for many many years; it really is the law of the jungle.

If Iran had bombed Trump's inauguration, that would be an act of war; there's no moral valance to that, just that they would get their asses kicked for it.

Did Egypt et al send a diplomat to Tel Aviv to formally slap Golda Meir with a glove or something in 1973? If you want to go to war, you just do it.

So, if Afghanistan decided to fly a plane into the Pentagon or White House out of the blue, there'd be no moral valence to it, just some random shit that happened, sucks for the victims?

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There's also the minor issue of Hezbollah. Israel's not just bombing Lebanon for kicks and giggles, despite what a lot of people seem to think, and Iran has more than a minor bit of influence over that side of the conflict... I don't recall anything in the MOU that says Hezbollah will start abiding by the terms of the UN resolution, for instance, or that it will cease all hostile activities against Israel.

Point 1: The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war, by signing this MOU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.

Hezbollah is included, but you are right that they might not follow it either. It just makes less sense from my POV (the MOU was seen as a victory for Hezbollah, it would make no sense to undermine it).

So would that mean that, under the terms of this MOU, Hezbollah and all Iran's proxies will be permanently prohibited from attacking Israel? Peace in our time, indeed!

It is my understanding that the MOU only holds for a 60 days period.

Awful writing of the MOU, then, to use "permanent termination" in a 60-day MOU. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

It just makes less sense from my POV (the MOU was seen as a victory for Hezbollah, it would make no sense to undermine it).

Seconded. The US-Iran deal is not bad for Hezbollah, e.g. it acknowledges that Iran has an interest in what happens in Lebanon.

It is also not bad for Hezbollah's overlords, i.e. the IRGC -- otherwise Iran would simply not have signed the deal.

My understanding is that Hezbollah did attack Israel with rockets when the Iran war began, and in return Israel bombed Beirut and invaded south Lebanon, and is openly destroying villages with the aim of displacing Lebanese.

Quite frankly, I do not like Hezbollah, but them attacking Israeli troops in Lebanon who are busy with genocide-through-displacement seems one of the less objectionable things they did.

The problem is that Israel thinks they're a lot stronger and smarter than they actually are.

They think they can get away with 5D chess gambits like Netanyahu facilitating payments to Hamas so as to divide the Palestinians and so further pursue their divide and conquer/settle policy.

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas

What a retard! Same with their overt and obnoxious propaganda campaign, how Israel has 'the most moral army'. It's been counterproductive.

They think they're a military superpower, yet they can't seem to handle Lebanon. The Lebanese army isn't even fighting them, just Hezbollah. They fought Hamas for a couple of years and didn't manage to destroy a small force, totally encircled, without air power or any heavy weapons. Somehow Hamas got the drop on them in October 7th, so much for all-knowing Mossad!

But they think they can take on Iran?

The Israeli military is not that capable, it can't perform the (challenging) offensive tasks their politicians have in mind. They can do standoff attacks and elaborate assassination stunts. They can shoot and shell and scorch the earth but can't seem to hold much ground. Unfortunately for them, ground wars are won by holding ground and destroying armies.

The solution is to puncture their delusions of strength. The US should cut off military support until Israel complies with commands. F-35s can't fly without spare parts. Israel relies heavily on US satellites and aerial refuelling and the actual munitions themselves. Israel's military-industrial base is weak and top heavy, just like the military itself. They design drones and high-tech weapons. But they can't produce the myriad precursors in steel and chemicals needed for those weapons. No country of 10 million can. It makes no sense to be selling or transferring (the US has these stocks of weapons 'pre-deployed' in Israel that Israel sometimes taps) munitions and parts to a country harming one's national interests, while America also faces a shortage of munitions.

Israel is a small country and needs to start acting like it. Less bombing, more peace treaties and a bit of sincerity in actually adhering to ceasefires and accepting limits on territorial aspirations. Israel has never even officially defined the permanent territory in its borders, they're incredibly opportunistic and aggressive.

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas

I was aware that he was doing this, but I was not aware that he was on the record saying as much. I am totally bedazzled on how he could stay in power after Oct 7. Any opposition party who just printed this slogan on a billboard with his name underneath it should have won against him handily.

It seems that the Israeli right and Hamas were conspiring to prevent a two-state solution, and both got their wish. Of course, they both have quite dissimilar ideas about the specifics of how the one state should look like. Given Oct-7 and the Israeli reaction to it, it positively seems a monkey-paw variety of wish for either of them.

While MAGA deserved to lose their little Iran adventure, Netanyahu deserved to lose even more. His whole strategy for dealing with the Palestinians is to press the "defect" button as fast as he can. That is rarely a winning strategy.

They think they're a military superpower, yet they can't seem to handle Lebanon. The Lebanese army isn't even fighting them, just Hezbollah. They fought Hamas for a couple of years and didn't manage to destroy a small force, totally encircled, without air power or any heavy weapons.

I don't think there's a single nation or ever was that could handle entrenched urban enemies while also caring about PR, in an enviroment where their opponent is encouraged (by the international response) to have as many of their own civilians be casualties as possible.

It's like how the US was easily able to destroy almost the entire Iranian conventional Navy and Air Force, but struggled to destroy the more hidden IGRC weapons. Doesn't mean the US isn't a superpower, no matter what doomers want to say. Remember when Trump threatened the power plants, and the Iranians had civilians ringing them? Choosing not to bomb them doesn't mean you can't.

The US did it in Iraq, they secured ground against an entrenched enemy - and in much larger cities too. US infantry are actually decent at fighting. Or Russian infantry, they secure cities too. They took Mariupol, it was a tough fight against committed Azov defenders. They took Bakhmut, which is bigger and a lot better defended than these random hills in Lebanon. But they actually take ground and once ground is taken it stays taken. The Israelis go on these raiding missions into Gaza and blow things up but can't seem to take and hold territory.

caring about PR

The Israelis 'care about PR' but would never let it affect their military tactics, which include terror bombing, torturing prisoners and just randomly shooting people. They go on twitter and write these random screeds. This is from the Israeli minister of national security:

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn! With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF, and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration.

I told the Prime Minister, even in our private meetings: For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don't win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

But even with them blowing up all these buildings, dropping all these bombs - that is not achieving political goals! Even if what you say is true and that no nation can handle entrenched urban enemies while 'caring about PR' against tough, determined foes. Then that should affect strategy. I would simply not attempt military operations that cannot achieve my political goals, or that cost more than they gain!

Same with the US. Blowing up the Iranian airforce and navy, even if the US actually did that and it's not just cope... who cares? Did it accomplish US political goals? No! Blowing up power plants would've just seen the Iranians blow up more oil facilities in the Middle East. That doesn't help America achieve its goals, quite the reverse.

If Israel wants to conserve its international reputation, avoid casualties, conquer land, defeat and divide its enemies... well it needs to prioritize, Israel is not a great power and can't have all of those things simultaneously. The US can't do everything it wants simultaneously against determined opponents. If Israel embrace a doctrine of using human shields (the 'mosquito protocol') to approach boobytrapped buildings, that's necessarily going to affect your international reputation. There are tradeoffs and limitations for these powers.

All of this, but from my perspective Israel's current policy is Jewish neuroticism writ large.

I have Jewish friends and I love them for their intelligence and wit, but whenever politics or conversation comes to Zionism, they turn into different people. The Holocaust has burned a collective trauma across the Jewish community (reinforcing the historical trauma of the pogroms) that causes them to act out.

If they continue to try to manipulate other gentile communities to act in their interests, they will continue to generate bad will that is not in their collective interest.

As a wise man once said, “If they don’t want to be seen as an international conspiracy to subvert and destroy anything that contravenes their ethnoreligious interests, then they should probably stop conspiring internationally to subvert and destroy anything that contravenes their ethnoreligious interests”

I don’t know how many people here ever read the book Start-Up Nation about the story of Israel’s so-called “economic miracle.” Their view in that book essentially came down to the premise that its success was mostly internal and owed to “battlefield entrepreneurs,” that spurned a culture of innovation, via their military. What they downplayed in the book though was something that’s actually fairly well known in contemporary military doctrines called the “qualitative military edge.” That’s wholly independent of Israel and has existed since the days of the Cold War.

Because the nations of the Warsaw Pact had a numerical advantage over the US and its allied stations in Europe, America had to maintain its QME in defense systems, which are almost all based in technology. That’s why in US-Israeli arms deals, Israel gets first regional access to our defense technology. When America supplies both Israel and an Arab state the same tech, Israel gets a more advanced version of the platform and the ability to customize the US system. It’s why in Obama’s term (just to pick one example out of many), you can find stories in the news about how his administration just sold 20 F-35 aircraft to Israel, soon followed by a sale of F-15’s to Saudi Arabia.

To the OP’s point above you, Israel’s actually missed several economic opportunities because of its attention paid to their defense industry. If you look at Singapore for example, they chose a multicultural path to avoid the kind of race riots that threatened to divide them in the 1960’s. Israel didn’t ensure rights to Arab citizens or even Mizrahi Jews. Singapore chose economic development as a primary development target, Israel chose to prioritize defense at the expense of economic development; and so funds that could’ve went to fostering unity and regional development went into security and suppression of the occupied territories; and is more reliant on US military aid because of it.

In defense of Israel, Singapore has better land, and focusing on a multicultural, multireligious state was always more likely to succeed.

  1. Singapore's land isn't an important religious site to multiple monotheist religions.

  2. Singapore's land was sparsely populated by native Malays and mostly unused jungle. The settlement of Chinese workers may have started in the 14th century, predating modern ethnic nationalism. Israel's land was far more occupied and contested.

  3. The malaysian Sunni muslims are either more tolerant of non-muslims from either a cultural basis, or maybe a Shafi'i islamic school perspective. This is less true of Arabic muslims in general.

If you could have body-swapped Lee Kwan Yew into dictator of Israel during it's founding, I don't think he could have molded Israel's society to be similar to what he did for Singapore.

Honestly, if your comparison is that you did well but unperformed compared to Singapore I'm inclined to cut you some slack.

I would sacrifice a testicle to have a dozen more such disappointments.

It is in their collective interest. Jews have lived in Europe for 2000 without being able to assimilate. They have done so by having numerous rules and conventions that make it difficult to interact with Goyim. For example their food rules make it hard for them to share a meal with Goyim.

They have an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a strong sense of them and us.

They have been in constant conflict with their host populations. Nothing unites a population like an external enemy.

Israel has some super woke people. It has some of the most fanatical religious people in the middle east. They have people who are genetically largely European and some who are north African and some who are from Persia. They have little to unite them except a common enemy. If Israel had been founded on an island with no enemies it would have torn itself apart by now.

Jews require constant conflict with the outside world and that is what makes their religion so difficult for the rest of us.

This is no different than any other intense religious practice. All religions have an ideological lexicon for distinguishing themselves from the out-group. You have Jews and Gentiles. Muslims and Infidels. Christians and Pagans. Communists and Counter-Revolutionaries. Catholics and Freemasons.

Jews (and I’m referring to the original meaning of the term, the religion of Judaism) are very committed to their beliefs. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. Plenty of Jews if you’ve ever truly interacted with any and tried inquiring into their beliefs will tell you go to Church and seek God within your own tradition. There’s something of a tradition in Judaism that if someone wants to convert, a Rabbi is supposed to deny them on 3 separate occasions and accept them on their 4th attempt. It isn’t because they’re scrambling to hide the secret Jewish titty bars and glitter from you, and the cage where they sacrifice a virgin down in the catacombs. They want to know through the spirit of your conviction that being turned away isn’t going to stop you from wanting to become a Jew. The religious requirements are heavy, and they want you to understand that. But in Judaism, it also isn’t a requirement that you have to become a Jew to have a share in the world to come. What requirements are incumbent upon you by God depends entirely on which covenant you belong to. Jews belong to the Mosaic covenant, Gentiles belong to the Noahide covenant.

They don’t “require” constant conflict with the outside world.

It's been clear for a while (really since the ceasefire) that Trump has been looking for a way to extract himself from this situation and walk away with minimal possible concessions. In this case the mou's concrete provisions are mostly a way to do this, with aspirations of a "final deal" that could potentially, in the viewer's imagination, deliver wins for the preferred side. (Of course as I've been saying the "final deal" and its associated 300B is a total pipe dream)

Reading between the lines, the "deal" basically seems to be a "don't mess with us and we won't mess with you" sort of thing, where the US lifts its blockade while Iran stops attacking neutral shipping. Lebanon is a sideshow and both sides know their shipping is the only important thing that matters now, and neither side wants to defect over some trifling matter.

We know that "Project Freedom" has been continuing, and supposedly Iran has not attacked any ships on the southern route for 2 days. This is likely what the US demanded from Iran in exchange for lifting the blockade. Ships are warily heading into the route, with ais off and at night, because even though attacks aren't happening, there's still fear in the air. The US though is asking ships to start taking the route during daytime and with ais on. Meanwhile Iran is running its mouth about tolls and the northern route. A bunch of Chinese ships are taking that route, because if the bully in the house is offering you safe passage for free, why not take it. But if Iran doesn't let other ships in the route, they won't learn to accept it and be beholden to them. The rules right now are: any ship with balls can yolo it down the southern route with no approvals or permissions, or if you don't have balls, beg and wait in line for permission to pass in the northern route. So as long as Iran doesn't start blowing up cargo ships, they'll naturally start feeling a sense of safety under US guidance, and after a while traffic will be restored to the southern and original routes, completely ignoring any Iranian toll nonsense.

Anyways, looping back to Lebanon, it might be a sideshow, but both sides want to avoid Israel doing anything too provocative, lest it end up as really bad optics. So likely Netanyahu will be kept on a leash for the short term: the occupation will continue and low level tit for tat attacks will happen daily. But Israel won't go on any serious offensive operations. Once both Iran and US are locked in and complacent in the status quo, the leash will probably come off for both Israel and Hamas, and they'll be able to duke it out fully. Just not now.

The point of an MOI, in commercial law at least, is that in complicated negotiations with a lot of moving parts, it makes sense to have a written record of the items the parties actually agree on so that they don't become issues later on. To that effect, the idea that the negatives for the US in this memo won't end up as part of the final agreement is wishful thinking. The reason this deal repeatedly came close and then failed was because the Iranians were demanding that the US front -load most of the benefits to Iran, as they were always going to be inclined to do considering Trump's track record when it comes to looking for reasons to back out of deals, including with the Iranians themselves. That's what makes this deal so bad, before it's even been finalized; the Iranians get everything they want, and what the US wants is still subject to negotiation. The only way the 300 billion, or sanctions relief, or the unfreezing of funds, is off the table is if the entire deal goes sideways, at which point we're in the same place we were a week ago with the strait being closed except we don't have a navy in the region to enforce a blockade.

To be clear, I'm not going to criticize Trump for making a bad deal, because sometimes a bad deal is better than no deal. I will criticize Trump for putting the country in a position where they were forced to accept a bad deal. The nuclear question isn't even relevant at this point, because Iran found out that the greatest military in the world can't stop them from nuking the global economy, which is a much more powerful weapon considering they can actually use it. Prior to this war, there was a question as to whether Iran had this capability, and previous presidents agreed that it was better not to find out. Now we know, and the answer isn't good.

The nuclear threat of oil though seems to be rapidly disappearing. If Venezuela and Argentina energy comes online plus some pipelines built in the gulf the leverage here will dissipate. Even now it was a weaker threat. The Straight was closed and 1970 energy issues didn’t appear.

Eventually electric cars will reach a level of adoption where oil is less immediately critical (the demand for ships, trucks, trains and planes which are harder to electrify will be easier to satisfy). But that's a ways off and in the meantime we've avoided crisis by eating into inventories and strategic reserves to the tune of ~6-7 million barrels a day. If thing continue that will eventually have to come out of demand destruction through prices high enough to reduce demand and gas demand is pretty inelastic. I'm not sure you can get 1970's style crisis without the political component, but prices and inflation could definitely be squeezed quite a bit higher.

The US though probably is past the point it matters. Provided we can figure out how to legally ban oil exports domestically so the US market balances on domestic supply/demand.

It can hurt the rest of the world. But we do have policy levers for it not to effect the US.

What does Iran actually get before the final deal besides the blockade being lifted? Sanctions waivers are pretty much a nothingburger when China buys as much oil as Iran can sell at only a tiny discount. There were a few posts in the previous thread about how the unfreezing is also a nothingburger and the US can easily sandbag on that.

except we don't have a navy in the region to enforce a blockade.

Nothing in the mou requires any us force withdrawal before the "final deal" and us officials claim they're not going anywhere either.

The downblending of the uranium, as a minimum, is as much a part of the MOA as the 300B is.

Anyway, in commercial law it is understood that both sides are expected to be negotiating in good faith. That is very much not true here.

Anyway, in commercial law it is understood that both sides are expected to be negotiating in good faith. That is very much not true here.

That applies to literally everything Trump is involved in.

It also applies to Iran.

Akshually...

This whole "good faith" negotiation is very much a civilian (meaning civil law)/American thing, in English contract law there is no obligation that the parties are acting in good faith or anything like that. Good faith is mostly reserved for "relational" contracts in English law meaning things like Employment contracts and Franchise agreements where both parties expect there to be long term relations between them.

What's to be said? The Israelis had a ton of international support after 10/7, but they overplayed their hand and reacted in a way that engendered more antagonism against them then they would have had otherwise. It was very difficult to be pro-Palestinian in the immediate wake of the initial attacks, but turning Gaza into rubble at the expense of tens of thousands of civilian deaths was not seen as a proportionate response. This was especially true after they had to be bargained with to allow the importation of food and medical supplies for the civilian population. If a Democrat had been elected in 2024, we would have continued to see the same perfunctory public support for Israel combined with behind the scenes action to bring the war to a close, which may or may not have been successful. If a normal, competent Republican had been elected, we would have seen public support for Israel and continued weapons commitments, but nothing beyond that. But Bibi got Donald Trump, the one president who could be convinced to do anything provided he was personally impressed by the last person who talked to him, and the two men already had a good relationship.

Then you add the fact that he's always believed that the US should take military action in Iran, and that he deliberately chose advisors who wouldn't prevent him from doing what he wanted. The problem is that he didn't have the geopolitical wisdom to understand that prior presidents hadn't taken action because they were weak men, but because it wasn't clear that such a war could be won, at least without the kind of commitment that they were willing to make. When Trump loses the war, he's forced to make commitments to Iran that Israel doesn't like, and now Bibi has a decision to make. He managed to alienate the last person willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt, and he has no good options at this point. It's not like Democrats are going to be more pro-Israel after the midterms. This is the legacy of Netanyahu, the complete obliteration of Israel's international standing.

They probably made the right call there turning Palestine into rubble.

The point of having political capital to do stuff is to spend it. When your political capital is high you should spend it doing stuff you want to do until it is low. Then you stop and start building capital again.

Same thing with money. Dying with a vault of gold is stupid. Spend it on creating a world you want to create.

The main issue Israel has had relates to mass migration into western countries and the rise of wokism in developed countries. These were always going to present a problem for Israel whether they did something or not. More Muslims in Europe is bad for Israel. An anti-white movement in the west and anti-success is bad for the Jews. I think Nixon was caught on tape probably many times being racists. Of the Jews I don’t think he trusted them but he noted they were highly competent. The west doesn’t like competency anymore.

The Israelis had a ton of international support after 10/7,

But they didn't. There were pro-palestine protests two weeks after 10/7, before Israel had even started to really move on Gaza. I think that was actually the wake up call for Israel, the reason they are acting like they are, they realized that europe is rapidly islamizing and they need to go now.

There were pro-palestine protests two weeks after 10/7

And people associated with them were losing their jobs. It was a mask-off moment for anti-Zionism that essentially vindicated its critics and would have permanently damaged associated organizations if Israel had not proceeded with their avenged seventy-seven-fold plan. It was a highwater mark in public support for Israel abroad after a long period of decline.

This is a recurring argument I see across the political spectrum; because your most intense opponents continue to do/say outlandish things there's no sense in attempting to moderate in an appeal to public opinion and so you should just do whatever you want cause you have no control over how you're perceived. This seems to me a pretty obviously self serving attempt by extremists to rationalize extreme courses of action. You don't win when the entrenched opposition sits down and shuts up and admits you were right, you win when the general public stops finding their criticisms of you persuasive.

If you look at this YouGov tracker there was a real spike in public support for Israel after 10/7 that declined pretty rapidly as the Gaza situation got worse and worse. I don't think the American Public found the arguments of campus radicals very persuasive on 10/14, but over time Israeli actions alienated the public.

I was talking about europe not the us, still I congratulate myself on remembering the 2 weeks timespan correctly. The "moderate the tones" thing, it's not so much that they got near instant backlash over retaliating, what I'm saying is that they realizedd they have no constituency left going forward, it logically doesn't exist. If you don't believe me look at the +65 lines and the Democrats lines on that survey: what do you think it's going to happen when the 65+ die and the Democrats have power? And this is the US, the country that is going to be most favorable to israel going forward.

You can see this basically everywhere in politics. Biden and Trump both came in with positive approval ratings! Biden left with one of the most negative approval ratings in history, and Trump is on track to possibly do even worse.

The deepest haters are always going to hate you no matter how cool or winning you are, but most people are not your deepest haters. The numbers can differ a bit on topic but generally in our polarized society there's essentially 30% who will always hate you, 30% who will always love you, and 40% who can be persuaded in some form/don't really care that heavily to begin with. (Like swing voters/nonvoters).

The reason why leaders like Biden and Trump keep dropping in approval after isn't because citizens are being haters, it's because the leaders are failing the standards they hold. They all come in with positive expectations, and if you can't match that then you get judged appropriately. When Trump promises an end to war, less focus on culture war topics and a greater focus on consumer economics and lower prices and we get more war + endless culture war + higher prices, he failed and of course his approval goes down. They aren't just the haters, they're people who were really willing to give him a chance and he failed them.

Same thing here. Israel had a lot of support behind them! Yes there was that 30% of haters or such who wouldn't care no matter what, but the US population was largely sympathetic and behind them. But Israel took that as carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, and they starved the Gazan population and they expanded the settlements and they spoke openly of their genocidal plans. Of course people turned against Israel! They're not all the haters, they are earnestly reacting to Israel's actions.

Part of it is because they're all drinking their own Kool aid. They surround themselves with sycophants and yes men and the other 30% suckup cultists and don't realize that the support of the 40 really is conditional.

How is that not consistent with the idea that the public did listen to the campus radicals, but it took some time for the campus radicals to influence the public?

Campus radicals have been trying to convince Americans that Israel is a morally abominable apartheid state for 20+ years, it would be a huge coincidence if decades of persuasive efforts all paid off in a sudden public opinion swing over the span of a year in a way that was completely unrelated to Israel's actions in Gaza.

Campus radicals don't emphasize exactly the same things to exactly the same degree all the time. The Hamas attack pushed Gaza to the top of their issues list, even if they had always been concerned about it to some extent, and that increased the propaganda from the campus radicals about that particular subject.

I'm reminded somehow of the famous Chris Rock bit at the end of Black People vs Niggas

And I see some black people lookin' at me. "Man, why you gotta say that? Why you gotta say that? It ain't us, it's the media. It ain't us, it's the media. The media has distorted our image to make us look bad. Why must you come down on us like that, brother? It ain't us, it's the media." Please cut the fuckin' shit, okay?! Okay?! Okay?! When I go to the money machine tonight, alright, I ain't lookin' over my back for the media! I'm lookin' for niggas! Shit, Ted Koppel ain't never took shit from me. Niggas have! So, you think I got three guns in my house 'cause the media outside? "Oh, shit, Mike Wallace! Run!" Fuck outta here, man! Tired of this shit. Tired, tired, tired of this shit!

Two weeks after? Try as soon as the news was out. Same day and next day. Such as the somewhat reported-upon (and somewhat denied) "gas the Jews" protest in Australia.

It was very difficult to be pro-Palestinian in the immediate wake of the initial attacks

I'm pretty antagonistic towards Israel myself, I'm even rather critical of the attitudes that non-Israeli Jewish people tend to have, but this is plainly not how I remember it. I remember an immediate and massive outpouring of support for Palestine, and not just from the immigrant Muslim population, and Jewish people frantically trying to get the barest condemnation of the attack, out of people they thought were their friends.

I don't doubt that there were plenty of far-left morons who engaged in Palestinian flag waving immediately, but in a country of 330 million you can always find plenty of people to take an indefensible position, along with a news media and internet environment incentivized to convincing you that these ideas are mainstream. But this wasn't a position that was taken in polite society. Noted far left radical Joe Biden (Trump's words, not mine) immediately committed to supporting Israel, as did virtually every Democratic politician. Even actual far-left radicals like AOC and Ilhan Omar condemned the attacks. The only politician who didn't was Rashida Tlaib, who in addition to being far-left is actually Palestinian. Ditto news agencies; I can't recall any mainstream commentators saying as much as that the attacks were the regrettable result of decades of occupation and blockade. The only place I heard that was Democracy Now!, and even they were inclined to engage in a lot of throat clearing.

I don't doubt that there were plenty of far-left morons who engaged in Palestinian flag waving immediately, but in a country of 330 million you can always find plenty of people to take an indefensible position, along with a news media and internet environment incentivized to convincing you that these ideas are mainstream.

But your original claim was that "it was very difficult to be pro-Palestine", so what difficulties have these people ran into? Once Trump got elected they managed to push through some "muh antisemitism" policies and some people got expelled / deported / otherwise cancelled, but that wasn't in the immediate after math of 10/7, and didn't amount to much anyway.

along with a news media and internet environment incentivized to convincing you that these ideas are mainstream. But this wasn't a position that was taken in polite society.

I mean, if the news media and internet environment was such that it could convince people that these ideas are mainstream, than these ideas are mainstream. When ideas are not mainstream, what you see is a crackdown like when people criticized Covid policies and vaccines, mass migration, or genderwang stuff.

I mean, are you sure that pro-palestine opinion wasn't allowed in polite society in the immediate aftermath? Far left views- farther left than actual elected officials- do not effectively exclude individuals from polite society in the same way that merely right of center views sometimes do.

You're correct that the establishment loved Israel for about a month. But virtually no effort was taken to exclude far-left antisemites(yes, many of these people are antisemitic- in the same way they're anti-white) for the same reason virtually no effort was taken to exclude far leftists of many other varieties. We live in a society which has systematically dismantled its memetic immune system for lefty ideas, and 'anti-semitism' is a welcome correction- even if some of these people are nothing of the sort.

There were massively rallies in support of Gaza around the world right after it happened including in NY. I don’t know what the other poster is on about.

In the long term, I increasingly feel that the only hope for Israel is that whoever first invents and controls ASI (Amodei, Altman, maybe Brin and Page) takes pity on their co-ethnics and/or purported homeland.

Otherwise the geopolitical situation is bad, the demographics are bad, the reputation is bad. Israel was a fool’s errand. You can’t stand against two billion Muslims forever, especially as they stream into Western lands in ever higher numbers and grow to be politically prominent there, too. As Scott has said so many times, only a small number of people have to really care about an issue to get their way if most people don’t care about it, and Muslims care about Palestine as much as Jews care about Israel and are far more numerous. The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population. No cunning, no chutzpah, no number of places on the Forbes billionaires list can stand up to that.

The only possibility was gambling that the easy prosperity and trade ties that had persuaded the Gulf Arabs into reducing their hostility could be replicated in an Iran in which the revolutionary regime was defeated, and that possibly as a consequence over many decades hostility toward Israel could be reduced. The Mossad judged that, after the recent widespread protests, a killing blow to the ayatollah and IRGC and cabinet elite, plus using Claude and image recognition to dynamically identify and track police stations, local pro-regime militiamen and troop movements and strike them with air superiority, would bring the people back to the streets in a way the government could not crush. That gamble clearly failed. The highest risk tolerance protestors were already arrested or killed. The rest stayed home. The Iranian middle class are simply too comfortable to rebel in a way that threatens, for most of them, their lives. Most of us would do what they did, which is nothing.

What more is there to say? The decline may be fast or slow, maybe both. You can’t hold out against the world forever, surrounded by enemies.

Israel was a fool’s errand. You can’t stand against two billion Muslims forever,

Israel in it's present location might have been. An Israel almost anywhere else, probably including one carved out of a German state as reparations for the war, would have been perfectly fine.

Israel didn't just pop out of the ether post-1945. Zionism as a political movement was active and working as early as the late 19th century, and the Jewish presence in Israel was prevalent enough that they were calling for a national boycott of Germany in the 1930s. So it's not as if they walked into all of this blind.

While I enjoy fiction like the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I don’t think an Israel anywhere else would have survived either. There were two very large waves of migration that have given the state the necessary human mass to survive (especially given the workshy chareidi population, which for lack of good alternatives probably would have migrated in large numbers to any Jewish state with religious freedom) - the Mizrachi migration and the Soviet migration.

The former wouldn’t have happened without Israel being located where it is (I don’t think the Jewish population of the Middle East would remain particularly large, but like the Christian one it would slowly have trickled out over time due to persecution, mostly to the West, maybe some to Latin America and Asia). The latter would never have happened, because an Israel located in eg (West) Germany would have been in the more discrete enemy category for the USSR than Israel and so emigration would be much less likely to be allowed (yes, some Soviet Jews went to the US, but they usually pretended they’d go to Israel first).

I also don’t think, even in their anger, any of the allies or even many Jewish leaders would have agreed it was structurally stable to carve out a corner of densely populated West (and it would have been West) Germany, ethnically cleanse the natives and establish some kind of Jewish ethnostate. Yes, the Ostsiedler were ethnically cleansed, but that was behind the Iron Curtain, in the chaos of the postwar period, and by countries with tens of millions of people in an empire with hundreds of millions of people.

There's enough essentially deserted parts of the world where I don't think it's outlandish. Northwestern Australia was proposed and whilst it might have just ended up being a weird curiosity I can't really see who would have objected or attempted to annex a small Jewish state up there. Maybe it just doesn't catch on and folds back into Australia after a few decades or something, but like Northwest Australia has about 100k residents right now (and that's a direct product of the massive mining boom that wasn't known about at that point). I think it's estimated at like 10,000 people circa 1950.

Small locus of Jews move there circa 1950 after an offer, they discover the massive Iron Ore deposits and that drags in sufficient immigration from the rest of the world's jewry and Western countries. By now Broomesrael is Singapore Southwest.

The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population. No cunning, no chutzpah, no number of places on the Forbes billionaires list can stand up to that.

Iran does not force high level Israeli politicians like Ben-Gvir to constantly broadcast blatantly genocidal rhetoric, such as what he did earlier today.

Iran did not make the IDF shell a family leaving Gaza City and then lie about it

Iran did not make Israel immediately invade Syria during the Syrian power vacuum.

And Iran certainly are not behind the West Bank settlements where people are beaten and their are homes destroyed/stolen.

Perhaps if Israel did not do such things, they might find a bit more support.

It’s worse than that, Israel’s been actively pushing for this shit in the shadows for a long time. Look up “TIRANNT” sometime. It’s an intelligence analysis track that first began all the way back in 2003 that conducts war games for a full-scale invasion of Iran. It’s a plan that would be activated in the event of a “second 9/11,” on the default, a priori assumption that Iran would be behind it. It’s why Gilad Erdan (who’s the UN Israeli ambassador) explicitly compared October 7th to the 9/11 attacks, which provided the pretext for the war on terror.

There’s a lot of people in DC that seek a pretext for linking all kinds of activities with Iran, even independently of activities they are involved in, to legitimize a major regional conflict. Back in 2011, Netanyahu demanded the IDF and Mossad to lay plans for an attack on Iran within two weeks, but he backed off when members of his own war cabinet questioned his legal authority to do so.

Hey, jews still have the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. It's even got a rainbow as its official flag!

Since then, the share of Jews steadily declined, and according to the 2021 Russian census, there were only 837 ethnic Jews left in the JAO (0.6%).

No they don't?

They can flee there if needed, it's in the name after all.

The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population.

This is like one of those weird fantasy-movie retcons where the new villain introduced in the sequel is suddenly found to have been the biggest villain all along behind all the bad things that happened. Israel was the primarily villain in the Muslim world for three decades before Khomenei appeared on the scene, Israel had already fought several wars against a varied lineup of Arab muslim enemies. If anything, Iran's obsession with Israel is an effort to post up off the pre-existing Islamist hatred for Israel to climb the Jihadist power-rankings. Which, Iran will be top of the table for the foreseeable future.

The highest risk tolerance protestors were already arrested or killed. The rest stayed home.

I see this statement all the time and it strikes me as so odd; the much more likely explanation is that people don't like when other countries bomb their homeland and react negatively to the people doing the bombing, regardless of their feelings about the government of their homeland. This has been proven over and over and over again. If the US and Israel were relying on a strategy where the People Rise Up, they first needed to demonstrate that they cared about the Iranian people. They mostly demonstrated the opposite. Iranian dissidents found themselves caught between a regime that hates them, and outsiders who hate them.

the much more likely explanation is that people don't like when other countries bomb their homeland and react negatively to the people doing the bombing, regardless of their feelings about the government of their homeland.

And it makes a lot of sense. The regime at least needs the people, so they can't just destroy everything and kill everyone. Israel and the US, on the other hand, don't need Iran at all. They don't kill them all because it would not look good, but actually Iran being entirely dead would be better for them than what they have now. It's perfectly rational to stick with the regime.

They mostly demonstrated the opposite. Iranian dissidents found themselves caught between a regime that hates them, and outsiders who hate them.

I would rather say that "outsiders who don't care enough to support, or even know them". I know of at least one famous Russian political dissident, Alexei Navalny. For Iranians, I can only think of a film director.

I'd say the clear indifference to their wellbeing demonstrated by both Israel and the United States makes it difficult for Iranians to view them as liberators.

This is like one of those weird fantasy-movie retcons where the new villain introduced in the sequel is suddenly found to have been the biggest villain all along behind all the bad things that happened. Israel was the primarily villain in the Muslim world for three decades before Khomenei appeared on the scene, Israel had already fought several wars against a varied lineup of Arab muslim enemies.

There was no suggestion that Khomenei invented Muslim anti-zionism. But the transition from secular Arab Nationalism of the PLO and Nasser to anti-zionism with a more explicitly Islamist character - both inside and beyond Palestine - coincides almost perfectly with an expansionary (Sunni) Islamist identity, spread in grand irony from the gulf, that radically reshapes the Muslim world, as Naipaul so adeptly chronicles. That ideology completely changed Islamic identity in Muslim states more populous and in some cases more important than much of the actual Arab heartland. Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Muslims in India, in the Philippines, in West and East Africa. Regions of increasing strategic importance to the United States. Regions where Muslims care much more about Palestine today than they did in 1955.

It was in that context that the Islamic Revolution tried to take that mantle from the Sunnis.

Considering how iran's islamic revolution champions the palestinians and advertises themselves as a literal defender of the greater islamic faith, I fail to understand why israel has not deployed expeditionary IDF corps to root out the IRGC while they were already blockaded. This should be a existential conflict for israel in the long term, Trump would probably continue air support if israel provided ground troops and a reasonable path to victory.

They have no route to Iran without American landing vessels, and for a largely conscript army the casualties that would be incurred even if victory was possible would be so high as to existentially threaten the state. If 100,000 young men die in a country of 6 million (when you subtract the Arab and Charedi population who don’t fight) ie 3 million men total, 1.5 million young men, everybody loses people. Plus, there’s no game plan for that quagmire either. A tiny country can’t occupy a hostile major one for long. They can occupy an indifferent one (colonial India) or one where they have a centuries-ahead technological advantage, but no more.

The US may have been willing to loan the transport ships needed, the US navy was already blockading Iran anyway. 100K casualties sounds actually survivable, paraguay has survived worse. They would be getting full US air support and their mission would be regime change to a friendly government.

If Israel took 100K casualties in a ground control attempt in Iran but was faltering, the US public might be convinced to give them a troop surge to finish the job. That would be more palatable than the US shouldering 100% of any ground troop burden.

tl;dr: Trump was told to jump higher than he could. His knees buckled on the landing and now he's crawling around telling the zionists that he's sorry he can't stand up to Iran. The zionist response when he asks for a hand is to spit on him for being weak. Genuinely, even the antisemites are shocked.

I feel like there was an old white nationalist 2.0 cope around the time where ISIS was at its peak about AIPAC and Israel that ran somewhere along the lines of: AIPAC has a better grip on America than America has a grip on the middle east.

I think the truth of that observation is unfolding in front of us to a certain extent. The weakest link in the Israel/AIPAC dynamic is Israel. AIPAC can still unseat elected representatives at will. Most recently demonstrated with Massie. American politicians still dance to their tune. It's Israel, whose actions became incoherent after Oct.7, culminating with this Iran ordeal, that's the problem in this dynamic.

I think the only interesting answer to the question can come from zionists and adjacent folk. Nigh every other group that's not zionist, from progressives to regressives, wants to dump the Israelis tomorrow. The entire world is getting sick of Israel and its behavior. So from a zionist perspective: What ever was the plan here?

Like, zionists have this iron grip on US foreign policy. What did they want the US to do? Unless the plan is to literally genocide every single Arab via US military might so that Israel can do whatever it wants in the region, then US involvement stops making sense very quickly. The US can bomb things. They can do economic coercions, they can occupy big buildings in cities, build FOBs in valleys and patrol roads in Humvees. But they can't do much else. As Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated.

Americans have thousands of their soldiers dead, tens of thousands if you count the suicides, trillions spent, and nothing to show for it. And now we are reading that Israel, not just the 'Netanyahu government' but a sizeable portion of the Israeli public and America based zionists, wanted America to commit to another middle East war effort with no explicit end goal, no theory for victory, and no discernable US gain outside of rank delusions that Iran intends to nuke Huston and Vienna if ever given the chance. We don't even have the pretense of regime change anymore.

The cost of this war, however, would be enormous. Not just in direct military spending, but with every economist (spit) sounding the alarm bells that this would prove catastrophic for global markets. Countries most affected, including some US allies, have already started rationing programs. Meanwhile Russia, US's geopolitical enemy, has been making bank month over month due to this war and the oil/gas market disruptions.

This comes across as incoherent lunacy. Destabilizing the middle east? Eh, on some level that makes sense, even if I oppose and abhor it and the negative consequences it has had for not just the middle east but Europe. But if this is the continuation... What's the plan, where's the big picture everyone's missing? I can't even put together how zionists are pretending to be allies with the US at this point. That they even attribute a theory of mind to Americans.

In defense of the zionists, AIPAC is still so strong they can be forgiven for thinking less of Americans. So if there is any weight behind these events, it will come down on Netanyahu first, Israel second, AIPAC a distant third. So long as the Israeli lobby holds the keys to a plurality of public offices in the US, they will remain strong. But Israel needs to find some stability fast. Maybe Netanyahu is playing the role of a future sacrificial chicken perfectly. Sin as much as you can before the head goes off.

To that extent the answer to the question is clear. Let Netanyahu take as much as he can before we give the Western cattle a new shepherd.

There is no plan. To understand the Iran War from Israel’s perspective you have to understand that it was a Hail Mary move.

Since the JCPOA it was clear to Mossad that Iranian nuclear weapons development continued largely unabated. Inspections were limited and easily misdirected. Iran had no need for a large domestic nuclear power program. The founding mission of the Islamic Revolution was the destruction of Israel. Iran was funding proxies. The IRGC controls much of the export economy and therefore foreign currency.

The risk for Israel is not necessarily being overrun. This remains the ultimate risk, but there are others. The risk is that regular attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis perhaps, make life in Israel unliveable for those who want first world conditions, and they leave. The economy collapses, leaving a mass of zero skill ultra orthodox who don’t work, some Arabs and various Mizrachim who have no foreign passports or the skills to get a visa. At that point, the country ceases to exist in a defensible state. That is why they felt Iran had to be defeated.

They gambled and they lost. They’re not that smart.

They gambled and they lost. They’re not that smart

I suspect it's even dumber than that. Netanyahu is a criminal who needs the war to keep going so he can stay out of prison, while the broader Israeli right is dominated by thug-brained ethnnats. Netanyahu is happy to torch Israel's future and international standing to keep his freedom for another year, and his supporters are happy to let him, because they are too dim to understand what is happening. If they're not outright envisioning Greater Israel, they're at least envisioning a future where Israel's enemies have been brutally put in their place.

Now I'm wondering if the real hail mary move is if Israel nukes Tehran in a preemptive strike

That would be an extremely pyrrhic victory for Israel because it would result in the governments and populations of the West ostracizing Israel vastly more than they do now and would probably also massively intensify the split between more liberal, more peacenik Jews and hawk Jews.

soyjacks_pointing_at_mushroom_cloud.jpg

Nuking Tehran wouldn’t destroy the regime. Tehran is actually a comparative hotbed of opposition compared to other cities. Power and the IRGC are highly distributed, as are weapons stockpiles, missiles, the conventional military, and the nuclear program. Iran is too big to defeat militarily with anything other than a ground invasion, a spontaneous revolution, or both. Even the Japanese only surrendered because they knew the alternative was full invasion. Israel can never invade Iran.

Iran is actually more vulnerable to nuclear weapons than the US or Russia because a larger portion of its military and economy is concentrated in its capital compared to Moscow or Washington, D.C.: nearly 20% of Iran's population and more of their economy is in the metropolitan area of Tehran. And speaking of power, the list of targets is, as I understand it, a target set of less than 150 to take out 90% of the country's power.

I suppose Israel emptying the silos to kill or mutilate the wealthiest and smartest fifth of Iran and turning off the power for the survivors might not "destroy the regime" but I do think it would count as a military defeat for Iran.

I suppose Israel emptying the silos to kill or mutilate the wealthiest and smartest fifth of Iran and turning off the power for the survivors might not "destroy the regime" but I do think it would count as a military defeat for Iran.

Depends on the propaganda and PR, doesn't it? There's plenty of people out there who think the US has had more significant materiel losses in terms of planes/ships than Iran has.

Now I'm imagining Star Wars as rebel propaganda to explain why having Alderaan completely obliterated was actually a huge rebel victory! when in real life there is zero reason to believe that the Death Star was in fact destroyed by a small team of X-Wings, it's borderline impossible and even the rebel copium-huffers have to insist that it only happened due to literal magic.

Write that down! Write that down!

In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

I wish we could stop it with the "this is the middle east'. Just stop it.

The first great test of the Revisionist’s claim to understand the Arab came with the Western Wall controversy, of 1928-29. That Jews could use the area for prayer was established by long precedent, repeatedly affirmed by the Ottomans in the late 19th and early 20th century. Fanatic madman, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, was trying to use the wall as a wedge issue in his campaign to cement control over the Arab community, and, like the rightoid shithead he was, pursued a dual strategy of provoking and funding violence against Jewish worshippers, whilst also spreading rumours of Jewish intentions to take over the Temple Mount among the Arab public. The Zionist leadership was trying, with mixed success, to handle the issue through a mixture of appeals to the British administrators, and domestic and international hasbara campaigns.

That’s cucked and bugman, though, and so, tired of Jewsniping impotently from the sidelines for a year, the Revisionists decided it was time for them to step in. In order to demonstrate their enormous understanding of Arab psychology, they unveiled a truly brilliant and strategically adroit plan, so cunning in its methods and delicate in its design that it could not fail to win the day. They would - get this! - organize a gang of oafs to march to the wall and shout stuff. This would ‘assert Jewish pride’ and ‘demonstrate resolve’ and ‘show that Jews are not victims’ and other important goals of Retard Revisionist Zionism. That it happened to be precisely what Hajj Amin Al Husseini had been trying to engineer the whole time was but a minor detail. When you truly understand that Arab mind like a Right Wing Zionist does, you don’t even have to game out his plans.

Fast forward a few months, of course, and there were riots all over Palestine, and over 100 Jews were dead, many of them murdered in appallingly bestial fashion. To cap matters off, after imposing their Iron Wall on the Arab rioters, the British authorities decided it was time to review the policy of open Jewish immigration, with the Hope Simpson Enquiry paving the road to the White Paper, and ensuring the doors of the Holy Land were slammed shut just in time for the Holocaust. Great job, knobhead. But when YOU HAVE SUCH AN INCREDIBLY GREAT GRASP OF ARAB PSYCHOLOGY, you don’t have to say sorry. You just blow up a hotel or whatever.

...

The truth is that the Middle East is a mess because it is full of people whose thought process extends to ‘but this is the Middle East’ and then respond to real or perceived disrespect by chimping out, then cry when other people chimp back. Those Middle Eastern countries that have managed to turn lemons into a measure of lemonade don’t do it by inciting their dumbest and most violent people to start provoking everyone around them. They do it by taking out Pakistani generals on loan to kill them.

The excerpt is questionable. A pacifist approach in the decades that followed would have been far more disastrous for Zionism than the misadventure described. Arabs, particularly Levantines, are more feminine, more emotional, and more neurotic than the one dimensional ‘Arab mind’ narrative suggests, sure. That is only part of the story.

Well, you see...

When Kahane wasn’t condemning normie Zionists for having contempt for the Arabs, he liked to call them dogs. Not the most original metaphor, but vivid enough, so let’s run with it. Imagine a dog, not a Pitbull (that’s racist), but a Belgian Shepherd or similar. We observe one person who tries to reason with the dog, discusses with him the categorical imperative, and performs random unsolicited acts of kindness to appeal to its better nature. Another, swarthier person enters, perplexed at this cringe European, and pushes him to the side. He takes a good long look at the dog, walks over and kicks it square in the nuts, returning to high-five his friends. Rinse and repeat for three decades. Who is surprised that the dog is deranged?

What you do with a dog, obviously, is you train it. You don’t respond to its barks and snarls by getting down on all fours and barking back because ‘this is the yard’ and that’s what is done here. How do you train the dog? Well, go find someone who’s good at it, and ask him.

You don't have to be a pacifist just because you're not doing pointless chimpouts, is what he's trying to say.

Wait, Trump and JD say (some) things which sound obvious and true to my ears? Is today opposite day or something, or has Trump's handler been replaced?

At least the Israeli ministers are still acting like comic book villains. They think that if they can thwart a US/Iran peace, perhaps they will still get their favorite outcome of Trump glassing Iran.

Personally, I think Trump should simply give Netanyahu 24 hours to retreat from Lebanon before we find out how well protected the IDF troops there are against US airstrikes.

Personally, I think Trump should simply give Netanyahu 24 hours to retreat from Lebanon before we find out how well protected the IDF troops there are against US airstrikes.

There's a lot of steps the US can take to ramp up the pressure on Israel before it reaches that, like cancelling arms purchases, stopping intel sharing, etc...

Notably, financial sanctions would probably be extraordinarily effective against Israel, even if merely threatened.

We should encourage Israelis to forget about their ancestral homeland and resettle in Florida and start a new defense hub with a specialty in cyber arms. Also maybe try to improve the food situation.

We should encourage Israelis to forget about their ancestral homeland and resettle in Florida

I floated even more ambitious plan couple years back:
https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/147305?context=8#context

Sounds like the MCRN from the expanse, except they're Israeli now. Seems like a recipe for Earth-Mars perpetual cold war.

There's a latam conspiracy theory that the IDF is scouting for a plan b settlement in western argentina. Maybe that's why Peter Thiel is looking to get an argentinian citizenship, he's trying to get on the ground floor of Neo Jerusalem 2.

The slavs have a conspiracy theory about them doing this in Ukraine. Everyone has a conspiracy theory about the Jews building backup Israel on their land.

If they would still be subject to U. S. immigration law, it's a non-starter. In the event that some other country starts persecuting its Jewish population, they can move to Israel under Chok ha-Shvut; a homeland under the jurisdiction of the goyim would be tempted to refuse them entry on the usual grounds, as occurred prior to the Second World War.

Should the Hutu and Tutsi have ethno-states? What about the Yazidi, or the Kurds? The Rohingya? The Germans? Different Amerindian groups across the Americas? Given that Israel exists now, and destroying it would be a humanitarian catastrophe, I think it aught to continue. At the same time, I don't think being subject of a genocide and/or ethnic cleansing entitles a group to an ethno-state in perpetuity. That interest has to be balanced against other interests.

I don't think being subject of a genocide and/or ethnic cleansing entitles a group to an ethno-state in perpetuity.

A single incident does not justify a perpetual ethno-state; however, the Jewish people have been subjected to a long, long, pattern of persecution, and were unable to escape after the implementation of modern border controls in the wake of the First World War. If we were still in the Phileas-Fogg-era system, or Nathan Robinson's ideal, Am Yisrael might be a bit less worried, knowing that they could always take their packed suitcases to somewhere more tolerant.

Jewish people have been subjected to a long, long, pattern of persecution, and were unable to escape after the implementation of modern border controls in the wake of the First World War.

Jews are also one of the oldest ethnoreligious groups in the world, and I'm pretty sure by far the oldest that has spent most of it's time as a merchant minority. Once you take those factors into account, I don't think their history indicates that they are currently or in the near future will be predictably in more danger as Jews than other merchant minorities. Armenians are in the same boat, if you look at the past 100 years.

I specifically mentioned a lot of the above groups since many of them faced persecution in the very recent past. The Hutu and Tutsi were butchering each other as late as the 2000s in the Congo. Rather than try and force a Hutu or Tutsi ethnostate, you have largely had a stop to the massacres by changes in government policy and culture instead.

Asking for an ethnostate is a pretty big ask; it's asking for all people in a given territory to either leave or be ok with the state and culture being made to service the needs of a particular group of inhabitants of an area often at the expense of other inhabitants. While sometimes it is the lesser of two evils, such as some post WW1 and WW2 settlements, it's always at best the lesser of two evils. Typically the other evil has to be brutal international war and/or crimes against humanity.

Asking for the establishment of an ethnostate, rather than just the maintenance of once which is a far more moderate and reasonable ask, is so extreme that if Israel didn't exist today I would object to it. Given Israel already exists, it should not be destroyed since that would require great tragedy, but it doesn't have a right to exist in perpetuity given all that goes into an ethnostate. No nation does.

it doesn't have a right to exist in perpetuity given all that goes into an ethnostate. No nation does.

That's a lot of assumptions you have there. One could more easily make the argument that, granting that nations exist and have a right to exist, ethnostates must by necessity also exist to actually enforce that right.

If they would still be subject to U. S. immigration law

By "We should encourage" I assume dr_analog meant passing legislation that would explicitly make immigration from Israel easier, not just sending them postcards with a suggestion.

passing legislation that would explicitly make immigration from Israel easier

Not good enough. Jewish people fleeing anti-Semitic persecution, under Dr Analog's proposal, would still have to play Mother-May-I with a Gentile immigration officer legally empowered to say "The persecution you're fleeing isn't that bad, and we think you might be moving for economic reasons/you might cost us more money than you pay in taxes/you had minor brushes with the law in your youth/the records where you're coming from are incomplete and we can't be certain that you aren't a murderer; therefore you're going back whence you came, and if you end up in a mass grave, we'll make a bunch of really sad movies about your plight in fifty years or so."

I don't understand why you're now on round two of using any possible ambiguity in a statement to imagine a needlessly weaksauce implementation. The legislation could look like anything up to and including automatically granting American citizenship to any Israeli who asks for it, or indeed just granting all living Israelis American citizenship upfront. Is this likely to happen? No, but dr_analog was not trying to predict the future: the original post was simply "We should…".

Granting US citizenship to current Israeli citizens would be legally easy (politically nightmarish and unthinkable, but that's different question) as one time special and exceptional act that does not have to conform with normal US immigration laws and practices.

@Celestial-body-NOS was talking about non-US, non-Israeli Jews. Israel was established as safe haven for all Jews in the world. To duplicate this, US would have to also establish Law of Return and credibly promise to keep it for all eternity.

In such situation, US immigration authorities would now have to decide who is a "Jew" for the purpose of return, easy to understand why even the most philosemitic person would not want to go there.

Is that not what we’ve been doing?

If Israel is our ally, our greatest ally, then they can't be allowed to do this to us. They can't insult and undermine the clear foreign policy of the POTUS and be allowed to do so.

Replace "Israel" with "USA", you funnily enough get how it has felt to be a European for the past year and a half. Trump has instituted an era in which alliances are no longer treated with the sanctity they deserve. If betraying your ally has marginal benefit to you, then that is the done thing.

While I am not in favor of the war continuing, part of me does see this as karmic justice. Finally America gets to know how it feels to be shafted by your "greatest ally".

I mean, totally see your point, but there's nothing really comparable here.

If anything the closer parallel would be the Nordstream 2 bombing.

Even without Ukraine, there is the following:

  • Punitive tariffs.
  • Threatening the invasion of Greenland.
  • Invading Iran without first discussing with the EU nations, causing economic damage and chaos without even giving them a chance to prepare.
  • Having it in the national security strategy that they want to create regime change in Europe.

You can see how these points might come off like a betrayal of sorts, right? And this took me like 10 minutes to think of. I am sure there is more stuff that I am forgetting about.

Threatening the invasion of Greenland.

Again, completely blown out of proportion. They wanted to buy it, the talk of invasion was media and politicians hyperventilating.

Invading Iran without first discussing with the EU nations, causing economic damage and chaos without even giving them a chance to prepare.

A bit of a dick move, but hardly comparable. The war didn't sabotage some bespoke diplomacy Europe was trying to get done, and the US does not depend on European aid the way Israel does on the US.

Having it in the national security strategy that they want to create regime change in Europe.

Europe has literally censored American speech in order to influence US elections, tried to prevent an interview with the current president taking place on an internet platform, and sent activists to help campaign for his opponent.

Again, completely blown out of proportion. They wanted to buy it, the talk of invasion was media and politicians hyperventilating.

It is always interesting to me that two people can see the same event unfold and come to wildly different conclusions. As far as I can tell, Trump clearly indicated he would take Greenland by force if necessary, and only backed down because several NATO countries showed support for Denmark. Had they not done that, had Denmark stood alone, no alliance would have kept the American military from waltzing in and taking the island.

That interpretation makes no sense to me. Denmark would have as much luck holding Greenland without NATO backing as with it, if Trump actually wanted to take it by force. You can also compare that situation to cases where he actually did use force, like Venezuela and Iran, and see there's essentially no overlap.

It was horrible diplomacy, and there's lots to criticize there, but acting like the invasion was imminent and it was repelled by the resolve of Europeans bravely standing together is cartoonish propaganda.

Trump pushes and sees if he gets pushback. I think the likelihood of taking by force was low - maybe 10% - but NATO sending troops moved it from 'yeah, could be easy, could be fun' to 'going to be a headache'.

I think 0.01% probably more reflective

Obviously, no military in the world could prevent a determined US from taking Greenland. The cost however, of taking it by force changed massively for the US. The threat of sanctions from a combined EU + potential war with the other NATO countries made Trump see military action as no longer worth it.

Yeah, and the consequence of the US and Ukraine blowing up Nordstream 2 was that Germany did…absolutely nothing, cozied up to Trump, increased their contributions toward the NATO target and sent more money to Ukraine.

Did some amazing new investigation happen that I missed? We don't definitively know who bombed Nord Stream. Even on Wikipedia there's not a hint of evidence that the US was involved (and Wikipedia will never miss the chance to skew an article against America). Don't try to sneak propaganda through by presenting it as common knowledge.

Yes, Der Spiegel did a very in-depth story on how Ukraine did it, which seemed to at least pass the sniff-test.

Thanks for the article. There does seem to be good evidence that Ukraine did it. But this topic was discussing US-Europe relations, and again, there's nothing in the article that suggests that the US was involved. (Your link mentions the Seymour Hersh article that @peanutgallery linked, but only as a half-baked conspiracy theory.)

As regards the that topic, Spiegel did a follow-up suggesting that the US had some forewarning of the attack but ultimately was not involved in supporting the Ukrainian operation.

It seems plausible at the minimum that the US is not being forthright, but one might actually see that as being in solidarity with Germany, which itself has, as far as I know, declined to officially point fingers.

The American establishment media reporting of yesteryear went beyond 'the US had some forewarning of the attack' and went to 'the US forewarned Germany of the attack.'

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We also had a NYT expose right before the Germans announced, iirc.

There was an article three years ago by a famous journalist Seymour Hersh three years ago (https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/22973-us-and-norway-blew-up-the-nord-stream-pipelines-seymour-hersh.html). Of course, he was dragged through the mud for it and it's all circumstantial evidence, and I guess the story got buried if it's not in wikipedia, but there are tons of people who don't believe the US government version of the story.

Ah, yes, the 'so sensitive we won't tell the US military because they're overseen by Congress, so we'll tell other parts of the US military that are also overseen by Congress, and they'll tell foreign partners who need to tell their Congress-equivalent' theory.

Also had some novel theories on how air-dropped torpedoes worked, and a cartoonish fixation on avoiding simple solutions.

Replace "Israel" with "USA", you funnily enough get how it has felt to be a European for the past year and a half. Trump has instituted an era in which alliances are no longer treated with the sanctity they deserve.

I'm not seeing it. The Greenland thing was blown way out of proportion, and other than that what have done that's such an insult? Slowed down the gravy train somewhat?

The US has demonstrated that the Europeans are useless, which is certainly quite insulting. While previous US Presidents generally treated the form of the alliance with sanctity, the Europeans allowed the substance of the alliance to wither.

It still blows my mind that European NATO countries can do things like "miss NATO spending goals and fall behind on military readiness for years despite years of increasingly pointed US signals that there will be consequences for this" or "make preparations to literally give away territory that is crucial to American defense preparedness" and then act as if Trump arrived ex nihilo and his actions have zero context and make no sense besides a wanton betrayal for no reason.

It still blows my mind that European NATO countries can do things like "miss NATO spending goals and fall behind on military readiness for years despite years of increasingly pointed US signals that there will be consequences for this"

But they had already started ramping up spending before Trump's election and were continuing to do it after he was elected. That's the point - yes, Europe has been failing in several aspects, but it's been in the process of improving on those, and the result has been a continuous stream of piss on the face by the Trump admin nevertheless.

"make preparations to literally give away territory that is crucial to American defense preparedness"

The Chagos Islands? That's the UK specifically, it's not within the purview of (other) NATO (countries) to intervene in this affair. Why take out complaints with the UK on Denmark?

That's the point - yes, Europe has been failing in several aspects, but it's been in the process of improving on those, and the result has been a continuous stream of piss on the face by the Trump admin nevertheless.

For better or for worse, I think that Trump's first term probably did a lot to set the mutual opinions of Trump and the Europeans. And in Trump's first term, the number of NATO allies meeting the 2% GDP benchmark doubled, which sounds great until you realize it was from 4 to 8. Then there was a regression in the Biden-era. The numbers really didn't improve dramatically until 2024 and 2025. So while it's true that Europe has been in the process of improving, it seems pretty clear that it took a literal invasion of a European country to get that going.

NATO spending, of course, is far from the only complaint the USA has with European NATO countries; whether it's cracking down on free speech or installing Chinese telecomms or what have you.

You can counter with various things that the US of A did, such as Gitmo - that's entirely fair, but my point is that Trump didn't emerge out of a vacuum. And frankly if the Europeans have a lot of issues with the US of A, and the US of A has a lot of issues with Europeans, a split seems pretty natural. But whenever Trump suggests this, some people treat it like a massive stab-in-the-back for no reason, despite it being a pretty natural development.

The Chagos Islands?

No, Denmark agreed to let Greenland secede, which throws existing NATO security arrangements up in the air if it's followed through on. It's very natural for the US of A to want to acquire Greenland under the circumstances.

Obviously the Chagos deal is also non-ideal for the US.

Obviously the Chagos deal is also non-ideal for the US.

The Chagos deal was pushed by the US deep state during the Biden administration. That is perfectly compatible with the idea that the deal is non-ideal for the US, but not with the idea that it is a shocking betrayal of the US by the UK.

Perhaps it's a shocking betrayal of the US by the US!

So while it's true that Europe has been in the process of improving, it seems pretty clear that it took a literal invasion of a European country to get that going.

So what? The point is that Europe is doing what the US claims it wants Europe to do and the result is, well, all the things that Trump has done.

I'm all for Europe distancing from US and developing independent capabilities, and have been so even before Trump, but it's also obvious that you can't just achieve a neat split where both commit to doing their own thing without the other - the recent events have made clear that whatever US does globally will in any case have a huge impact on Europe (and what Europe does of course also has some impact on the US).

Regarding Greenland, it's odd to argue for Greenlandic independence aims (without anything concrete about the details vis-a-vis relations to the Western alliance, or anything else really, on the table), considering that Trump admin itself attempted to present itself as some sort of an opponent of Danish colonialism on the island and what have you.

the result is, well, all the things that Trump has done.

Press conferences and speeches?

it's also obvious that you can't just achieve a neat split where both commit to doing their own thing without the other - the recent events have made clear that whatever US does globally will in any case have a huge impact on Europe

Almost any sovereign nation-state can do things that have a huge impact elsewhere; it does not follow then that all nation-states must be part of a military alliance.

I actually do tend to favor either NATO-but-with-division-of-labor or a slow, coordinated split, but the mere fact that Europe and the US impact each other isn't necessarily an argument for NATO, and it certainly isn't an argument that NATO is necessary.

Regarding Greenland, it's odd to argue for Greenlandic independence aims (without anything concrete about the details vis-a-vis relations to the Western alliance, or anything else really, on the table), considering that Trump admin itself attempted to present itself as some sort of an opponent of Danish colonialism on the island and what have you.

I am not sure what argument you're making here. Certainly it seems quite plausible that the US would be a better colonial overlord (or partner, or whichever term you prefer) than the Danish, so I don't see anything particularly odd about the argument. That's different from saying the argument is convincing - the devil is in the details, and the people of Greenland would be ill-advised to simply jump ship without looking before they leap.

To be fair, what Trump did to his NATO allies was much less of a betrayal than the move Israel is now pulling. If he had invaded Greenland or made a deal where Putin gets to invade the Baltic countries without US interference, that would be in a much more similar ballpark.

The US has been waging war against Iran on behalf of Israel. Israel considers Iran to be a threat to their existence (not entirely without reason, though at this point who is ultimately responsible for the bad blood between them is akin to the hen-egg-problem).

If you call on your big brother to help you in a fight, that means that you are conceding control of the fight. Of course, a smart elder brother would refuse to fight for a younger sibling just itching for blood, and consider that their sibling will likely throw their interests completely under the bus, but that does not make Israel's behavior less bad.

No, a smart big brother would take the fight and then beat little bro himself. You don't leave him out to dry.

There aren’t a lot of options. Burgerland and Israel got their assess kicked, the news just isn’t reporting it. The “laundry fire” on the Gerald R. Ford was so bad that there are now serious concerns the ship will never sail again. Basically every American base in the Middle East has been glassed. The final kicker was when most of IAF got unexpectedly blown up on the runway a few days ago. This was in exchange for attriting about 10 percent of Iran’s missile stockpile. Your only options are Operation Overlord 2.0 or nukes.

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Speak plainly. Whatever you're doing here, the humor (if that's what it is) is not landing and posting ridiculous statements to see who bites looks like trolling.

I genuinely don’t understand how that’s not speaking plainly.

Okay, if you're genuinely claiming that every American base in the Middle East has been "glassed" and most of the IAF has been destroyed, do you have some evidence? Those are extraordinary claims.

Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show

The Washington Post, May 7, 2026

*The End of the American Way of War?

“The Iran war has called into question the feasibility of the American way of war. For decades, the United States has premised its national strategy on the ability to fight using forces forward deployed close to enemy territory”

The Brookings Institute

Anon, this stuff is literally all just in the news, it’s just that no one is paying attending. Almost every major US base in the Persian Gulf has sustain serious damage (article 1) to the point that the military is concerned that they won’t be able to effectively forward deploy to the Middle East anymore (article 2). That’s just two articles I was able to find with five minutes on Google. There’s hundreds like this.

The Iran missile stockpile:

U.S. Intelligence Shows Iran Retains Substantial Missile Capabilities

“Secret new assessments say Iran has operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting that its military remains far stronger than President Trump has asserted.”

The New York Times, May 12, 2026

The IAF thing:

Ramat David Airbase hit by missile fragment during Sunday's Iran escalation, IDF confirms to 'Post'

The Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2026

The article is currently claiming “minor damage” from a “missile fragment” but it was enough to cancel Israel’s planned 200 plane strike. Remember, this “minor damage” stuff was the party line we were hearing about the USS Gerald Ford for months.

And in any case, you are misapplying the rule to speak plainly. I’m not required to soooooooooource you just because you don’t like what I’m saying.

Those claims are rather different from your OP.

If you genuinely believe what you are saying, no, the rules don't require you to cite sources for your belief that the moon is made of cheese, or lizard people are running the world (though it is reasonable for people to ask for sources). However, I remain skeptical that you were being sincere in your claims that US military bases have been glassed and the IAF has been destroyed on the runway.

However, I remain skeptical that you were being sincere in your claims that US military bases have been glassed and the IAF has been destroyed on the runway.

You might disagree on the degree. But look at the communications coming from Trump, Vance, Rubio, Netanyahu and Ben Givr. Does it sound like things are going really well to you? My version of events matches the chatter a lot better than the one where Iran is collapsing in two weeks.

You might disagree on the degree.

Yes.

The degree of difference between "The US and Israeli militaries have taken more damage than is being reported" and "The US and Israeli militaries have been all but wiped out" is.... significant.

Aircraft carriers totaled, the entire IAF destroyed on the runway, multiple US military bases "glassed" (was this meant to imply that Iran literally nuked them, or was it just hyperbole?)... that is rather different than "Some missiles did more damage than they are admitting."

You claimed the first, then fell back to the latter when pressed.

Rarely has a more textbook case of Motte-and-Bailey been displayed here on the Motte.

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My understanding is there's a significant minority who believe that the US losses have been heavily understated. Generally this is claiming hundreds or thousands of US deaths, a missile strike disabling Gerald R. Ford, and the loss of dozens or hundreds of planes on the ground. The US has shown they are downplaying losses at least somewhat, so this view is somewhat understandable.

The biggest reason I don't think this is true is that if Iran really did this damage, then they would never stop talking about it.

While you're at it don't forget to mention how Iran also sunk 5 arleigh burke class destroyers

Link?

It's joke, on several occasions Iran claimed to have scored direct hits on us destroyers

Where's the satellite (or other) evidence that "most of IAF" was destroyed on the runway a few days ago?

The “laundry fire” on the Gerald R. Ford was so bad that there are now serious concerns the ship will never sail again.

The Ford is currently in Norfolk. If the US had the ability to transport it there from Greece without it sailing, then I seriously doubt Iran is winning the war.

...anyway, on that note, the Ford is currently in Norfolk, within camera range of passing ships. Should be pretty trivial to determine if she's been hit by antiship missiles.

Where's the satellite (or other) evidence that "most of IAF" was destroyed on the runway a few days ago?

Indisputable video footage of the entire Israeli air force being destroyed here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7FwDMzIbZrg

This has got to be one of my favorite YouTube genres.

It certainly takes a level of shit-eating grin to embrace hyper-nationalist military propaganda to the point of parody. Makes me feel commonality across cultures and ideology.

That pales before the footage of the mighty T-59 tank!

Average Broken Arrow experience

So, what now?

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

Same way everyone else in the world navigates problems with earstwhile partners: talk shit when frustrated and marginal costs are low, hype bromides of commonality when you want something from them and/or they are doing what you want, and recognize that it goes in both directions. No one is above being undercut.

For the rest of people who are trying to understand the world, don't over-rely on the propaganda of either narrative swing. Such people would understand the swings are themselves exaggerations serving a moment rather than literalisms, and not try to enforce arbitrary rules based around cultural chauvenistic hyperagency about how they 'allow' an ally to behave... not least because the first thing to understand about the world environment is the principle of anarchy, and part of that is the limitation of your own state's agency over others. Allies are based on coincidence of interests, not expectations of compliance to non-existent standards.

This feels bad.

Was there ever a period that you felt good about the middle east that wasn't also a period you would have felt bad if you paid more attention to the middle east?

Taking this question seriously, I would say the period where it looked like the Oslo accords might work counts (lets say from the Madrid Conference in 1991 which started the Oslo process to the start of the Al-Asqua intifada in 2000).

I wouldn't say I actually felt good about the situation during the period between about 2005 and 2012 when it looked like Israel under a Kadima-led government might be able to meet their security needs by building walls, rather than needing to oppress Palestinians on a day-to-day basis, but it was a lot less dismal than the Israel-Palestine conflict normally is.

This is a good attempt at a good faith period for optimism. I think it could have been undercut by information available at the time, but I do respect you for trying to answer it seriously.

My opinion is that I don't mind a bit of hypocrisy in politicians, or flip-flopping, or even outrigh lying sometimes. It's part of their job.

We don't want politicians to be perfectly honest, consistent, straight shooters. If they were, countries would go to war over basic disagreements, and then just stay at war forever because no one could ever forgive or forget. The job of the politicians is to smooth over those disagreements however possible, and words are cheap.

So for the past few months, Trump and Vance have been saying pro-Israeli and anti-Iran stuff, because they were allies with Israel against Iran. Now they're trying to make peace with Iran and get Israel to stop fighting, so they're saying anti-Israel and pro-Iran stuff. That's just how the game of politics works. But as far as I can tell they would never actually do anything against Israel, and the deal with Iran is still basically "stop bombing, allow shipping through Hormuz, all other details TBD."

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

The first question is whether the US actually has a problem. Right now Trump is making nice to the Iranians and disparaging Israel, but he did the same thing to both sides (alternately) when trying to negotiate a peace between Ukraine and Russia, so it likely doesn't mean much.

Obviously the Iran deal isn't as good for Israel as the US forcing regime change in Iran, but Israel will have to live with that. The US agreement in the MOU for its allies to not attack Lebanon is worth about as much as past (or future) Iranian assurances not to fund terrorism -- that is, nothing at all. Obviously Israel does not feel bound by the MOU -- they are not in fact a party to it. And the US is not going to attack Israel to ensure the territorial integrity of Lebanon. Israel will continue to act as a loose canon, and the US will continue to occasionally pretend to be upset while being able to do nothing about it, and Iran's choice will be to blow up the deal or live with that. I suspect they'll complain but live with it.

While I wish to be hopeful this could be the beginning of the end of Israeli control over domestic politics, I'm still quite wary. Trump is very unique. In a "only Nixon can go to China" sense, perhaps only the egotistical chaos beast with a base single mindedly devoted to him rather than a consistent idealogy can ignore Israel. The Israel idealogues are simply outgunned by the massive blob of Trump fandom. They tried their best to sway him but the chaos beast did what it does best, and betrayed them out of boredom and frustration. He could probably even threaten to invade Israel like he did with Canada and Greenland and his base would barely move, just like the latter.

But this is a Trump thing. He radically reshifted politics and turned up the entertainment dial from a 5 to an 11. Consistent clear and reliable policy is out, doing whatever you want whenever you feel like it is in. But can the next presidential hopefuls capture that magic? I doubt it. There's a 60% chance the 2028 pick is either Vance or Rubio. Rubio is an obvious "return to establishment and respectability" pick, and Vance is a slimy little worm hanging out of Trump's ass instead of really pulling in people much by himself. Vance seems to view anti Israel politics as the future, but will he stick with that when the winds blow back? Well, he hasn't stuck with much else so I'm doubtful.

But there is that ~40% chance it is someone else previously unseen. Maybe that someone else will be a Mega Trump who is even more entertaining and chaotic, in which case it depends on their own unique beastness in how much the Israeli interests can sway him. Or maybe it'll be a return to form politician who disavows the increasingly flailing Trump approval rating and doesn't need any swaying from the Israel side to begin with. Who knows.

And that's of course assuming the Republicans win again in 2028, which is the less likely result. The Democrats are waking up far more to Israeli abuse of politics (even if the older holdouts cling on to their cries of antisemitism) to the point that supporting Palestinians has become a culturally embedded sign of moral goodness as Armand Doma points out. I can't imagine they're going to be too friendly to Israel. But again you never know.

What exactly is Israel supposed to do? Not make a fuss about jihadist Muslims killing their citizens because it will mess up Trump's "peace deal" (read: humiliating capitulation virtually unparalleled in US history)?

If Trump wants to prostrate himself to the IRGC, he's free to do so, but when the Israelis said "Never again", it wasn't just an empty statement.

What's really funny is that Israel's enemies don't understand that it's America that protects them from Israel. The dissolution of the friendship between the US and Israel is not good news for Iran, Syria, etc.

Not make a fuss about jihadist Muslims killing their citizens because it will mess up Trump's "peace deal"

Yeah, that's how peace deals work. Hezbollah has killed 4 Israeli civilians since the 2025 Gaza ceasefire. Israel has extracted more than enough Lebanese blood to get even.

The dissolution of the friendship between the US and Israel is not good news for Iran, Syria, etc.

Yes, I know that if Israel had their way they would turn the greater part of the Middle East into Gaza. The United States has an interest in preventing any more refugee crises. It would be good for Israelis to keep in mind that American foreign policy has many settings below "zero aid".

It seems rather obvious that the Iran war was Israel's idea, and they managed to sell it to Trump.

There are ways they can respond to the odd missile which do not blow up the world economy. Blow up a few more pagers or whatever.

but when the Israelis said "Never again", it wasn't just an empty statement.

Come on. How many thousand Jews does Iran murder in their camps per day, again?

Sure, Oct 7 was bad, and Iran is partly to blame for arming the murderous thugs known as Hamas, but it was still just a terrorist attack, not a genocide. Personally, if I were arguing for Israel's side of things, I would stay the hell away from genocide rhetoric, because the party most likely to have crossed the line from ordinary war crimes to that is not Iran.

For example, they are demolishing villages in Lebanon. The aim is clearly to forcibly displace the native population. Arguably, that is already genocide.

Personally, I have very little sympathy for the objective of keeping Iran away from nukes. "A Middle-Eastern country run by bloodthirsty, slightly genocidal religious nutjobs has nukes" is something we have survived before. If we can get Iran not to develop nukes with some modest effort (e.g. Obama's deal), I am all for it. If we need to wreck the world economy to prevent it, it is simply not worth it.

What's really funny is that Israel's enemies don't understand that it's America that protects them from Israel. The dissolution of the friendship between the US and Israel is not good news for Iran, Syria, etc.

We will just have to see, won't we? I am a bit skeptical that their current strategy of jeopardizing the opening of Hormuz will endear them to the autocrats of the gulf states. Israel does not have the manpower to occupy Iran. I think it is fair to say that cowing Iran through conventional air power has been tried extensively. Extending the bombing to civilian infrastructure will not help.

Perhaps they can nuke Iran, but at that point the gulf autocrats might feel obliged to do something about them for appearances sake, even if they secretly welcome them decimating a rival regional power. Their population does not get to vote, but Israel killing a few tens of millions of Muslims might still incite some anger.

Last year, Israel weathered the Iranian drone and missile attacks very well in part because the US and their regional allies were shooting them down. If the US decides that the crazies bombing each other in the ME does not concern them, things might turn out differently.

On a longer timeline, being cut off from US military tech will definitely hurt Israel. How many different weapon systems can a country of nine million citizens develop by themselves, really?

Personally, I have very little sympathy for the objective of keeping Iran away from nukes. "A Middle-Eastern country run by bloodthirsty, slightly genocidal religious nutjobs has nukes" is something we have survived before

Well, you can survive a decent number of rounds of Russian roulette, too. Which isn't to say I'm an Iran hawk, but "very little sympathy" seems extreme.

Let me rephrase that. I think nuclear war -- even though probably not an x-risk -- is really bad and we should try to avoid things which make it more likely, including reducing the number of warheads, disincentivizing states from obtaining nukes and incentivizing nuclear disarmament.

Suitable tools to do that are diplomacy and sanctions. And first and foremost, international law. Sure, like all law, it is just make-believe, but in practice it works well enough. Denmark could afford a nuclear program, and if they felt that the Gemans were going to invade again sooner or later they would have one. Instead, they get to live in a pacified Europe where the marginal security offered by nukes is simply not worth it.

I feel that Trump and Bibi are just accomplishing the opposite. Now, I am fine with using Stuxnet to destroy Iranian centrifuges. Bombing their enrichment program is probably already an undue step of escalation (especially as it likely used intel learned from UN inspections), as is assassinating their nuclear engineers. Killing their head of state in a botched attempt at regime change sends a terrible message.

Any country in the world which has less cozy relations with Trump than the Saudis will notice that recently, one head of state got kidnapped and one got assassinated by him, and how it was basically impossible for these states to hurt the US militarily. They will also notice that North Korea was not targeted, and conclude that this likely has something to do with their nuclear weapons.

The Iran debacle showcases that in a world full of strongmen, you want nuclear deterrence. Any supporter of the Iranian regime who was on the fence wrt nukes will conclude as much -- Iran can't squeeze the balls of the world economy through Hormuz forever.

Netanyahu seems like a foolish hero of some Greek tragedy who wanted to thwart the prediction of some oracle and thereby causes it to be fulfilled. His and Trump's violent disregard for international law have made the world less safe everywhere.

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!

Not say this? For starters? Israel was actually doing pretty well with restraint and measured responses right up until Oct 7th when they (somewhat understandably but very foolishly) let Hamas provoke them into an orgy of violence that makes them look like just another band of murderous ethnic psychos.

Oct 7th definitely gave Israel a blank check... for Gaza. What the fuck did Lebanon do?!

I'm almost hoping that tweet by Israel's defense minister is misreported or... something. But it's all too believable regardless just from Israel's actions. Absolutely unhinged shit.

Yes it’s always lucky when a conveniently timed terrorist attack gives you an excuse to do exactly what you already wanted to do anyway. Russia, America, and William Randolph Hearst would approve.

It’s like someone who wants to blame Britain for WW2 since they were the first to declare war on the other party. But the fact that the bell only rang after the first punches were already thrown on the continent is irrelevant.

What the fuck did Lebanon do?!

Fail the foundational responsibility of a sovereign state, which is to maintain a monopoly on organized violence within their territory.

When your territory becomes the basis of extended artillery campaigns against your neighbor as part of another conflict, one of you is going to lose sovereign control as a result.

I repeat the quote by their defense minister

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!

Even taking everything you said at face value, does that quote not seem completely insane? I'd expect some diplomatic concerns about pacifying a restive region, not bragging about committing a second genocide.

I repeat the quote by their defense minister

I note your quote of the defense minister does not address, or refute, what Lebanon did (or failed to do), which was the topic of your question and it's direct answer.

Even taking everything you said at face value, does that quote not seem completely insane? I'd expect some diplomatic concerns about pacifying a restive region, not bragging about committing a second genocide.

Even if I took that quote at face value, it is neither bragging nor is the situation in Lebanon a genocide unless you scope the term down to the level routinely noted as undeserving in other contexts- including the context of the previous Hezbollah artillery campaign from southern Lebanon that led to mass regional evacuations of jews from northern israel, i.e. technically genocide by ethnic cleansing definitions if you stretch it to a small enough area. I don't mind if you want to call the Israeli dislocations of border villages genocide, so long as you consistently apply the standard to the dislocation of Israeli border villages by the Hezbollah artillery campaign, but consistently applying the standard provides the answer to your earlier question.

Which returns to the point of what Lebanon- or at least the state of Lebanon- let its sovereign territory be used for.

nor is the situation in Lebanon a genocide

It isn't actually, but if we took "all of Lebanon must burn" at "face value", it plainly would be. It's concerning, and in the modern world, unusual, for war rhetoric to aspire to the literal obliteration of the enemy nation - I think it's fair to describe such claims as genocidal aspirations even if the actual war strategy is less insane. (And yes, Hezbollah and Hamas plainly harbor genocidal aspirations with regards to Israel.)

It's concerning, and in the modern world, unusual, for war rhetoric to aspire to the literal obliteration of the enemy nation

It's unusual for Europeans but probably not as crazy in that part of the world. The problem, of course, is that the Israelis want to be seen as Europeans/Westerners not like the sort of demented terrorists who run around saying they'll obliterate Israel.

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What the fuck did Lebanon do?!

Lebanon was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and couldn't and basically allowed them to continue as is. Post-Oct 7th they started shelling northern Israel and forced many people to evacuate.

Essentially, they declared a (limited) war in support of Hamas and refused to back down until the situation in Gaza was resolved. America invaded Afghanistan for similar reasons.

No, they did not attack Israel until Israel attacked them first. On October 8th they fired some volleys at Lebanese territory, in the Shebaa Farms area, which is definitively not Israeli territory. These were symbolic attacks, on their own territory, which did not even harm any of the invading Israelis who had built illegal outposts there. Israel responded by attacking Lebanon.

  1. How do you think America would respond if Mexico just carried off their women in a Bronze Age raid and Canada started launching rockets at them?
  2. That wasn't the only attack, they fired other rockets at Israel within the week.

They played a high risk strategy by convincing Trump to start the war in the first place (yes alongside long term Republican hawks) and telling him it would be quick and easy. There was never public support for this war, or any real attempt to build support. Now they've run into the obvious problem that the public doesn't want to pay any cost to support this war, so Trump has to back down before the mid terms to retain some popularity. All of this is the predictable bad case outcome of Israeli strategy to start the war in the first place and they can either take the L or double down on continuing the war and undermine their relationship with the Republican party after completely torching their relationship with the Democratic Party.

I'm not sure why you wrote a serious response to OP assuming he was arguing in good faith; he explicitly called for Pro-Palestinians and anti-semites to help him feel less bad about Israel responding to rocket fire. I don't think he's interested in non-groyper perspectives.

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People are allowed to post pro-Israel diatribes and they are allowed to post anti-Israel diatribes, so long as they follow the rules, though in my opinion, the OP was not really a diatribe so much as honestly asking for opinions.

Unlike you, @FiveHourMarathon does not have a history of bad faith posting. You do have a history of antagonistic call-outs and you've been told repeatedly to stop doing this. Banned for five days this time.

I don't like calling out people who attack me, especially when I've been blocked, but if we let this kind of discursive spiral continue, we're going to end up instituting woke speech norms on a forum explicitly existing to avoid them.

For what it's worth, I read

So plan trusters, antisemities, pro-Palestinians, shitlibs, anyone.

as obviously tongue-in-cheek. After all, very few here self-describe as antisemites or shitlibs. The fact that you did not include a slur for the people taking the side of the Israeli government (genocide apologists?) does not mean that you did not want them to reply, and the banned poster was not arguing in good faith.

I'm glad someone saw the humor in picking four absurd descriptions, but not laughing at my jokes isn't a problem really. The problem is that there's this tendency on certain topics here to attack someone's character when they are brought up, it's not a problem with your argument it's a problem with you. To engage with this argument requires me to go on the defensive and show my philosemitic bona fides in order to talk about Israel without getting dismissed as antisemite. The woke purity spiral has shown us that this never stops at the first, but continues until debate is nothing but purity tests.

What exactly is Israel supposed to do? Not make a fuss about jihadist Muslims killing their citizens because it will mess up Trump's "peace deal" (read: humiliating capitulation virtually unparalleled in US history)?

Do they want to continue receiving, in Vance's estimation, two thirds of their defensive weapons from the United States?

That doesn’t really answer the question. Israel has no good strategic options and didn’t even before October 7th. Hope that eventually something happens in Iran and that Hezbollah doesn’t want to fight and that they can hold off every attack and Hamas never develops rockets that can breach the Iron Dome and that the Houthis don’t get more aggressive with missiles and that they continue to maintain a huge technological / military advantage.

A lot of hope, in other words. October 7th showed how weak Israel was and is to ground invasion, it’s a largely flat country with no strategic depth, surrounded by civilians who - regardless of what their leadership may or may not believe or say - want to kill and pillage its inhabitants and take their land. The only winning move was not to play, but that was decided a long time ago.

I'm amazed that Israel, which did a fantastic job of marketing itself for decades and has huge and obvious access in the media, has suddenly decided to ignore optics and surrender totally in the face of social media.

As you were posting what you were posting below on November 9, 2023, there were already groups decrying the Gaza genocide. Israel had no reason to worry about optics, as the optics were not at all under its control.

What marketing campaign would you suggest?

I posted this November 9th, 2023

Hamas didn't do this in spite of the Israeli response, they did it to provoke the Israeli response. Hamas' end game was exactly this scenario: torpedo the Israeli-Arab rapprochement created by the Abraham Accords for another generation, so that the can gets kicked down the road another 50 years.

The reaction of much of the global public, especially the Muslim population, to the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is not something that Israel is in a position to change. Braying like a jackass that the human terrain isn't acting rationally to your standards is as useless as politicians who complain about the voters.

The ground invasion is what Hamas wanted from the start, it's a trap. It's sad to me that so many people are so brain poisoned from watching too many Hollywood action films that they see a trap and say "Well a real hero goes in anyway and figures out a way."

The Israeli Arab rapprochement isn’t the risk here. Ultimately the Arab world might destroy Israel, sure, but it’s not the primary threat. MBS still doesn’t care, the domestic population was pacified, there were actually surprisingly few violent pro-Palestinian protests in places like Egypt and Tunisia, the UAE obviously remains onside for Israel. The risk is that the Shiites (primarily in Lebanon but to some extent also Yemen and Iraq) and Hamas alone can make Israel unliveable by first world standards.

By the way, I don’t think the evidence has borne out your speculation on Hamas’ plan. Everything I’ve seen suggests they really did believe they’d storm through to the West Bank and ignite a popular uprising among Palestinians and possibly even Israeli Arabs, and at that point Hezbollah would probably have finally joined in with Iranian permission (which they probably didn’t initially have), and that would have been immediately existential for Israel, fighting on three fronts including internally, everyone throwing everything at them. It wasn’t a PR move.

So Trump started a war with Iran and failed to achieve his ends, folded, and is now trying to buy his way out by forcing the Hezbollah situation to a stalemate again (when they were supposed to be disarmed decades ago, talk about cucked) and because Israel makes some noises via their most demented minister Israel is cucking the United States?

What about the nation whose nuclear program Trump claimed to have destroyed, whose civilization he threatened to extinguish who he's now backing down to and paying and helping maintain the efficacy of their proxy and basically making it clear that blackmailing the world via the strait is now a-okay? Their cock isn't in his mouth?

Question: what's to stop Hezbollah from taking a breather and going back to shelling Israel and demanding nothing be done lest their ally close the strait again? Who'd be to blame then?

I mean, on some level this is delicious karma for Israel. They put all their hopes on the most transactional and changeable man in politics and somehow expected him to take a massive L before the midterms when he could just cut and run and are reaping what they're sowing. Trump isn't Bush, he isn't just going to hang around because global economy/rules-based, liberal international order/blah blah.

But the shamelessness here in the pivoting and scapegoating on the Trump side is intolerable.

What about the nation whose nuclear program Trump claimed to have destroyed, whose civilization he threatened to extinguish who he's now backing down to and paying and helping maintain the efficacy of their proxy and basically making it clear that blackmailing the world via the strait is now a-okay? Their cock isn't in his mouth?

Question: what's to stop Hezbollah from taking a breather and going back to shelling Israel and demanding nothing be done lest their ally close the strait again? Who'd be to blame then?

Not really part of the question here. How we got here and what decisions Trump made are kind of irrelevant. At some point it's the stated policy of the POTUS and to allow a putative ally to undermine that policy isn't acceptable if they want to remain an ally.

because Israel makes some noises via their most demented minister Israel is cucking the United States?

Israel isn't just making noises. They're continuing the war in Lebanon and stating that they intend to continue the war in Lebanon regardless of its impact on the stated policy goals of the USA.

They're continuing the war in Lebanon and stating that they intend to continue the war in Lebanon regardless of its impact on the stated policy goals of the USA.

They are obviously lying. Israel had excuses to invade Lebanon since forever, and it seems very likely that the Hezbollah attacks which provoked the current excursion were in turn a response to the attacks on Iran.

Wrecking the peace talks is the real objective, not an unintentional side effect.

Not that this detracts from your point.

Not really part of the question here. How we got here and what decisions Trump made are kind of irrelevant.

Ridiculous. It has everything to do with it, and this sort of pivot into fake grievance due to actions people chose to take is not irrelevant.

No. It's really irrelevant to the relationships involved.

The President of the United States has made a decision, and for Israel to try to undermine that policy is to make itself an enemy of the United States. It doesn't matter if that policy is wrong or the result of bad decision making or even illegal under US law. Those are problems for the USA to work out on its own.

Either we are the alpha in this relationship or we aren't. It's embarrassing to me as an American if this is let pass. It doesn't matter if we're wrong, we've validly decided to be wrong.

we've validly decided to be wrong.

Uh. Wow. First time in my life I've seen this sentence. I didn't know that was a thing that could be valid.

If you can't see the difference between validly decided and correct, then you can't understand the ideas of sovereignty, rule of law, human or any other rights.

Without validity, if error has no rights, then we live under anarchy and tyranny.

I think you are right. Sort of similar to the way a child (or person of any age, come to think of it) can be entitled to retain an emotionally based stance on something while having no ability or willingness to verbally explain why.

It's a hilarious sentence though. Certainly new to me.

No. Not similar to that at all.

Do you really not understand the idea of respecting anyone?

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No. It's really irrelevant to the relationships involved.

A pretty solipsistic view of relationships. The reality of the situation and the particular problems your ally faces are irrelevant to the relationship you have with them? You don't think that it matters, if only as an extenuating factor, whether your betas are resisting because they want something non-essential or whether it's because it really is a serious matter for them?

Even the most blinkered tyrant doesn't assume that telling someone to jump and telling them to jump into a chasm are the same thing.

I think you mean irrelevant to the power dynamic.

It's embarrassing to me as an American if this is let pass.

That's my point! You're already being embarrassed! If anyone should be bracketing the Lebanon issue it's Iran. They should be glad to get a deal with America. Instead America is so feeble apparently that Iran can basically bully it into not just surrendering in the Hormuz theater but in Lebanon/Israel.

But I grant that this whole thing is a good representation of Trumpian foreign policy: madman theory without the nerve, deference to enemies who will fight back combined with not just disrespect to allies but a sort of put-upon, aggrieved attitude about American honor as if America wasn't already casting it aside with great abandon under his rule.

Israel probably won't hold out against the US for long, it is too dependent. And they have fucked themselves here in a permanent way imo, so you can enjoy that. But to me this whole thing is displacement: you can't actually bring your enemies to heel so you look at the other guy and act like that's where the humiliation is coming from.

I do wish I could see how the realists who've been praying for this sort of break with Israel/approach to Iran reacted upon finding out that fucking Trump and Vance are the ones parroting their talking points now though.

I’d like to see America exercise complete control over Israel. We have their billionaires, we have their Haredi baby factories, we are holding their militant neighbors at bay, and we should be justly rewarded for this. America should completely take their tech sector. We should not allow a single tech company in Israel; they should be coerced into coming to America to do business. This is something that it’s in the realm of possibility as America becomes increasingly anti-Israel, though not anytime soon. I don’t see a good reason why we shouldn’t treat the country as a kind of serf state, whose citizens only work to support the prosperity of America. What are they going to do, go to Han-supremacist China or FSB-controlled Russia? They are trapped with us. If we can manage to wrangle back control of the country we can really exploit them for everything they have.

Why wouldn't they go to Russia?

Impossible to penetrate Russian society today. FSB goes after oligarchs like Browder, they are heading further in the direction of Christian nationalism, etc. If they flee to Russia they are surrendering their influence.

Don’t imagine it would be much different than the 10,000 or so some odd Jews that live in Tehran or Shiraz, in Iran. People misunderstand just how delicate and fragile Israel is, especially when much of its economy is held up by its secular, high-tech development, driven forward by only a few thousand or so rugged and enterprising pioneers inside the country. It only takes a small amount of Jews to exit the country before things get really bad for them. The remaining ultra orthodox are mostly unproductive as far as their relevance to the modern economy goes.

I thought there were some changes to get the ultra orthodox men into jobs and even drafted military service. It should be axiomatic as they grow into a larger percentage of the Israeli population, otherwise Israel would be reliant on women to do all the fighting and other typical male work.

The story’s more complicated than most people let on. The values of secular Israelis aren’t really all that much different from those in the developed Mediterranean European world. The Haredim though, follow their spiritual leaders (who encourage the men to take up Torah study all day and women to embrace the life of a housewife). The divide means that the secular Israelis mostly align themselves with the basic democratic practices of the state whereas the Haredim are socialized by communal activities. Something like half the men don’t participate in the workforce, and the women not just being prevented from doing so by the community, couldn’t do so even if allowed due to their pregnancies. So they’re a community that lives off the expense of the rest of productive society. Funny to think as an anti-Semite would that these people live as a “parasite” on the “host” society. As an Arab friend one mine once hilariously and stupidly put it: “They’re Israel’s beaner problem. They’re worthless to society, lazy as shit, get on welfare and push around baby strollers all fucking day.” And as the growth of the Haredim keeps increasing, it increases the burden on the welfare system that enables their existence in the first place, leading to a breakdown in Israeli society that has bothered political parties and secular Israelis for a long time.

While that is a raw deal for the secular Israelis, I feel that if push came to shove and the core undisputed lands of Israel were under threat the men could be convinced to mobilize if their homes were literally being torn down and their women kidnapped, spiritual leaders be damned.

Are there not also some disaffected Haredim that self-convert to the secular Israeli way of life? If so, they serve as a bonus pool of population that can slowly add to Israel's workforce. I think only the subsidies need to be cut for the Haredim to stop being a net drain, and in an emergency it seems like they could be tapped to repay all the subsidies they have soaked up over the years.

Forcing the Haredim to secularize would probably ruin Israel's democracy though, they would obviously never vote for it. It would be a one time action of a dictator.

I think your analysis is apt but it’s highly unlikely to happen or play out like that.

Today the Haredim do play a role in the Israeli government and some had an interest in secular institutions, and then there’s the anti-Zionist minority that see the existence of Israel as a blasphemy (the most famous of them being the Neturei Karta in Mea Shearim). It was originally founded by a Rabbi from NYC that immigrated to Israel but never became a citizen (and saw the state as a Palestinian occupied territory) and he was against the state because it wasn’t a product of divine intervention via God’s decree. The state has to be established by the Messiah through his Messianic qualifications. If the Haredim are largely not interested in secular matters because they’ve devoted their lives to God, that’s not something you can just go in and easily reverse. Some few people may leave here and there. The rest are going to fight you tooth and nail. You saw this in 2024 when the ultra orthodox were fighting with the police outside of army bases in Israel. Their Supreme Court ruled the draft exemptions they previously had were illegal and the military anticipated something like 70% of them wouldn’t show up for their first day. The Shas party and the leader of the non-Hasidic Ashkenazi community ordered them not to go to the draft office.

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That's if the influential Jews physically flee to Russia. Why wouldn't they just invite Russia in to offer a marginally less shitty deal than the one you're proposing USA should offer them? Or China, for that matter.

Many Israeli are Russian Jews anyway (or just Russians with very thin Jewish ancestry).

They could offer Russia a buffer of tech that's not completely pozzed with Western values yet is better than the feeble attempts of Russia to create its own internet, for example.

Why wouldn't they just invite Russia in to offer a marginally less shitty deal than the one you're proposing USA should offer them?

I think traditional Russian allies in the ME are Syria (under Assad, mainly) and (wait for it) Iran. If Russia started bombing Iran, they would need to find someone else to build their drones against Ukraine, and I am not sure if Israel has the production capacity.

Russia and Iran are allies of convenience. Russia also likes a close relationship with the Gulf. Russia also sold out close Iranian allies Armenia. Putin pursued and expropriated some Jewish oligarchs, but also plenty of gentile ones, and there are still plenty of Jews he allows to remain rich, or indeed in other important roles in the state (politicians, propagandists, etc).

Russia also sold out close Iranian allies Armenia.

'Sold out' implies getting something in return. Russia was not bribed into its position in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, it was impotent and subsequently ignorred/bypassed.

'Sold out' implies getting something in return.

We do not know what, if any, backroom negotiations and deals, whether official or unofficial, were involved (unless Mottizens are much more elite and well connected human capital anyone could imagine).

And if they decide to do that, we can expropriate the wealth of their loyalists in America and allow Israel’s neighbors to invade with the help of our military intelligence. Why shouldn’t we do this? The threat of losing the land traps them into doing what we want.

Aside from the problem that you can’t confiscate the human capital, all you can do is take the property produced by it, I don’t imagine they’d just idly sit around and do nothing about it.

It does not seem to me that the super high IQ Israelis are the same as the super tribalistic Israelis. If we allocate tens of billions into paying and retaining the high IQ portion, then it concretely benefits America and is cheaper than defending Israel.

I can search for the data on this later, because I’m going off memory of what I read here (and by proxy to IQ), Israel’s primary export locomotive has been its high-tech sector. They’re renowned for that achievement all over the world. But something like only 3% (I think; I know it’s less than 5%) of all employee positions in Israel are in those high-tech manufacturing fields; and that accounted for nearly 1/2 of Israel’s entire exports back in 2015.

What this means by implication (and Israeli elites themselves have written about this, and their worry of a brain drain) is they’re very worried about conflicts and political sensitivity to certain issues that could cause Jews who came to Israel to turn around and emigrate out of the country back to the one they came from. In 2023, the presidents of some Israeli universities wrote a warning about the governments plan to weaken the judiciary system could substantially impact academia, resulting in a further brain drain of intellectual talent. And even worse, one of the knock-on effects of this (there are other factors lending themselves to the same problem as well) is that it’s the most educated segments of society that will end up bearing the highest tax burden; which just adds to the economic (and political) polarization. Then add on to that that something like 10% of Israeli citizens have dual citizenship, which makes it easy for them to leave at the first sign of trouble. Israel is in a very precarious situation.

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