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So apparently after 40-some odd years, US military aid to Israel is ending. (Or at least Trump announced he is ending it. Arguably it's a decision for Congress)
In any event, this is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, even though I am generally pro-Israel I am against US military aid to Israel. With its advanced economy, Israel doesn't really need it, it gives ammunition to various people who like to claim that (AIPAC; the Jewish Lobby; da Jooz; etc.) control everything, and it allows the US to exercise a lot of control over Israeli military spending and sales.
Unfortunately, I am not optimistic that those who harp on the issue of this military aid will dial down their complaints about Israel. It seems to me that the military aid is more of an excuse to attack Israel as opposed to the actual objection.
I would analogize these criticisms to Trump's famous they/them attack ad. Spin doctors may have claimed that the ad was really about budgetary priorities, but it was pretty obvious that in reality, Trump was capitalizing on widespread American opposition to gender ideology.
So I guess my question is this: Among people who complain a lot about US military aid to Israel (and in fact there have been complaints here just in the last week or so), and assuming that the aid is stopped, to what extent will this satisfy them?
As one of the critics of US support of the Israeli government you mentioned, I will admit that the direct military support is just the tip of the iceberg. Argumentatively, it is convenient to point to the tip to argue for the existence of the iceberg, because that part is rather hard to dispute while the parts below the water line are less obvious.
I think US support for Israel takes many different forms, among them the direct military aid, preferential access to US weapon systems, the US using diplomatic pressure to intervene on Israels behalf with third countries, liberally using terrorist designations to cut their enemies from the global finance system, direct military interventions on their behalf, use of their UNSC veto to block resolutions against them, disincentivizing individuals and third countries from boycotting them economically, sanctioning the ICC, use of military means to defend them in case of attack.
I believe that there could be an Israel worth defending, one which is genuinely pursuing a two-state solution with the moderate Palestinians, demolishes the illegal settlements in Area C and whose military operates with Western thresholds for civilian casualties rather than Russian ones. However, this is not the Israel which the majority of their electorate prefers, clearly.
Israel is unfortunately not the only militarist-expansionist country in the world, Russia is clearly worse in scale
by orders of magnitude. But with Russia, the free world is doing its best to exert economic pressure to dissuade them from violating the norms of international law, with Israel, the free world is enabling them.What I would prefer to see is the US-Israeli relationship sink to the same level as the US-Uzbek relationship. If they refrain from any atrocities for a while, I am fine with selling them the same military tech the US would sell other non-aligned states in the region. If they do not, they should get sanctions. Make it clear that any beef they have with their Muslim subjugated populations or neighbors is their own beef, not a Western one -- though there are doubtless very good reasons for Westerners to have a separate beef with countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia over their human right records.
AIPAC forgoing the direct military aid is clearly damage control. Scott Alexander has argued persuasively that AIPAC is very effective as a lobby organization. I have no doubt that as long as they control Congress, they will remain very effective in continuing to enable the Israeli government's current expansionist agenda. The fix seems to be to make their brand so toxic that it becomes net negative for candidates to receive funding from them.
Worse? By orders of magnitude?
"By 31 August 2026, OHCHR had recorded 70,950 civilian casualties in Ukraine since 24 February 2022: 17,257 killed and 53,693 injured"
Israel has killed about 70k Palestinians out of 2.3 million living in the Gaza Strip. To match Israel in magnitude, Russia would have to kill at least 913 thousand Ukrainians. Even if you add Ukrainian combat losses (let's say, 212k KIA+MIA), that's only 230k, or just 25% of the reference target set by Israel.
As an utilitarian, I would compare the total death tolls rather than the average. Someone who murders 10% of a population of 10M is even more evil than someone who murders 10% of a population of 1M, in my view.
I will totally grant you that 70k vs 230k is merely a factor of three, so "half an order of magnitude", not "orders of magnitude", and I have edited my post to reflect that.
I guess an Israeli apologist might say that comparing Gaza to Ukraine is an apple to orange comparison in any case, because the Gaza war is simply punitive in character rather than a territorial expansion, and the apples-to-apples comparison would be their Lebensraum project in the West Bank vs the Ukraine war. (Ok, perhaps they might not use exactly that phrasing.)
To which a Russian apologist might reply that this comparison is unfair because unlike the Palestinians, the Ukrainians are fighting back (with Western support) rather than quietly being ethnically cleansed, obviously suppressing an enemy armed with NATO tech will be bloodier than suppressing an enemy armed (partly) with stone slings.
Yes, but not because of anything you said: the nature of the war environment in Gaza & the methods of Hamas are both significant drivers in the amount of civilian casualties.
There's also a general ignorance on the scales involved. Many people can point to the 70k fatalities estimate. Almost no one cares to remember or cite the overall size of Hamas in Gaza pre-2022.
(Answer: ballpark 80k, around half of that being the militant wing and half the civil-administrative supporting the militant wing. This does not include other militant groups involved in the fighting.)
70k is a big five-digit number. However, the estimates of number of combatants killed also focus on the 5-digit number range.
Even if you lowball that to 10k combatants, a 1-to-6 militant-to-civilian ratio in dense urban warfare where the militants actively seek to leverage civilian cover isn't exactly breaking historical norms, even before bystander cover propaganda strats.
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