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Notes -
I don't fully understand the Israel conundrum.
The ideological stake over the issue hasn't been divided merely between the left and right, but within each aisle too. In recent years, it seems as though liberals have fallen out of love with them and many of them believe that (on principle) Israel shouldn't exist. While others believe in the two state solution. The mainstream media has been louder about the IDF's excesses in occupied territories (like this one, a cursory search). Tankies over at GrayZone and related websites are convinced that western mainstream media is still defending Israel. I don't get this position, are they arguing that western media isn't criticising Israel enough or that the media is silent altogether? The right seems to be divided too, many of them enthusiastically support them while others don't like that billions of dollars of taxpayer money is sent to Israel every year and they're convinced that their lobby in the US is most supportive of liberalism and progressivism and the war machine.
My questions are what drove the evolution of these views into what they are, exactly how influential is the Israel lobby in the US, why do tankies believe that Israel doesn't get criticised in the media, are the liberals starting to decouple from Israel, are there any other reasons besides the treatment of Palestinians that the Israel question takes up so much oxygen in the foreign policy room?
I think Americans will have a sort of a crisis of faith when they understand that this isn't about them – that they are no longer important enough to pander to; and their changing sentiment is largely explained by this fact and their subconscious sense of being disrespected.
Israel itself is changing, growing, militarizing, becoming more right-wing by the day (their conservative right-of center being on the level of fringe Western right-wingers), and less invested in maintaining the sympathetic image of a scared, scarred victim of abuse by overwhelming power and numbers. The modern Israeli identity is their own, decoupled from Western culture, regardless of what anyone says about «the only democracy in the Middle East»; they've learned what works well, and are in the process of discarding the rest. There are still mighty interest groups doing their jobs, think tanks dedicated to nipping substantial anti-Israeli efforts like BDS in the bud, the stigma of Antisemitism in general is still powerful enough to cover Anti-Zionism (and the accusation of «white supremacism» or other adjacent smears against isolationists is only getting more life-ending)... but ultimately modern Israel doesn't care quite as much what Americans or other nations think, and will care almost nothing in the coming years. Have they defunded those gaudy outreach programs with sexy IDF girls yet? They might.
Right now Israel is preparing for war. Washington is making somewhat noncommittal noises, but the truth is, it's just unable to do more than postpone the decision, drag their feet with demanded supplies. And if they tarry too much, it will be self-defeating. Israel is resourceful, they will make do with tools it has or can produce or procure by other ways – only further decoupling. All those complaints about $3 billion that right-wingers like to air – they're no doubt annoying to Israelis, and will be thrown back in American faces when this annoyance (and the political benefit of bringing it up) outweighs the utility of that chump change.
Does this look like Netanyahu's cartoon bomb moment?
Democrat or Republican, if you identify with the Hegemonic Superpower Maintaining Rules-Based International Liberal Order, the paternalistic big brother watching over a seed of a fraternal culture in the hostile environment – this must sting.
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