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I think ultimately, Israel and Palestine is such a scissor statement that I don’t think there’s much chance of finding a middle ground. I think at this point, whether we admit it openly or not, the crisis is down to which country will exist. Either the Jewish State of Israel will control all the land or the Arab state of Palestine will. Both sides and their supporters understand this because there has never been a long term real peace. The ceasefires have mostly ended up being the time when everyone reloads and upgrades their weapons.
The degree to which this realigns American or Western European politics depends mostly on how important and long lasting the current war becomes in the West. If this is a minor blip on the road to Jewish conquest of Gaza and the West Bank, then I think it’s going to be hard to unite people around hating the Jews. If it becomes a potential flashpoint leading to wider conflict, I expect it to be something that overshadows other points. If the biggest issue in the next two election cycles are economic, or law and order, or similar, I don’t see Jews being a trump card simply because most people will be worried about food costs or safety or things like that to worry about Jews fighting in a tiny corner of the globe that has few natural resources, and unlikely to ever affect them personally.
If this becomes a Left Thing like South Africa was in the West, I think the Jews are screwed long term in Israel. Once it basically becomes a meme they all support, it's hard to stop them because they are so relentless about it plus they have the whole Muslim world on their side too.
The question is will that actually happen. I don’t see how it does, because at the end of the day, there’s a contradiction in the sense that on the one hand never again and on the other is from the river to the sea (code for eradication of Jews in Israel). You cannot both say that the holocaust was Terrible when Germany did it and then repeat the exact same things the Germans did and calling for the death of Jews with intellectual integrity. The difference at least in Israel is that this time the people calling for the death of Jews are unwilling to do the deed themselves and thus will sadly shake their head as they die at the hands of people that the West refused to let them fight back against.
Sure you can, if your intellectual basis is "oppressor-oppressed dynamics." Just argue that in the Holocaust, Germany was the oppressor and Jews the oppressed, but here, Jews are the oppressor and Palestinians the oppressed; that the relative position is the moral factor. That the point of comparison for "calling for the death of Jews" now isn't "calling for the death of Jews" then, but "calling for the death of Nazis" then, because both are calling for violence against "the oppressor" in the name of defending "the oppressed." (I did once, back in college, have a conversation with someone whose position on death camps and genocide was "no bad tactics, only bad targets," and that whether such things are immoral — or not — depends entirely on who is using them against whom and whether or not the latter group "deserves it.")
I don't agree with this view and its "more oppressed than thou" hierarchy, but at can, at least sometimes, be a consistent one.
Out of morbid curiosity, who, in this someone’s mind, “deserves it”?
In short? Right wingers.
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