It’s all because everyone involved is so mortally afraid of losing their position, and of being harassed mercilessly by the pro-Israel lobby, that they are unwilling to show even the slightest sign of backbone. I seriously doubt most of the people responsible for making decisions like this actually agree with those decisions, but who knows? The effect is the same.
If the pro-Israeli lobby is so influential, well, it is what it is, being a crucial voting block in the US is a good survival strategy, although how long that will hold I don’t know, but for now, being against military help to Israel is like being anti-gun, a good way to be a former politician, except in some very specific places…
No argument with that. The real question though, is why do we accept that? We are in effect saying “it’s ok, your job is more important than any moral stand you might take.” Which, come to think of it, is the American way I guess. We are a society that elevates making money to the highest of social virtues, to the extent that we define social good as working for someone else to help them make more money. And we value that over doing things that actually benefit society, but which don’t pay much or at all.
Do the voters want to end military support to Israel all that much? Seriously. Maybe here, and increasingly in many places, and it’s certainly possible that the next generation will see supporting Israel as being very similar to supporting any other “iffy” country, but in 2024, in meatspace, how many voters actually make the choice to go for politician A over B over their promise to stop arming Israel?
Rather few would vote for someone because they opposed arming Israel, but a lot would probably vote against someone who opposed arming Israel. That is probably the case. And it highlights the problems with democracy–the will of the people is sometimes immoral, wrong, and the exact opposite of what you should do, unless you believe that majority opinion is itself the highest moral position.
The clear intent of the system, the way it was set up at least, is for elected officials to use their judgment and make the best decisions they can, balancing the will of the people with what they personally view to be right. It was never intended that elected representatives would simply act as puppets of the electorate–that’s how a direct democracy would work, and we quite intentionally have a much more indirect system.
It kind of worked as long as the job of being a representative of some sort was more of an honorific and a burden than a cash cow or a path to personal power. That didn’t last too long though, and it wasn’t long before people began valuing the power and as they used to say emoluments of being a politician over their duty.
All of which is immaterial to today’s problem probably. Realistically, because people have been bombarded for decades now with pro-Israeli propaganda, and because demonizing Muslims and Arabs has been normalized for at least as long, anyone who tried to interject any balance or nuance into the discussion gets pilloried (and primaried).
The trouble is we have no way of actually knowing this. But the reality is that a PAC with a lot of money is willing and able to money bomb opponents of any candidate that won’t toe the line of a foreign government’s policies. A foreign government that is probably committing genocide. That’s fucked up. In the end, it isn’t about support of the people. It’s about the money. The money has utterly corrupted our system.
Interesting, long article.
We saw it was about 10-12% of Dem Primary voters, and likely not many others.
AIPAC is the most feared group in American politics now that the NRA has largely self-destructed.
Also, deep down, we only care about our ingroups. That article above shows how hard it is to rise above that.
Bartov is a noted historian of WWII Germany, among other things. That article is IMO a very good analysis of what is happening not only in Israel, but to some extent in the USA as well, at least in terms of the psychological aspects of Trumpism.
It also pretty demonstrates why we should not expect much change any time soon in Israel, sadly enough.
It’s a really good piece. One thing that aligns in my personal experience is the shift in attitudes. I’m had people here in the US saying some morally bankrupt stuff to me. And these are folks who’d say that clearly that folks like Smotrich or Ben-Givr are total trash.
But now they sound like Smotrich and Ben-Givr 20 years ago. That’s what Hamas saw. They looked into Israel and saw the latent racism and the possibility they’d be able to unlock it into the wide open. And that’s what they did.
When you lower yourself to the level of your opponents, as Israel in some ways has done, you play into their hands.
I cannot think of a historical case where taking the low road actually worked, in the long run. I don’t mean forgoing violence–WWII was nasty but from the Allied side sadly necessary–but things like Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and now Rafah, etc.
Are there examples where taking the “high road” has worked?
I made a banner back when I was on social media with a quote that said “When they go low, we go high” and then there was a picture of the door to the Führerbunker, and another picture of the guys on top of the Reichstag planting the Soviet flag.
I felt very clever.
I don’t know how True Scotsman we want to get regarding the height of the road or what the point of it is, but the US and Commonwealth forces generally treated opposing civilian populations better than the Germans or Japanese in World War 2, even accounting for the fire/atomic bombings. I think you could make a connection from that to the successful integration of those two countries into the postwar liberal international order largely led by the United States.
There’s also a fair bit of evidence that the current US military is way better at avoiding civilian casualties than anybody else, but that’s sort of damning with faint praise and I don’t know if it really makes a difference diplomatically.
Plenty of times where taking the low road worked. I’m assuming you are living in America right now, yes? 
But you might not be considered the good guy when you spend all your time doing low road shit in plain view, at least in modern times, and if you need allies, it might be problematic in the future.
I am very much in support of what the Allies did in WWII, but I think we sometimes whitewash what happened.
Obviously there are the cases of firebombing civilian population centers you mentioned, or the other sorts of large scale atrocities associated with the total war scenario that occurred in WWII. But even beyond that, we can look at how the allies conducted themselves in the peacekeeping aftermath.
While the allies helped the axis powers rebuild, I think most folks are largely unaware of the sorts of insurgent activities that occurred in axis countries in the immediate post-war period. For instance, German insurgent groups operated in Germany for quite a while, attempting to thwart allied activities in the region (to what end, I have no idea, given how utterly destroyed Germany was at that point). But what I think is notable, is how the allies responded, because it was generally in a manner that is relevant to the recent situation in Gaza.
The allies absolutely engaged in collective punishment of the civilian population in countries like Germany, when insurgent activities took place. Note, I’m not talking about the really massive collective punishment, like when the Soviets expelled all the german speakers from Poland after the war. But rather, I’m talking about how the allies responded to the (largely ineffective) Nazi Werwolf insurgency. The soviets did all kinds of terrible things to german civilians, but I’m not talking about those as the Soviets were basically Nazis by a different name already and committed infinite attrocities. But even the US and UK forces were imposing collective punishment on german civilians in the form of fines, curfews going well into 1948. The general civilian population was punished for the actions of the insurgent terrorists. In immediate aftermath of the war, that collective punishment likely involved much more brutal atrocities against the civilians, especially from the soviet side.
Eisenhower expected far worse insurgency than we actually encountered, and specifically made it so that he wasn’t responsible for maintaining living conditions in Germany. In the actual aftermath, the insurgency never really materialized in a significant form, but the US still threw over a hundred thousand Germans into prison camps. The UK kept hundreds of thousands of German troops in the Rhenwiesenlager for months after the war, specifically to combat the werwolf threat.
I think that’s definitely true, in that historically it’s not really something that most militaries have given a shit about at all.
And really, the “high road” taken in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where we actually cared about civilians, then kind of made those same civilians a target for insurgents. Even today, it’s common that the US be blamed for the deaths of civilians killed by the very folks we fought against. So, killing those civilians became a victory for those forces, giving them soft targets that they could hit without having to deal with actually hitting US Military targets, and then the US would get blame for it.
Insurgents didn’t murder civilians under Saddam Hussein, because he didn’t give a shit, and would just murder even more civilians. So, in some ways, taking the “low road” can be extremely effective. It’s like, if you’re a monster, then you remove the effectiveness of terrorist atrocities as a tactic to use against you.
By worked, I mean resulting in a sustainable, long-term solution to a real problem. None of the bad things we have done have yielded any positive long-term results, at least as I see it. I suppose if you are one of the 1% and amoral, yeah, I guess it worked.
Sure, as others have noted. We’re not talking about perfection or purity. We’re talking about a system resistance to doing evil, rather than a systemic toleration of it or even an embrace of it. Most long-term solutions that work are not built on mounds of skulls.
Which does call into question the entire existence of many countries, including our own.
It looks fairly sustainable from over here, I’m pretty sure the descendants of the people who inhabited all the land that are the current USA aren’t going to get it back.
Stuff like this seems unlikely to make things better, for example:
“It is better that they explode and not the soldiers,” one of the soldiers speaking to Haaretz recalls being told by his commander who justified the practice.
Haaretz says the IDF has not been using terror suspects, but rather innocent civilians who it detains specifically for this practice.
The report cites several soldiers who have witnessed the tactic regularly used in Gaza.
Haaretz says the practice has been used across Gaza in recent months, and senior officers, including the chief of staff, were aware.
What are those examples? We setting up WWII post war as the “high road”? Because like I pointed out, the allies did a lot of stuff that would be considered war crimes.
For the recent actions in Iraq and Afghanistan… We got mired in those conflicts for 20 years. In Afghanistan, ultimately we failed to establish any lasting effect. Are we looking at them as a victory we would pattern future actions upon?