Full statement:
The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.
Biden is betting he loses more supporters if he doesn’t defend Israel. I hope beyond hope that he’s right, but I’m not so sure.
The larger problem is that Biden doesn’t seem capable of nuance. This is a complex situation, and it would be cool to have a leader who can acknowledge that Israel has the right to exist, and has also gone too far in it’s war on the Palestinian people.
There are no heroes in this story. Nobody occupies the moral highground. Innocent blood is being spilled, and the people suffering have no agency in the conflict. It’s just politics and victims of political violence.
It’s not nuanced at all.
Israel is committing genocide. We should not be supporting genocide.
Nobody except maybe a terrorist organization is saying Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.
Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. The levant is a diverse area with a rich history, and Israel looks to genocide the people that are the result of that and replace them exclusively with a single group of people that haven’t been the majority in the area for thousands of years, if ever. Jewish people deserve security and self determination but Israel isn’t it.
This is untrue. Theocratic apartheid ethnostates don’t have a right to exist and lots of people are saying it
I was saying boo-urns
And Iran. And all of Hamas’s many supporters throughout the world.
It’s a safe bet, by a lot, and the calculus doesn’t really change no matter how much nuance you apply, because with every statement you’re always trading some nebulous number of single-issue pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist voters for a much larger group of pro-Israel/Zionist voters.
Then you have folks like the OP who are essentially working as a thinly-veiled propaganda arm of Hamas/Russia/etc., and it really muddies the signal-to-noise analysis on the issue.
It’s a problem for Biden, but there’s no winning. Trump doesn’t have the problem only because he’s not the incumbent right now, so he can hem and haw and try to deflect from the reality that he’s much worse on the issue–like every other issue–for people who align even a little bit with any policies left of center.
So Biden just has to basically take the hit, because the Democrats care about functional government and stable diplomacy and foreign policy relationships, whereas the GOP, as the party of dysfunction, white grievance, and ethno-religious fascism, isn’t saddled with the same considerations. Biden actually tried–and partially succeeded–in slowing down arms shipments to Israel, and the GOP threw a shitfit in Congress because they want those arms shipments: Their donors want them, and they can hang it on Biden’s neck no matter what, because people like OP will continue to go to bat for them.
I’m not exactly sure it’s a safe bet. Hillary was a safe bet over Bernie, right? A few votes in the right areas could tip the election either way. The fact that he can’t find a way to appease both the people who are against genocide and the people who are pro-Israel is worrying to me.
You are definitely right about Trump not having the same problem though. However, Trump could also say literally anything on the issue and still get support because nothing he does actually matters.
It’s a safe bet. The number of voters Biden loses if he were to change positions enough to appease any authentic anti-Zionists (as opposed to agitprop elements, for whom no position would be good enough to silence) would dwarf the number of voters he might gain. That might not mean he gets reelected, but hell, changing positions at all would cost him votes. Like I said: all choices are bad. It would have been a political disaster for any president, because every voter who cares enough about it to be a single-issue voter is entrenched enough to not be swayed at all unless the other side is completely alienated.
He can’t find a way to appease both sides? Well what does that look like? What’s the position that appeases both staunch Zionist voters and the subsection of the anti-Zionist protestors who vote? That’s not a rhetorical question. Every other US politics-adjacent post on Lemmy recently has been OP or one of their comrades criticizing Biden for his position on Israel, and I’m genuinely interested to hear someone articulate the nuanced position that Biden should supposedly take that he’s currently failing at, and how he’s supposed to do that and not immediately lose all prospects of reelection. FFS, even characterizing this as a division between “pro-Israel” and “against genocide” is already throwing nuance out the window. From where I’m sitting, Joe Biden has as nuanced a position as he can, because the nature of foreign relations in the Middle East in 2024 is itself nuanced and, for US interests, profoundly precarious. If you want nuance, you better be prepared to swallow a healthy dose of realpolitik alongside it, and that’s something that as of yet I’ve not found any noble armchair advocates and red-shadowed “patriots” willing to do.