[alt text: a screenshot of a tweet by @delaney_nolan, which says, “Biden/Harris saw this polling and decided to keep unconditionally arming Israel”. Below the tweet is a screenshot from an article, which states: “In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.”]

  •  DdCno1   ( @DdCno1@beehaw.org ) 
    10•6 hours ago

    Some background on why exactly Israelis were unhappy with Biden/Harris:

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-shows-israelis-massively-favor-trump-over-harris-in-us-election/

    The Israeli public should have realized that Biden actually helped them by not agreeing to every one of Netanyahu’s whims, yet here we are.

    I’ve seen far too many people parrot uneducated talking points like “America is arming Israel unconditionally”, which has been very much not the case under Biden. Why are people ignoring that he, just to name one example, withheld arms deliveries and threatened more restrictions unless more aid shipments were allowed into Gaza and the humanitarian situation there improved? I’m generally pro-Israel, even though I detest Netanyahu, I believe that the wars against Iran’s proxies are justified (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all attacked first without provocation and none of them are anything other than murderous terrorist groups), but I have no issues with these kinds of demands.

    I fear that without Biden/Harris, the sparring match between Israel and Iran might get much more heated than it is already, potentially even escalating into an all-out war. Trump has the potential to cause a great deal of instability in the entire region (which would impact the rest of the world as well) and dramatically increase the suffering of ordinary Palestinians, Lebanese and Israelis (as well as potentially Iranian civilians as well) by antagonizing Iran, by removing demands from the Israeli government to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, by performing stupid stunts similar to his administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli territory (which will only inspire terrorist attacks and hostile acts from Iran), pulling back on pressure on the Houthis (because Putin might demand it), etc. pp.

    World politics are messy, but at least under Biden, one could always assume that there was a reasonable, experienced politician surrounded by knowledgeable experts trying their best. They didn’t always succeed and even where they did, the results were often imperfect, because we are not living in a perfect world, but there was a certain amount of reliability that one could count on. The second Trump term on the other hand will be a severely cognitively declining Trump surrounded by sycophant yes-men stumbling his way through and creating a new idiotic crisis every week, this time without the kind of “old-school” Republicans in key positions that prevented Trump from following his worst instincts the last time around. This applies to both the current wars in the Middle East and every other aspect of foreign and domestic policy.