@mike_kraft the US is basically energy independent, a net exporter post the fracking revolution. but unless we prohibit exports, we are exposed to world pricing, so mayhem in the Middle East means we pay more. it's not Saudi vs not Saudi. the US provides the security architecture for the whole region from the Arabian Penninsula to Egypt through Jordan to Iraq, north through Israel up to but not including Lebanon and Syria. 1/
@mike_kraft withdrawal risks letting the whole region become like Lebanon and Syria in the worst case, or letting rival powers (one of or some combination of Iran, Russia, and China) provide the force-backed stability the US now provides. the status quo is superior in my view to either alternative. one might hope stable, genuinely independent, locally legitimate Westphalian states wld spontaneously emerge in current borders, but I don't think the weight of experience suggests that's likely. /fin
@phillmv yes. i just think it odd we're having a whole conversation about Presidential immunity in which Democrats are like "of course we'd never be for that", but the serial murder stuff never gets a mention.
@BenRossTransit @Alon @ikentcpel @djc i agree antizionism is often blurred, usually into its worst forms.
the basic antizionist position to which many not-right-wing Americans, including many American Jews, are gravitating towards concedes that "Jewish and democratic" is too great a contradiction, and so advocates a secular liberal state without religious or national favoritism.
that position may or may not be practical, but it is not advocacy of anything ethically horrid.
@BenRossTransit @Alon @ikentcpel @djc in the United States, the only mainstream zionist position is a two-state solution.
from an American perspective, Netanyahu is objectively antizionist.
he has certainly done more to discredit zionism than any other person in history.
should Obama be prosecuted for ordering hits, including of American citizens?
(drone assassinations overseas see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/10/us/23awlaki-memo-reupload.html which actively discusses the question, after the long FOIA memo. "we believe the AUMF's authority to use lethal force abroad also may apply in appropriate circumstances to a United States citizen who is part of...an enemy organization". the same target's son was eventually killed too, purportedly as collateral damage to the assassination of another target.)
@Alon @ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @djc the conversation in which he said his main stupidities was in January, long before the much larger protests now. he’s a dude from one campus (these protests are now a national phenomenon), made a “leader” long before the scale of participation is what it is now. he’s nothing more than a well picked nut. you can find others too. but they are not typical.
@Alon @ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @djc many of the protesters are antizionist. that is the position from which they are protesting. if you hold dear and deeply the opposite position, exposure to any of what they are doing may be painful. that is quite distinct from racist or antisemitic, however. a growing fraction of American Jews is antizionist. a remarkable accomplishment of Israel’s leadership.
@Alon @ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @djc no. protesters in general have little organizational association with groups that coordinate and organize them. ANSWER was involved in many anti Iraq War protests. protesters do not have to answer for them. and even US Trump voters and Likud voters do not bear the sins of the leaders they vote for. i voted for Obama, who innovated and routinized assassination. he is a murderer. but i am not.
@ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @Alon @djc absolutely, tarring Americans with Trump’s pathologies while he was President is a form of unjust collective responsibility akin to racism. even Americans who for whatever reason elect not to disavow their President when some third party demands it. Netanyahu is a grifter and war criminal, but Israelis don’t inherit that status, though he is their leader, even if they won’t disavow on demand.
@BenRossTransit @ikentcpel @Alon @djc (oh and leaders are often nuts. they are almost always weirdoes, the opposite of representative. it’s one of the paradoxes of “representative democracy” that the elected class may be called upon to represent, but they can never be representative.)
@BenRossTransit @ikentcpel @Alon @djc absent the epithets, they should be welcome to. and the controversy surrounding this particular thread is over the prevalence of the epithets. do they exist? yes. with any meaningful frequency? maybe not, unless simple expression of the view that Robert E Lee was a great and noble man and the South’s cause was largely virtuous counts as epithet. to me, it would count only as error.
@ikentcpel @Alon @BenRossTransit @djc no, it doesn’t. some fool says outrageous things. it’s not incumbent on everyone in the drum circle to take a break + publicly denounce it. all this started with a real, less dumb, question—do Jewish kids just going about their lives, dressing and acting like they did before all this—face pervasive harrassment. i think the answer is no, but it’s an empirical question we can’t definitively answer.
@mike_kraft we certainly don’t need to abet them! we need to restrain them against the Palestinians, but also prevent adventurism by Iran and its cancerous proxies. not because contemporary Israel is a good actor — it’s a terrible actor — but because a regional interstate war that likely would not stay regional would be an absolute catastrophe. Israel is the new Saudi, an “ally” we dislike, against whose human rights violations we push back to some degree but not enough.
@mike_kraft i agree. the cold war “justified” lots of foolish interference in internal politics. but Vietnam, for example, was not that. it was about preventing a distinct, self-governing territory from being taken by force. it was a “war lost” — with lots of absolutely unjustifiable US atrocity — but it was not absurdly founded, and perhaps not without deterrent effect. Korea was similar. the line between shambolic withdrawal of Afghanistan and Ukraine is pretty straight.
@Alon @BenRossTransit @djc it is absolutely nutpicking.
@mike_kraft Iraq I, Vietnam, and Korea were very directly policing. Many of the Cold War conflicts were indefensible in my view, interferences in domestic politics, analogous to the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, for all the error and horror, territorial war, the great scourge of history, outside of Africa (which the US mostly writes off as too troubled to bother which) has been deterred since WWII. Which is why Ukraine matters so much.
@mike_kraft I think that’s just untrue. It’s like police abolitionism. Police are the source of a great deal of the violence we see, sure. Abolitionists assume no police and that violence disappears. It fails to account for the violence of others deterred by policing. For all the very real horrors you can blame the US for, overall “pax americana” has been very real. The great threat to world peace is its undoing.
try as you might, you can’t quite not see that you are the villain. but you are addicted to your villainy.
democracy. whiskey. sexy. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/world/middleeast/tiktok-iraq-killing.html
@mike_kraft the world is not so clean. no one thanks the US for the status quo. no one will thank the US for the civil wars and territorial wars that would result from simply withdrawing support. the Biden admin has in many respects been terrible on Israel. but it's been remarkable in preventing a broader regional war that, as you say, several of Israel's asshole leaders are hellbent to provoke. even worse than states that don't deserve to continue are no states at all, war of all against all.
@mike_kraft what, all of them? let Saudi and Egypt collapse or lose a war to Iran and its proxies and just hope that whatever emerges is okay with us? watch a cornered Israel nuke Tehran, and then maybe vice versa?
i think that would be a bad mistake. we need to learn how to support the stability of states without being seen either to provoke or repress domestic political change. a world on fire is worth preventing in the meantime. the ashes rarely bring anything good.
@mike_kraft i agree that a multiconfessional secular state is by far best way forward. unfortunately, neither of the two communities that lives there seems to agree. i think in practice, for the forseeable future the name of the game must be external constraint. israel has forfeited in my view any right to autonomy or independence, and the palestinians don't have any pretense of it. the US + arab autocracies must be all up in Israel/Palestine affairs, even though no one wants the heartache.