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Trump's Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected
Trump declared repeatedly that if the remaining Israeli hostages weren't out by his inauguration there would be 'hell to pay'. Most people assumed this meant that MIGA Don would fully back more aggressive Israeli military action, but instead he's willing to pressure Israel into a deal they don't want. Israeli finance minister Smotrich called it a 'catastrophe' and if he quits the government it would collapse Netanyahu's coalition.
Details of the proposed plan can be found here:
The agreement includes provisions for Israeli forces to remain in the Philadelphi corridor and maintain an 800-meter buffer zone along the eastern and northern borders during the first phase, which will last 42 days. Israel has also agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including approximately 190 who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more. In exchange, Hamas will release 34 hostages. Negotiations for the second and third phases of the agreement would begin on the 16th day of the ceasefire.
Presumably, the Palestinian prisoners were not getting 15 years for nonviolent protests.
Take Sinwar:
The correct utilitarian response would have been not to exchange 1026 prisoners for an Israeli soldier, and it would certainly not be to exchange 34 hostages for 1000 prisoners now.
How is this anything but an almost total Hamas victory?
To me it reads like a very dehumanizing admission from Hamas, and a natural corrolary from the idea that Israel will retaliate more than ten-fold against attacks on its population. It enshrines the idea that Israel has such a social, technological, military, political advantage on Palestine that its people's lives, even just civilians and common soldiers, are worth orders of magnitude more than Palestinian lives. And Hamas agrees with that.
If it was plausible for Hamas to claim it was because they are kicking Israeli ass so much on the battlefield they forced them into negociating an unfavorable exchange, then maybe it would be a Hamas victory. But the only way Hamas is winning is that they getting killed so hard that Israel has to pull its punches for it not to look like they're outright massacring the helpless.
I feel like pointing out that Israel is very much not pulling their punches, to the point that "Israel is outright massacring the helpless" is the default position among the youth, and among most people outside the US' sphere of influence. This is a gigantic contributor to the massive rise in antisemitism (well, in combination with the conflating of anti-Israeli sentiment with antisemitism). IDF soldiers and members of the Israeli government are currently unable to travel to huge portions of the world without being arrested due to the belief(and evidence) that they are outright massacring the helpless.
It seems like that's largely owed to the fact that any amount of striking buildings that house Hamas and also (by Hamas' design) house the helpless is going to look like massacring the helpless. The only way to not massacre any helpless in this case is to stop doing anything, or invent magical weapons like that one scene from Iron Man where he takes out terrorists with micromissiles while sparing every hostage they had.
No, it is due to Israel going out and massacring the helpless. Last I checked, all that horseshit about the Hamas terror hospital was debunked - and Israel then went on to blow up all the other hospitals in Gaza to boot. They specifically blew up multiple people whose only goal was to distribute food or first aid, they killed journalists, they killed aid workers - there's far too much evidence of deliberate genocidal intent (including direct statements by Israeli government leaders!) for these arguments to hold water.
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Granted, but at some point if you have any humanity you have to say, 'the number of helpless people we're massacring is not worth the number of terrorists we're killing".
But that's not the entire calculation. The more terrorists you kill, the fewer of your people die in the future (and the likelier you are to save some hostages). A state should absolutely accept the collateral deaths of foreigners as the price for the security of its own.
Even leaving this aside, what you said seems to imply that the ratio of Palestinian civilians to Hamas militants is particularly inhumane. From what I've seen, it seems to hover between 1:1 and 2:1. Is that particularly extreme by the standards of urban warfare?
I feel honor-bound to point out that this is the actual logic and justification used by the nazis during the holocaust - every single jew could grow up to be an enemy of the state, so better to kill them all now. You're totally free to adopt this position on the motte, that ethnic cleansing is ok because the ethnicity you're cleansing doesn't like you, but outside of spaces where people like SecureSignals can post you're not going to have much luck - and in fact most people around the globe will think you're an utterly repellent person as a result.
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And what is the equivalent point for non-helpless people, and non-terrorist combatants?
Even people under terrible regimes have agency, which is why 'just following orders' or 'just running train schedules' were dismissed as defenses in notable past examples. Helplessness in turn also implies an inability to defend one's self- but this cannot co-exist with the ability to attack, since the means are the same, and which has certainly been displayed.
Similarly, terrorists are- by almost universal international definitions- actors who conduct unlawful violence. This is not only categorical, but generally morally, distinct from the systemic use of lawful force by a governing entity- particularly when the stated and demonstrated intent is to continue violence as a matter of policy. The categorization is certainly complicated by legalistic disputes, but as far as the moral premise goes the acts which started the war were conducted by the same entity that would be responsible for punishing said acts if they were unlawful.
The Palestinians have many issues, not all of which are their own fault, but treating them as helpless and without agency is neither accurate or humanizing them. There certainly isn't a lack of willingness and ability to fight and die against a hated administrating entity- only a dispute as to who it is. A consequence of that, however, is that arguments of helplessness against the other don't carry the same weight.
I'm not defending the terrorists, as in the people actually firing rockets, I'm defending everyone else. Including, yes, people who hate the Israelis and hope that Hamas wins, which I imagine is just about everybody at this point, as well as the people who pack their lunch boxes.
Incidentally I disagree with this, and discussed it further here. Until WW2, it was almost always understood that those giving orders would be held responsible for the results of those orders being carried out, providing that the actions taken corresponded roughly to the orders given. Like so many load-bearing aspects of our society, we jettisoned this so that we could jump up and down on the Nazis a bit more.
I would dispute that you are actually defending the non-terrorists. (Which- if it seemed otherwise- you weren't being accused of. Apologies if that seemed so.) Rather, I would present that your attempted framing is a form of moral malpractice- not because it defends terrorists, but precisely because it does not defend non-terrorists, and instead leads to greater risk to them.
The question was posed to you with the expectation you'd avoid it, but also to demonstrate its limits: the humanity argument's tolerance for casualties goes up significantly when the populace has agency that they use to support actors, and even higher when the actor in question is the government. Simple humanity is willing to both kill and watch a lot more people get killed when it's a result of an inept aggressor than a helpless bystander. You can see demonstrations of this in everything from fiction, to group social dynamics, to- of course- security politics both domestic and inter-state.
As such, appeals to humanity that imply the former (humanity has a low tolerance limit for violence) is in play rather than the later (humanity has a high tolerance limit for violence against aggressors), appeals which are used by bystanders in rationalizing acceptance of the 'actual terrorists' who use such appeals as the basis of their strategy, are placing more people at risk, rather than a less.
This would be a great deal of wishful projection.
Sadly, most people in the world don't particularly care about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, any more than they could be forced to care about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It wasn't a dominant factor in recent Western democratic elections. It has notably not set the Arabic street ablaze as middle eastern states have not merely maintained neutrality, but even increased cooperation with Israel. It certainly hasn't been a particularly captivating issue in Asia or sub-saharan Africa, where sympathy for far away non-co-religionists is in short supply and where you can often find non-trivial examples of even sympathy for Israel on anti-islamic grounds.
The dominant trend of anti-Israeli international politics over this war is how few of them outside of the normal muslim world religious sympathies are about Israel, and how many of them have American or domestic political motives. Whether it's a low-cost/high-visibility way to raise a middle flick off the US (always popular in Latin America), a way to counter-balance/win some favor with American strategic rivals by signaling partial alignment with them / against the US (often overlapping), a way to discredit international law advocates/bodies that might challenge them (Nicaragua), or a way for electorally unstable ruling parties to try and rally support by appealing to narrative origins (South Africa, Ireland), it quite often has little to do with Israel or Hamas themselves.
People who believe the world is on their side on any issue, let alone this one, are going to be disappointed, much as the Europeans were disappointed when 'the world' and 'the international community' were not particularly on their side in the Ukraine War.
And WW2 was also where the pre-WW2 era of geopolitical dominance by European monarchies and empires was broken, and with it the artificial imposition of European monarchist political norms which tied sovereign immunity to the legal identity of the Sovereign and their enabling actors which helped lead to said world wars.
Whether your post-WW2 political tradition holds more in the individualist western political traditions (in which the individual agency permits guilt, even as it can protect from collective judgements), a familial/clan-centric model (in which membership of the oppressive ethnic-clan group allows guilt), religious-identitarian models (in which case participation in the religious-administrative group permits disposition), class-ideological models (in which case membership to the relevant oppressor classes enables class-based action), or other more collective-responsibility models in general, the pre-WW2 models of European monarchial-sovereign supremacy of responsibility have globally been replaced by traditions that- for various reasons- recognize the agency and culpability of various non-central actors.
Given that one of the enabling factors of WW2 (and even WW1) was precisely how load-bearing 'it's not my responsibility' was on enablers to the wars that (repeatedly) self-destructed the European political system, there was a fair deal more reason to jettisoning that presumption than just Nazi-jumping.
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Perhaps if every country or faction that wanted to defend Palestinian citizens sent troops so that there would be enough manpower to force the end of hostilities without bombing the places where the rockets are being fired from, we wouldn't be having that talk. And yes, it is my understanding that Israel can't afford to have that many boots on Palestinian ground, certainly not when they're bound by the need to wear uniforms and Hamas isn't.
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The point of killing terrorists is usually not to kill terrorists for the sake of it, but to protect the helpless people that are close to you.
Perhaps at some point it would be "humane" to give up and let the terrorists do what they want because they have too many human shields. I do not believe that point has been reached, or that Hamas can ever hold that many people hostage.
Yes, of course, that was implicit.
You seem to be saying that the number of people killed in Gaza is well below the number you feel would be worth ensuring that no Israeli is ever again killed by Hamas, and that this number is not de facto reachable given the scale of the current conflict. That, to me, seems to indicate that you believe the appropriate number is greater than the number of helpless civilians remaining in Gaza. And yes, I do find that abhorrent. If I said three decades ago that killing all the Irish would be easily worth it to stop the depredations of the IRA you would think I was a maniac, and rightly so.
The wall basically works. The Iron Dome basically works. What happened on Oct 7th was awful, and I feel sympathy for the Israelis who worry about rocket attacks, but neither of those things justify slaughtering far greater numbers of Gazans.
I do not believe that Israel can indefinitely protect itself from Hamas and its other hostile neighbours with purely defensive tactics, and moreover, I do not believe they are obligated to restrict themselves so.
If you said killing all the Irish was worth it to stop IRA, I would call you a maniac because by all accounts I know of, IRA's goals were not like Hamas', and IRA's tactics were not like Hamas', and IRA's reliance on putting their own citizens under enemy fire for the sake of martyrdom was, if at all existent, not like Hamas'. IRA was not, as far as I'm aware, making the English pick between their own destruction and killing innocent Irish along with IRA soldiers.
If Gazans have any agency, the onus is on them to drive the militants who are martyring them for "free Palestine" out. If they do not have that agency, I find that I cannot feel more sympathy for them than for those who can and will defend themselves [or are defended by their government].
To condone Gaza indefinitely bombing Israel because Israel can (mostly, for now) take it because stopping them would take more Gazan lives than Gaza currently takes Israeli lives is far too close to the concept of utility monsters for me.
"There's a third option: just leave." - yeah, because that worked so well 109 times before. At least, that's the number Israel's opponents cite sometimes.
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Could it be that this is Trump getting revenge for Bibi not backing up his election fraud claims in 2020 and instead calling Biden to congratulate him? I vaguely recall Trump saying “Fuck him” (in reference to Bibi) at the time. For someone as vindictive as Trump is said to be, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis.
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I think that, if true, this is a good thing. Like the US going into Iraq, Israel had no real endgame, and, like people have said below, US pressure may give Netanyahu an out. BUT... I'm not a Trump supporter. Six months ago the idea that Biden was even suggesting the necessity of a ceasefire was anathema to my IRL Republican friends. I personally tend to be pro-Israel so I'm kind of agnostic about the whole thing given my above comments about there being no endgame. Trump hasn't even been inaugurated yet and he's already expressed willingness to sell out his base. First in siding with Musk on H-1B visas and now by forcing Israel into terms that they find unacceptable. One further possibility is that Netanyahu, realizing that acceding to the deal ends his political career, tells Trump to pound sand. What's Trump going to do, withhold aid? Again, six months ago this would be unthinkable. Will the US become completely aloof from the Middle East? Will the Jews who support the Republican party exclusively because they're the most unwavering about Israel turn coat? Seems more likely than the pro-Palestinian protestors backing Trump. But what about the Muslims? Are they another group Trump is trying to pull into his orbit? How many more sacred cows is Trump willing to slaughter?
Back in 2016, I couldn't rule out the possibility that Trump was some kind of Trojan Horse meant to gin up the loyalty of a populist base only to betray them. What I had in mind at the time was that his "replacent" of Obamacare with "something better" was just code for instituting some kind of socialized healthcare system, since a popular Republican would have an easier time getting such a proposal through, even if heretofore no Republican would consider doing such a thing, and would be lambasted if they even tried. But Trump was so completely unlike any other politician that he might have been able to pull it off. His first term shattered any such illusions of moderation, as he leaned further into MAGA expectations, but this veneer is beginning to crack. Maybe he figured he needed to win a second term and solidify his base of support before delivering the coupe de grace. I wouldn't bet on it, but between siding with his billionaire friends over his own base on an issue central to his popularity and selling out Israel to Hamas, it wouldn't exactly surprise me. And the worst part is that the Trump true believers will tell me that he's being entirely consistent and that H-1B immigration is good, actually, and he's not selling out Israel because this war had no endgame anyway, and while all that may be true it doesn't change the fact that you have to do quite a lot of mental gymnastics to make this conform to anything Trump has said previously.
I think it’s a shot in the dark. I don’t see Bibi deciding to go with the deal because he already rejected it, and frankly doesn’t trust tge Palestinian side to really keep the deal. Given 75 years of “Israel signs peace deal, leaves area” and “to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Palestinians have rearmed and are trying to destroy Israel — again” he really can’t make a deal. It’s either an unconditional capitulation followed by military occupation to prevent rearming, or the situation as it existed on 10/6. He knows it, everybody who’s looked at the history knows it. And so I think Trump is offering the deal because he wants to say he tried.
Ok, then Israel gets cut off from the US' teat and no longer receives financial, military or social support from the US, and Trump initiates prosecutions against anybody who broke the law to assist them. It is easy to get confused and believe that Israel is the one holding the leash, given how many members of congress have an AIPAC handler, but the US is actually the dominant power here and what they want to happen matters. This deal is getting forced down Bibi's throat and he doesn't have any leverage here.
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I don't even think that offer is on the table.
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Does Trump's base compete for jobs with people who get into the US on H-1B visas? Not H-2A or H-2B?
Yes. Many roles performed by Americans now in companies not permitted to employ foreign nationals would likely be filled by H1b holders as we see this presently in organizations unfettered by prohibitions against employing foreign nationals.
I think they're still Trump's base, just not as visible or loud. Many will still have to move in very PMC circles.
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No, he is focusing on "Make America great again", not wasting endless sums of money fighting wars in the middle east that end up destroying the local christian population. His base has won absolutely nothing from the last few decades of neo con wars. His base got nothing but debt and mentally ill veterans from the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Providing Israel with endless welfare is the opposite of America first.
Trumps loyalty should be to the US, not people whose loyalty is to other countries.
You're engaging in the same fallacy that Democrats often engage in when it comes to Trump voters and other Republicans: Assuming what their interests are. Trump spent the entire campaign season portraying himself as the protector of Israel, and Republican politicians routinely criticized Biden for the mere suggestion that Israel should make concessions in cease fire talks. Remember when he threatened to withdraw supply of offensive weapons and the backlash surrounding that. I don't think Trump coming in and saying that Israel would have to completely withdraw from Gaza and release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners would have played well during the election. Especially considering he made no bones about the fact that Ukraine would have to surrender territory. You may agree with Trump's actions here, but it runs contrary to what anyone could have reasonably expected based on his prior statements. Whether or not this constitutes selling out his base depends on whether those who wholeheartedly supported Israel up until now are willing to cast these loyalties aside in favor of Trump.
I don't actually think that he's going backwards on that. Have you paid any attention to the international reaction to Israel's efforts at ethnically cleansing Gaza? Huge swathes of the world are currently off limits for Israeli government visits due to their arrest warrants, and there are criminal prosecutions against vast numbers of individual soldiers as well. They're hurting themselves too - the example I used in discussions like this previously was the IDF soldier who killed himself because he wasn't able to live with the guilt and trauma he picked up crushing the meat out of innocent people with a bulldozer. This conflict is not good for Israel in any real sense (though it may be good for Netanyahu's personal position) and continuing to enable it isn't doing Israel any real favours. It actually makes an incredible amount of sense that he'd pursue a strategy like this after portraying himself as the Protector of Israel - if a drug addict asks for a lot of money to buy drugs and a free space to do them in, you're not really protecting them in any sense of the word by continuing to enable their addiction.
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Who exactly do you think Trump's "base" is. More specifically, who matters more, the average (R) voter, or the "donor class"? I can't find it again, but I remember a bit circulating right-wing circles online some years ago, quoting an interview with a Republican "campaign advisor" who got a little too honest with the interviewer and said that his job was basically to help GOP candidates more convincingly lie to red state rubes about how they're going to do the various stupid things these voters want, all the while knowing, as all Republican candidates do, that once in office their job will be to do none of that, and deliver what the deep-pocket donors want instead.
"Should be" ≠ "is."
I've been heavily persuaded by thinkers like Yarvin and Parvini (who have many disagreements) about how elite backers matter so much more than the peasant masses who have nothing but their (meaningless) votes, and "democracy" is a sham. For example, the H1B fight: Musk is going to get his way, because he matters, and millions of "Trump voters" simply don't.
For an alternative narrative (which I don't exactly share) I know some right-wing anti-Trump people — a very much different group from the "Never Trumper" crowd — who have their own narrative about 'who is Trump's real base.' These acquaintances held that the "Russian collusion" narrative was pretty much correct in all the broad strokes… except for having the wrong country. They argued that when people say that Trump didn't (or wasn't able to) deliver for his base in his first term, they're wrong: Trump very much did deliver what his actual backers, the people who installed him in the White House, put him there to do: "moving the embassy to Jerusalem and tax cuts for (((billionaires)))." (Cue more comments about Kushner, "the Tribe," "ZOG," and how it would have been better if Harris won, because at least then we'd have more attention paid to the "ongoing genocide" in Gaza, etc.)
And further, I'd conclude by asking why we should be trying to "make America great again" when "American greatness" is what got Western Civilization into the mess it's in in the first place.
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So for much Jewish ethnocentrism. Interestingly, were he not Jewish, he would probably be accused of anti-Semitism.
A lot of American Jews, including the elites, are secular. I wonder if this will cause a rift between Jews in the Trump administration and their more religious Israeli counterparts.
Netanyahu isn’t particularly religious either. Witkoff likely knew that and realized he was being blown off with an excuse as a power play, hence his reaction.
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Holy shit.
I'm a lukewarm (non-American) supporter of Trump, but this is genuinely impressive to me. Even if he can't resolve the situation completely, the fact he can progress some kind of resolution at all at this time is amazing.
Honestly if this is true and succeeds, this might be the single thing that has raised my opinion of Trump the most. He's not even in office yet!
Biden had already been pestering the Israelis to GTFO, with Bibi hoping Trump would come to the rescue and give him a free hand. Trump signaling "no" ends those hopes.
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He's thrown Canada into a bit of chaos, particularly since the NDP (left wing party) stopped supporting the minority Liberals and the government will therefore fall at the first opportunity. Of course, Prime Minister Trudeau prorogued parliament until his replacement gets selected by his party in late March, so the "first opportunity" isn't any time soon.
We now have provincial leaders dealing with Federal responsibilities (see Alberta Premier Danielle Smith visiting Trump), which is an odd change of pace.
Exactly. The NDP has refused to go along with the Conservatives bringing down the government for a while now. Instead, Singh just constantly said Trudeau had to go but won't vote to kick out the Liberals.
Then, all of a sudden, after Trudeau resigns (Freeland has to play a role here) and prorogues Parliament, Singh is suddenly on-board when...he can do nothing cause Parliament is suspended for months until the Liberals pick a new leader.
The cynical explanation is that this has little to do with Trump: the NDP knows they're utterly done due to backing the Liberals for so long and Singh deliberately ran out the clock so he could get his pension.
I think you actually have the causation backwards: Trudeau lost Singh's support, then he resigned. Singh took a more-firm-than-typical stance against the Liberals after the winter break started, which is what prompted the most recent rounds of Poilievre pushing non-confidence motions. If all had gone according to plan, the government would have fallen about a month later. Instead, Trudeau resigned and prorogued parliament as they search for his successor.
Yes. The Saskatchewan party ran on the connection of the Federal Liberals -> Federal NDP -> Provincial NDP. Blaming Carla Beck for Justin Trudeau's actions seems to have worked, so it absolutely would work for Singh as well.
I think that Singh's pension is a meme. It's a nice jab, but I'd bet that he'll get reelected in his seat. The only examples I could find of a party leader losing their seat are:
I think it happened to the Green Party too, but they don't count. High-profile politicians generally don't lose their own seats.
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Interestingly, this also appears to be occurring in Ontario itself, since the rest of the province has stood in opposition of the federal government for the past 7 years [and the same thing was true of the City of Toronto itself, at least for a time, considering who they elected as mayor]; this is partially why Ontario didn't set up internal border checkpoints (the police told them no), and is part of how [and why] the truckers were effectively permitted to occupy the city where a significant fraction of Liberal voters live and work for a solid month.
Really, Ontario is Canada in microcosm- it's as harshly divided [against the policies the rich and the federal government (and its employees) would prefer] as the rest of Canada is in comparison to Ottawa. No wonder the Feds (and by extension, the supporters of the current government) feel so threatened and fed up that they can't get anything done.
That's actually a big fucking deal, for the same reason it's a big deal when Texas starts signing security agreements with Mexico. Granted, there isn't exactly much migration across the prairie border (not that the US could really stop you, of course), but the fact that the US is the primary trading partner for each province isn't lost on anyone here.
Canada calls its federation "confederation" for some reason, but if the Federal government continues its abdication and some absurdity happens (either the Western Canada party doesn't get a majority, or Trump actually does manage to destroy the Canadian economy especially if no election occurs until October, or Quebec continues on closing itself off from the rest of Canada) it might actually become what it's called.
I kind of feel sorry for Kim Campbell 2.0. Maybe they won't do it because the PC already claimed 'first female PM' back in the '80s but I have no expectation that they'll be able to refrain from doing this- perhaps an East Indian woman, both to out-IdPol Singh and remind that intentionally-imported demographic who brought them here in the first place?
Yup. The biggest power voids I've seen the provinces fill before this is some trade delegations to foreign countries. Even that could've been framed as just helping the local businesses and industries.
This is straight-up international diplomacy.
God I hope not. Singh has been half-assing opposition to Trudeau for months (and hinting at it before then), but he finally committed to bringing down the government...in late December, with at least six weeks until it would be possible...which has now been extended to more than three months. I'm hopeful that it'll all be over when parliament reconvenes in March (Early April election call + 37 day minimum campaign = new government in May??), but I'll believe it when I see it.
Remember that (under the current Liberal rules) temporary foreign workers and students are eligible to vote for the next Liberal leader (who will be the next Prime Minister, of course). In contrast, voting for the Conservative leader required a $15 membership fee and being a Permanent Resident or Citizen.
Unless they change the rules, that candidate could get in by appealing directly to foreigners for votes, instead of appealing to sentiment towards them by citizens and permanent residents.
And I find it more interesting that the Liberals don't give a shit. Then again, it's not like that had far-reaching consequences in Texas even though it really should have, but then again the US hasn't had an acting President for the past 2 or 3 years.
Maybe they think it'll end with a Con majority so Smith is just wasting her time playing Queen of Alberta (or hedging her bets if the Liberals somehow retain their minority status- and that's a risk I think is understated given the below), but I think the more notice the Cons (and their newer Ontario backers) are put on the better it'll ultimately be for the West if for no other reason than to provide a check against policy starvation.
The reason I think it's still going to be October is just because that's the optimal game theoretic strategy for every interested party. If an election was called today everyone already knows the result; what else do they have to lose by stalling for time? Black swan events are a thing, and if you don't wait for them, you can't get lucky.
I can't think of a more on-the-nose emblem of Liberal immigration policy than this. Fortunately, non-citizens can't vote in elections, so I don't expect much to be put on the scale by these groups, but still.
Eh, the NDP's run down the clock about as much as they can -- at a certain point propping up the Liberals will cost them more votes than it's worth. (and it's already costing them some)
The Bloc I suppose is always a wildcard, but it doesn't seem that they had much success with issuing ultimatums and they are poised to make out very very well in QC for the forseeable future -- so I can't see Trudeau's successor turning them.
Throne speech is a confidence vote; I predict an election declaration soon afterwards. (although at the maximum period, not the minimum -- for just the reasons you mention)
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Yes it did. Greg Abbott is for better or worse aligned with the hard right faction; he now has a free hand to defy the federal government. Internal politics are radically different and a big part of that is the conception that Texan interests and US national interests may not be one and the same anymore. Nullification is now a mainstream part of political platforms.
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Trump had some major Israel related diplomatic victories in his first term, too.
They were only "diplomatic victories" in an Israeli sense, not an American one. Israel got a ton of stuff it wanted while the US increased its presence and exposure in the region for negligible gain.
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I suspect that for domestic reasons Trump wants this over on whatever terms so that it isn’t festering during his term. Israel splits the left, yes, but it also splits Maga.
No it doesn’t. Even IRL antisemitic right wingers- of whom there are far fewer than on the internet- see Palestinians as a bunch of savages in the desert that need dealt with by someone.
The American right has, probably, a literal single digit number of people with any sympathy for Palestine whatsoever. If there was a way to poll trump voters who also deny the Holocaust, I suspect that poll would show strong support for Israel in its wars against Palestinians. There are more Trump voters who use Palestinian as a slur than who think Israeli forces have done literally anything wrong.
It's not correct to assume there are only antisemitic right wingers and zionist right wingers. There are a great deal of Republicans who are noninterventionist either out of libertarianism or as a result of Iraq/Afghanistan and there are many who, like me, have a great affinity for Jews while seeing Israel as morally no different than the terrorist states they fight. This isn't a coalition, but it's certainly a larger group than the "Holocaust didn't happen but it's a good thing" types. If it's enough to contribute to Democrat election losses, then that means it's enough to contribute to Republican election losses.
And that's not delving into the conservative voting Muslim or global South origin issue.
Yeah, there’s non-interventionist right wingers- and they don’t particularly want the war to stop. They don’t care about gazans. It’s somebody else’s troops fighting. At most they want Israel to pay for it.
At most? Did you mean at least? You don't get to call yourself a non-interventionist if you support intervening in a foreign conflict by sending vast sums of money, military equipment and military support. That's the bare minimum required to be a non-interventionist.
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This doesn't match my personal experience… but then again, the "Holocaust-denying" sorts I know IRL weren't exactly big on Trump — either from a 'not voting until the left is actually correct about the GOP candidate being Hitler' position, or a 'they're both ZOG puppets, but Harris winning would at least keep more attention on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been the best thing in decades for waking people up to the vile, murderous inborn character of the Eternal Jew' position.
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The slogan is "make America great again". Not waste trillions on forever wars in the middle east with no prospect of success. Maga is the opposite of the fiascos of nation building from the mainstream republicans. Genociding the local christian population isn't that popular with young people. Younger voters, including younger republicans skew a lot more pro Palestine. Israel actively supporting jihadists in Syria hurts their supposed "anti-islam" stance.
Well, there's some on the right — though, per your later point about "younger republicans," these skew older — who belong to what Parvini calls the "counter-jihadis." For them, the answer is that it's not about "nation building" or bringing democracy, feminism, and LGBT tolerance to the Middle East, it's about killing Muslims — because either you're killing Muslims, or Muslims are killing you.
I remember one, shortly after Oct. 7, demanding that US troops be sent over to start killing Gazans, because if we didn't do so right now, we'd have similar attacks in countless American towns, and that the whole reason the attack happened in the first place is because we weren't keeping the Muslims suppressed enough, which is why we need to make sure that we are bombing or shooting Muslims in multiple countries 24/7/365.
I've encountered arguments about how there are no civilian casualties in Gaza because there's no such thing as a Muslim civilian, that every single one of them — even a newborn — is a valid military target. About how there are no moderate Muslims, only those biding their time and practicing taqiyya, and how even the most well-integrated and moderate-seeming Muslim could suddenly commit a terrorist attack at any given moment. How the First Amendment doesn't apply to "Mohammedanism," because it's not really a religion at all, but a political ideology of murderous global conquest — much like Nazism — trying to pass itself off as a religion. How Islam is and has always been the number one enemy of Christendom — with invocations of Charles Martell, the Reconquista, the Gates of Vienna, the Crusades, etc. — and thus fighting them must remain the West's highest priority. (I find this one skews a bit younger and more online than the rest, tending to come with a fondness for "Deus Vult" and "Make Istanbul Constantinople Again" memes.) Lots of "founded by a pedophile warlord" comments.
Yeah, and that has quieted some of these folks a bit, though there's a certain amount of "enemy of my enemy" and "it's a complex situation" rationalization that happens IME.
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I think we have more than single digits of people on this site who fit that description.
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Right, but a loud single digit (let’s say 5%) can cause trouble on an issue, especially when they’re overrepresented in your propaganda wing.EDIT: Sorry, misread you. I think your numbers are off: I’ve had multiple in-person MAGA Americans bring this up with me spontaneously. They’re not like the left, they don’t have any love for Hamas, but ‘we’re spending gold and reputation so Israel can defend its stolen land by bombing helpless savages to paste’ is absolutely a POV that exists on the MAGA right. I think a percentage in the high single-digits is probably about right.
Trump has enough on his plate, I doubt he cares much about Israel, and so I can imagine him wanting to just get this off the table so he can focus on more important stuff.
IME the most common formulation is ‘I don’t trust Jews but they have the right to do whatever they want to sand niggers but they should pay for it themselves because they have all the money in the world anyways’. This is not a pro-Israel position but it’s also not a position which has sympathy for Palestine.
Our experiences differ, I guess. There are plenty of right-wingers who are pro-Jewish, or at worst mildly irritated by them, who nevertheless feel that killing lots of Palestinians is wrong.
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I think this exactly right. A lot of the coarse anti-Semitism you see on Twitter since Musk's acquisition doesn't have an IRL equivalent. It's not an issue that splits MAGA because core MAGA voters - white working class, poorer whites, a significant amount of Hispanics this time around - are either pro-Israel or don't think about Israel at all.
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This smells like giving Israel and out. Big bad Trump comes in and makes them take a ceasefire deal saving face internally.
If so, brilliant work by Trump.
This is a no-win conflict and the sooner it ends the better. The longer it festers the higher the chance it escalates into something much more serious.
I don't expect the Middle East conflict to end entirely, but if this causes a significant reduction in tensions, then Trump deserves the Noble Peace Prize (but of course they'll give it to Biden or Blinken instead).
Let's be honest, though—it only works because Trump is untouchable among his base. If Biden had insisted on a similar deal Trump would be screaming about how he can't sell out Israel and we must support Israel at all costs. Any US president could force Israel into a ceasefire by threatening to cut off military aid, it's just that the political consequences would be dire. Whether the pro-Israel wing of the party (i.e. the wing that's more pro-Israel than usual) will take him to task for this remains to be seen. I doubt the Orthodox Jewish community will let this slide, though. They're essentially single-issue voters.
It's not like they can do anything to him. He's already been elected for his second term as president, and he couldn't have another even if they did vote for him. It's not like we have recall elections for presidents either. So why would he care?
They can't do anything to him personally. But they have their own elected representatives who are going to be looking for concessions lest they find themselves on the hot seat. It's not so much about what they can do to Trump as it is about Trump's own lack of loyalty. He's acting like he can do anything he wants to and Republicans in congress will just fall in line. If he oversteps, though, people who need to keep their seats will make it very difficult for him to get anything done.
I don't think it would be a very good look for the jewish community to openly and nakedly hold the entire political establishment hostage because their foreign homeland is no longer being treated better than American citizens in the wake of natural disasters. If this actually happens, how do you prevent it from becoming visible and tanking Israel's reputation among the American people?
I would hope that if American citizens are fighting back against people who are shooting rockets at them, we wouldn't punish those American citizens.
If a Texan rancher lost one of his family members to a cartel robbery then went on to line a bunch of random mexicans up on the ground and crush them to death with a bulldozer he would absolutely deserve serious, rigorous punishment and prosecution. "A member of their ethnicity attacked me" is justification for retaliatory violence (EDIT: just to clarify, I mean retaliatory violence against the actual culprits, not random members of said ethnicity) - but it isn't justification for ethnic cleansing.
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Who's talking about punishing Israeli citizens fighting against Hamas?
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