Predictable but disappointing

Two big takeaways:

1) More unexploded missiles and bombs have fallen in Gaza than anywhere in the world since at least the Second World War.

2) Ukrainian frontline is 600 mi long, and Gaza frontline is 25 mi long. There’s more rubble—37m tons—in Gaza than in Ukraine.

Giving Israel every single thing it wanted for 7 months bought Biden exactly zero goodwill from Israel supporters, and meanwhile the left will never forgive him. Terrific work.

Yes, right after a Biden official quietly admitted that Israel already has all the US weaponry it needs to invade Rafah: x.com/aaronjmate/sta…

There is a notable inconsistency in the position of some progressives when it comes to diplomacy in Ukraine vs. Gaza.

Many who support ceasefire in Gaza — ending the bloody war as part of a diplomatic process aimed at securing Palestinian sovereignty — oppose the same in Ukraine

Biden had took away an important lesson from the preceding decades: if you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war.
There couldn’t have been a worse one to learn as the calendar ticked over to the next millennium
Branko Marcetic
jacobin.com/2020/02/joe-bi…

Biden's adoption of a shallow Irish identity for political purposes led him to adopt a shallow understanding of history and social relations, too. jacobin.com/2020/02/joe-bi…

This belief that people are simply driven by ancient hatreds that can't be overcome is key to Biden's worldview. It led him, for e.g., to champion sectarian partition of Iraq, a more extreme version of US segregation (which he ofc also played a role in perpetuating, in the 70s).

Let’s see:
- Blinken says the ceasefire deal is extraordinarily generous & says it’s up to Hamas to accept
- Hamas accepts
- Israel rejects. Orders Palestinians to leave eastern Rafah & then proceeds to bomb western Rafah
- bombing Rafah was the US “redline”
- US blames Hamas

Remember Fetterman had those snarky tweets claiming Rashida Tlaib was helping Trump get elected? Now he’s on Fox News attacking Biden from the right.

US-made cluster bombs continue to kill kids in Yemen, nearly 8 years after Congress failed to ban their transfer to the Saudi regime

(The same will be true in Ukraine, where DOD's own estimates indicated that there will be hundreds of thousands of unexploded cluster bomblets)

.Branko Marcetic: 'A deal was on the table that would have freed Israeli hostages, #Hamas agreed to it, but Israeli leadership rejected it because those leaders oppose ending the war under any circumstances that don’t lead to Hamas’s destruction.' jacobin.com/2024/05/israel… #Israel

Any other year, this would have been the craven, despiccable low point of US foreign policy: visit a recently ethnically cleansed crime site to suck up to a dictator via an extended photo-op.

But this year, the US also sends weapons to Israel to annihilate Gaza.

Anyone who looked at the front pages of the top US news outlets yesterday and read the headlines would have no idea that Israel rejected a deal that would've freed hostages because it refuses to end the war under any circumstances (Netanyahu's own words).
jacobin.com/2024/05/israel…

The solution to the horror in Gaza is ultimately political, but as we wait for politicians to show a spark of humanity & leadership, we can spare some cash to help individual people trapped in Gaza get themselves and their families out:
gofundme.com/f/wztjsc-evacu…

This got me blocked. No surprise petty authoritarians are also sensitive little flowers.

The more they double down on backing an increasingly indefensible war, the pro-Israel side drifts further into 1950s style anti-communist hysteria. Now this antiwar activist's crime isn't criticising Israel, but writing a totally unrelated dissertation that uses a Marxist term.