Stop doing business with Israel until the genocide stops
Israel is happy to keep buying our arms but it more than capable of carrying on without us for several years. They’ve armed to keep pace with Iran and have done a good job at doing so - far surpassing them in nuclear capability. We’d have to do considerably more than just not do business with them.
Not doing business is something we can do first while we work on the rest.
I agree, but they’re mainly thinking about not losing our high readiness military bases in Israel. Israel and Kuwait represent our ability to act quickly in the middle east. That somehow seems to be worth more than a genocide.
Ideally yes, but unfortunately even if Biden does want to do that, existing US doctrine won’t allow it. Israel is basically Americas proxy in the middle east and protects “American interests” in the region from traditionally Russian backed states like Egypt and Iran.
Then there’s all the more kooky stuff like the amount of important and rich people in the US that are either zionists themselves, are Christian zionists who belive Israel needs to exist to bring forth the second coming, or just simply have vested interests in the military industrial complex.
Which all make it so opposing Israels genocide extremely costly in terms of political capital.
Our doctrine is whatever we say it is. We control our foreign policy not the other way around. And if we let our previous policy set us up to support dictators and genocidal regimes then our kids are going to be reading about us in text books. Just like we read about our parent’s generation doing that.
Come to think of it, the Silent Generation was in charge back then too. the fuck is going on with them?
I’m pretty sure that if Biden just decided to withhold (conditionally or otherwise) weapons for Israel that had already been flagged for that purpose by Congress, he’d be running a foul the same rules Trump violated by withholding aid from Ukraine. And regardless of whether he was doing it because he had a legitimate change-of-heart, it would totally look like it was for political gain after the uncommitted votes in the primary.
The Leahy Law actually demands it. But we’ve been unlawfully shielding Israel from that for so long everyone has forgotten about it. And if you think it wasn’t meant for these specific purposes, here’s Patrick Leahy on the issue.
“On this one, I think that there are violations of the Leahy Law,” Leahy said. “I’m not in the Senate. I can’t fight about it… I’m not the chair of the committee. But everybody who’s asked me in the international press, the national press, I’ve said to them: I think there are violations of the Leahy Law.”
