Meanwhile on the International front....

Israel isn't dependent on the U.S. We give more military aid (as opposed to economic aid) to Israel than anywhere else by a lot, and $3.3 billion is a lot of money. ... but it's not "dependence" money for Israel, the way aid to, say, Ukraine is. ... It accounts for about 15 percent of Israel's defense budget, significant yes, but yank it, and Israel is still formidable and could make up quite a bit of that on its own. Plus, the U.S. gains a bit more than "starring role in the Bible" fuzzies from the relationship, Israel's end of what is an unprecedented intelligence sharing relationship between the countries has (arguably) benefited the U.S. more than the other way around.

On a GDP per capita basis, unlike other places the U.S. gives aid to, Israel is a highly developed country that produces things (IT, biotech, cybersecurity, aviation, in particular). They have money in their own right, unlike most of the other places U.S. aid goes to.

I say this personally thinking that my country shouldn't be running up huge debts and in the process giving money to another country, especially one as self reliant as Israel really is. ...

But working with the fact that we do that, to put it in pespective, take away the U.S. aid. ... and Israel still has an economy that is 20 or 30 percent bigger than Iran's, with only 10 percent of the population that Iran has. Israel is not dependent on the U.S.

Putting aside Netanyahu waging aspects of a war for his own political survival and the creeps he has aligned with to maintain a coalition government. ... I assume that Israel (the majority of people there) wants to maintain support, because nobody benefits from being a pariah. But if they morally think they are doing the right thing because of the attack on 10/7, they can afford (on their own) to stick to their guns (no pun intended). And the more blatant antisemitism that comes out as the protests to what Israel is doing go off the rails, the less pressure Israel is going to feel to tamp it down. Any pressure the government is feeling there right now is coming from Israelis itself.

 

It doesn't matter how you define "antisemitism."

Focus on any behavior (whatever ism or hatred is behind it) that constitutes a threatening atmosphere, and/or prevents classes, studying, access to libraries, etc. for other students. ... and you don't have to stare at your belly button and parse it.

 

At least some them are really ignorant, from footage and interviews I have seen, and from many of the signs they have put up in their encampments.



They seem to either no knowledge of the history between Israel and its Arab neighbors, or they are downright dishonest. i.e. Israel being threatened continually in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and the military attacks Israel had to fend off. ... how many times others tried to negotiate peace, how Israel was ready to agree to something multiple times, including agreeing to a Palestinian state, only to have the Arab side come back with some crazy demand in order to torpedo it, because ultimately the stance has always been "River to the sea, we want them wiped off the map."

Those protestors have largely created a one-sided made-up history that neatly fits the "oppressor / oppressed" narrative that toxically become the base for class warfare politics in this country. They buy into this nonsense that Jews came and stole "Palestine," from this indigninious group of Arab Palestinians, when in reality, before Israel, it was a sparsely populated place with Arabs, Jews and Christians, all of whom had biblical historical claims to the area. Golda Meir used to try to piss off the Arabs by saying, "I am Palestinian," to try to say that there was no real Arab Palestinian identity, it was a designation made up by occupiers, the last of which were the British. She wasn't entirely wrong. ... she had a Palestinian passport before Israel was created.

And this is not some one-sided tale of oppression. The Arabs suffering there are a product of their parents extreme religious intolerance and hatred, attitudes which are still prevalent among their population.

 

1) The claims of various groups are bibical AND historical. I didn't mean to connect the two in any way other than to say that everyone feels like they have a claim to that land to one degree or another.
2) There are religious morons in Israel, same as everywhere else. But the vast majority of Israelis are not like that, and as a country, the Israeli's have never killed anyone "in the name of religion." They largely have wanted to have their Jewish state (which made sense after 3/4 of Europe helped a madman try to commit an actual genocide) and live in peace.

If October 7 -- which was a savage terrorist attack -- doesn't happen, and them turning Gaza into a parking lot isn't happening. That doesn't address whether the scale of what they have done is justified, but 1) This isn't a "kill Muslims" thing for them, and 2) Those demonstrations on college campuses haven't been limited to the scale of the response Israel felt it had to launch, it's gone way beyond that into oppressor narrative land.