As long as the west funds Israeli military, or offers aid in every protracted conflict in Israel, the most belligerent aspects of Israeli society will prevail. Much like Apartheid South Africa, the house of cards will topple the moment the west removes the 💰 from the equation.
I know we are naturally oriented to care about internationalism, but we need to think of ways to shut off the money in a politically intelligent way. Unfortunately the westoids do not care about Palestinians, so this needs to be about spending the money at home. We can’t argue for them to stop killing Palestinians, but we could probably argue for them to spend the money on something else at home.
This would obviously take decades or longer, but just like climate change or veganism, I feel leftists are too involved in the actually compassionate arguments that move themselves, rather than the selfish arguments that motivate most westoids.
The west in general and the US in particular has too much at stake in Israel to allow the funding to be diverted. We don't fund Israel out of anything resembling internationalism, we do it because Israel is an important satellite state of our empire - a tool of ours
Which in my view is similar to US funding of apartheid South Africa. Granted the timing of the end to funding in SA was corresponding to the end of the cold war. I’m genuinely not sure what motivator could be used to end funding, but my point remains that this aid will allow this condition to remain in perpetuity.
You're right about that, and re-reading it now, I think I misunderstood what you were saying at first
My irl experiences outside of the few people who keep me sane are almost completely limited to Republican-voting Libertarians and people to the right of them, who I'm guessing the spend-at-home strategy isn't meant for. I could see it working particularly well with SocDems, but I'm having a hard time imagining a way to decouple the US-interest motivation for spending at home from the same motivation for maintaining the status quo in Israel
The only explanation I've heard for South Africa's support crumbling has been that public opinion turned against their apartheid government, but it looks to me like that can't have been the whole story. After all, Israel is in no uncertain terms an apartheid state, and our political machinery including media just denies it outright without so much as an explanation. I'm at a loss too about effective ways to move forward
I think the fact a majority of the victims being Christian helped garner support against apartheid in SA. Also the SA commandos were not helping build anti communist support in any nation really, I.e. Angola.
100%. It is also a part of the larger capitalist order. Zionism offered a mechanism by which to create a Western outpost in the middle east that was used to suppress Arab Nationalist and socialist movements, as well as simply serve Western capitalist interests by opposing any state that "got in the way".
It continues to serve that purpose.
