I don’t think they’re saying literally that the same weapons are being sent to one destination or else the other – the issue is the authorization being there or not.
I think the point is that providing weapons for Israel so they can continue the slaughter, basically the whole US political spectrum except for a few scattered outliers is behind, whereas weapons for Ukraine is this big struggle and debate with a lot of people on the pro-invasion side. And even the people who are saying “We MUST arm Ukraine so she can defend herself, what’s going on in an offense against humanity” are also pretty much giving Netanyahu a stern waggling of the finger (if that) and a hearty handshake and a big check in support, as his ongoing genocide continues.
The reason why support for Ukraine is so shaky is that Republicans have been thoroughly compromised by the nation that started the war and has an interest in removing American support for Ukraine. Trump is far from the only leading Republican who is bought and paid for by Moscow.
Israel is an entirely different matter. As much as Netanyahu is a terrible person, he did not start this war and had absolutely no other choice than to respond to Hamas murderous rampage with a campaign to remove the terrorist organization. There was no other option and someone far further left on the political spectrum would have to do the same. Hell, any nation on Earth, including the most peace-loving ones, would have started a full-on war in reaction to attack like this.
The relationship between Israel and the USA is also far firmer than between Ukraine and the USA and not just because of the routinely overstated influence of the “Israel lobby”. Israel is a far more important country, the most important Western partner in the Middle East for strategic reasons alone. It’s a hub for cutting-edge research in pretty much all areas, from biotech to defense and it houses some of the most important chip fabs in the world - think of it as a second Taiwan. It’s also a startup hub, one of the most important places for new high-tech companies to emerge in the world. You have very likely used technology and inventions that came from Israel without knowing it. Intel for example has had a presence in the country since the 1970s, pretty much since the beginning of close US-Israeli ties, and benefited massively from the research and development that happened there.
Israel is small and surrounded by enemies that have tried to destroy it and its people (what do you think “From the river to the sea!” actually means?) from the moment it was conceived by the UN. You are making a serious and sadly these days very common mistake of falling for a massive worldwide propaganda campaign - fueled by Iran, Russia and China, who are doing it in an attempt to weaken one of America’s most important strategic partners - that tries to portray the justified, if brutal, war against an organization that does everything in their power to get as many civilians on both sides killed as a genocide, while at the same time ignoring the real and openly stated genocidal intentions of this terrorist pseudo-state and its supporters. The whole genocide argument falls apart at even the most cursory glance: Why would a country with genocidal intentions go through enormous lengths to minimize civilian casualties, far more so than any other country in the world? The IDF is the only military on the planet that is routinely informing civilians through calls, messages, flyers, hacked TV stations, web services, etc. before air strikes and ground operations. This is nearly completely unheard of elsewhere and entirely unheard of at this kind of scale. This actually hurts Israel militarily, as it allows not just civilians, but also terrorists to get away.
Why would they go through all of this trouble if the aim was to exterminate a people? How would a pluralistic democracy where Israeli Arabs (they don’t like to call themselves Palestinians) have representation in the Knesset and even a Supreme Court judge decide to commit genocide anyway? Not to mention, if they were truly genocidal, they would start with the members of this people within their own borders, with an increasingly harsh campaign to separate them from the majority to slowly lead over to extermination, which is the opposite of what’s happening in Israel, where - despite some very real discrimination, not too dissimilar to minorities in other developed nations - Israeli Arabs has gained more rights, influence and representation instead of less over time.
Note that I’m not saying that there are no war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza. That would be preposterous. I’m certain that, just like in sadly any war, there are individual soldiers satisfying their blood lust. I’m also not denying that Palestinians have experienced and are experiencing countless injustices from the Israeli state and individual Israelis, especially settlers. This is however entirely different from the allegation that there is a planned, systematic campaign to murder an entire people. I think many people who are parroting this claim have good intentions, but are simply too inexperienced with what wars look like, mistake the absurd overrepresentation of this conflict in the media compared to other, much worse ongoing wars with this war being much worse. Assad had - in a single prison - about as many people murdered as have allegedly (we only have Hamas numbers) been killed in Gaza. The civil war in Sudan has seen massacres at a near incomprehensible scale, with tens of thousands dying over the course of days - yet barely anyone is talking about this. Why is that? Why are we all so obsessed with this tiny strip of arid land in the Middle East? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be watchful, that the international community should not be Israel’s bad conscience, but there is still something profoundly wrong with the way our media - both news and social media - elevates this conflict above every other war.
Sorry for the wall of text. I hope you don’t mind it and the fact that I have some opinions that go against the majority in this community.
The reason why support for Ukraine is so shaky is that Republicans have been thoroughly compromised by the nation
One reason why support for Israel is so unanimous is that all politicians have been compromised to some degree by AIPAC’s influence. It’s just being done in a “legal” fashion and a lot more competently than the (also fairly effective) job that Russia is doing.
As much as Netanyahu is a terrible person, he did not start this war
had absolutely no other choice than to respond to Hamas murderous rampage with a campaign to remove the terrorist organization
Absolutely false. Or rather – it is false that he was obligated to respond by starving children and everyone else, bombing hospitals, and absolutely guaranteeing the continuation of the conflict. Do you really think there’s a single person in Palestine today who doesn’t want to see Israel eradicated off the face of the planet?
If your goal is to eradicate Hamas, this course of action is the absolute last one you would choose.
They could have chosen to pursue a genuine end to the conflict and address its root causes (which basically boil down to Israel wanting to take land from the Palestinians, reduce them to subhuman status with the society they’re imposing on them, and kill them without warning or recourse any time they feel like – which is why Israel doesn’t want to change anything about that.)
They could have chosen to invoke a war against Hamas itself, while still being at least mindful-on-the-surface of civilian casualties. It would be difficult, since their treatment of Palestinians means that basically anyone who’s an adult could potentially be a Hamas supporter, but them’s the breaks when you oppress an entire population for 75 years; you create a situation that’s boo hoo difficult for yourself to deal with “humanely.”
They could have done literally nothing; it’s not ideal, but at least it wouldn’t have involved killing thousands of children and absolutely guaranteeing continued support for Hamas from this generation of Palestinians and maybe beyond.
Hell, any nation on Earth, including the most peace-loving ones, would have started a full-on war in reaction to attack like this.
In the aftermath of World War 2, the allies faced the issue of what to do with the nation that had invented a whole new type of crime against humanity. What they did was:
Involve the international community
Ensure that anyone accused of this crime would have a chance to defend themselves against the charges with legal representation
Took the “innocent” (relatively speaking) civilians of the country, made some effort to rebuild their country, and carefully set up structures which would address the root causes that had led to the breeding ground for hatred that had been created where the problem had festered in the first place.
And, will you look at that, it worked, and we don’t have a continuing insurrection decade after decade in Germany today, with an oppressive open-air prison for all the German people which keeps flaring up into terrorism and murder.
I’m not excusing any murder, kidnapping, or rape of the innocent on October 7th. The people who did it should be punished. The holocaust was orders of magnitude worse, though, and somehow we managed to react to that without starving millions of children and continuing an endless cycle of suffering even into the present day.
Ukraine is mostly getting old stock, weapons that would otherwise be destroyed, because they are at or past their expiration date.
Israel gets the latest kit, which they are buying with American money from American arms manufacturers. An entirely different mechanism. It should be noted that Israel is mostly self-sufficient in terms of military weapons, but it’s of course more convenient for them to take this aid than to make weapons they could make themselves.
As for “political capital”, Ukraine and Israel are so thoroughly different in this regard, it’s like they are from two different planets. In no way are they comparable other than that America has a vested interest in keeping both alive and on its side.
Sorry Zel, your weapons are sent to Israel so they can murder some brown people.
Israel and Ukraine need very different weapons. This is false.
I don’t think they’re saying literally that the same weapons are being sent to one destination or else the other – the issue is the authorization being there or not.
I think the point is that providing weapons for Israel so they can continue the slaughter, basically the whole US political spectrum except for a few scattered outliers is behind, whereas weapons for Ukraine is this big struggle and debate with a lot of people on the pro-invasion side. And even the people who are saying “We MUST arm Ukraine so she can defend herself, what’s going on in an offense against humanity” are also pretty much giving Netanyahu a stern waggling of the finger (if that) and a hearty handshake and a big check in support, as his ongoing genocide continues.
The reason why support for Ukraine is so shaky is that Republicans have been thoroughly compromised by the nation that started the war and has an interest in removing American support for Ukraine. Trump is far from the only leading Republican who is bought and paid for by Moscow.
Israel is an entirely different matter. As much as Netanyahu is a terrible person, he did not start this war and had absolutely no other choice than to respond to Hamas murderous rampage with a campaign to remove the terrorist organization. There was no other option and someone far further left on the political spectrum would have to do the same. Hell, any nation on Earth, including the most peace-loving ones, would have started a full-on war in reaction to attack like this.
The relationship between Israel and the USA is also far firmer than between Ukraine and the USA and not just because of the routinely overstated influence of the “Israel lobby”. Israel is a far more important country, the most important Western partner in the Middle East for strategic reasons alone. It’s a hub for cutting-edge research in pretty much all areas, from biotech to defense and it houses some of the most important chip fabs in the world - think of it as a second Taiwan. It’s also a startup hub, one of the most important places for new high-tech companies to emerge in the world. You have very likely used technology and inventions that came from Israel without knowing it. Intel for example has had a presence in the country since the 1970s, pretty much since the beginning of close US-Israeli ties, and benefited massively from the research and development that happened there.
Israel is small and surrounded by enemies that have tried to destroy it and its people (what do you think “From the river to the sea!” actually means?) from the moment it was conceived by the UN. You are making a serious and sadly these days very common mistake of falling for a massive worldwide propaganda campaign - fueled by Iran, Russia and China, who are doing it in an attempt to weaken one of America’s most important strategic partners - that tries to portray the justified, if brutal, war against an organization that does everything in their power to get as many civilians on both sides killed as a genocide, while at the same time ignoring the real and openly stated genocidal intentions of this terrorist pseudo-state and its supporters. The whole genocide argument falls apart at even the most cursory glance: Why would a country with genocidal intentions go through enormous lengths to minimize civilian casualties, far more so than any other country in the world? The IDF is the only military on the planet that is routinely informing civilians through calls, messages, flyers, hacked TV stations, web services, etc. before air strikes and ground operations. This is nearly completely unheard of elsewhere and entirely unheard of at this kind of scale. This actually hurts Israel militarily, as it allows not just civilians, but also terrorists to get away.
Why would they go through all of this trouble if the aim was to exterminate a people? How would a pluralistic democracy where Israeli Arabs (they don’t like to call themselves Palestinians) have representation in the Knesset and even a Supreme Court judge decide to commit genocide anyway? Not to mention, if they were truly genocidal, they would start with the members of this people within their own borders, with an increasingly harsh campaign to separate them from the majority to slowly lead over to extermination, which is the opposite of what’s happening in Israel, where - despite some very real discrimination, not too dissimilar to minorities in other developed nations - Israeli Arabs has gained more rights, influence and representation instead of less over time.
Note that I’m not saying that there are no war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza. That would be preposterous. I’m certain that, just like in sadly any war, there are individual soldiers satisfying their blood lust. I’m also not denying that Palestinians have experienced and are experiencing countless injustices from the Israeli state and individual Israelis, especially settlers. This is however entirely different from the allegation that there is a planned, systematic campaign to murder an entire people. I think many people who are parroting this claim have good intentions, but are simply too inexperienced with what wars look like, mistake the absurd overrepresentation of this conflict in the media compared to other, much worse ongoing wars with this war being much worse. Assad had - in a single prison - about as many people murdered as have allegedly (we only have Hamas numbers) been killed in Gaza. The civil war in Sudan has seen massacres at a near incomprehensible scale, with tens of thousands dying over the course of days - yet barely anyone is talking about this. Why is that? Why are we all so obsessed with this tiny strip of arid land in the Middle East? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be watchful, that the international community should not be Israel’s bad conscience, but there is still something profoundly wrong with the way our media - both news and social media - elevates this conflict above every other war.
Sorry for the wall of text. I hope you don’t mind it and the fact that I have some opinions that go against the majority in this community.
One reason why support for Israel is so unanimous is that all politicians have been compromised to some degree by AIPAC’s influence. It’s just being done in a “legal” fashion and a lot more competently than the (also fairly effective) job that Russia is doing.
This conflict has been going on for a long time before October.
Absolutely false. Or rather – it is false that he was obligated to respond by starving children and everyone else, bombing hospitals, and absolutely guaranteeing the continuation of the conflict. Do you really think there’s a single person in Palestine today who doesn’t want to see Israel eradicated off the face of the planet?
If your goal is to eradicate Hamas, this course of action is the absolute last one you would choose.
In the aftermath of World War 2, the allies faced the issue of what to do with the nation that had invented a whole new type of crime against humanity. What they did was:
And, will you look at that, it worked, and we don’t have a continuing insurrection decade after decade in Germany today, with an oppressive open-air prison for all the German people which keeps flaring up into terrorism and murder.
I’m not excusing any murder, kidnapping, or rape of the innocent on October 7th. The people who did it should be punished. The holocaust was orders of magnitude worse, though, and somehow we managed to react to that without starving millions of children and continuing an endless cycle of suffering even into the present day.
The political capital and dollar bills used are the same though.
No.
Ukraine is mostly getting old stock, weapons that would otherwise be destroyed, because they are at or past their expiration date.
Israel gets the latest kit, which they are buying with American money from American arms manufacturers. An entirely different mechanism. It should be noted that Israel is mostly self-sufficient in terms of military weapons, but it’s of course more convenient for them to take this aid than to make weapons they could make themselves.
As for “political capital”, Ukraine and Israel are so thoroughly different in this regard, it’s like they are from two different planets. In no way are they comparable other than that America has a vested interest in keeping both alive and on its side.