• Krono@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    23 hours ago

    How do you explain things like her refusal to let a Palestinian speak at the DNC? Or how she re-commits herself to Israel’s “defense” whenever asked?

    I want some of that hope, but it seems like facts are pointing in the other direction.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      12
      ·
      23 hours ago

      Election campaigning. She’s trying to win over voters, and while we like to think she could do that by just going full-on progressive, it’s just not backed up by the numbers. Suburban moderates are necessary to achieve victory, so she’s courting them, along with any conveniently available gop defectors. They lean more pro-Israel than we do, so, so does her election strategy.

      Not everyone in the electorate cares much about the plight of Palestinians, a significant number of people remember the Intifadas not as some sort of just campaign for liberation, but as a widespread rash of suicide bombings on civilians just trying to live their day-to-day. They don’t want to see the US cave to that by turning our backs on an established ally.

      This is why it remains important to continue grassroots efforts to bring light to the difference between innocent Palestinians and Jihadists, incidentally. Mainstream America isn’t going to jump on any sort of reclaim-Palestine-from-the-colonial-oppressors rhetoric any time soon. Peaceful co-existence by pressuring the Israeli government, supporting Israeli peace protestors and reminding people not all Palestinians are hostile militants is a different story though, that’s potentially achievable. If the electorate continues to swing, more of the politicians will get room to follow. Especially since we don’t actually need Israel’s geostrategic position any more, as of the past decade or two. We have more leverage than we used to.

      • Krono@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        23 hours ago

        You’re right, and none of that gives me hope that Harris will pivot.

        The re-elect Harris campaign will start on January 20th, and the political reality you just described will still exist.

        Changing stances on Israel’s genocide will take leadership, which is something we haven’t seen from the Harris campaign. It is not Harris leading a campaign on principle, it is the polls leading the Harris campaign, just as you described it.

        Those suburban moderates’ views can be changed, they just have never been exposed to an opposing message. The news says Israel is the good guys and Hamas is the bad guys; only those on the fringes say otherwise. If Harris would show leadership and take a principled stance on the side of humanity, she could bring most of these low information moderate voters with her.

        • BMTea@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          17
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          22 hours ago

          This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, “deep state” (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn’t another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.

            • BMTea@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              4 hours ago

              It isn’t “Trumpian”, it predates Trump and is an actual phrase that comes from the social sciences and was then adopted and abused by conspiracy theorists. In the American context, it’s a useful concept because it helps to explain the continuity in unpopular or discredited policies between administration that tout different outlooks, but end up railroaded into these policies. It’s just a different name for what Obama called “the blob.”

              • Carrolade@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                3 hours ago

                Uh, no it’s not a technical term.

                Yeah, there is a large bureaucracy that implements policy, no question. That policy was initiated democratically though, and can be similarly reversed. Just not unilaterally by a President, who is not supposed to be a king, especially if Congress decided it.

                And the blob term to describe the bureaucracy was used by an Obama aide, not Obama btw. Not that I expect honesty out of Trumpets.

                edit for clarity

          • filister@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            arrow-down
            5
            ·
            21 hours ago

            But she also didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech and actually has been quite critical of the war in Gaza. But yes, don’t expect miracles. I still think she will be more critical of the Israelian government and whether this leads to a ceasefire or not is to be seen.

            But in any case she will be harder on them than Trump, who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem during his presidency and offered the “peace deal of the century”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_peace_plan#:~:text=The stated purpose of the,both parties to the conflict.

            • BMTea@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              edit-2
              4 hours ago

              She met with Netanyahu regardless, and did a photo op with him. Every since her poll numbers drastically improved, she has become less and less pensive about her unconditional support for Netanyahu’s Israel.

              It’s really silly to point to the provocations and one-sided policy of the Trump administration at this point. Biden not only kept to them, he doubled down on them, and none of them were as monstrously deterimental to the Palestinian people than what Blinken and Biden have done.

              They have jettisoned the entire domestic and international humanitarian framework to allow Israel to punish, slaughter, herd and humiliate millions of civilians. And Harris sees no reason to contradict them or abandon this policy. She has made it unequivocally clear that she is with them on this. They’ve really gona above and beyond in doing so. And at the end of the day, a majority of Democratic senators gave Netanyahu a standing ovation in Congress. Her party, her president, her position.

        • Carrolade@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          23 hours ago

          We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.

          So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.

      • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        16 hours ago

        Me not understand. Me single issue Lemmy voter. Why Kamama not shit on own constituency for paltry gesture that change nothing? Why Kamama?! Why?!