If you are keeping score at home, you have surely noticed that the two most important defense officials in Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the former military chief of staff Benny Gantz — warned last week that Netanyahu is leading Israel into a disastrous abyss by refusing to present any plan for non-Hamas Palestinians to govern Gaza and appears to be contemplating a long-term Israeli military occupation of Gaza instead. Gantz said he would leave the government if there was no plan by June 8.
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“Netanyahu’s acquiescence to the extreme right, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, has generally been seen as motivated out of his need to keep his coalition together and himself out of jail,” Friedman told me. “Now it seems that he has willingly sold his soul to the extreme right. One explanation is that the extreme religious right projects a Messianic image onto him that corresponds with his own sense of having been called to save Israel and the Jewish people. He has a plan for the day after and it’s very clear to anyone who listens: ‘Total victory’ — and eventually the return of Jewish settlement there. Israel is on the way to reoccupying Gaza.”
If that happens, Israel will become an international pariah and Jewish institutions everywhere will be torn between Jews who will feel the need to defend Israel — right or wrong — and those who, with their kids, will find it indefensible.
Then you’re an idiot. It doesn’t matter that Fox News will try to make something an issue. They’re going to call Democrats antisemites while chanting the great replacement theory regardless of what Joe Biden does and everyone who’s going to be influenced by them is already lost to him for five other made up crises. Liberals like you are continually jumping at the shadows thinking there’s some masterful triangulation that will thread the needle just right to make the rightwing mediasphere unable to push a message while completely losing the plot about how that comes across to the voters that actually matter.
The very instinct to just duck and defend at every turn is why we lose on issues like this where the majority of the country are with us. Chuck Schumer isn’t some DSA member and he had it right: take the political fight to the people who mean to do us harm and define them as the problem. Biden should be spurning Netanyahu, both because it’s the right thing to do and the right political move, and he should be saying it out loud, defining the narrative rather than waiting for it to be defined for him. There’s a perfectly good message here about the United States as a moral force promoting a just international order and the dangers presented by rightwing fascists motivated by hate and putting personal needs above what is good for their nations.
“Don’t worry about the media that helped orchestrate this in swing states across the nation.”
Staggering strategic genius right there.