Summary
Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the UN, stated during her confirmation hearing that Israel has a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank, aligning with far-right Israeli officials.
Stefanik sidestepped support for Palestinian self-determination, blaming their leadership for failures.
Her stance signals a shift from Biden-era opposition to Israeli settlements, with Trump lifting sanctions on Israeli settler groups and nominating pro-settlement figures like Mike Huckabee for key roles.
Stefanik also vowed to audit UN funding and block aid to Palestinian refugee agencies.
He wasn’t moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, signalling in no uncertain terms his personal position.
I think a lot of people really misunderstood the no-lose scenario Trump engineered wrt Israel.
He got to call him Genocide Joe, while hammering on the debates saying, and I quote that Harris and Joe HATE Israel.
I have absolutely no doubt that both Russia and Israel timed their respective beligerences to try to politically hog-tie Biden knowing Trump could hammer him and once he was in give them both carte blanche.
Like, I have many many issues with how Biden specifically didn’t do the right things in the middle east, but he was attempting to thread a political needle to not hand Trump the ammunition he needed to get re-elected. In retrospect, and I’m sure Joe would agree, that given the reality that Trump was getting the big seat again, he should have just said “fuck it” and done the morally correct things.
And things, now, are going to get so much worse. Trump’s teams position is that it’s acceptable for Israel to just take and settle everything that the Palestinians had. There no longer is an alternative view that involves coexistence from the US government.
Specifically wrt to the middle east, there was a bad option and a worse option. Had Harris won, the political realities could have allowed the expenditure of political capital to do the right (or at least righter) thing. Trump won’t even consider it.
I also like how every pretty valid criticism that could be levied at Biden because of his support for the war in Gaza somehow instantly applied, also, to Kamala Harris. Successfully. There was pretty much no change or hesitation just because it was a whole new person who was, at most, in an advisory role to Mr. Genocide himself.
It was all a bunch of bullshit from the beginning. I don’t think that one issue made a huge difference in the election, honestly, I don’t think enough Americans care. I think it was a combination of multiple issues, each one expertly tuned to different audiences according to their preexisting prejudices to exploit whatever fault lines existed, and then relentlessly pushed. There was a little bit on news media and podcasts and whatever crap. But I definitely think social media was a huge part of it, and we on Lemmy were privileged to see just that one facet of it, with a huge helping of “Palestine” because we tend to be left enough for that one to be one that can really hit home.
You’ll notice that nearly all the people who couldn’t stop posting articles about what disasters Biden was engineering in Palestine, and how big a problem it was, are no longer as enthusiastic about the nightmarish future that’s now on deck there, now that there’s no profit in it for them.
I am one of those people and that is a lazy bullshit generalization. The left has gone nowhere and was screaming about this future coming to pass since you before you were born.
Harris was put in place by the Democratic party and advertised herself to be precisely the continuation of Biden. Aside from some token gestures she did nothing different in regards to Palestine.
And she made a point of denying Democrats who wanted an end of the genocide to speak at the DNC convention, even though they wanted to advocate people to vote for her, despite the previous actions of the administration she was Vice President in.
She really hammered home the point that she will continue Bidens murderous Zionism legacy with that one.
I mean it certainly didn’t help that she actively refused to break from Biden on Gaza, said the exact same things Biden was saying and had a VP that said he supported Israeli expansion.