[lovich]

> At any point in the last more than a year of his term, Biden could've ended that conflict with a phone call. He did not because, again, he is an avowed Zionist.

No he could not have. Israel has been a contentious ally for the US, especially while a Democrat has been POTUS because they are actually independently capable of supporting themselves and have their own internal economy and military industrial complex.

The relationship between the United States and Israel started with us(The United States) peeling them off of USSR support in the late 60s[1], and if we abandon them they will either go it on their own or find another ally who has interests in the region due to oil still being important.

Biden as a representative of the United States had leverage over Israel, but not such complete control that he could just call Netanyahu and demand and end the war and have that be done with.

And that's not even getting into whatever the fuck you mean by " ... he is an avowed Zionist" [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_and_the_Arab%E2%8...

[Cyph0n]

You can argue all day long, but at the end of the day, the US has immense ability to exert pressure on Israel, starting with withholding UNSC vetoes.

The Biden admin pulled no levers whatsoever. On the contrary, it went to great lengths to cover for a genocide that it was aware of. This admin will be part of the history books, but not in a good light :)

[lovich]

> ... US has immense ability to exert pressure on Israel, starting with withholding UNSC vetoes.

You are 100% correct on this. That does not however mean they have the ability to end a war in one phone call

> The Biden admin pulled no levers whatsoever.

This is incorrect. Biden tried to constrain Netanyahu and did shit like making the pier to deliver aid to the Palestinians. Netanyahu responded by snubbing Biden and giving a speech to the Senate instead.

I am generally anti Israel as the nation because I believe they have been a shit tier ally who feels free to fuck around in our elections with no remorse, but acting like we had the ability to force them into actions they didn't want, without using military force, is fucking ridiculous.

Again, I think they are a piss poor ally, largely because they will not work with us, and that is largely because they have the ability to operate independently and utilize that ability constantly. If we got rid of any dependence on oil I would say fuck the whole region because every state there is in a competition over who can be the biggest assholes to us, with the possible slight exception of Jordan, and I cage that claim because I only know a decade or two of their history in relations with us and honestly mostly because one of their kings wanted to be in star trek so bad he got a spot as an extra, which implies some level of agreeing with our values.

[matwood]

Thank you for your comments. In short, it's complicated. The other piece which you didn't mention that other people bring up is cutting off the 4B-8B in military aid to Israel. In the past that might have given the US more leverage, but Israel has a 700B GDP economy now - they don't need that aid to buy weapons. The aid the US sends just ends up back in the US economy, and keeps Israel from buying arms from China.

[Cyph0n]

> In short, it's complicated.

No, it is not. The US has the power to sanction entire states & cut them out from the global banking system overnight. Look at what Cuba has suffered for daring to oppose the US.

> but Israel has a 700B GDP economy now

That would mean shit if the country is sanctioned and its leaders declared persona non grata. South Africa was similarly quite powerful, but when you’re reliant on Western backing and integration, existing as a pariah state is not a sustainable position to be in.

[lovich]

Yea, but that’s not a single phone call from the president. I know we’re getting closer and closer to an Imperial Executive every year but we definitely weren’t there under Biden.

[Cyph0n]

Let’s just agree to disagree, although we will never know for sure given that Biden is a self-avowed Zionist who chose the path of unconditional support.

[jmyeet]

Israel isn't independently capable of doing anything. When Israel was created it was a poor backwater. France and the USSR were early allies. I mean Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty and killed ~34 American servicemen in the 1960s. It's widely suspected that Israeli spies or sympathizers stole weapons grade uranium from the US (ie the NUMEC Affair). But this all changed after the Six Day War in 1967 and Israel became an American imperial project to destabilize an oil-rich region, to stop Pan-Arabn Nationalism.

But the history has always been that the US could order Israel to do whatever it wanted from Eistenhower telling Israel to get the hell out of Sinai to Biden telling Israel to knockj it off in Gaza in 2021 [1] and plenty in between (eg US involvement in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 led to Moshe Dayan telling Golda Meir they had to stop because the Americans said so, basically).

The parallel for this is apartheid South Africa. That regime collapsed when it became clear that domestic political pressure was forcing the US to withdraw support. The exact same thing would happen in Israel. Israel gets billions in direct aid and, more importantly, the military is completely dependent on US arms shipments and weapon systems.

If Biden had told Bibi "we're going to stop arms shipments if you don't stop this" it would've ended immediately.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/19/biden-tells-israels-netanyah...