I hope it is kosher to post this under ~talk. I know people are sick of this topic, so I put plenty of tags in to help those not interested avoid seeing this thread. FWIW, you can go into your Settings and enter keywords to filter threads on ( via tags ).

To my question.

Netanyahu has been killing people with no means of defense.

What is President Biden's motivation to keep sending military aide to Israel while Netanyahu continues to do this?

I have a few guesses, but none of them on their own or together seems to justify the political or humanitarian costs:

1. Somehow it is in the geopolitical interest of the U.S. to do so
2. Israel would be destroyed without military aide ( but defensive weapons can still be sent )
3. The U.S. benefits from Israeli intelligence
4. Congressional republicans aligned with Christian Nationlists want to see Israel live out a Biblical prophesy and it would cost President Biden politically if he were to push a decrease in military aide - assuming he could.
5. President Biden might have lost Jewish American votes, BUT Jews are a minority in America and many American Jews are against what Netanyahu is doing.

Those are the possibilities I could come up with. Am I missing anything? All of these possibilities together do not seem to be worth the political cost President Biden incurred. Is there something I missed?

I have been pretty consistently pro-Palestine and critical of injustices perpetrated by Israel, but the anti-Zionist stance has always seemed to me to be counterproductive.

On the issue of just the legitimacy of the state of Israel, here's my basic stance: All land controlled by all governments was taken at some point through conquest (this is not a whataboutist stance, it's a tautology), but in the post-colonial era we all decided that might isn't right and that a mixture of international law, norms, and democratic principles should dictate the legitimacy of territorial claims. So, the Ottoman empire fell. The British seized control of the land of Palestine and retained a moderately weak mandate over the land (moderately weak in the sense that they were the essentially undisputed administrators of the land and had a military presence, but the territory would likely try to break away if the British tried to exercise significant control over it). With this moderately weak mandate, they pushed for the creation of the state of Israel that, by extension, I would consider a moderately-weakly legitimate state under the pre-WWII paradigm. Israel fights a defensive war against the Arab states and succeeds, converting the state of Israel as defined by the original 1948 partition plan from a weakly legitimate state into a properly legitimate state. At this point, the post-WWII frameworks kick in, and all the developments in the conflict past this point should be a function of that lens (ie. Palestine wrongfully denied sovereignty, illegality of settlements, etc.).

Zionism, in the most basic sense, is the belief in the creation of a Jewish state of Israel. There are more extreme and moderate versions of it, but that's all that it is at its core. Anti-Zionism is opposition to the creation of a Jewish state of Israel (I would not consider opposition to settlements or, strictly speaking, even to the accession of new territory into Israel proper past the 1948 borders after the two wars to be anti-Zionist itself). The anti-Zionist stance before the establishment of Israel was reasonable, but past that point is primarily a claim of one nation over the land of another nation. It's perfectly understandable at the end of the day for the Arabs and, particularly the Palestinians, to be upset about the whole situation and even to feel that a great injustice was done unto them. But that should all be relegated to the world of international affairs between established states. Ultimately, in my eyes anti-Zionism is not anti-semitic, but it's definitely anti-peace.

I don't see a way that Palestine could ever function as two discontinuous parts, and the complete unworkability of the concept makes it infeasible for anything other than a one-state solution to gain momentum in Palestine. In an alternate universe, Egypt might have annexed Gaza years ago, a clearer sense of direction would have emerged in the West Bank, and something of a functioning state would exist for the Palestinians. But of course, Egypt was and is quite opposed to any such solution. So, my basic proposal would be to turn Gaza and the West Bank into two separate, independent states with the latter carrying the namesake of Palestine. If Gaza turns out to be a problematic, belligerent state, then treat it like any other nation in that camp: sanction them, hold Gaza the state itself accountable (as opposed to a vague assortment of belligerents), use diplomacy to achieve piecemeal progress. Surely, any front against Israel would be significantly weaker as the priorities of the two nations inevitably diverge.

This to me seems like the only workable long-term solution, aside from Israel causing a bloodbath in hopes of establishing total militaristic dominance over Gaza and eventually annexing it.