Summary
Trump plans to lift the Biden administration’s freeze on supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and reverse sanctions against Israeli settlers.
Summary
Trump plans to lift the Biden administration’s freeze on supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and reverse sanctions against Israeli settlers.
The occupiers are the state of Israel. Biden had some very limited sanctions against specific extremists who weren’t also Americans, but no one in their right mind thought that was somehow stopping the occupation.
Yes, that what I said, though I can see how the ordering of my words could be ambiguous.
And Trump is removing them. Therefor Trump is, in an objective and literal sense, empowering those people subjected to those sanctions by removing sanctions that Biden had put in place.
Those sanctions didn’t actually do anything about the occupation. It’d be like sanctioning some random ultra-Z Russians rather than their leadership or institutions and acting like it’s curbing the occupation of Crimea. A few specific Israelis couldn’t bank with the United States, but they can just route through American-Israelis in their ranks instead. Them specifically banking wasn’t in any way important to the occupation.
Lifting the sanctions by Trump is bad, but more on the symbolism than the impact.
Trump could have said hey this sanction isn’t working, we need to strengthen it so that it does. But he instead said get rid of this sanction entirely. I get that you’re saying “well it didn’t really work and they had access to it anyway.” I do. But by your own account they had to go through extra steps to get it and now they don’t. That’s empowering. Even if just in the psychological sense that they now get to think “hey Trump is doing things to make it easier for me to keep occupying this land.” They now know that Trump is aiding them, so that gives them a greater sense of purpose and power to continue. And now they get more of the bigger bombs with which to do it.
This is just such a minimal impact it’s hard to get worked up about it. It’s wrong and it’s bad and it’s worse, but we have not lost a force for good in losing Bidenism. Bidenism with respect to Israel was evil. And Trump is eviler, but on this issue, there’s really not much worse it can get. On many many other issues Trump is incomparably worse, but no one should pretend Biden was in any way a bulwark against genocide and occupation.
This very story demonstrates it. In a raft of reversing Biden policies, the only things he could do for Israel was unrestricting a single bomb and removing some token sanctions. That’s the sum of Biden’s efforts to restrain Israel.
The “it’s worse” is all I’m arguing about. Not the degree to which it’s worse, just that it is worse at all. And by the definitions of the word empowering, Trump being worse than Biden is empowering the Israelis.
I haven’t been arguing that Biden has been a force for good in this conflict. Agreement that Trump is worse was my only objective. So 🍻