I see your point, but I didn’t personally authorize military aid to the IDF. I don’t have the authority or money to do much besides vote and protest. I’ll accept responsibility equal to my power to change the situation, but nothing more.
Joe IS doing a lot of good stuff, but not when it comes to Palestine.
The stuff he’s doing is in response to pressure voters like you have applied. Now that the primary is over we need to think of new ways to keep the pressure on. Protests will have a place, but I wonder what else can be done.
There is nothing else you can do that is targeted at Biden, by design. Only voting for down-ballot candidates for Congress who will try to hold him to account might have any effect. Of course, that assumes that the courts don’t continue their trend of handing the President more and more power that Congress previously held (and which they’re doing precisely because people began to understand the power of down-ballot elections).
I would take it a step further. Biden has put sanctions on Israeli settlers for the first time in American history.
With the construction of a port, Biden is establishing a US military presence in Gaza, which I'm not aware of ever having happened there.
Does that excuse four months of inaction oops I mean active military aid? Fuck no.
Is that driven to some extent by political calculus related to the support he's losing from progressives? Absolutely yes. To what degree, I have no idea, but I suspect it's pretty large. It would be nice if he were doing it because innocent people including little children were dying in a country-wide indiscriminate slaughter.
How does that square with $10 billion worth of aid that we're still trying to give to Israel? As Sanders points out, it doesn't.
But even with all those mitigating factors in play, Joe Biden is showing signs of being the first American president who might potentially want to stop the infernal bargain the United States has had going with Israel for many, many generations.
I get the idea of having some skepticism about him, simply because he's an American leader, and because of the grim reality of his full-throated support for Israel up until a couple of weeks ago. But it still looks to me like support for Joe Biden is the most realistic glimmer of hope of divorcing the US military budget from Israel's bloody little hands that's come along for a long, long time. If you're refusing to support Biden outright because of this issue (and specifically in this election against Donald "finish the problem" Trump), I would say to look again.
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