US funding of Israel is at most a few percent of their GDP. Some years it drops to below 1 percent. If the US stopped funding Israel nothing would happen in Israel. Israel is more than capable of looking after themselves. And they have nukes.
The only political repercussions of cutting funding for Israel would be in the US itself. It buys votes. They’re not actually doing it for Israels benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_Sta...
For example AIPAC is pledging $100m to target in primaries progressive democrats who have not supported Israel recently. That is a hell of a lot of money: https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/11/17/powerful-pro-israel-...
It is the largest recipient of American foreign aid since WW2
Remove that and Israelis will be making peace with Palestinians very quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
For years, the CIA helped arm, fund, and train the "Al-Nursa front"—Al-Quaeda's official Syrian affiliate. Al-Nursa took over Aleppo, ran wild looting, raping, and killing. But when Russia and Assad finally freed the city from the terrorists, US condemned the liberators.
And Assad is not a terrorist? "We want democracy; here, have a bullet in the head instead".
That Wikipedia page says pretty clearly it supported the Free Syrian Army, and that some arms may have accidentally ended up with IS extremists. That is not the same thing as "helped arm, fund, and train" at all.
Nour al-Din al-Zenki seems to have gotten some support around 2014/2015. It's not entirely clear to me what the entire story on that is, and the LA Times article doesn't explain it either.
You are spectacularly misrepresenting your own links to the point it's exceedingly hard to take this in good faith.
(As for Assad—I am no fan of the man, he is a butcher, but still far better than Al-Nursa.)
Which completely contradicts what you claimed.
Generally speaking, Israel is part of the West and we expect them to have a higher standard than some dictatorship.
That being said, how many deaths can be attributed to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan? I assume order of magnitude higher than what we're witnessing in Gaza. It seems Israel doesn't get the same free pass for some reason.
At present it's not clear Israel is being held to any standard. What is the lower standard you would like them to be held to?
It would also be worth explaining why you think any country is due "a free pass" when it comes to killing. And what that "free pass" entitles you to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
I'm surprised you're asking for numbers that are so easily accessible. Perhaps you're only thinking of people directly killed by US soldiers while the parent comment was considering all violent deaths caused by the war the US started?
https://www.unicef.org/iraq/press-releases/more-9000-childre...
That doesn't make them wrong. There is truth and there is falsity and for every important, complicated truth, there are people who "prefer" the narrative that conveys it. But it's not the body count that establishes the truth, it's the underlying work that went into revealing it.
The truth of the situation you're intent on nudging us about is intensely complicated.
You can't criticize someone for saying something that's true, and people only do so when they are losing the argument. If you're so beaten back that you're resorting to that, I will help you: Hamas killed more Israeli children than Saddam killed American children.
But, more generally, you're just not responding to anything I actually wrote.
"Reality is too complex to understand, therefore the understanding you are offering must be wrong," is also a way to argue against anything, unless it's accompanied by some part of that reality that the other person cannot explain with their theory.
The act of stating facts is criticized as being "intent on nudging us," and rather than challenging those factual claims or contextualizing them, the line suggests epistemic disengagement in the face of a reality that is "intensely complicated."
The same media that's wrong about this is giving other information based on similar assumptions (granted that they were corrected).
And around 33% of that total is from failed rockets in Gaza (based on figures collected in previous wars).
So I don't think it's in the early stages, although this ceasefire is going to restart some elements, which is unfortunate.
Hamas needs to surrender - everything they do makes life worse for Palestinians.
For the rest of your post it is so much unsubstantiated propoganda, that appears to be solely put forward to "somehow" excuse the deliberate state murder of many thousands of civilians, disproportionately children and women, in this I'm unsure whether you are the victim or the perpetrator.
Everytime I read about Israel's response, I wonder how the military might have proceeded differently if it was in developed Israeli cities that Hamas were hiding instead.
You are describing how Palestinians treated Jews in Israel. You do realize that Israel is the native land of the Jews for considerably more than a "few generation"? Jews have been native to Israel for more than 3,000 years. What right do Arabs have to come and colonize it?
> and so your new country destroys it without taking sufficient precaution not to hurt civilians.
What more precaution can they take than "leave, there's going to be a war here"? I mean seriously, what else do you want them to do?
> I wonder how the military might have proceeded differently if it was in developed Israeli cities that Hamas were hiding instead.
Easy. The civilians would leave, or Hamas would take them captive. But they would not stay there like some Palestinians are.
Afghanistan child deaths: 26,000 vs 5,500 in Gaza (according to Hamas).
Good discussion at https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/82572/why-are-s... about the issue.
A quick Googling doesn't find me a counter-estimate from Israel. Given the very clear evidence of large scale bombardment of the Gaza Strip (Israel claims 6,000 bombs dropped, and Hamas is known for favoring populated areas; https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip...), counts in the thousands seem very plausible.
I don't doubt they include Hamas fighters, but I do doubt that Israel's targeting has been so effective and precise the deaths are mostly Hamas. US intelligence estimates 20-25k Hamas members (https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html); I don't think half of them are likely to have been already taken out.
Also, as a percentage of civilian population Gaza deaths are very close to Iraq deaths, except way less dead children in Gaza vs Iraq.
Israel spent $23.4b on it's military vs $3.3b from the US. And the Israeli economy is $522B making the US "funding of Israel" 0.6% of their economy.
That's hardly "funded by the US government". And on top of that the US is "funding" Israel in return for technology, so it's more a purchase by the US than anything else.
>The U.S.-Israel economic and commercial relationship is strong, anchored by an annual bilateral trade of nearly $50 billion in goods and services. Several treaties and agreements, including the 1985 U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA), solidify bilateral economic relations. Since the FTA’s signing in 1985, the United States has become Israel’s largest trading partner.
I think it's fair to say that the US has strong connections to Israel. I don't know if it's fair to imply it's totally dependent on the US as they implied, but I think it's more complex than the aid being a small percentage of the GDP.
So you need to take into account what the US would lose. It's far more complex than your shallow "cry and scream".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil...