> Many believe he could have stopped it with a phone call and explicitly refused.
This seems to take all of the culpability, motive and free will away from Netanyahu. I'm not saying Biden couldn't make that call, but why do we assume Bibi would have actually stopped if so?
To a lot of outsiders it honestly looks like to some extent Israel controls US foreign policy. It's not a good look. Why does the US have to tiptoe so much around this issue? Why does Israel have such leverage? What is this leverage?
I always say, imagine if it was France instead of Israel. Then you see how crazy the situation is.
A strong West-allied military in the Middle East is extremely valuable.
If France started a war of aggression, the US would also 100% stand with France, especially if it started with France being hit with a terrorist attack. I’m not sure what you are trying to say.
From my layman's perspective, it's because a lot of people in the US just plain support Israel. I think that's because of religious connotations but again I don't really know. I've even seen an Israel flag being flown in the same yard as a Trump 2024 yard sign, here in my tiny northwest Iowa town.
Because critics always say what they don't want but rarely think through what they do.
The very likely case of Palestine replacing Israel would be a rapidly anti-US, anti-Western, anti-Democratic government and a loss of a very valuable port in the middle east due to the, y'know, rapidly anti-US issue.
Also depopulating Israel of Jews would almost certainly result in another Holocaust. Because Hamas - the most likely-to-govern organization for Palestine - has long enshrined Jew murder in its charter.
Depends what was in the phone call! If he said "I'm going to drone you and everyone in your cabinet and all of your family" that would probably have done it, coming from the one person on earth who can credibly make that threat.
Biden's aides could probably come up with a more nuanced and more statesmanlike but equally effective threat than that, of course. Any US president would have great leverage to threaten an Israeli PM personally or politically, or threaten changes to US foreign policy that would work badly for Israel.
> Any US president would have great leverage to threaten an Israeli PM personally or politically, or threaten changes to US foreign policy that would work badly for Israel.
US Presidents aren't dictators and there is no way _any_ policy change too bad for Israel wouldn't have led to serious financial issues for any party. AIPAC is damn well connected.
In any case, I don't believe Netanyahu would have caved. No matter the threat - the crimes of Oct 7 were way too serious for any Israeli PM to leave unanswered. It was the equivalent of 9/11 - and just like the US back then, who completely flattened Afghanistan in retaliation, there is no way any other Israeli PM would have had any other realpolitik option than to fight until Hamas is gone off the face of the planet.
It’s more like 10x worse than 9/11. Israel is a fairly small country of 9m people. So much of the population was connected to those killed. If you scale it to the US it would be as if 41,000 Americans were killed. Our response would be off the charts in such an event.
> there is no way _any_ policy change too bad for Israel wouldn't have led to serious financial issues for any party. AIPAC is damn well connected.
Well, yeah, it might not have been good for Biden financially or for the US strategic military position in the region. That's exactly why he didn't make the call - it's not that he doesn't care about the slaughter of innocents, but he cares about other things more.
This seems to take all of the culpability, motive and free will away from Netanyahu. I'm not saying Biden couldn't make that call, but why do we assume Bibi would have actually stopped if so?