r/ProgressivePolitics

In a thread of tweets, Adam Johnson introduced this article thus:

> I wrote about J Street’s “cut off military aid to Israel” PR gambit which, upon closer inspection, is clearly a time-buying scam that 1) aligns w/ Netanyahu’s “phase out” plan & 2) provides a fake Israel-critical talking point for Dems increasingly under pressure from their base.

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2:

> Jonathan Chait joins the campaign, along with J Street, Lindsey Graham and Netanyahu, to severe US military funding of Israel to blunt opposition and give the appearance of distance between democrats and Israel while maintaining the status quo of arming genocide and apartheid

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3:

> Also this is one of the most evil and cynical things I’ve ever read: here Chait argues there’s been “selective attention” on Gaza by activists vs the West Bank not because 100X more people have been killed/it’s widely seen as a genocide but because they all secretly love Hamas

> > Revealingly, the movement is focused on Gaza, to the point where Gaza is often used as shorthand for its goals. Although Gaza has seen the worst carnage, it was also the staging ground for horrific mass attacks on civilians. Pogroms by Israeli settlers in the West Bank have no defensive rationale, yet they have received a fraction of the attention bestowed on Gaza. The most convincing explanation for this selective attention is that Gaza, but not the West Bank, is controlled by Hamas, and the pro-Palestinian activist network in the U.S. is in solidarity with Hamas.

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4:

> Just to clarify: there’s an emerging consensus among israel defenders to push for a “cut US military aid to Israel” because technically “aid” only means funding (despite it colloquially meaning military sales but whatever). So it’s clearly not “a good first step” but cynical PR

< For progressive Democrats, the de facto position on US military ties to Israel in recent years has been to oppose US military aid, except in the case of notionally defensive missile interceptor systems like Iron Dome. This spring, that’s started to break down: One of the two leading contenders in the Senate Democratic primary in Michigan, the physician Abdul El-Sayed, says that he opposes not just military aid, but all US arms sales to Israel, including Iron Dome. He’s one of a large crop of left-wing candidates who are serious contenders in ongoing Democratic primaries and are pushing for the US to stop selling any weapons to Israel. >