Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich welcomed President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory Monday, saying that “the time has come” to extend full Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank.
He made the comment a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a recorded statement that he has spoken three times with Trump since the election and that they “see eye to eye on the Iranian threat.
You wanted to toss out another candidate? Over Gaza, something 90% of America would be somewhere between ambivalent and gleeful if it burned?
Or did you want to wait until the convention, bypass the VP and flip the bird to black and/or women voters while nominating a different compromise candidate that no one actually wanted at the last minute?
Yeah, it was Biden until it wasn’t. And if he’d hadn’t stepped down the choice would’ve been him or Trump. This isn’t a fucking buffet. You vote for the Democrat or you accept the Republican.
That is just plainy wrong.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx
This is from end of March.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/01/slight-uptick-in-americans-wanting-u-s-to-help-diplomatically-resolve-israel-hamas-war/
The DNC did everything they could to demotivate and alienate their base. Everyone who cheered that on instead of demanding proper primaries didn’t just loose the elections, but also showed a moral desolace
I can’t find sentiment analysis to say how important Gaza was to voters in the election, but I strongly believe of the things that people cared about, Gaza was only significant for Arab Americans.
Plus a convention to pick a candidate would’ve only divided everyone just before the election. No better-loved candidate was going to come out of that. Only compromise that left everyone unhappy. Or most likely still Harris but with less enthusiastic support.
It’s all well and good to say people are unhappy about injustice, we are. But is anyone going to vote change their vote any the economy or domestic policy over it? Fleetingly few.
I did find an article of someone looking forward to saying told you so if Trump wins. Well, good job. They can say told you so. I’ll keep their smugness in mind when Netanyahu escalates. I’ll remind myself, this is what Arab voters wanted above all else.
If a convention to pick a candidate was so bad, why did the Republicans win with it? The Republicans had proper primaries. They won.
As for the importance of Gaza, here are some early numbers analyzed
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/11/election-harris-gaza-policy
I do appreciate the effort to source your argument. That is an opinion piece by someone who already had a strong opinion about US Israeli policy. I get people cared. I certainly get that Arabs cared. But it’s going to take some time, if we ever know, why things turned out this way.
One thing seems certain even in that article: unless there is a hotbed of Gaza sympathy in rural Pennsylvania, Gaza didn’t swing the election.