This. Israel is the unofficial 51st State of America, they don’t need blackmail lol
Comment on Do you think that Trump is being blackmailed?
Objection@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
No. Of course it’s possible, but if the only evidence is that he’s doing everything Israel wants, then does Israel also have something on the vast majority of Congress? Did they have something on Biden, Obama, Bush, etc?
The simpler and more likely explanation is that all these politicians support Israel for other reasons, because Israel serves as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US and a staging ground to conduct it’s campaigns of terror and conquest across the MENA region. Look at how many countries in that region the US has destabilized: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, and of course the Israelis themselves are attacking Palestine and Lebanon. This is a consistent campaign of conquest that goes across decades of different administrations.
You don’t have to blackmail US politicians to get them to bomb brown kids in the Middle East, it’s what they all want to do anyway.
plutopos@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
marcos@lemmy.world 6 days ago
then does Israel also have something on the vast majority of Congress?
Isn’t that well known? When did people forget Israel pays for the campaign of the vast majority of the politicians in the US?
Objection@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
We’re talking about blackmail material. If AIPAC is sufficient explanation for why congress supports Israel, why do we need all this conjecture and supposition that Trump is being blackmailed, when we know for a fact that he takes AIPAC money too?
marcos@lemmy.world 6 days ago
My guess it’s because it’s very likely that Israel has some very damning blackmail material on Trump.
But I do agree it’s not necessary. There’s enough publicly known reasons for Trump to support them to the death of the second-to-last US citizen without the need of any secret material.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Plus Trump has a natural hardon for authoritarian leaders.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 6 days ago
The only thing is that the US hasn’t really used Israel as a staging area for expeditionary action in the Middle East.
Both the Gulf and Iraq Wars used Saudi Arabia as a staging ground. Afghanistan was too far away for the US to use Israel. If anything, the US usually excludes Israel from any overt military action given the political blowback from using Israel in the region.
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Israel is used as a destabilizing presence in the ME to prevent the region from uniting against Western imperialism. The point is not to use Israel as a staging ground for direct US action, but to allow it to do its thing so that the region is focused on the immediate threat of Israel and less able to respond to US soft power threats.
“Let us extract your resources, or we will allow Israel to assassinate your leaders and bomb your schools.”
Objection@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
Even if that’s true, they are still in the US sphere of influence just like Saudi Arabia, and that’s all that US politicians care about. They will happily overlook Israeli crimes just as they overlook Saudi crimes, and I don’t see people suggesting the Saudis have blackmail material.
What do people mean by saying the US does whatever Israel wants? Sending them weapons to kill brown kids in Palestine, Lebanon, etc? The US wants to do that. Bombing Iran? The US wants to do that. Either you have to take the theory further and say that the whole reason the US wants to dominate the region is for Israel’s sake (I don’t know why they can’t just want to dominate it for their own sake), or you have to ignore all the conflicts the US has gotten involved in in the region that aren’t directly related to Israel, brushing them off as coincidence.
Either way, the simplest explanation is that the US is simply a militaristic state hellbent on domination and expansion through conquest, motivated by the same things that have always motivated imperial conquest.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 6 days ago
That Israel has invested in American politicians and American public opinion for decades. It doesn’t absolve the US of its moral failing, but it provides an explanation.
Objection@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
And the US has done the same to other countries. And there are countless billionaires and corporations that influence US politics just as Israel does.
Maybe we should focus more on the general problem of class conflict rather than looking at it in terms of nations. If you got all the Israeli money out of US politics but did nothing about the other corporate money and corruption, it’s hard to imagine much would change.