BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Appeal to Emotion, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 44% saturation with 387 hits. Analysis detected 1,031 faulty-reasoning hits from 879 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 52.7% and a BS Rank of 54% (9,514 of 20,518 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 53.60% of the article peer group.
Last week, House Republicans tried to embarrass Democrats by offering a floor amendment ending all military aid to Israel.
But then 103 House Democrats , more than half of the Democratic caucus, voted for the amendment as a badge of honor.
They included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts.
In the space of a few weeks, the Israel issue has finally flipped.
The critics have become the mainstream and the defenders of Israel are now the outliers.
Polls show that 58 percent of Democratic voters say the U.S. is too supportive of Israel and 52 percent call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide.
All this has consequences, both for Israel and for domestic politics.
Progressive Democrats, who have been winning a string of primaries mainly on pocketbook issues, have long been attacked as overly critical of Israel.
But now, criticism of Israel is increasingly the dominant Democratic position, while support from AIPAC and affiliated political action committees has become toxic.
This increases the influence of the left in the Democratic Party generally, since calling out Israel’s barbarism is now a political bonus rather than a burden.
There are simply too many Democrats espousing this position, both candidates and voters, for the House and Senate campaign committees to demonize them.
The ultimate weathervane in Democratic politics, Rahm Emanuel, long in the Israel-right-or-wrong camp and a self-promoted candidate for president in 2028, recently invited himself to Israel to deliver a much-publicized speech at Tel Aviv University.
“Your government is complicit in the horrors now being inflicted on innocent families in the West Bank,” he said.
“That undermines your international legitimacy, as a small nation, at a time when you can least afford it.”
Emanuel criticized Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but also U.S. administrations for serving as his enabler.
“We’ve done you no favors by averting our eyes,” he said.
Emanuel, you might say, is a day late and a shekel short.
The New Yorker recently ran a deeply reported piece on the Biden administration’s repeated failure to use the leverage of extensive military aid to limit Israel’s barbarism.
The writer, David Kirkpatrick, interviewed every major senior player making Middle East policy under Biden.
Every time Biden advisers sought to condition aid on greater restraint, they were out-played by Bibi and a few hard-line Bibi allies around Biden, and most importantly by Biden himself.
“Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that,” Kirkpatrick writes.
Even worse was Biden’s indulgence of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.
Biden kept making threats that aid might be cancelled, but never delivered.
This story first appeared in our free Today on TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Prospect reporters.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National security adviser, went on the record.
“We repeatedly raised and discussed options for withholding weapons,” he told Kirkpatrick; but, except for the brief suspension of one shipment of bombs, “‘the President always deferred on that decision, because we kept thinking that we were close to getting a deal’ for a hostage release and a ceasefire.’”
Sullivan added, “When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize.
… I will say straightforwardly—we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”
Even taking the reputation-burnishing with a big grain of salt, a tragic picture emerges of a missed opportunity to save Israel from Bibi’s worst instincts and to save tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.
And there was a worse tragedy.
Trump was elected thanks to a huge falloff in Democratic turnout in 2024, much of it among the young.
Biden’s appalling failure to hold Israel to account was a big part of the story, since younger Democratic voters tend to be far less indulgent of Israel’s brutality.
Bibi’s success in playing Biden for a fool segued directly into his manipulation of Trump, with even more dire consequences in the form of the Iran War.
Critics have widely pointed out that all of Trump’s assumptions have been proven wrong.
But those were Bibi’s assumptions, which he foisted on Trump.
Israel has now been sidelined.
The Israelis were not part of Trump’s short-lived truce, nor are they part of Trump’s resumed war.
Netanyahu’s success in playing Biden for a fool segued directly into his manipulation of Trump.
At home, the increased strains in the alliance with the United States has weakened Netanyahu, who faces an election in the fall.
Whoever is the next prime minister, Israel will be even more isolated globally.
The oft-repeated false claim that criticism of Israel is tantamount to antisemitism has been weakened by this shift.
But given Trump’s vanity and opportunism, as he comes to appreciate that the Iran war is a fiasco with no good exit, he could well reflect on how Netanyahu manipulated him into launching the war.
And though Trump has found it expedient to pose as a friend of the Jews, it is a short step to blaming history’s perennial scapegoat.
The post The Israel Issue Flips appeared first on The American Prospect .
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