Summary
Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the UN, stated during her confirmation hearing that Israel has a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank, aligning with far-right Israeli officials.
Stefanik sidestepped support for Palestinian self-determination, blaming their leadership for failures.
Her stance signals a shift from Biden-era opposition to Israeli settlements, with Trump lifting sanctions on Israeli settler groups and nominating pro-settlement figures like Mike Huckabee for key roles.
Stefanik also vowed to audit UN funding and block aid to Palestinian refugee agencies.
What was Biden actually doing (as opposed to just saying) regarding the West Bank which you liked better?
(My impression is that Biden’s sanctions on the settlers has no practical consequences, but I’m not 100% sure of that.)
Not nominating a UN ambassador who said Israel had a biblical right to it, for one thing.
Biden’s “stop or I’ll say stop again also here’s more weapons” level of ‘resistance’ to Netanyahu sure wasn’t anything to be real proud of, but I’ll take that over enthusiastic encouragement any day. Trump also has unpaused some of the military shipments that Biden had paused, today, on day one. Sending even more weapons than Biden was one of his key priorities for the next few years, apparently.
Edit: Also, Biden sanctioned settlers in the West Bank, which never happened before, which Trump also undid on day one. Also, Biden resumed shipments to Palestinian aid organizations which Trump had stopped. Has Trump stopped those again? I don’t know whether that rose to the level of a day-one priority, but I’m absolutely sure it is coming.
B-b-but, both sides. Genocide Joe.
I will never co-sign a genocide. That’s why I’m voting for Cornel West. Don’t thank me, I don’t have time, I have another comment to write.
Gotta meet your quota
So your answer to the question is “nothing”? And yes, the sum total of four settlers Biden sanction do qualify as “nothing”.
I know. It never stops.
Not that it’s the point, but here’s a summary of the sanctions at one point. 11 individuals, 11 entities, I don’t know what changed about it after that: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-issues-new-batch-of-sanctions-targeting-west-bank-settlers-amid-rampant-violence/
He also paused some weapons shipments, he re-funded Palestinian aid organizations, he tried to get them food, yada yada yada I’ll just repeat what I said about it before since you seem to have missed that part of it:
I would broadly agree with you that the sum total of what Biden did was infinitesimal. He was hitting a boulder with a rubber mallet. He was throwing water bottles at a house fire that he helped ignite. The difference is, Trump is showing up with gasoline, a whole truck full of it, and spraying it on and wants to burn five other houses in addition to this one. Biden at least wasn’t doing that. That makes Trump way worse, even though Biden is bad. I don’t know how that simple logical construction turns into this post-graduate equation that people can’t fathom, or means that they claim I’m saying Biden wasn’t abetting a genocide, but that’s how I see it.
I eagerly await the strawman through which this fairly crystal clear explanation, in my view, gets turned into something else which it isn’t.
I’m not gonna say this assumption is wrong, because we’ll have to wait and see about that, but people who disagree with your position (including me) see what Biden was doing as nearly the worst way he could’ve handled the war in Gaza. Trump’s rhetoric is definitely worse than Biden, but on the ground what he did in his first term and what he’s doing now is what other US presidents were also doing، give or take symbolic actions like moving the US embassy. To borrow your analogy, the worst Trump could possibly do is put some lego bricks on the boulder and pretend he contributed to its structural stability. The whole thing boils down to: What can he do that Biden didn’t already do?
Also note that I’m discounting any possible relation between Trump and the ceasefire; if we assume he did contribute to the ceasefire then he becomes objectively the better candidate for Palestine no matter what he does from this point, but let’s not get into that.
He wasn’t moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, signalling in no uncertain terms his personal position.
I think a lot of people really misunderstood the no-lose scenario Trump engineered wrt Israel.
He got to call him Genocide Joe, while hammering on the debates saying, and I quote that Harris and Joe HATE Israel.
I have absolutely no doubt that both Russia and Israel timed their respective beligerences to try to politically hog-tie Biden knowing Trump could hammer him and once he was in give them both carte blanche.
Like, I have many many issues with how Biden specifically didn’t do the right things in the middle east, but he was attempting to thread a political needle to not hand Trump the ammunition he needed to get re-elected. In retrospect, and I’m sure Joe would agree, that given the reality that Trump was getting the big seat again, he should have just said “fuck it” and done the morally correct things.
And things, now, are going to get so much worse. Trump’s teams position is that it’s acceptable for Israel to just take and settle everything that the Palestinians had. There no longer is an alternative view that involves coexistence from the US government.
Specifically wrt to the middle east, there was a bad option and a worse option. Had Harris won, the political realities could have allowed the expenditure of political capital to do the right (or at least righter) thing. Trump won’t even consider it.
I also like how every pretty valid criticism that could be levied at Biden because of his support for the war in Gaza somehow instantly applied, also, to Kamala Harris. Successfully. There was pretty much no change or hesitation just because it was a whole new person who was, at most, in an advisory role to Mr. Genocide himself.
It was all a bunch of bullshit from the beginning. I don’t think that one issue made a huge difference in the election, honestly, I don’t think enough Americans care. I think it was a combination of multiple issues, each one expertly tuned to different audiences according to their preexisting prejudices to exploit whatever fault lines existed, and then relentlessly pushed. There was a little bit on news media and podcasts and whatever crap. But I definitely think social media was a huge part of it, and we on Lemmy were privileged to see just that one facet of it, with a huge helping of “Palestine” because we tend to be left enough for that one to be one that can really hit home.
You’ll notice that nearly all the people who couldn’t stop posting articles about what disasters Biden was engineering in Palestine, and how big a problem it was, are no longer as enthusiastic about the nightmarish future that’s now on deck there, now that there’s no profit in it for them.
I mean it certainly didn’t help that she actively refused to break from Biden on Gaza, said the exact same things Biden was saying and had a VP that said he supported Israeli expansion.