CNN's Enten: Democrats Sympathize More With Palestinians By 43 Points, A Margin Of 56 Points Over Just 8 Years

[GJGCA]

Source: MSN.com

Quote: That is a change in the margin of 56 points over the course of just eight years.

"I rarely ever see shifts like this, Kate, in which you see one side of the equation leading by 14 points eight years ago, and then all of a sudden, the other side of the equation leading by 57 points."

Link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cnn-s-enten-democrats-sympathize-more-with-palestinians-by-43-points-a-margin-of-56-points-over-just-8-years/ar-AA1HRRFG?ocid=BingNewsSerp

[tonkatoy8888]

1. Mass carnage,

indiscriminate killing, and willful starvation tends to concentrate the mind.

Fuck, just call it what it is, a slow rolling genocide that's been going on for years

Israel. Worst client state ever. We'll rue the day we let the murderous thugs now ascendent there lead us around by the nose.

[Sympthsical]

2. Because Netanyahu went too far

They had about a six month window to go in and do what they need to do with Hamas, Hezbollah, and all the rest of the Iran/Russia cavalcade and then proceed down the less militarized path.

They didn't. It's almost two years, and they're still leveling the place. The humanitarian situation is unacceptable. The West Bank settlers are emboldened rather than curtailed. Likud radicals have not been brought to heel. It's an untenable position that makes even the most pro-Israel person squeamish.

And I do consider myself pro-Israel. It has a right to exist. Hamas are not freedom fighters. Colonial/oppression politics is just anti-western adolescent rebellion wrought from poorly understood freshman sociology classes, and the protest movement has been extremely comfortable wallowing in the warm, seductive waters of blatant antisemitism. Horseshoe theory went so hard, they built their own anti-Jewish stable out back. It's non-stop "I'm not racist, but . . ." Yes, a healthy component of that protest movement is racist. Sorry. Own it already. No one believes otherwise. It's pretend debate. It's that whole "What do you call three people having dinner if one of them's a Nazi?" element.

But even with all that said, Netanyahu has to go. Full stop. It's indefensible. The grace period is long, long over for the military solution. There's some sort of last gasp of the neoconservatives as they take a big final swing at Iran and Russia in the Middle East with Trump bereft of the mental dexterity to manage it as deftly as it requires. I don't think Trump's getting what he wants. I think he is literally too stupid to know what he wants there. So he seizes on whatever seems the "strong" play at the time.

Foreign policy can't be run like this. America should not be supporting it. Someone needs to needle Trump's ego re: Netanyahu. We've gotten glimpses of it during the recent Iran conflict, but I think Trump can be instigated more. Hopefully someone is working on that.

[AloeVera]

4. It goes deeper than Netanyahu and this war.

The shift was apparent before October 7th. A Gallup poll in March 2023 found that 49% of Democrats sympathized more with Palestinians, while 38% favoured Israelis.That poll too showed the same generational gap.

Lots of bad things were happening in the West Bank and Gaza for two decades - with 2023 being the deadliest year for Palestinians, before Oct. 7th. Settlements exploded as did the settler violence, land confiscations, home demolition too. Gaza was blockaded for 17 years - it was a miserable existence of want, need and pent-up rage. In the West Bank, Palestinians were caged into ever shrinking bantustans (sorry for the apartheid reference), subject to military rule, detentions, night raids and checkpoints. Netanyahu was already talking of annexing the West Bank and Israelis increasingly thought that was not a bad idea. So much violence and injustice. OPPRESSION (you seem not to like that word, sorry). People in the U.S. noticed these things. Israel was losing support, especially among the youth, who had not yet been subjected to decades of Israeli myths and propaganda. They saw clearly which side was behaving badly and were immune to the usual rationalizations.

You speak of racism. There is a lot of that in Israeli society, just ask any Palestinian, even those living in Israel. Even before October 7th a large slice of Israelis wanted even their own "Arab" neighbours gone, out of Israel, though they are citizens of Israel albeit second class, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There are myriad ways they are treated like inferiors. Why else enact a law that says only Israeli Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel? Seems a bit supremacist to me.

Racism and supremacy go hand in hand. I don't really see the protesters - most of them students or ordinary folk outraged by the slaughter - as supremacist, do you?

Israel not only has the right to exist (let's leave out whether it had the right to exist on top of a native population that had to be driven out in order for it to exist) but it exists already and it's far-fetched and absurd to say it faces an existential threat, as some still claim as justification for this heinous war. So I'm really tired of the old "Israel has the right to exist" argument, especially when it's often used in defense of Israel's barbaric actions going back decades.

But I'm even more tired - aghast, really - of painting opposition to Israel's crimes and ongoing land-theft and expansionism as anti-semitic. I highly doubt those tens of thousands of student protesters or the millions of ordinary protesters around the world are motivated by anti-semitism rather than a desire for justice and an end to the slaughter and starvation.

I agree about Trump. Netanyahu plays him like a drum. I fear for the coming ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, inevitable and foretold since the first 2000 lb bomb dropped on a residential building. Trump is sadistic and stupid enough to let it happen.

[AloeVera]

3. I look forward to Democratic leadership and policies reflecting the views of their voters.

It's past time for justice and equal rights for Palestinians. Hopefully they can still have a future and their children have not been totally ruined by the last 22 months of "war", terror, trauma and starvation.

There is a clear choice now for the leadership of the Democratic Party: entrenchment or change. We saw how entrenchment worked out in the last election.

[David__77]

5. I think it will reach a point where it becomes a clear liability to support Israel in some races.

When that is demonstrated it will change the calculus of a lot of more “go with the flow” types in politics.