Although personally in favor of Palestinian independence and critical of war crimes committed by Israel in its siege of Gaza, I attempted to explain in a back-and-forth discussion with a user (only afterwards learning was one of the community’s two moderators) why protest voting in the 2024 election to “punish” the democrats in favor of the republicans harmed the ultimate interest of reigning in Israeli violence in Palestine.
To further emphasize the damage caused by such a protest vote, I argued that not only is Palestine worse off with Trump elected instead of Harris, but as are a myriad of other social issues. The other user disagreed, arguing that Trump’s return to office facilitated the ceasefire, rather than my argument that Netanyahu deliberately delayed it to help Trump get elected.
After my fourth reply post in a reply chain that stemmed from my initial reply to the moderator’s comment, I was banned from [email protected]. Having at no point advocated in favor of the violence perpetuated by Israel in Gaza, I think the ban was unjustified, and demonstrates a bad precedent for maintaining echo chambers of moderator opinions, rather than communities that foster discussion.
Do you genuinely believe Trump put any sort of pressure on Netanyahu? Especially given his recent “let’s ethnically cleanse Gaza”-comments? That sounds terribly naive.
I worry time will show us it really wasn’t that simple.
It seems the most likely explanation, but I’m not fanatically committed or anything. If I see a better explanation I’ll accept it, but for now “because Trump” seems the most likely.
The way I see it is that Trump isn’t ideologically committed to anything; he’s not a true believer like Biden, he doesn’t care. And someone who doesn’t care wouldn’t want to worry a second about Israel’s genocide in Gaza because it’s just a complete and pointless headache. He was then faced with the other headache of what to do about the apocalyptic hellscape of hopefully postwar Gaza, to which he—likely with some amount of bad intention— said “hey let’s just put the people somewhere else”. It perfectly fits someone who simply doesn’t care.
By the way because I’ve seen this gotcha way too many times: Biden tried to do the same thing (can’t tell you when) and Sisi said what basically meant “hell no over my dead body”.