At a hearing, Elise Stefanik pledged to continue the US’s defence of Israel and advance Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda.

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.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I’m surprised you’re still here, to be honest. Yes, I know what Palestine is like right now. I care a lot about it. I wrote my congresspeople, back when they were approving the aid, trying to tell them not to do it. I didn’t think it would do anything, and it didn’t. That’s why I didn’t want Trump to come, and make things quite a bit worse than even Biden’s already war-criminal level of performance.

      Around 85% of the Palestinians in Gaza are still alive right now, as far as I know. How many once Trump is done with them?

      50%?

      80%? Will he solve the Middle East during his term, and bring an end to the killing? It seems unlikely.

      Less than 10%, with a lot of it annexed to Israel?

      That last one seems pretty probable to me. I think better than 50/50 odds. I don’t want to bet.

          • TokenBoomer@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 days ago

            You’re so sure of yourself. A little humility goes a long way:

            But those caveats should not obscure the fact that it was a Democratic president who so thoroughly failed in pushing Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to accept a ceasefire deal—and that Biden’s incompetence is what has allowed Trump to take a victory lap before even taking office.

            This failure had catastrophic consequences. According to the official death toll, Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza. Public health researchers estimate the actual death toll, which will only be known after buried bodies after pulled from the omnipresent rubble, is far higher.

            I’m sure the Palestinians sleeping in tents tonight are wistfully reminding themselves that Biden was better because Trump might be worse.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              I actually commented at more length on this exact article a while back, when one of my bots posted it:

              https://ponder.cat/post/1337717/1524546

              Now that the Israeli military has done several more attacks in Gaza since the ceasefire (including by a sniper who killed a child), and attacked a refugee camp in the West Bank for good measure, I stand even more so behind my assessment that taking the cease-fire seriously without having a reason to think it will continue is just poor pattern recognition.

              You could have had Kamala Harris, who you could say might have been worse or might have been better than Biden. Instead, we have Trump, who is catastrophically worse, in every objective sense, by such a wide margin that I don’t want to think about it. Congratulations, I guess.

              I don’t want to talk about this any more. I’m not sure why I engaged with it for this long.

              Edit: I was thinking to myself, what the fuck? What are all these weird comments, why am I back in this experience of having this type of conversation?

              And then I thought, ooooohhhhh, I resubscribed to [email protected] for some one-off reason, and this came up in my feed without me realizing that was where it’s from. There’s a reason I unsubscribed, because it is filled with an unusually high proportion of this stuff. Okay, peace. I’m back to unsubscribing, because I remember how infinitely more pleasant my Lemmy experience is without quite so many of the aggressively wrong people who always adhere to exactly one viewpoint and never stop replying. Cheers, you can carry on without me with what you’d wanted to say.

              • TokenBoomer@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 days ago

                I’m sorry if I make you feel like you need to leave, it’s just a different way of viewing the world. I understand your sentiment about the threat of Trump, but I don’t excuse the Democrats role in allowing this to happen.