• archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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    3 months ago

    I think there’s an argument to be made that Trump and Netanyahu are uniquely situated over other fascists, but I think their dominance is more a function of taking up all the oxygen rather than them being uniquely evil/competent/popular (at least when it comes to trump)

    I agree that Netanyahu has proven to be extremely effective as a politician, and is leaps-and-bounds more educated/intelligent than Trump (pretty sure he has 3 or 4 degrees, from MIT and Harvard and was rumored to be a prolific student).

    I think if/when he ever gets voted out/thrown in jail/assassinated, he will leave Israel as a moldy peach to whoever takes his place. They’ve effectively burned their good-will, even between 5-Eyes states, and managed to elevate/coalesce the surrounding regional powers and their reputations (Iran and Lebanon are currently getting a ton of credit for not taking the bait and escalating with Israel, and that’s done quite a lot to rehabilitate their reputations in the ME and with Global superpowers like China and Russia). Even if there was a successor as prolific as Netanyahu, they would be left without the standing or connections that he had, and western appetite for more escalation from them will have effectively run out.

    All that said; the problem of Israeli imperialism won’t go away with him, even if it will be a lot less effective in his absence. We need to start thinking of Israel as the Ethnostate that it is, and reevaluate their role in our foreign policy. I think if there’s anything their war in Gaza has proven is that they are far more ideologically fascistic than anyone in the west really was willing to recognize. That they didn’t end their war and return to their apartheid domination, and instead chose to continue escalating into genocide and now expanding their border with Lebanon, shows that their imperialism is of a different type and scale than the US’s has ever really been. They are far less content with soft power diplomacy than we are.

    I really wish this generation was less enamored by the ‘great-men’ historical interpretation - it blinds us to the broader influences and motivations involved with international conflicts.