Why do some people I otherwise respect have such a blind about Israel?

@AdmiralPrune Why Egypt? Lebanon I get because of Hamas, and Syria is inherently so unstable.

@BlueVeins About B and C)can you say more? A

@Fukfacewillie I'm just gonna focus on B because it's a very big topic. Hope that's OK.

When the US donates weapons to Israel, it comes in the form of money with strings attached. A certain % of the money has to be spent on US arms manufacturers. Given the asymmetrical conditions of the Israel-Hamas conflict, Israel has both reason and leeway to test certain types of hardware that don't get much action elsewhere, like unmanned vehicles with guns, remote-controlled gun turrets, air defense, AI targeted weapons, etc.

Here's where you put your tinfoil hat on a little.

The defense contractors are getting a good deal out of this, and the war lasts forever. They take out ad space on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, even though news viewers aren't buying tanks & F-16s. Presumably, there's some backroom deals and the news media gives them slanted coverage in return. A Reuters journalist is killed by a missile strike, and it's reported as a "missile from the direction of Israel"... by Reuters, themselves.

Palestinian are reported as dying in the passive voice, every death count is listed as being from the "Hamas-run ministry of health", even though the stats they put out are widely considered to be reputable, even by the US gov't, based on lists of names released after attacks. Stories of antisemitism in protests come to dominate headlines and details are left out to make situations look worse than they are. Usually the bias is subtle to a point where most people wouldn't notice it. Sometimes it takes the form of reporting on Hamas killings with a tone of moral outrage, but reporting on Israeli killings with a tone of neutrality. Both are fair in isolation but in combination, it cultivates a one-sided view of the conflict.

For this next part, you might need a slightly bigger tinfoil hat, so try to bear with me.

Throughout the past eighty odd years, the US (and the world) has seen rapid technological development and economic growth. This has made the US easy to govern -- you can promise everyone a better future, reliably deliver results, everyone's basically happy and has some incentive to comply. We've had massive leaps in mechanical science to make industrial processes & transportation easier. Then, electronics matured and helped coordinate all that machinery we invented. The internet came along and with it, a wave of computer programming feats that connected people across the world up through the 2010s.

But as the 2010s wore on, all of those innovations were reaching maturity. Technological development still happens, but most of the productivity gains have already been realized. The pie is growing much less than it used to be. So now, the dominant strategy for participants in the economy is to fight each other for bigger slices of that limited pie. That's why the economy these days is so cutthroat, why everyone is a grifter and every new business model these days seems to rely on some form of rent seeking.

In this environment, maintaining social stability is increasingly difficult, especially from the standpoint of the upper class who want to keep their power and privilege. They intuitively understand that if they want to keep the rest of us in line, they need to lean more on violent force and the threat thereof. Remember those asymmetric warfare weapons I mentioned earlier? Yeah, I think that's what they're getting out of this. If American workers revolt against them, they want to have all those killer robots and anti-air systems and auto-turrets to even out the inevitable numerical disadvantage they'd be dealing with.

So, the wealthy Conservatives donate to AIPAC. AIPAC gives campaign money to the politicians. The politicians coalesce into this creepy cult of servility to Israel where they kiss the western wall and publicly run cover for Israel.

The extent to which everyone involved is willing to aggressively defend Israel is decreasing as Israel goes down in popularity. AIPAC has lost a lot of its credibility and will probably continue to do so moving forward. IDK exactly where they'll go from here, there are definitely ways they could slow the rise of anti-Israeli sentiment if they make rhetorical concessions but things are turbulent enough that the whole house of cards might just end up falling apart.

@BlueVeins Thank you. I am a little dubious that defense corporations exert this influence any more than any advertiser might, and for that I’d want to see sourced reports There is definitely less coverage now, but the killings in Gaza seemed to get quite a lot of coverage.

The influence of AIPAC seems clear enough, but wouldn’t any advertiser get special treatment? Most of the ads I see are for drug companies and reverse mortgages. Haven’t seen much defense contractor spending.