DL Open Thread Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Anyone who thinks that removing Benjamin Netanyahu from power would end Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza is overlooking an inconvenient truth: Two-thirds of the Israeli public doesn’t just support the war, they support denying humanitarian aid to its victims. There are right-wingers in Israel who make MAGAts look like hippies, like the illegal settlers in the West Bank attacking Gaza-bound aid trucks. Seems like “good Israelis” are as rare as good Germans once were.
Democrats probably won’t retain control of the Senate after November because they have so many seats to defend, but GOP voters are doing their best to help by nominating some dreadful candidates. Congratulations, Republicans, on inventing the bottomless barrel.
Remember when Cape Town, South Africa, almost ran out of drinking water a few years back? That was just a harbinger. The combination of drought and extreme heat has Mexico City and Bogota, Columbia, facing the same problem.
In Mexico City, more and more residents are watching their taps go dry for hours a day. Even when water does flow, it often comes out dark brown and smells noxious. A former political leader is asking the public to “prioritize essential actions for survival” as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Meanwhile, 2,000 miles south in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, reservoir levels are falling just as fast, and the city government has implemented rotating water shutoffs. The mayor has begged families to shower together and leave the city on weekends to cut down on water usage.
The population of Phoenix, Ariz., has grown 4% since 2020, which means there are now more than 1.6 million people there whistling past a very dry graveyard.
The floor’s yours.
The Israeli electorate became radicalized in response to the wave of suicide bombings targeting buses, cafes, and other civilian targets in the 2000s causing many civilian deaths, which some proudly refer to as the “Second Intifada.”
Up to that point, Israel more or less followed the UN-approved tit-for-tat “proportional” retaliation against each attack, relying heavily on “targeted assassinations” and taking some care to avoid innocents.
But after the bloody Second Intifada, and the increase in rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon, Israeli voters had no more F’s to give about how many Palestinians were killed to stop the violence in Israel, and Likud formed a durable majority.
It seems one’s humanitarian impulses about the war in Gaza increase in proportion to one’s distance from Hamas/Hezbollah rocket range.