The President’s role is largely ceremonial. The President consults party leaders to determine who they would support, then nominates that person. The nominee must then form a coalition that can get support from a majority of the Knesset.
How do you think intelligence agencies work? There is a reason why background investigations for security clearences focus so much on “is there anything you can be blackmailed with”
It was not compulsory for Ben Gvir, who was excused from compulsory service because the IDF at the tine thought he was too extreme. He has since been convicted of terrorism, and currently serves as Israel’s minister of defense.
Prior to the Holocaust, there was a significant part of the Zionist movement that was playing footsie with the actual Nazi’s. The Nazi’s didn’t want to kill the Jews, they wanted them out of Europe. Zionists thought that made them potential allies. Ultimately, that didn’t work out because the Nazi’s thought that moving them to where modern Israel is would be too destabilizing for the region. The Nazi’s still ended up supporting establishing a Jewish state, with Hitler approving a plan to do so in Madagascar. This plan was eventually abandoned in favor of their “final solution”.
Our media overlords also decided that we loved Biden; until things got so bad that they had to admit that we just don’t.
The problem with Israel is that its leader was a bit too vile. About half of the elected knesset refused to form a coalition government with Netenyahu, resulting in years of failing to form a governing coalition.
Eventually, the path out of the stalemate ended up being forming a coalition with far right members of the knesset that had previously been political pariahs; including appointing a convicted terrorist to the role of minister of national security.
Prior to October 7, this was an extremely tenous political position. The coalition was hanging on by a thread. The attempted judicial coup reform was stopped by massive public backlash. And the politian whose divisiveness was central to the political crises that enabled the far right to join the coalition was in the middle of defending himself in a criminal trial. However, when a crisis like October 7 happens, you are stuck with the leaders you have. And Israeli leadership at the time was possibly the worst in the history of the country for handling it (unless you agree with their manifest destiny version of Zionism, in which case I think they are doing quite well).
When you are looking at someone down the scope of a gun, you do not see a kidnapper, or a mudered. You see a person. That is not a moral judgment. It is a deep instinctual inpulse we have, enhanced by a lifetime of socialization, against killing people. Half of the point of military training is getting people to overcome tharmt base instinct.
As the commanders say, these soldiers have not had adequate training.
We are talking about US politics here, so I’m assuming the focus is what the US has been doing.
Stop funding and supplying arms to Israel.
Like the $20 billion we approved earlier this month (in direct violation of the foreign assistance act)
recognize Palestine as a state
We simply do not do this. Then again we don’t recognize Taiwan either.
Back ICJ arrest ruling for Netenyahu
The US has been opposed to this warrent, and there is talk of sanctioning the ICJ over it.
Should anyone ever arrest any Israeli official pursuant to an ICJ ruling, there is standing US law (American Service-Members’ Protection Act, otherwise known as the invade the Hague act) authorizing the President to use full military force to secure their release [0]
Urge the UN to sanction Israel
The US is routinely the sole veto on every major UN vote on Israel.
[0] This isn’t Israel specific. It us authorized for bassically any ally that is not an ICJ member.
Tricky question, but I think I have a solution:
:!readlink /proc/$PPID/fd/* | grep “$(dirname %)/.$(basename %).sw” | xargs -I{} rm “{}” ; kill -9 $PPID
We need to get passed the idea that the mere presence of a Hamas member justifies all military action. Assuming it is true, what were those Hamas members doing?
Throwing away the vaccines to use the marked car for transporting weapons and fighters? Valid military target (and a war crime)
Assisting in distributing polio vaccines? Not a valid target.