the broken, on 11 February 2024 - 05:33 PM, said:
I think there's a massive difference between the 1970s US level of involvement in the Middle East, which was filtered mostly through newspapers and news bulletins and framed as an outgunned and outnumbered Israel facing existential threat in conflicts largely fought military-on-military (particularly in the Yom Kippur War) and eliciting public sympathy (through the Munich crisis), with other issues kept firmly out of the public eye (what Israel was starting to do in the occupied territories), and what people are seeing right now 24/7 via social media.
I think Americans are broadly sympathetic to Israel and see October 7th as a catastrophic terror attack on Israel (and numerous other countries whose citizens just happened to be in certain areas), but much moreso than in the past, there's also real concern over the scale and level of civilian destruction unleashed in response, which eclipses anything else we've seen for well over half a century. Biden's tainted with that. A lot of people don't care, or will reason that a Republican/Trump White House would have even been far more full-throttled in response and support for Israel, but the demographics that do care are the ones that Biden can least afford to lose.
This post has been edited by Werthead: 11 February 2024 - 06:08 PM