Netterville

In general, it was truly insane how the public debate about Israel was controlled and kept within extremely narrow bounds in the US, American politicians and commentators were visibly walking on eggs whenever the topic came up and it was like listening to someone with battered woman syndrome. Almost the entire world was looking at this shit in disbelief because it was so bizarre. My favorite example is actually AOC's 2018 interview, where she inadvertently used the expression "the occupation of Palestine" and you could tell both that she didn't know much about the topic but also that she was terrified to have made a faux pas and immediately proceeded to almost apologize for it. I remember watching that interview at the time and, as a Frenchman, it sounded completely surreal. This was basically a collective action problem, same as AIPAC's power in Congress, but the war effectively solved it and the pre-2023 equilibrium is never coming back. In fact, I expect that we'll hear a lot of crazy anti-Israel talk in the future, because the heavy-handed tactics used by the lobby for decades have created a lot of resentment and many people are going to act on it now that it's safe to do so. Pro-Israel voices in the US are thoroughly unprepared for that, because they have been so used to completely dominating the discourse on the topic that at this point their only response to attacks on Israel is hysterics (as we have seen recently with Mamdani and El-Sayed), but that only works if people are scared and they're not anymore. Eventually they will adjust but it will take a while and they will have a hard time convincing rich Jewish donors whose brains have been destroyed by social media.