u/SirCrapsalot4267

This is a rant with a ton of data, because I cannot stand the media on this one in the US. I also will be clear I do not want to see Israel fail as a nation, and at the same time want their leaders to face accountability for the atrocities they've committed and for Palestinians to have human rights. But all of this is almost certainly headed towards catastrophe on its current course.

This is also focused on Israeli politics, I am not ignoring failures of Palestinian leadership in the past, which of course are also real.

There is a narrative that has become almost universal in Western liberal discourse about Israel and Palestine, and it goes something like Benjamin Netanyahu, this corrupt, authoritarian, and desperate to avoid prosecution politician, has hijacked an otherwise decent liberal democracy and dragged it toward policies that most Israelis don't actually support. Remove him, restore judicial independence, and Israel self corrects. It's a comforting story and it's also not supported by evidence.

Start with the opposition. Benny Gantz, routinely called in Western media as the sensible moderate, sat in the war cabinet and supported the Gaza campaign throughout its most devastating phase.

Then there's Yair Lapid who has not called for ending the occupation.

Naftali Bennett, who now polls competitively enough to potentially replace Netanyahu, is to his right on settlements and Palestinian statehood.

Avigdor Lieberman, cast as the secular pragmatist, has made statements about Arab Israeli citizens that would terminate a political career in any Western European democracy.

These dudes are the opposition, these are the most likely "moderates."

The polling data makes the "Netanyahu problem" framing essentially completely fucking untenable. Gallup found in 2025 that only 27% of Israelis support a two-state solution, down from 61% in 2012. Pew found that only 21% of Israeli adults believe Israel and a Palestinian state can coexist peacefully, the lowest figure since they began asking in 2013.

The Jewish People Policy Institute found that support among Jewish Israelis for negotiations toward a Palestinian state dropped from 19% to 11% in just six months. A Hebrew University poll found 64% of the Israeli public agree there are "no innocents in Gaza."

These are not Netanyahu voter numbers. These are Israeli Jewish society numbers, cutting across secular and religious, left and right, young and old, with the youngest cohorts, the ones who will define Israeli politics for the next thirty years holding the hardest hardline positions of all.

The fantasy that regime change produces a fundamentally different policy trajectory is contradicted by history as much as by current polling. Settlement expansion accelerated under governments of every political stripe, the occupation has been maintained, funded, and expanded by the Labor, Kadima, and Likud parties alike. The legal infrastructure of Palestinian dispossession was not invented by Netanyahu. He inherited it, accelerated it, and handed real institutional power to its most extreme proponents, but he did not create it.

What the Netanyahu framing does in media, functionally, is allow Western liberals and American Jewish communities to maintain a position that is becoming increasingly incoherent, which is to be deeply critical of specific Israeli government actions while insisting Israel is fundamentally a self-correcting liberal democracy that just needs better leadership.

It allows them to avoid the harder conclusion that the polling forces on anyone looking honestly, that this is not a democracy being temporarily hijacked. It is a democracy expressing, with reasonable accuracy, what its Jewish majority currently wants. That conclusion is more uncomfortable, because it implicates the society rather than just its leader, and because it suggests that the solution is not available through Israeli domestic politics alone.

Netanyahu is not irrelevant to this moment. He has actively cultivated and accelerated radicalization for domestic political survival, mainstreamed Ben Gvir and Smotrich, given them ministries with real institutional power, and used prolonged conflict to evade legal accountability.

He is a genuine accelerant, but accelerants require fuel that was already present. The fuel, which is decades of occupation, settlement expansion normalized across the political spectrum, a media ecosystem that has steadily dehumanized Palestinians, an education system that has radicalized successive generations, and a military culture increasingly shaped by religious nationalism, none of that is Netanyahu's invention and none of it disappears when he does.

Remove him and you most likely get the same settlement expansion, the same rejection of Palestinian statehood, the same military operations, just conducted with better public relations, more sensitivity to international legal exposure, and therefore less friction with Western governments.

A Gantz or Bennett government probably kills fewer people with more precision, faces less international condemnation, and makes the same demands for the same territory toward the same ends. That is not a solution. It is the same problem made more diplomatically palatable and therefore harder to confront.

The Netanyahu framing in the end serves everyone who wants to avoid the harder reckoning. It serves Western governments that want to maintain Israel relationships without confronting what those relationships now underwrite.

It serves American Jewish liberals who want to remain staunchly pro-Israel while being appalled by what Israel is doing. It serves the Israeli opposition, which gets to position itself as the solution without committing to anything that would actually change the fundamental dynamic and it serves Netanyahu himself, because as long as he is cast as the singular villain, the structural forces he represents escape serious scrutiny.

The data says something simpler and more uncomfortable, that all of this is not one man's wars. It is a society's war and that requires a proportionally more serious response than waiting for the next Israeli election.

Rant over. I want Israel to get its shit together, but I want the media, and well intentioned people in general who are staunchly pro-Israel, which I guess I am since I want Israel to exist, just not as an oppressive ethnostate, to be honest that this will require immense pressure from the outside world if we want to avoid more catastrophes, for Jewish people, for Arabs, for Druze, and for everyone else.

Obviously I'm trolling a bit with the title. But I have a bunch of telecasters, and I always come back to the standard Fender 52 reissue pickups (sold aftermarket as the Pure Vintage 52 set). They just do everything you need.

Bridge is the right output and crunches up well while doing everything you want a Tele bridge pup to do. The neck pickup is magical.

Everyone chases botique pickups, and I've tried a bunch and don't get me wrong they're amazing but I've never found any that do the job better than the ones Fender has had sitting in front of us the whole time.

I was just permanently banned from a major left-wing sub for citing leaked CCP internal documents about Xinjiang and human rights abuses against the Uyghurs. I tried to discuss with the mods at first, but they told me "we deny an imperialist fiction of “human rights” abuses and the imperialist framework of “human rights.” After a bit more non-fruitful discussion, the mod's final response was "Comrade Stalin was a great man."

I consider myself a democratic socialist. I oppose US imperialism, I think Western institutions are hypocritical on human rights, I was genuinely in agreement with most of what that community posts.

But I can't get my head around how a section of the left that correctly identifies Western atrocities then defends Stalin, dismisses Uyghur detention as CIA fiction, and calls human rights itself an "imperialist framework."

At what point did opposing Western power mean giving a free pass to any authoritarian state that frames itself as anti-imperialist? The people in those Xinjiang camps are workers and ethnic minorities being detained by a state. Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to care about?