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Originally Posted by Dunyain
Everyone keeps saying Israel is losing its "good will" or "moral authority." And I really am having a hard time conceptualizing what this actually means in the tangible world. All of their supposed "good will" or "moral authority" on October 8th didn't bring back any of the hostages or bring back to life any of the dead civilians slaughtered by the Palestinian Jihadis. And it didn't stop any of the 20,000 (or whatever the number) rockets Palestinians have fired at them since.
If you follow this issue long enough you learn that "good will" means the inclination of the U.S. to supply Israel with weapons and other forms of support. And "moral authority" means keeping atrocities contained to a level which don't readily reveal the actual dynamic of the conflict, that of an occupier torturing it's occupied population, to the extent that American newspapers can credibly misrepresent the conflict as some kind of "tit for tat" or Tom and Jerry scenario.
While political support for Israel is declining and active opposition is increasing, it's not going to lose its "good will" anytime soon as U.S. politicians are loyal to their donors and the security state first, their other constituencies a distant second. Biden is probably going to lose this election, but Trump will carry on the same Israel policy. But Israel's actions do help increase the deficit between American's preferences and the policy they get, increasing demand for an alternative party. But that's a medium to long term concern, not immediate.
As the mainstream media strains itself to avoid depicting the truth about Israel it loses credibility and, with it, the ability to wield influence across the board. It gets harder to portray Israel as the "good guy" when the fact that it is deliberately starving hundreds of thousands of children is widely known. It is riskier to call Israel a democracy when the scale of the massacres it is committing have a way of inducing more people to learn about the occupation and realize Israel is not democratic.
So "good will" and "moral authority" are propaganda terms for U.S. support and the facade of its moral justification in the U.S. - it's all about the U.S. relationship. Very few people outside of heavily propagandized populations have any actual "good will" towards Israel or thinks it is righteous in its central project, that of ethnic cleansing. And while the real measures, which might be translated into tangible values like an aid package amount or the number of votes pro Israel politicians receive considering their Israel stance as a factor, are waning, there is likely little consequence due to the scale of waning and other factors that buttress the measures such as election contributions made by AIPAC or zionist ownership of U.S. media outlets.