ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire

The US, under whichever administration, is in a very difficult position here. If the US stops all support immediately, this could be the end of Israel. Would that be just? I see a president carefully dancing on the thin line of supporting the Israel state while using the US leverage to stop the war (latest example: sending the CIA chief to the negotiating table). But this needs to be done without enabling Israel's biggest adversaries that support a Jihad against the people of Israel.

> If the US stops all support immediately, this could be the end of Israel.

How would Israel disappear? Palestine is clearly no match for them - who else is expected to suddenly move in?

I certainly think we could stop funding their military while still pledging to support them if someone actually tries to invade.

Keep in mind, Israel has it's own defense budget - it's not like it's military just disappears when US funding dries up

It's a common fallacy that money equates to purchasing power. That is only true so long as there continues to be a market with stable supply and stable prices. After COVID-19, many people had plenty of money, but you simply could not buy masks or vaccines at any price if there simply were no longer any to be sold.

Militaries are just as interconnected as anybody else. They depend on supplies of weapons and munitions. If the supply is gone, the size of the budget doesn't matter.

Iran is who is expected to suddenly move in under this scenario.

Israel has nuclear weapons. By the logic of even developing them, there's no reason not to deploy them if it faces conquest. Any existential crisis facing Israel will not come from outside.

Israel can face defeat without everybody dying (which is what would happen if they tried to use nuclear weapons). The US has enough control over Israel to make sure that never happens. We are a far greater military power than Israel.

Israel has quite a lot of domestic defense industry.

> How would Israel disappear? Palestine is clearly no match for them - who else is expected to suddenly move in?

They've had wars with all their immediate neighbours since the modern state was created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab–Israeli_conflict#Notable_...

Some of those countries are more friendly now, but loss of USA support would be huge. Such a removal of support would IMO be extremely unlikely due to how USA internal politics looks like from outside.

American foreign policy wasn't parodied as "world police" for nothing.

> I certainly think we could stop funding their military while still pledging to support them if someone actually tries to invade.

Subtly and nuance? Oh how I wish any politics cared about that.

I'm assuming, from the PoV of Israel and the Jewish diaspora in the USA, that because the specific attack that set this in motion was much much worse (proportionally speaking) than the 9/11 attacks were to the USA, anything less than 100% uncritical total support will look like "a betrayal" or "giving in to terrorism", to enough of the Jewish electorate in the USA, as to make that kind of talk unviable for at least a decade.

Real people aren't Vulcans. Emotions are raw, and will remain that way for a long time. And so the cycle will continue until either one side or the other is dead, or some absolute negotiating genius steps in and manages something even more impressive than the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

(Makes me wish for Mo Mowlam to be reincarnated; good luck to you if she was an inspiration!)

They don't even share borders. How "suddenly" could they possible cross Iraq and Syria?

If they were being successfully invaded, and facing defeat, the US would not be able to stop them from using nukes. What is the US going to do otherwise? End its support of a country that no longer exists?

The US has a military with deep intelligence ties. They would stop Israel from using nuclear weapons even if that meant invading Israel and taking out all of the leaders. There's no way the US would allow Israel to use a nuclear weapon.

You're gonna just guess that's true? That they will have perfect intelligence and a perfect capability to prevent a determined decision? What we do have some evidence for is Israel's ignoring the US calls for moderation.

Yes, I'm totally confident that Israel will not be allowed to use nuclear weapons and the US's vast military apparatus can stop them.

>If the US stops all support immediately, this could be the end of Israel

I doubt it, Israel would nuke Iran before letting this happen.

Iran was pretty miffed when some weapons of unspecified origin recently hit Iraq and Syria because they happened to land on the heads of Iranian operatives.

The concept of nations and borders in the middle east is a bit... different from the western variant.

I agree with your major point, but just point of fact that 20% of Israel's military budget is from foreign military aid-- nearly all of that paid by US tax payers (although it was France that likely supplied Israel with the technology for their nuclear arsenal).

A US official stated that at the rate Israel is bombing Gaza, Israel would have run out of munitions in 3 days without US aid. An Israeli official said the same, but he said their arsenal would only have lasted one day. Even if either/both were engaging in a degree of hyperbole, the gist is, that the bombing continues at the will of the Biden administration.

Yes, Israel would not cease to exist if the US withdrew support for genocidal murder and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but it would halt this most recent massacre of Palestinians by Israelis.

And, if the US stopped running cover for Israel in the UN Security Council, Israel would find it untenable to continue its belligerent disregard of international humanitarian law and past UN resolutions-- it might actually become the democratic state it claims to be, but to do so it will necessarily no longer be an ethno-religious state.

Is deploying nuclear weapons against a close ally of Russia really a feasible scenario?