Summary

Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the UN, stated during her confirmation hearing that Israel has a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank, aligning with far-right Israeli officials.

Stefanik sidestepped support for Palestinian self-determination, blaming their leadership for failures.

Her stance signals a shift from Biden-era opposition to Israeli settlements, with Trump lifting sanctions on Israeli settler groups and nominating pro-settlement figures like Mike Huckabee for key roles.

Stefanik also vowed to audit UN funding and block aid to Palestinian refugee agencies.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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    1 hour ago

    Remember everyone, the “ceasefire” that Trump “negotiated” (wink wink) is in no way just a temporary distraction, he’s better for Gaza than Dems could ever have been.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      31 minutes ago

      They haven’t even stopped killing. Most of the death at this point is from injury, disease, and starvation, and I’m sure they are still not letting any food come in. And they’ve still been shooting people. And they did an air strike on a refugee camp in the West Bank yesterday, too, which they had been leaving alone for the most part.

      Presumably, they’ll keep doing that until someone shoots at the IDF, at which point it will suddenly become a big deal that “Hamas broke the ceasefire” and they’ll resume unapologetically shooting people at scale. Starvation and disease, meanwhile, will be doing their gruesome work throughout, unabated.

      I don’t honestly know whether Netanyahu engineered the timing on purpose, to give an opportunity for craven propaganda outlets to make a big fanciful noise about what a genius Trump is because he fixed Palestine, unlike that loser Joe Biden. I could see it either way: It would cost him nothing, but on the other hand, why bother? I’m not sure he really cares what people say about Trump. Either way, he gets what he wants.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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    3 hours ago

    In that case, Spain has a divine right to all parts of the US west of the Tordesillas Meridian. The pope said so.

  • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Then don’t be surprised about Muslims following the Quran to the letter

    • Surah Al-Hajj (22:39-40)

    “Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged. And indeed, Allah is competent to give them victory. [They are] those who have been evicted from their homes without right—only because they say, ‘Our Lord is Allah.’ …”

  • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    The bible is just a story book, and if you take it so seriously that you support what is happening over there right now then you’re fucked.

    Fight me.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    12 hours ago

    You know what the bible also says, Elise?

    "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.

    – 1 Timothy 2:12

    Please STFU Elise Stefanik as is your biblical right, nay duty, thus sayeth your lord.

    • Lennny@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      According to the white house you’re a woman too. As gender is now assigned at conception … Stupid penis taking 8 weeks to start appearing in utero.

    • Badland9085@lemm.ee
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      10 hours ago

      Knowing how these people behave, it’s “rules for thee, not for me”, and “yes that’s true but every woman should follow, but I’ll continue to say whatever the fuck I want anyways”. Cognitive dissonance on the surface level does not stop them. It’s always been a “I will say whatever the fuck I want and hide behind some pretty words, and all I have to do is to ignore your criticisms. You can’t touch me.”

    • towerful@programming.dev
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      12 hours ago

      Kamala would’ve nuked it.
      You know, hormones and the predisposition to genocide, or whatever.
      Great work everyone.
      As a bonus, we get to:


      Edit: bullet points

      • Gloomy@mander.xyz
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        8 hours ago

        Declare everyone as biologically female (because at inception, all embryos are female. It’s only after 6-7 weeks that the y chromosome kicks in an makes it biologically male. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222286/, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ - note the “at conception” points)).

        As somebody who has done courses in gender studies it is painful how plain wrong and unscientific this is. Sure will be true for a lot of the other ones (especially climate). The sex ideology one (and contrary to their claim they of course are the ones with an ideology, because that is what you have when you ignore reality and make up your own truth based on falsehood) will do a lot of harm on the short term. There are real people out there who’s whole existence just got denied. My heart goes out (without a Sieg Heil, but in an empatic way) to all the Transpeople, Intersex People, Non-Binary People and all others who just got their identity denied. Please stay safe and hold tight. There are sane cis people out here who know you exist and stand by your side. For what ever that will be worth in the time to come.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 hour ago

          As somebody who has done courses in gender studies it is painful how plain wrong and unscientific this is

          And this is exactly why they’re doing everything they can to make sure people can’t learn this stuff in the future.

      • rigatti@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Correction on your one point - they declared that everyone is neither male nor female, since no one at conception produces reproductive cells. That starts happening later.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        13 hours ago

        As recently as yesterday, someone on Lemmy was showcasing to me the cease-fire Trump skillfully engineered in Gaza, with his straight-talking diplomatic skills, as an example of what Biden could have been doing any time he felt up to getting on Trump’s level, and a reason why Trump was better.

        • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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          13 hours ago

          What was Biden actually doing (as opposed to just saying) regarding the West Bank which you liked better?

          (My impression is that Biden’s sanctions on the settlers has no practical consequences, but I’m not 100% sure of that.)

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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            12 hours ago

            Not nominating a UN ambassador who said Israel had a biblical right to it, for one thing.

            Biden’s “stop or I’ll say stop again also here’s more weapons” level of ‘resistance’ to Netanyahu sure wasn’t anything to be real proud of, but I’ll take that over enthusiastic encouragement any day. Trump also has unpaused some of the military shipments that Biden had paused, today, on day one. Sending even more weapons than Biden was one of his key priorities for the next few years, apparently.

            Edit: Also, Biden sanctioned settlers in the West Bank, which never happened before, which Trump also undid on day one. Also, Biden resumed shipments to Palestinian aid organizations which Trump had stopped. Has Trump stopped those again? I don’t know whether that rose to the level of a day-one priority, but I’m absolutely sure it is coming.

            • Saleh@feddit.org
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              8 hours ago

              As it stands in terms of manifested actual political effects, not virtue signaling and token efforts, Trump managed to push for the ceasefire Biden was unwilling to apply pressure for.

              We will see, how the politics of Trump look, when it comes to material on the ground effects, but Biden proudly stood by and gave more bombs while watching daily how women and children are murdered with them and millions of people have their everything destroyed.

              So so far Trump did much more for Palestinian lifes than Biden. That is not a big achievement of Trump. It just shows that Biden indeed is genocide Joe, who chose every day to continue this, despite all it taking to end it being a phone call.

              Also as Biden delivered weapons while Israel was murdering US aid workers he directly violated US laws.

              • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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                8 hours ago

                Trump managed to push for the ceasefire Biden was unwilling to apply pressure for.

                So so far Trump did much more for Palestinian lifes than Biden.

                You know they’ve still been shooting people in Gaza past Sunday, right?

                An Israeli sniper just shot a kid. Yesterday or today I think. They also air-struck a refugee camp in the West Bank, which hasn’t been happening recently.

                I don’t even know why I’m still here, having these conversations. This place is very weird. On most of Lemmy, it’s kind of isolated spots of “yay Trump he fixed it, Israel’s gonna be good now” from time to time, but mostly it just gets laughed out of the room. On !world@lemmy.world it’s like a mob of it.

                • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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                  8 hours ago

                  An Israeli sniper just shot a kid. Yesterday or today I think.

                  That is, unfortunately, just what happens when Israel accepts a ceasefire. It’s definitely not good, but it’s better than when the genocide was going full steam ahead.

                  They also air-struck a refugee camp in the West Bank, which hasn’t been happening recently.

                  The ceasefire doesn’t cover the West Bank. Again not good, but this is how Israel does things and isn’t an indication that the ceasefire is going to fail.

                • Saleh@feddit.org
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                  8 hours ago

                  I didnt say Trump fixed it. I said that Biden put the bar so ridiciously low, that it was easy for Trump to step over it.

                  And while i hope that murder who sho the kid in Gaza will be punished for it in this world and the next, it is certainly a much smaller extend than what Israel was doing daily for the past year with full support from Biden.

            • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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              8 hours ago

              So your answer to the question is “nothing”? And yes, the sum total of four settlers Biden sanction do qualify as “nothing”.

              • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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                8 hours ago

                I know. It never stops.

                Not that it’s the point, but here’s a summary of the sanctions at one point. 11 individuals, 11 entities, I don’t know what changed about it after that: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-issues-new-batch-of-sanctions-targeting-west-bank-settlers-amid-rampant-violence/

                He also paused some weapons shipments, he re-funded Palestinian aid organizations, he tried to get them food, yada yada yada I’ll just repeat what I said about it before since you seem to have missed that part of it:

                Biden’s “stop or I’ll say stop again also here’s more weapons” level of ‘resistance’ to Netanyahu sure wasn’t anything to be real proud of, but I’ll take that over enthusiastic encouragement any day. Trump also has unpaused some of the military shipments that Biden had paused, today, on day one. Sending even more weapons than Biden was one of his key priorities for the next few years, apparently.

                I would broadly agree with you that the sum total of what Biden did was infinitesimal. He was hitting a boulder with a rubber mallet. He was throwing water bottles at a house fire that he helped ignite. The difference is, Trump is showing up with gasoline, a whole truck full of it, and spraying it on and wants to burn five other houses in addition to this one. Biden at least wasn’t doing that. That makes Trump way worse, even though Biden is bad. I don’t know how that simple logical construction turns into this post-graduate equation that people can’t fathom, or means that they claim I’m saying Biden wasn’t abetting a genocide, but that’s how I see it.

                I eagerly await the strawman through which this fairly crystal clear explanation, in my view, gets turned into something else which it isn’t.

                • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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                  8 hours ago

                  The difference is, Trump is showing up with gasoline, a whole truck full of it, and spraying it on and wants to burn five other houses in addition to this one.

                  I’m not gonna say this assumption is wrong, because we’ll have to wait and see about that, but people who disagree with your position (including me) see what Biden was doing as nearly the worst way he could’ve handled the war in Gaza. Trump’s rhetoric is definitely worse than Biden, but on the ground what he did in his first term and what he’s doing now is what other US presidents were also doing، give or take symbolic actions like moving the US embassy. To borrow your analogy, the worst Trump could possibly do is put some lego bricks on the boulder and pretend he contributed to its structural stability. The whole thing boils down to: What can he do that Biden didn’t already do?

                  Also note that I’m discounting any possible relation between Trump and the ceasefire; if we assume he did contribute to the ceasefire then he becomes objectively the better candidate for Palestine no matter what he does from this point, but let’s not get into that.

          • Windex007@lemmy.world
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            12 hours ago

            He wasn’t moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, signalling in no uncertain terms his personal position.

            I think a lot of people really misunderstood the no-lose scenario Trump engineered wrt Israel.

            He got to call him Genocide Joe, while hammering on the debates saying, and I quote that Harris and Joe HATE Israel.

            I have absolutely no doubt that both Russia and Israel timed their respective beligerences to try to politically hog-tie Biden knowing Trump could hammer him and once he was in give them both carte blanche.

            Like, I have many many issues with how Biden specifically didn’t do the right things in the middle east, but he was attempting to thread a political needle to not hand Trump the ammunition he needed to get re-elected. In retrospect, and I’m sure Joe would agree, that given the reality that Trump was getting the big seat again, he should have just said “fuck it” and done the morally correct things.

            And things, now, are going to get so much worse. Trump’s teams position is that it’s acceptable for Israel to just take and settle everything that the Palestinians had. There no longer is an alternative view that involves coexistence from the US government.

            Specifically wrt to the middle east, there was a bad option and a worse option. Had Harris won, the political realities could have allowed the expenditure of political capital to do the right (or at least righter) thing. Trump won’t even consider it.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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              12 hours ago

              I also like how every pretty valid criticism that could be levied at Biden because of his support for the war in Gaza somehow instantly applied, also, to Kamala Harris. Successfully. There was pretty much no change or hesitation just because it was a whole new person who was, at most, in an advisory role to Mr. Genocide himself.

              It was all a bunch of bullshit from the beginning. I don’t think that one issue made a huge difference in the election, honestly, I don’t think enough Americans care. I think it was a combination of multiple issues, each one expertly tuned to different audiences according to their preexisting prejudices to exploit whatever fault lines existed, and then relentlessly pushed. There was a little bit on news media and podcasts and whatever crap. But I definitely think social media was a huge part of it, and we on Lemmy were privileged to see just that one facet of it, with a huge helping of “Palestine” because we tend to be left enough for that one to be one that can really hit home.

              You’ll notice that nearly all the people who couldn’t stop posting articles about what disasters Biden was engineering in Palestine, and how big a problem it was, are no longer as enthusiastic about the nightmarish future that’s now on deck there, now that there’s no profit in it for them.

              • Saleh@feddit.org
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                8 hours ago

                Harris was put in place by the Democratic party and advertised herself to be precisely the continuation of Biden. Aside from some token gestures she did nothing different in regards to Palestine.

                And she made a point of denying Democrats who wanted an end of the genocide to speak at the DNC convention, even though they wanted to advocate people to vote for her, despite the previous actions of the administration she was Vice President in.

                She really hammered home the point that she will continue Bidens murderous Zionism legacy with that one.

              • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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                8 hours ago

                I also like how every pretty valid criticism that could be levied at Biden because of his support for the war in Gaza somehow instantly applied, also, to Kamala Harris.

                I mean it certainly didn’t help that she actively refused to break from Biden on Gaza, said the exact same things Biden was saying and had a VP that said he supported Israeli expansion.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        12 hours ago

        I’m surprised you’re still here, to be honest. Yes, I know what Palestine is like right now. I care a lot about it. I wrote my congresspeople, back when they were approving the aid, trying to tell them not to do it. I didn’t think it would do anything, and it didn’t. That’s why I didn’t want Trump to come, and make things quite a bit worse than even Biden’s already war-criminal level of performance.

        Around 85% of the Palestinians in Gaza are still alive right now, as far as I know. How many once Trump is done with them?

        50%?

        80%? Will he solve the Middle East during his term, and bring an end to the killing? It seems unlikely.

        Less than 10%, with a lot of it annexed to Israel?

        That last one seems pretty probable to me. I think better than 50/50 odds. I don’t want to bet.

          • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 hour ago

            Are you fucking for real dude? That’s your defense?

            I’m not even going to ask you to elaborate on how you believe that just invoking the term “realpolitik” explains your position, because frankly I just don’t care enough to know.

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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            11 hours ago

            I had a feeling you wouldn’t really want to engage with that conversation. It’s pretty fucking upsetting.

            • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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              11 hours ago

              You’re so sure of yourself. A little humility goes a long way:

              But those caveats should not obscure the fact that it was a Democratic president who so thoroughly failed in pushing Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to accept a ceasefire deal—and that Biden’s incompetence is what has allowed Trump to take a victory lap before even taking office.

              This failure had catastrophic consequences. According to the official death toll, Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza. Public health researchers estimate the actual death toll, which will only be known after buried bodies after pulled from the omnipresent rubble, is far higher.

              I’m sure the Palestinians sleeping in tents tonight are wistfully reminding themselves that Biden was better because Trump might be worse.

              • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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                10 hours ago

                I actually commented at more length on this exact article a while back, when one of my bots posted it:

                https://ponder.cat/post/1337717/1524546

                Now that the Israeli military has done several more attacks in Gaza since the ceasefire (including by a sniper who killed a child), and attacked a refugee camp in the West Bank for good measure, I stand even more so behind my assessment that taking the cease-fire seriously without having a reason to think it will continue is just poor pattern recognition.

                You could have had Kamala Harris, who you could say might have been worse or might have been better than Biden. Instead, we have Trump, who is catastrophically worse, in every objective sense, by such a wide margin that I don’t want to think about it. Congratulations, I guess.

                I don’t want to talk about this any more. I’m not sure why I engaged with it for this long.

                Edit: I was thinking to myself, what the fuck? What are all these weird comments, why am I back in this experience of having this type of conversation?

                And then I thought, ooooohhhhh, I resubscribed to !world@lemmy.world for some one-off reason, and this came up in my feed without me realizing that was where it’s from. There’s a reason I unsubscribed, because it is filled with an unusually high proportion of this stuff. Okay, peace. I’m back to unsubscribing, because I remember how infinitely more pleasant my Lemmy experience is without quite so many of the aggressively wrong people who always adhere to exactly one viewpoint and never stop replying. Cheers, you can carry on without me with what you’d wanted to say.

                • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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                  10 hours ago

                  I’m sorry if I make you feel like you need to leave, it’s just a different way of viewing the world. I understand your sentiment about the threat of Trump, but I don’t excuse the Democrats role in allowing this to happen.

  • eran_morad@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    These fucking cunts either pretend to believe in fairy tales or really do believe in fairy tales, and I’m not sure which is worse.

  • Doorbook@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    Giving the history of US voting in the UN on anything Israel related being No, this doesnt make any difference.

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.net
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    14 hours ago

    And so has Russia to the Donbas, and so has China to Taiwan, and so has North Korea to South Korea, ans so has Germany to Silesia and Prussia and so have native Americans to America.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      13 hours ago

      I’d expect that she’s not saying “they lived on it a long time ago”, but rather “God gave it to the Israelites according to the Bible”.

      Exodus 23: 27-31:

      I will have the terror of me precede you, so that I will throw into panic every nation you reach. I will make all your enemies turn from you in flight, and ahead of you I will send hornets to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. But I will not drive them all out before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild animals multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have grown numerous enough to take possession of the land. I will set your boundaries from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates; all who dwell in this land I will hand over to you and you shall drive them out before you. You shall not make a covenant with them or their gods. They must not live in your land. For if you serve their gods, this will become a snare to you.

      Like, divine will and such.

      • Jeena@piefed.jeena.net
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        13 hours ago

        This particular god is obviously genocidal. People who worship him are immoral cowards at best.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          13 hours ago

          Well, the guy is the god of the Abrahamic religions.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions

          Christianity is the largest Abrahamic religion with about 2.5 billion adherents, called Christians, constituting about 31.1% of the world’s population.[158] Islam is the second largest Abrahamic religion, as well as the fastest-growing Abrahamic religion in recent decades.[158][159] It has about 1.9 billion adherents, called Muslims, constituting about 24.1% of the world’s population. The third largest Abrahamic religion is Judaism with about 14.1 million adherents, called Jews.[158] The Baháʼí Faith has over 8 million adherents, making it the fourth largest Abrahamic religion,[160][161] and the fastest growing religion across the 20th century, usually at least twice the rate of population growth.[162] The Druze Faith has between one million and nearly two millions adherents.[163][164]

          That’d be most of humanity.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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            5 hours ago

            Yes, correct, if most of humanity worships a genocidal maniac, they are at best immoral cowards who prefer to downplay this and emphasize other aspects of their genocidal maniac God.

            If they actively celebrate or justify the genocidal mania of their genocidal maniac God, they are even worse.

  • Blaster M@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Had a Biblical right, but they forfeited it when they stopped following God and went and did things worse than the surrounding nations. They were rejected as a kingdom of God just before Babylon took over, and when they flash mobbed the Romans to execute Jesus, that completed the rejection. Israel has not been the Kingdom of God for 2,500 years, roughly, and definitely do not have his backing for this assault.