@John I support the US / Western role in Ukraine. The tragedy is that US / Western support of Israel, which has chosen to turn Gaza into a new Aleppo or Grozny, undermines our ability to draw a clear moral distinction between what we support and what we are opposing in Ukraine. Yes, you can try to draw distinctions, like Russia was the aggressor and violated a sovereign border. I’ll agree. 1/

@John But if you want to be the “forces of light”, you can’t also be doing logistics for the wanton bombing of a civilian population, and the intentional destruction of a territory’s housing. 2/

It’s a terrible criterion to imagine that, if a democracy chooses to do a thing, that somehow makes it right. When a democracy chooses to perpetrate atrocity, it is no less atrocity. 3/

That said, Israel/Palestine deserves none of whatever limited normative deference is due a democracy, because roughly a third of the inhabitants of that territory are disenfranchised and roughly half lack equal protection under its laws. 4/

I once had a friend try to persuade me that China qualifies as a democracy, because tens of millions of members of the CCP can vote within the party. Doesn’t work. Apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve deference to the democratic legitimacy of its choices because it was a democracy for its white population. 5/

Again, even if Israel were a full democracy, that wouldn’t justify its adopting Assad/Putin tactics to pursue its objectives, morally, or politically in the eyes of the Global South, whose support or at least acquiescence we’ll require if we wish to continue to maintain the post Cold War security order. 6/

We need to be able to draw a sharp distinction between forces of light and forces of darkness. Setting aside the darker parts of our past, calling ourselves reformed, we could pretty credibly do that, viz Ukraine and Russia or even China and Taiwan. Biden was making real progress rehabilitating “the West” and “democracies”.

Until we started arming the perpetrator of a new mass atrocity. Then, to much of the world and much of our own publics, it all comes to seem like a lot of cant. /fin