My point is that you, among other liberals your age, have lofty goals for a system that has never once delivered the way you demand it must. Further, that rather than examine the failings of the system and the impediments to progress in order to better plot a path forward, the dreary majority of young liberals prefer to piss and moan about how "not good enough" is actually "worse."

Kind of like how you insist that Biden should do more by "executive fiat" in one sentence while one sentence previously you observed that congress would block "Jesus Christ himself." Kind of like how you agree that Biden is the most liberal president since FDR but also "just awful to think about" because he's "the most Democratic Party guy imaginable." What are the alternatives? the "Give Ukraine to Putin" DSA? The Greens? If you hate the Democrats, and you hate the Republicans, what's left?

Everything sucks, sure. What's your alternative? What's better? What gets the world closer to your goals? You're at "small tidy improvements to the status quo" about a guy who passed more social programs, funded more infrastructure and appointed more judges than anyone since the New Deal while insisting he's "Very Explicitly not anti billionaire" about a guy who's funding half his budget by giving the IRS teeth.

Israel? Israel is a clusterfuck. Israel has always been a clusterfuck. Here's all you need to know about Israel:

1) Congress passed a law in 1976 allowing them to cut off all foreign aid to any nation seen to be developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically targeting Israel and South Africa.

2) Israel and South Africa tested a nuke in 1979.

3) The Carter administration covered it up so no one would have to pick a fight with Israel and South Africa.

Okay, here's a little more about Israel:

Israel would be much less of a clusterfuck if Benjamin Netanyahu hadn't used stochastic terrorism to assassinate Yitzak Rabin. The end effect of this, of course, was to make Netanyahu the longest-serving leader in Israeli history. His whole platform? Fuck Gaza. Here's a whole book, by the way, about the ways the US has failed to rein in Israel in no small part because they are, in the words of Bamford, "the most embedded foreign espionage power within the United States."

The goal is to prevent a third world war in the Middle East, despite the best efforts of Russia and Iran. This goal is not enhanced by making Netanyahu more popular by giving him something to rail against. Every time Netanyahu has been in danger of getting ousted? he's railed against America and gotten right back into the catbird seat.

I don't know much about Israel? I mean, from a "setting foreign policy" standpoint I don't know much about Israel. I'm maybe 30 books into Israel which is enough to know how much I don't know.

However much I don't know? I know I know more than you, and I know it's a clusterfuck. Would I do things differently? Probably. But then I'm not in the position of knowing intimate details about Israel's nuclear arsenal, for example, or what heinous shit it's been wargaming in case we cut off its money. Did you know we had battle plans against the UK between the world wars? What sorts of contingency plans do you think we have around Israel?

So if anything, my point is "it's complicated" and "it could be worse" and what I've found is that the most strident leftists I know have absolutely no patience for complexity or optimism.

You don't "desperately want something to hope for" so desperately that you'll actually look.

That's my point.