Vice President Kamala Harris said in a meeting Saturday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that Washington will not allow for the forced relocation of Palestinians or any redrawing of the current border of the Gaza Strip.
“Under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of the borders of Gaza,” Harris said, according to a statement from the vice president’s office.
Is it “mere talk” when Biden says US support for Israel is unconditional? No, we can and should criticize him for that because those words encourage Israel to act without restraint. But, conversely, when the US signals that they will not support actions like forced relocation, we should also see that as a corrective, not “mere talk”.
To your point, in IR theory, there also exists phenomena such as the paradox of empty promises, where making unfulfilled promises can worsen human rights. But that claim is more nuanced: the problem occurs when promises are empty. That doesn’t mean all promises are empty or promising doesn’t matter. Public declarations are a necessary step (but insufficient on their own) to justify further action.
Your oversimplified what I wrote and then from that highly reductive take you built an overcomplicated argument.
If certain statements are reliably not followed by action that further the state objectives then “they’re all talk”, if they are reliably followed by such action then they’re not.
Whilst statements by themselves can logically neither be accepted as trully meant nor dismissed as “just talk” in the absence of any track record at all (i.e. first time your hear such things from such people) because there has not yet been time to observe if they’re followed by action or inaction leading to a conclusion about the statements being meant or “just talk”, when there is a track record one can most certainly extrapolate the likelihood of such statements now being meant or “just talk” if in the past such actors reliably followed such statements with action or inaction.
As it so happen, US Administrations, Democrat and Republican, including those were Biden was, invariably followed statements were they claimed they were going to make Israel do or not do something, with no effective action towards their state objectives or even with actions which were counter those objectives.
In fact the there not being a 2 state solution in Palestine even though various US Adminidtrations claimed to favour it is exactly because NOT ONCE has any of those Administrations acted to punish the Israeli Government for their actions against the Oslo Agreements, quite the contrary: Israel has kept being supported economically and military all the while it acted against the wished stated by the various US Administrations.
It is thus entirelly logical to expect that statements from the US Administration about imposing anything on Israel are “just talk”, and totally illogical to ignore the track record of decades of “stating one objective and the acting in opposition to it” by the US with regards to Israel.
Nowhere in your first comment do you make anything like the argument in your second comment. You say that my summary is reductive and that I built an “over complicated argument” by talking about broken promises. But then you essentially argue that this will be a broken promise!
Your second argument is more reasonable, and not at all over complicated, which is why I anticipated it. The problem with your fatalist take is that “mere talk” precedes, not only broken promises, but also fulfilled promises. Honestly, if your cynical take is right, then there’s no reason to expect anything from any party ever. Cynicism is depressingly fashionable on the left.