You know who else materially and morally supported Hamas? Netanyahu! This is basically a known fact to everyone in Israel. He helped the Qataris send them suitcases full of money through the tunnels under Rafah.
Why? Because he thought it would weaken the PA if the Gazans supported Hamas instead of Fatah (who are the dominant party in the…
You know who else materially and morally supported Hamas? Netanyahu! This is basically a known fact to everyone in Israel. He helped the Qataris send them suitcases full of money through the tunnels under Rafah.
Why? Because he thought it would weaken the PA if the Gazans supported Hamas instead of Fatah (who are the dominant party in the West Bank) - divide and conquer. Can you imagine the outrage if an American President supported a terrorist organization like the Mujahideen because they thought it was in their best interest? Oh wait no, we already did that in 1979 - except they started calling themselves the Taliban.
Just because a Western Democracy is better than a theocracy or a dictatorship doesn’t always mean they have a very principled stance when it comes to foreign policy.
I've never condoned the IDF's tactics and I despise Netanyahu (and the Likud party), so don't confuse my condemnation of Hamas, its Palestinian supporters, and people who call Biden "Genocide Joe" with blind allegiance to Israeli hardliners or what the IDF is doing.
The US also supported a whole shitload of horrors and horrible leaders in South and Central America (like Manuel Noriega) from the 1950's-1990's, supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War (ask me about digging up American-made munitions in Iraq), and supported Ghaddafi (I'm sure I'm forgetting other notable mentions). We've got a long history of shoveling shit onto 5 continents (Australia and Antarctica were spared I suppose).
I’m late to this party but have to throw in my 2 (or 3) cents. Travis’s, your comments regarding a clear delineation between actual genocide and what is horribly occurring in Palestine are very accurate. I recently finished an insightful review of Africa in the 80’s and 90’s entitled, “The Graves are not yet full”, {2001 Basic Books} by Bill Berkeley, who had spent the ‘80’s and 90’s covering Africa fr various entities. A lot of US excuses for backing really bad leaders in countries all over Africa, from Liberia to Sudan to South Africa, through multiple administrations was, as per usual always viewed through the lens of US v USSR and countering soviet influence. But more to the point, we backed or acquiesced to horrible leaders for poor reasons. When you note we should ask the Tutsi in Rwanda- those who miraculously survived, about what genocide looks like, I think they’d concur with your point of view. That is not what is occurring in Palestine. It doesn’t make the situation any better to know this. Similarly our support of South and Central American Dictators out of fear of communism (and liking our own oligarchs financial gain) is also horrible. But there larger issue to me vis-a-vie the Palestine situation is the misidentified nature of the term genocide. Genocide is what Hamas has as a platform towards the Israelis. I wonder if we had a group of Mexicans or Canadians ( not the citizens and not even the government- just a group) who had a platform espousing the destruction of all Americans (from the pacific to the Atlantic) entering the US and slaughtering a thousand or so Americans, whether we might retaliate similarly to the Israelis with even less consideration for those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think I don’t have to think what the response would be….
I’ve made the same point you make at the end of the comment elsewhere. Like if Native American tribes were launching rockets at the suburbs and blowing up whatever police come into the reservations to arrest them with TOW missiles and suicide bombings, or if Mexican cartels were doing ISIS-style cross-border raids while demanding that they be given back the American southwest. Don’t think we’d be talking about any 2-state solutions in that scenario, given how we responded to 9/11 alone.
Full concur on the rest of your commentary with respect to backing really bad people/groups in the War Against Communism on a number of continents as well.
The children starving in Gaza are not supporters of Hamas or combatants in any sense. They are innocent bystanders. Israel is turning back aid trucks with capricious excuses such as the pallets are the "wrong" size.
Whatever word you want to use for that it is still very wrong.
It *is* very wrong, but it’s not genocide. The children aren’t supporters but enough of a critical mass of their parents are. The children are suffering from the collective decisions of their parents just as much as they are from what the IDF is doing because their parents are guaranteeing more of the same for their children in the future by materially supporting Hamas.
In addition to the prior vote you cites, they’ve allowed Hamas to use their homes as entry/exit points for the tunnel network. They’ve also allowed Hamas to use hospitals and schools as stash houses, weapons caches, and/or operations centers. That’s materially supporting a terror group who even before 10/7 was always launching rockets at Israeli civilians rather than engaging only the IDF.
Aside from that material support, they also don’t ever try to fight against Hamas physically, rather they allow/encourage their male children to join the group rather than fight to overthrow it.
The president of the United States cannot stop the Israeli government from doing anything but a family from an apartment should die because they could not stop Hamas from building a tunnel exit in the basement of their building.
In addition: if known Hamas members are your neighbors, rat them out to the IDF rather than just sitting there and allowing a terror group to proliferate inside of your society. 10/7 was the result of 15+ years of Palestinians tolerating the presence of Hamas rather than either 1) violently overthrowing them or 2) ratting them out to the IDF en masse. Because they tolerated the presence of Hamas rather than snitching on or killing them, they gave Hamas the space to build a force 20,000+ strong and eventually capable of carrying out an attack like 10/7. Because Palestinian society tolerated the presence of Hamas for all of that time, Hamas returned the favor by using their fellow Palestinians as protective sandbags for IDF strikes. How’d all those years of tolerating Hamas work out for the Palestinians?
Al Qaeda in Iraq tortured and killed any Sunni suspected of cooperating with the new Iraqi government or coalition forces. That didn’t stop the Sunnis from turning on AQI and ending the Sunni-Shia civil war there that raged from ‘06-‘08 though. Palestinian men face that same choice: turn on Hamas—regardless of the risk factor, or condemn your children and grandchildren to more years of the violence cycle.
A lot of them take kickbacks from Hamas for allowing the exit to be built under their property, and they *can* do something if they don’t want a tunnel exit there: tell the IDF. If they allow the tunnel exit to be built on their property they are inviting lethal IDF raids and/or strikes designed to destroy the tunnel.
Pretty simple: don’t want the tunnels? 1) tell Hamas they can’t build them there instead of offering to help, and if Hamas doesn’t listen then 2) tell the IDF about the construction so that they can kill the Hamas builders.
No, I'm saying that in a pre-10/7 world the IDF would have done a limited incursion like they've done countless times before when they have good intel. When they lack that intel because the Palestinians condone the tunnel construction rather than report it, then the IDF can't do precise raids that kill the builders with gunfire and they end up destroying the tunnels the hard way after an attack like 10/7. If the ant's nest of tunnels hadn't been condoned by the Palestinians, there would be far less need for using air-dropped munitions as opposed to ground incursions. The easier it is for Hamas to hide underground, the harder it is for the IDF to find them precisely. If Palestinians had ratted out the builders years ago, they wouldn't be dealing with the aftermath of what Hamas uses those tunnels for. Sorry, but once you pick a side and help them dig, you're not exactly innocent anymore, and if that fallout affects your children later on then that's of your own making as much as it is the IDF's. Palestinians have a choice, and they chose to materially-support Hamas and condemned their children to the down-stream fallout as a consequence of their material support to Hamas. Palestinians are the terrorism version of mafia wives.
Let's not forget Pinochet in that list. I'll never forget when he died Maggie Thatcher describing him as "such a dear, dear friend."
You make some very valid points, and I concur with much if not most of what you're saying. But I also think that given Israel’s conduct since the atrocity of Oct. 7, and the utter destruction of Gaza - in which Hamas is not only complicit, but equally responsible because they are using the civilian population effectively as sandbags against artillery - it still is the case that what Israel is doing amounts to genocide. Regardless of Hamas, Israel is an overwhelming military force in this conflict. It is sustained and supported militarily by the US, and it has shown little to no restraint. We're supposed to be the good guys. Ostensibly seeking to limit civilian casualties, ensure medical and humanitarian aid is provided and protected as unimpeded as is possible, and to ensure the basic infrastructure that supports the local society is as intact as is practicable. Israel has done none of these things. It has done the opposite, and is in clear violation of not only the framework set out in the Geneva Convention, but also anything anyone would recognize as basic human decency.
And on the Geneva Convention, it’s more a set of guidelines than established laws to follow at this point. Russia is a signatory party as well but they’re still bombing maternity hospitals and kidnapping children en masse now aren’t they? This is why the UN has very little teeth and Russia is a permanent UN security council member lol.
So we're supposed to be using Putin's Russia as the benchmark now, are we? In fact, the Geneva Convention isn't a mere set of "guidelines", it's a pact the signatories are pledged to adhere to, under international law. Law that is enforced at the ICC at the Hague.
It's been a really busy day. I do intend to respond to your other reply more fully and will get to it tomorrow, because it does deserve a meaningful response. In the interim, you might want to acquaint yourself with this link. BTW, prosecutor Jack Smith was engaged in prosecuting war crimes at the ICC before taking on the prosecution of Trump (though you probably knew that).
Who’s prosecuting Russia since they’re a signatory party? Because they’re not adhering to that pledge they took as a signatory party and nobody seems to be doing much about it.
Yes they’re a benchmark for the effectiveness of the pact because if they’re a signatory party who violates said pledges and nothing happens then what does that say about the seriousness of the pact?
You have to be able to arrest someone in order to prosecute them. Putin is officially wanted for war crimes. If he were to travel to certain countries, he could be detained, rendered to be the ICC and prosecutored.
Travis. Today was a glorious, cloudless day, warm, the first one like it of the season around these parts, and I spent it with my 88-year old mother who is suffering from Alzheimer's. It was a good day, though it meant not being able to respond meaningfully to our discourse.
I agree that words do matter. So I thought this might be helpful to deepening our ongoing exchange. Genocide doesn't only manifest in the manner you described. There is also cultural genocide, such as in the the long, tortuous genocide inflicted on native American peoples, perhaps most exemplified by Trump's favorite president Andrew Jackson in what has become known as The March of Tears and the horrors that ensued.
Given that I have little time right now to respond as meaningfully as I would like, I thought I would pass this along as it reflects my views of the plight of the situation in Gaza and the Palestinian people generally. I'll be interested in your response. I recommend reading the text.
And ask yourself this: if Native American tribes for the last 20 years were launching rockets into civilian areas outside of reservations in the US and occasionally doing incursions into random suburbs outside of their reservations to murder, rape, and take hostages while building tunnel networks under their reservations and firing missiles at any police vehicles who came into those reservations to arrest them—all while declaring that the US must be ridded of “foreign occupiers”—while refusing to accept any kind of “2-state solution”—how do you think any given “strong on security” GOP administration would respond to those collective actions? Would it be much different than how the Likud party does things? Would we be talking about giving them the entire American southwest back as a 2nd state to live alongside? Think about that.
Cultural genocide—while terrible—is *not* the same thing as *actual* genocide—far far worse and often accompanied by cultural genocide anyway. Words matter, and so do degrees of separation, which is why there’s still a huge difference between cultural genocide and *actual* genocide. Is there some overlap in that Venn diagram? Sure. Is there still a whole lot of non-overlap? Absolutely. Violently-forced displacement—such as those suffered by Eastern-European Gypsies or Native American tribes or Gazans is *still* not the same as real genocide, where peoples are often not given the option to flee—unless they are lucky enough to get out early—and are instead rounded up and executed once discovered just for being who they are (rather than incidentally killed while armed forces pursue terrorists who hide themselves amongst a honeycomb of tunnels that the Gazans condoned the construction of and who in turn use those same Gazans as martyrdom sandbags for protection and PR).
I still don’t think it’s genocide because the killing of civilians is incidental rather than intentional. If this were genocide, the IDF wouldn’t even be looking for Hamas, we’d just see the IDF troops lining up *any* Palestinians they find against the wall in the streets and executing them on the spot whether or not they were combatants. THAT is genocide, when the targets *are* the civilians rather than sandbags that are merely in the way. When we see the IDF going house to house and executing every Palestinian they find there—including children—THEN we can call it a genocide. Otherwise you’re just watering down a term that has a real meaning. Words matter.
And the bulk of the arms the US sends Israel were sent there prior to 10/7 before this kind of military conduct was observed. Would you rather the IDF arm up with *less* precise munitions than the kind the US supplies? Because if they end up with a larger mix of less-precise munitions that translates to more civilians dying, not less. It’s not as though if the US cut off arms the IDF would simply run out. They also have their own domestic arms industry and a number of other countries ready and willing to sell to them if we weren’t doing so. Besides, Mike Johnson has Israeli aid on hold (in addition to Ukrainian military aid) so it’s not exactly like we’re still funneling arms over there at this very moment.
You know who else materially and morally supported Hamas? Netanyahu! This is basically a known fact to everyone in Israel. He helped the Qataris send them suitcases full of money through the tunnels under Rafah.
Why? Because he thought it would weaken the PA if the Gazans supported Hamas instead of Fatah (who are the dominant party in the West Bank) - divide and conquer. Can you imagine the outrage if an American President supported a terrorist organization like the Mujahideen because they thought it was in their best interest? Oh wait no, we already did that in 1979 - except they started calling themselves the Taliban.
Just because a Western Democracy is better than a theocracy or a dictatorship doesn’t always mean they have a very principled stance when it comes to foreign policy.
I've never condoned the IDF's tactics and I despise Netanyahu (and the Likud party), so don't confuse my condemnation of Hamas, its Palestinian supporters, and people who call Biden "Genocide Joe" with blind allegiance to Israeli hardliners or what the IDF is doing.
The US also supported a whole shitload of horrors and horrible leaders in South and Central America (like Manuel Noriega) from the 1950's-1990's, supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War (ask me about digging up American-made munitions in Iraq), and supported Ghaddafi (I'm sure I'm forgetting other notable mentions). We've got a long history of shoveling shit onto 5 continents (Australia and Antarctica were spared I suppose).
I’m late to this party but have to throw in my 2 (or 3) cents. Travis’s, your comments regarding a clear delineation between actual genocide and what is horribly occurring in Palestine are very accurate. I recently finished an insightful review of Africa in the 80’s and 90’s entitled, “The Graves are not yet full”, {2001 Basic Books} by Bill Berkeley, who had spent the ‘80’s and 90’s covering Africa fr various entities. A lot of US excuses for backing really bad leaders in countries all over Africa, from Liberia to Sudan to South Africa, through multiple administrations was, as per usual always viewed through the lens of US v USSR and countering soviet influence. But more to the point, we backed or acquiesced to horrible leaders for poor reasons. When you note we should ask the Tutsi in Rwanda- those who miraculously survived, about what genocide looks like, I think they’d concur with your point of view. That is not what is occurring in Palestine. It doesn’t make the situation any better to know this. Similarly our support of South and Central American Dictators out of fear of communism (and liking our own oligarchs financial gain) is also horrible. But there larger issue to me vis-a-vie the Palestine situation is the misidentified nature of the term genocide. Genocide is what Hamas has as a platform towards the Israelis. I wonder if we had a group of Mexicans or Canadians ( not the citizens and not even the government- just a group) who had a platform espousing the destruction of all Americans (from the pacific to the Atlantic) entering the US and slaughtering a thousand or so Americans, whether we might retaliate similarly to the Israelis with even less consideration for those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think I don’t have to think what the response would be….
I’ve made the same point you make at the end of the comment elsewhere. Like if Native American tribes were launching rockets at the suburbs and blowing up whatever police come into the reservations to arrest them with TOW missiles and suicide bombings, or if Mexican cartels were doing ISIS-style cross-border raids while demanding that they be given back the American southwest. Don’t think we’d be talking about any 2-state solutions in that scenario, given how we responded to 9/11 alone.
Full concur on the rest of your commentary with respect to backing really bad people/groups in the War Against Communism on a number of continents as well.
The children starving in Gaza are not supporters of Hamas or combatants in any sense. They are innocent bystanders. Israel is turning back aid trucks with capricious excuses such as the pallets are the "wrong" size.
Whatever word you want to use for that it is still very wrong.
It *is* very wrong, but it’s not genocide. The children aren’t supporters but enough of a critical mass of their parents are. The children are suffering from the collective decisions of their parents just as much as they are from what the IDF is doing because their parents are guaranteeing more of the same for their children in the future by materially supporting Hamas.
I'm curious how their parents have been materially supporting Hamas. My understanding is that there was only the one pro-Hamas vote in 2006..?
In addition to the prior vote you cites, they’ve allowed Hamas to use their homes as entry/exit points for the tunnel network. They’ve also allowed Hamas to use hospitals and schools as stash houses, weapons caches, and/or operations centers. That’s materially supporting a terror group who even before 10/7 was always launching rockets at Israeli civilians rather than engaging only the IDF.
Aside from that material support, they also don’t ever try to fight against Hamas physically, rather they allow/encourage their male children to join the group rather than fight to overthrow it.
The president of the United States cannot stop the Israeli government from doing anything but a family from an apartment should die because they could not stop Hamas from building a tunnel exit in the basement of their building.
Got it.
In addition: if known Hamas members are your neighbors, rat them out to the IDF rather than just sitting there and allowing a terror group to proliferate inside of your society. 10/7 was the result of 15+ years of Palestinians tolerating the presence of Hamas rather than either 1) violently overthrowing them or 2) ratting them out to the IDF en masse. Because they tolerated the presence of Hamas rather than snitching on or killing them, they gave Hamas the space to build a force 20,000+ strong and eventually capable of carrying out an attack like 10/7. Because Palestinian society tolerated the presence of Hamas for all of that time, Hamas returned the favor by using their fellow Palestinians as protective sandbags for IDF strikes. How’d all those years of tolerating Hamas work out for the Palestinians?
There was originally resistance but Hamas killed anyone who opposed them; Hamas threw people off the roof of buildings.
Al Qaeda in Iraq tortured and killed any Sunni suspected of cooperating with the new Iraqi government or coalition forces. That didn’t stop the Sunnis from turning on AQI and ending the Sunni-Shia civil war there that raged from ‘06-‘08 though. Palestinian men face that same choice: turn on Hamas—regardless of the risk factor, or condemn your children and grandchildren to more years of the violence cycle.
A lot of them take kickbacks from Hamas for allowing the exit to be built under their property, and they *can* do something if they don’t want a tunnel exit there: tell the IDF. If they allow the tunnel exit to be built on their property they are inviting lethal IDF raids and/or strikes designed to destroy the tunnel.
Pretty simple: don’t want the tunnels? 1) tell Hamas they can’t build them there instead of offering to help, and if Hamas doesn’t listen then 2) tell the IDF about the construction so that they can kill the Hamas builders.
"tell the IDF about the construction so that they can kill the Hamas builders."
Except that what the IDF actually did was destroy buildings. You are saying residents of the buildings should have invited the IDF to bomb them.
No, I'm saying that in a pre-10/7 world the IDF would have done a limited incursion like they've done countless times before when they have good intel. When they lack that intel because the Palestinians condone the tunnel construction rather than report it, then the IDF can't do precise raids that kill the builders with gunfire and they end up destroying the tunnels the hard way after an attack like 10/7. If the ant's nest of tunnels hadn't been condoned by the Palestinians, there would be far less need for using air-dropped munitions as opposed to ground incursions. The easier it is for Hamas to hide underground, the harder it is for the IDF to find them precisely. If Palestinians had ratted out the builders years ago, they wouldn't be dealing with the aftermath of what Hamas uses those tunnels for. Sorry, but once you pick a side and help them dig, you're not exactly innocent anymore, and if that fallout affects your children later on then that's of your own making as much as it is the IDF's. Palestinians have a choice, and they chose to materially-support Hamas and condemned their children to the down-stream fallout as a consequence of their material support to Hamas. Palestinians are the terrorism version of mafia wives.
Except the IDF wasn't targeting Hamas before Oct 7. The Netanyahu government approved Qatari $ support for Hamas.
Would you care to explain the Gaza incursions in 2009, 2014, and 2018 by the IDF that targeted Hamas then?
Some history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_conflict
Where were they on October 7?
Let's not forget Pinochet in that list. I'll never forget when he died Maggie Thatcher describing him as "such a dear, dear friend."
You make some very valid points, and I concur with much if not most of what you're saying. But I also think that given Israel’s conduct since the atrocity of Oct. 7, and the utter destruction of Gaza - in which Hamas is not only complicit, but equally responsible because they are using the civilian population effectively as sandbags against artillery - it still is the case that what Israel is doing amounts to genocide. Regardless of Hamas, Israel is an overwhelming military force in this conflict. It is sustained and supported militarily by the US, and it has shown little to no restraint. We're supposed to be the good guys. Ostensibly seeking to limit civilian casualties, ensure medical and humanitarian aid is provided and protected as unimpeded as is possible, and to ensure the basic infrastructure that supports the local society is as intact as is practicable. Israel has done none of these things. It has done the opposite, and is in clear violation of not only the framework set out in the Geneva Convention, but also anything anyone would recognize as basic human decency.
And on the Geneva Convention, it’s more a set of guidelines than established laws to follow at this point. Russia is a signatory party as well but they’re still bombing maternity hospitals and kidnapping children en masse now aren’t they? This is why the UN has very little teeth and Russia is a permanent UN security council member lol.
So we're supposed to be using Putin's Russia as the benchmark now, are we? In fact, the Geneva Convention isn't a mere set of "guidelines", it's a pact the signatories are pledged to adhere to, under international law. Law that is enforced at the ICC at the Hague.
It's been a really busy day. I do intend to respond to your other reply more fully and will get to it tomorrow, because it does deserve a meaningful response. In the interim, you might want to acquaint yourself with this link. BTW, prosecutor Jack Smith was engaged in prosecuting war crimes at the ICC before taking on the prosecution of Trump (though you probably knew that).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
Who’s prosecuting Russia since they’re a signatory party? Because they’re not adhering to that pledge they took as a signatory party and nobody seems to be doing much about it.
Yes they’re a benchmark for the effectiveness of the pact because if they’re a signatory party who violates said pledges and nothing happens then what does that say about the seriousness of the pact?
You have to be able to arrest someone in order to prosecute them. Putin is officially wanted for war crimes. If he were to travel to certain countries, he could be detained, rendered to be the ICC and prosecutored.
Again, pretty toothless enforcement mechanism so long as war criminals don’t travel to western countries 🤷♂️
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/world/europe/putin-saudi-arabia-visit.html
Travis. Today was a glorious, cloudless day, warm, the first one like it of the season around these parts, and I spent it with my 88-year old mother who is suffering from Alzheimer's. It was a good day, though it meant not being able to respond meaningfully to our discourse.
I agree that words do matter. So I thought this might be helpful to deepening our ongoing exchange. Genocide doesn't only manifest in the manner you described. There is also cultural genocide, such as in the the long, tortuous genocide inflicted on native American peoples, perhaps most exemplified by Trump's favorite president Andrew Jackson in what has become known as The March of Tears and the horrors that ensued.
Given that I have little time right now to respond as meaningfully as I would like, I thought I would pass this along as it reflects my views of the plight of the situation in Gaza and the Palestinian people generally. I'll be interested in your response. I recommend reading the text.
Kind regards.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/a-genocide-foretold-read-by-eunice?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=yqix2
And ask yourself this: if Native American tribes for the last 20 years were launching rockets into civilian areas outside of reservations in the US and occasionally doing incursions into random suburbs outside of their reservations to murder, rape, and take hostages while building tunnel networks under their reservations and firing missiles at any police vehicles who came into those reservations to arrest them—all while declaring that the US must be ridded of “foreign occupiers”—while refusing to accept any kind of “2-state solution”—how do you think any given “strong on security” GOP administration would respond to those collective actions? Would it be much different than how the Likud party does things? Would we be talking about giving them the entire American southwest back as a 2nd state to live alongside? Think about that.
Cultural genocide—while terrible—is *not* the same thing as *actual* genocide—far far worse and often accompanied by cultural genocide anyway. Words matter, and so do degrees of separation, which is why there’s still a huge difference between cultural genocide and *actual* genocide. Is there some overlap in that Venn diagram? Sure. Is there still a whole lot of non-overlap? Absolutely. Violently-forced displacement—such as those suffered by Eastern-European Gypsies or Native American tribes or Gazans is *still* not the same as real genocide, where peoples are often not given the option to flee—unless they are lucky enough to get out early—and are instead rounded up and executed once discovered just for being who they are (rather than incidentally killed while armed forces pursue terrorists who hide themselves amongst a honeycomb of tunnels that the Gazans condoned the construction of and who in turn use those same Gazans as martyrdom sandbags for protection and PR).
I still don’t think it’s genocide because the killing of civilians is incidental rather than intentional. If this were genocide, the IDF wouldn’t even be looking for Hamas, we’d just see the IDF troops lining up *any* Palestinians they find against the wall in the streets and executing them on the spot whether or not they were combatants. THAT is genocide, when the targets *are* the civilians rather than sandbags that are merely in the way. When we see the IDF going house to house and executing every Palestinian they find there—including children—THEN we can call it a genocide. Otherwise you’re just watering down a term that has a real meaning. Words matter.
And the bulk of the arms the US sends Israel were sent there prior to 10/7 before this kind of military conduct was observed. Would you rather the IDF arm up with *less* precise munitions than the kind the US supplies? Because if they end up with a larger mix of less-precise munitions that translates to more civilians dying, not less. It’s not as though if the US cut off arms the IDF would simply run out. They also have their own domestic arms industry and a number of other countries ready and willing to sell to them if we weren’t doing so. Besides, Mike Johnson has Israeli aid on hold (in addition to Ukrainian military aid) so it’s not exactly like we’re still funneling arms over there at this very moment.