Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

I for one will be holding my representatives responsible who continue to vote for the US to enable a genocide. The videos coming out of Gaza have turned me and many others into single issue voters.

Flipping the U.S. really is the key to ending this conflict. The U.S. reliably uses its security council veto to nix any meaningful UN response and the U.S. remains, by far, the biggest supplier of arms to the IDF. If the US were to stop veto'ing everything and cut off the IDF's supply of, at least, some types of weapons, the new ground assault would likely end quickly.

Unfortunately, that isn't likely to happen. Netanyahu has, to date, handled Trump deftly and Rubio's current presence in Israel seems to be aimed at offering support to the ground offensive, not opposition. I honestly have no idea what kind of backlash it would take to shake U.S. support for this genocide.

There's definitely a generational gap going in the US. Support for Israel is not popular among the younger generation in the US, and there's a good deal of voters in their 20s and 30s for whom support for Israel a red line in candidates. But older generations tend to be staunchly in favor of Israel, and too much of the gerontocratic political class thinks that pro-Israel uber alles is the key to winning votes.

It is worth noting that Andrew Cuomo, in a desperate last-minute gamble to boost support in the NYC mayoral race, has come out against Israel. Considering that much of the attacks on Mamdani have focused on his support for Palestine (construing him as antisemitic), it's notable that other candidates also seem to think that being anti-Israel is actually the vote winner for moderates right now.

I wouldn't label this as "support for Israel"/"against Israel". One can support Israel without supporting Israel's current approach. Many within Israel are not happy with Netanyahu's methods, and presumably they are not against Israel.

I understand that that's the current shorthand, but it seems inaccurate and unnecessarily polarizing to me.

> One can support Israel without supporting Israel's current approach.

I think you're overthinking this. We're taking about a country committing genocide here. You either support them or you don't.

Genocide according to the genocide convention which is what we're talking about can occur even when a single person is killed as long as there is "intent". This is why we keep seeing the reference to certain Israeli MK statements as proof of intent. So according to Israel's critics, which seems to be everyone here, because Yoav Gallant said that we'll shut the water to Gaza as a response to the Oct 7th attack the first bomb dropped on Hamas on Oct 8th constitutes genocide. There is no possibility of self defense.

What Israel's critics will add to that is that Israel has no right to self defense because it was occupying Gaza before the Oct 7th attack.

They'll also downplay the Oct 7th attack, claim Israelis killed their own, there was no sexual violence etc.

Then they'll look at the number of casualties as another proof. It's not "proportional". Israel is only allowed to kill a certain number of people in its wars. Otherwise it's clearly not self defense. But only for Israel, for other countries, still self defense.

People see bodies, children, on their social media feeds and destruction and that makes it very clear who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

Israel can't win this argument. Don't look for logic. Days after the Oct 7th attack Israel was already accused of genocide. Nothing Israel can do here is right and the actions western countries have taken (e.g. US post 9/11 or western response to ISIS) are not available to Israel because Israel shouldn't even exist and therefore should definitely not be allowed to defend itself (vs. the Americans and the Canadians who have lived on their land for 10,000 years and definitely didn't just steal it from the natives and kill all of them).

The only thing Israel can win is the actual war on the ground and so the leadership of Israel, while making many mistakes, is determined to win the war on the ground. Not all Israelis agree with that either. Personally I don't know if any other options really exist.

All that said, you can't really argue with the fact the population of Gaza is suffering immensely, many of them have lost everything they've had, many killed and injured, they live in terrible conditions. I mostly blame Hamas. I also blame the west for prolonging this war and not offering any reasonable solutions to Israel. Israel has faults and can and should do better but for the most part its hand is forced and has been forced by Palestinian violence/actions for some time. Maybe Gaza should have been taken immediately after Hamas took over in 2007. Maybe there would have been other courses of actions including post Oct 7. I donno. Oct 7th stunned me, it was an utter failure. Not really seeing anything proposed here at this point in time and don't recall seeing anything productive going back.

So all in all it's terrible. There's human suffering. We need to end it. The only way out I see is for Hamas to surrender. Let's get there and then we can debate what words mean, two states, one state, where do we go from here. This was is not going to end e.g. by the US telling Israel to end it.