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.

If you are charged with murder, but you killed because someone was attacking you, it is a legal defence that you were defending yourself.

There is no such defence against a charge of genocide.

The lawyers who wrote the international treaty, many of whom themselves survived the Holocaust and lost their relatives in it, carefully considered whether to add such a defence. They did not add it. They considered that genocide is a crime for which there is no excuse. That is should be possible to defend yourself without resorting to it.

In any case, the group at issue is not Hamas. The genocide is being conducted against all Palestinians.

Your argument also conveniently omits the extreme level of military dominance which Israel has over the Palestinians.

The real reason many Israelis cannot conceive of a solution other than killing or expelling them, is: how can we leave them there, after the level of hatred, murder, violence, and abuse we have heaped on them over the last two years? We have taken revenge for our 36 dead children, won't they want revenge for their 20,000?