Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election, thankfully. He is not withdrawing because he’s being held responsible for enabling war crimes against the Palestinian people (though a recent poll does have nearly 40 percent of Americans saying they’re less likely to vote for him thanks to his handling of the war). Yet it’s impossible to extricate the collapse in public faith in the Biden campaign from the “uncommitted” movement for Gaza. They were the first people to refuse him their votes, and defections from within the president’s base hollowed out his support well in advance of the debate.
The Democrats and their presumptive nominee Kamala Harris are faced with a choice: On the one hand, they can continue Biden’s monstrous support for Netanyahu, the brutal IDF, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That would help allow the party to cover for Biden and put a positive spin on a smooth handoff, even though we all know this would mainly benefit the embittered president himself and his small coterie of loyalists. Such a choice would confirm that the institutional rot that allowed the current situation to develop still characterizes the party.
I certainly don’t grant “Israel has a right to exist” from the jump. What right? From whom? For the record, I don’t think the settlers in the United States have any right over stolen native lands.
I don’t grant that the dissolution of a colonialist theocracy state is the same thing as a genocide. States are not peoples. Decolonization is not genocide.
One of the elements of genocide per the ICC: The perpetrator intended to destroy, in whole or in part, that national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.
Again, this is an essential distinction. States are not peoples. A national group is the people of a state, not the state itself.
The axis states ceased to exist after world war II. Despite gratuitous bombing by allied forces, the peoples of the states continue to exist, and largely inhabit the same territory.
Seemingly by your argument, land can be seized, people expelled, war crimes committed, but if you have created a state, it would be inherently wrong to dislodge you. I personally don’t regard states as a magic blanket that rules out decolonization by definition.
Um, the axis states all continued to exist. They just had a regime change. That is not what Hamas wants.
I’m sorry, but the definition is clear and it encapsulates Hamas’ goals entirely.
Now it seems we’ve reached a “verbal argument” where it’s just an argument over definitions, which I’m not interested in.
This is where I’m personally going to leave this:
Some people see the 70 -year genocide of the Palestinians as an unspeakable atrocity that plainly justifies violent and non-violent resistance.
Some people want to center the fears of the occupiers in the discussion, and use that to throw up their hands and shut down any action or solution that isn’t on the occupiers’ terms.