Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a US representative, said on Wednesday that she will oppose any future US military aid to Israel, including for defensive systems.
In a statement on social media, Ocasio-Cortez said that Israel was fully capable of funding “Iron Dome and other defensive systems”, and that “consistent with my voting record to date, I will not support Congress sending more taxpayer dollars and military aid to a government that consistently ignores international law and US law”.
Her remarks on Wednesday follow reports that she pledged to oppose any future military aid to Israel during a New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) forum on Tuesday evening.
“Our allies who need our military aid must understand that we will provide it consistent with the Leahy amendment and the foreign assistance act”, Ocasio-Cortez added, referring to a law which prohibits the US from providing military support to army units that violate human rights.
According to City & State, which obtained a partial recording of the DSA forum, Ocasio-Cortez told members: “I have not once ever voted to authorize funding to Israel, and I will never,” adding that “the Israeli government should be able to finance their own weapons if they seek to arm themselves.”
yeah, I do tend to think overall probably a majority of Israeli citizens have problematic views (racism, defending their colonialism, supportive of Israel’s war crimes and genocide, etc.) - I just also tend to think civilians are not morally defensible targets and I’m not too keen on defending targeting civilians (even when they’re Nazis, as I mentioned earlier).
Osama bin Laden used this kind of logic - that the US is a democracy, and thus civilians are valid targets because unlike in countries where people don’t have a choice, the idea is that the government does what the people choose for it to do. And you could make similar claims about US citizens being racist, defending genocide, etc. (after all, we fund, encourage, and enable Israel) … yet this reasoning still seems wrong to me, esp. when it’s a small minority of the US population that ultimately chose the representatives who run the government (and when satisfaction by voters with their representatives is so low, even hitting historic lows).
So, I don’t know - this reasoning just doesn’t feel entirely right to me, and it’s concerning when it’s being used to justify indiscriminate bombing of children, women, the elderly, etc.