Over the past 10+ months of watching a US-backed genocide, perpetrated by the right wing extremist government of Israel against Palestinian people in Gaza, I've frequently found myself in heated arguments with uninformed or dishonest apologists who insist that the American government doesn't have the power to stop the carnage. Even setting aside the fact that this is a pretty disgusting and disingenuous way of supporting a literal goddamn genocide in progress, the plain truth is that it's also wrong; as numerous American and even Israeli politicians have noted in public, Israel's military and security sector are wholly dependent on U.S. arms shipments and financial support - no matter how much Benjamin Netanyahu might want to "finish the job" (of murdering every Palestinian in Gaza) the state of Israel simply doesn't have the munitions and materiel to prosecute the genocide in Gaza, or any other "war" for that matter, without U.S. support.

Although they certainly don't act like it most of the time, Israel is objectively a U.S. client state in the larger MENA region, and if an American president wanted to end the genocide in Gaza, that person could easily do so simply by threatening to cut off the supply of financial aid and military equipment (including bombs) the U.S. government provides to the IDF. Furthermore, as the article I'm going to share below demonstrates, this is not even remotely a new situation:

https://truthout.org/articles/decades-of-us-arms-deals-with-israel-paved-the-way-to-genocide-in-gaza/

Decades of US Arms Deals With Israel Paved the Way to Genocide in Gaza

"Their military cooperation reflects a disturbing historical trend. Although posing as a mediator, the U.S. has long assisted Israeli forces in their ruthless war against Palestinian self-determination. For the past half-century, successive U.S. presidents have frozen the balance of forces in Israel’s favor with military aid, eliminating incentives to negotiate while fostering aggression. State Department telegrams, White House memos and other archival sources demonstrate that the U.S. has repeatedly covered-up Israeli war crimes, while turning the “peace process” into a screen for weapons deals."

Speaking plainly, the historical record (which is by no means a secret) indicates that the colonial project to displace Palestinians of their home and maintain the apartheid state of Israel, is every bit as much an American project as an Israeli one. When crass American politicians insist that students protesting a genocide simply "don't understand the history in the region" they are objectively talking out both sides of their mouths, because understanding the history doesn't absolve the United States from supporting colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, but rather incriminates it directly. The cold hard truth here is that the U.S. could end the genocide in Gaza tomorrow if our leaders, particularly President Biden, wanted to; and the fact that the American government has made no real effort to do so, and indeed continues to ship bombs to the objectively fascist Netanyahu government even while international courts are in the process of confirming that Israel is guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and prosecuting a genocide, means that America owns this monstrous shitshow of slaughter; quite literally lock stock and barrel.

#Colonialism #Genocide #Gaza #Israel #USPol