“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes.”
Those were the words of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in March, speaking about Israel’s assault on Gaza on the House floor.
“It looks,” she continued, “like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away. It looks like good and decent people who do nothing. Or do too little too late.”
“The time is now,” Ocasio-Cortez argued, “to force compliance with US law and the standards of humanity” and “to suspend the transfer of US weapons to the Israeli government. Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing.”
For the past ten months, while Israel has pummeled, starved, and demolished every corner of Gaza, AOC and other members of the Squad have shown integrity, exposing Israeli atrocities in the face of massive pressures to fall in line behind Israel on Capitol Hill. Left Democrats in office helped to reflect and boost a mass movement that has been growing on the streets and on college campuses to stop the genocide. Members of the Squad visited college encampments and gave their support at a time when the conservative right and the Democratic Party leadership alike were screaming bloody murder about student protesters, and anyone showing even meek support risked witch hunts and more. To prove the point, the Squad’s already slim ranks thinned further when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent millions of dollars to oust representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush from their seats in Democratic primaries this summer.
But when AOC took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention to cheers of “AOC! AOC!”, all that seemed to fall away. Instead, Ocasio-Cortez repeated the false narrative that Vice President Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly to…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Hadas Thier
