[about f—ing time!]
Joseph Gedeon in Washington
Wed 17 Sep 2025 18.18 EDT
“We, as Americans, must end our complicity in the slaughter of the Palestinian people,” he wrote. “Having named it a genocide, we must use every ounce of our leverage to demand an immediate ceasefire, a massive surge of humanitarian aid facilitated by the UN, and initial steps to provide Palestinians with a state of their own.”
He now joins a small but growing list of House members including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, as well as Vermont representative Becca Balint, who also called it a genocide earlier in the day.
“Today, I believe the Israeli government is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people,” Balint wrote in an op-ed in the Courier. “As the granddaughter of a man murdered in the Holocaust, it is not easy for me to say that.”
Yes, worse than both of those.
I’m not at all ignorant about either, but you might be ignorant of the sheer scale and longevity of the one Israel has been continually committing since 1948.
Well I’ve no idea what metric you’re using, but it’s certainly not number of deaths. Or proportion of the targeted group that died. Or the rate at which it occurred.
I guess the metric here is the duration? Yes, Israel has been committing atrocities again Palestinians for a long time - casual murder of civilians, for sure - but said atrocities have only recently graduated to fit the definition of genocide. There’s a reason people weren’t making those claims until the last couple of years. So even by that single metric it’s not the worst.
Plenty of people correctly said it was a genocide since 1948, so I’m not sure what you mean here.
Some people were using the word genocide in a technically incorrect sense when referring to forced displacement and war crimes. Obviously atrocities have been committed at a varying rate for a long time, but if we’re playing that game, Russia’s varying rates of crimes against the people of Ukraine go back centuries. The bar for genocide however is, quite rightly, set very high. That bar was not met until recently.
Forced displacement and ethnic cleansing isn’t genocide??
Performing genocide denial and erasing the Nakba to show why genocide has only just occurred is weird.
Hang on, genocide denial? Kindly fuck off with that shit, my point was ‘there have been genocides since ww2 that have resulted in orders of magnitudes more deaths, therefore performatively declaring the situation with Palestine to be the worst is bullshit’. Who’s denying what here exactly?
You said the bar for genocide has only just been reached in 2025… erasing the Nakba that started in 1947.
No, they have only recently worsened enough and become publicly verifiable enough that people are admitting what’s been true for a century.
And that reason is that the media and governments of all western nations were implicitly trusting the Hasbara lies and gaslighting most other people to do so too.
That the lies only recently stopped working doesn’t mean that they only recently started being lies.