What would that achieve? AIPAC is a domestic organization. Their members are US citizens and permanent residents, making individual political donations of their own free will.
AIPAC vets candidates for their support of Israel, and individual donors rely on them to make an informed decision. But ultimately it is their decision, and their money.
If AIPAC disappeared tomorrow, their members would still be directing their political donations towards pro-Israel candidates, as is their constitutional right. They would simply look for another nonprofit to do the vetting, or do the research themselves.
On top of being ineffective, attacking AIPAC in this way would also be unethical. You may not like that some US citizens prioritize support for Israel in their donations. That doesn't give you the right to suppress their donations. It creates a dangerous precedent where suppressing the political rights of some citizens is justified if they have the "wrong" opinions.
>You may not like that some US citizens prioritize support for Israel in their donations. That doesn't give you the right to suppress their donations.
It's quite simple, treat Israel like Russia. Same tools are available for any nation which commits atrocities under the watchful guise of the mighty, moral, USA.
My point is that you should tell that to the US-based individuals who choose to donate to pro-Israel candidates, or donate to other candidates yourself (if you're legally allowed to), instead of attacking their ability to exercise their right to donate.
The point is, donations from an active vocal minority aren't the only way to deal with the problem of subjugation of one government to another, especially when those governments are in the process of committing heinous acts of terror, war crimes, and crimes against humanity at massive scale.
> It is clear that these are not just citizens funding local candidates
Not only is it not clear, it's nonsensical. To summarize the facts:
- AIPAC is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Their historical role is to vet and recommend candidates; then their members make the actual donations.
- Federal law prohibit foreign nationals from contributing directly
- Candidates are required by law to enforce this
- Donors must provide name, address, occupation and employer if the donation is above $200.
So you're basically claiming that AIPAC members are engaged in a conspiracy to break federal election laws. That is a "flat earth" level of conspiracy theory, so the least you could do is provide arguments to back your claim.
> Also, they are advocating for a foreign nation. Under FARA rules they should be registered as forein agents.
This is false. AIPAC is a US-funded and US-staffed organization, advocating for US foreign policy. It does not receive funding or instructions from Israel. Therefore FARA does not apply to it.
Note that I already explained this in my earlier post... Your blind spot is that you can't fathom that US-based individuals legitimately care about US-Israel friendship, and wish to donate to US candidates accordingly. In your mind, AIPAC cannot possibly reflect the political priorities of regular Americans. The only plausible explanation for its influence is a conspiracy by the evil Jewish state, pulling strings in the shadows...
I'll point out the elephant in the room: Jews pulling strings in the shadows, manipulating a host country's politics for their nefarious aims... Those are the same antisemitic claims used by Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany.
AIPAC is the successor of an organization that the DOJ targeted for lack of FARA disclosure, its simply a reincorporation to slide by
But you’re right - putting the military on the OFAC list will be far more effective as it is practically putting economic sanctions on nearly every person in that country
It will likely impact pro-Israel non-profits as so many persons involved at all angles are also Israeli citizens, many holding US citizenship too, and it will be prohibited to move money to or from sanctioned people
> AIPAC is the successor of an organization that the DOJ targeted for lack of FARA disclosure, its simply a reincorporation to slide by
You started from a kernel a historical truth, then distorted it into a false claim...
- Historical truth: In 1962 the DOJ ordered the American Zionist Committee to register as a foreign agent, because it received funding from the Jewish Agency for Israel, which was tied to the Israeli government.
- Historical truth: around the same time, the AIPAC was created with a very different legal structure, as a fully US-staffed and US-funded organization. The DOJ was satisfied with the new structure, and in its 60+ years of existence, AIPAC has never been investigated by the DOJ for FARA disclosure (or as far as know, for anything else).
- Falsehood: "its simply a reincorporation to slide by". You're trying to make it look like AIPAC is structurally the same as the old AZC, making it a foreign agent in all but name. When in fact, the creators of AZC actually followed the law in spirit and letter, and built AIPAC on a completely different legal model, specifically to not be a foreign agent.
Of course, the AIPAC model is only possible because enough US citizens and permanent residents genuinely care about supporting Israel, and are willing to donate accordingly. Which brings us back to the original problem... That fact is hard to admit for people like you, who take it for granted that Israel is evil and manipulative, and a pro-Israel foreign policy can only be the result of manipulation. When reality is much simpler: there are Americans who disagree with you, and support Israel. Many of them are American Jews - which antisemites often accuse of duplicity, and lack of loyalty to their host country.
Speaking of which...
> putting the military on the OFAC list will be far more effective as it is practically putting economic sanctions on nearly every person in that country
> It will likely impact pro-Israel non-profits as so many persons involved at all angles are also Israeli citizens, many holding US citizenship too, and it will be prohibited to move money to or from sanctioned people
Thank you for reminding me of the importance of supporting pro-Israel candidates at all levels of US government. They are the last line of defense against the antisemitic fever that you and so many others have succumbed to.
I will go make a few more donations in your honor.
Last election the democrats didn't have a primary, and the republicans barely had one. Political change requires more than one day at the polls; it demands large scale sustained effort by many people, including those in positions of prominence, and even with that success takes time and luck.
Part of being in a leadership position is taking responsibility for what happens on your watch. The electorate can't be blamed for its leaders not doing their jobs when the their leadership is needed.
> Last election the democrats didn't have a primary, and the republicans barely had one
Now do down ballot.
> electorate can't be blamed for its leaders not doing their jobs when the their leadership is needed
Pro-Palestinian voters who swung for Trump explicitly endorsed the war. Even if they thought they were just throwing a tantrum. That includes the war’s repercussions, including the dissolution and incorporation of Palestine.
If you care about net effect, the answer is obvious. If how one feels reigns supreme, yes, that voting bloc is excused. (But still irrelevant.)
As I stated before, changing a political party from the bottom up takes time. While a good endeavor, it doesn't affect who is currently in the drivers seat. Either Harris or Trump were going to be making the decisions about the current Gaza situation regardless of what the electorate did.
> Pro-Palestinian voters who swung for Trump explicitly endorsed the war.
Pro-palestinian voters didn't swing to trump. Virtually no one swang to Trump; his election results in 2024 were basically the same as in 2020 plus the increase in population of areas that voted for him in 2020. Exit polls indicate that Trump voters were overwhelmingly pro-israel. I'm sure some individuals did, but not enough to make any difference one way or the other. Trump won because 6 million democrats who showed up in 2020 stayed home in 2024. If they had gone out and voted for Harris, and then Harris supported Israel's efforts, as she publicly said she would, you would still be saying they endorsed the war.
The parties have already decided their position on a variety of issues so if you're going to get nominated for the party you'll be against them on that issue.
And the system is designed to exclude independents. The last nationally visible "I" candidate was roughly H Ross Perot. The system made sure that didn't happen again.
Why shouldn't Hamas leadership be bombed wherever they may be? They're the leaders of a terrorist organization. The US takes out terrorists wherever they may be (or, works with local authorities to get them first). But, when local authorities are siding with the terrorists, we go in there and do it ourselves. October 7th was Israel's 9/11 - we went and got bin Laden in Pakistan, without dealing with the Pakistani government. Why shouldn't Israel do the same thing? I say - kill all the Hamas leadership, and leave the random Palestinian citizens alone.
Let's imagine that a political opposition leader from Russia were to take refuge in the US. Now imagine that Russia performed a "surgical strike" bombing in the US to kill what they viewed as a terrorist leader. Can you imagine the outrage that would occur? That's exactly the situation that Qatar has just experienced.
It's an act of war. One country bombing another country means they are at war.
Now, the power dynamics in this region mean that they'll probably get away with it, and Qatar is more likely to let it slip than not, but it's still morally reprehensible.
No, that's not the point. Whether someone is a terrorist is subjective. Russia could (and likely would) define their opposition leader as a terrorist.
My point is that if Russia were to conduct a bombing on US soil, regardless of who it was targeting, the response would be severe and the reasonable onlookers would not blame the US for being "upset" about it. Yet that is exactly what Israel has done to Qatar.
There is in fact international consensus on what constitutes a terrorist organization. Hamas, ISIS, Al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Houtis, Boko Haram and so on, very clearly quality.
Sure, China or Russia can and will label political opponents "terrorists" to justify persecution against them. Their goal is to destroy the international consensus, so that "terrorist" becomes a purely subjective label. By equating Israel's bombing of an actual terrorist group with Russia's persecution of a fake one, you are supporting Russia in this effort.
Instead, you should equate Israel killing Hamas leaders with the US killing Bin Laden, coalition forces bombing ISIS in Iraq, France bombing islamists in Mali, etc.
"Terrorist" is just this century's n-word. It has been applied wilfully by racists towards their chosen out-group victims in order to justify their atrocities.
Well because Israel asked them to come to Qatar for mediation. From Turkey.
Where they can't attack because it is a NATO member.
It was duplicitous move that not only put an end to any good faith negotiations, but also attacke a mediator in a negotiation. The hostages are dead and the Israeli military killed them.
> Why shouldn't Hamas leadership be bombed wherever they may be?
Israel wouldn't be nearly as criticised if they're restricted themselves to surgical strikes on Hamas. Hell, they could have done exactly what they did until hostages started being exchanged, and then switched to surgical strikes, and I suspect--while folks would grumble--leaders would have better things to focus on.
Surgical strikes is mostly a myth presented to make the war on terrorism look better than it is. The US military defined anyone killed above the age of 15 to be a terrorist regardless of situation, and thus by definition had almost zero civilian deaths. It was one of those things that got leaked through the war logs.
The war on terror is estimated to have killed 4,5 million people. Surgical strikes is not a good description for that, nor was the war on terror a good model for how to behave in a war.
> Surgical strikes is mostly a myth presented to make the war on terrorism look better than it is
Even if they are, which I don't grant, myths matter in the fog of war.
More pointedly, surgical strikes would mean serially decapitating Hamas and destroying its infrastructure from the sky. It would preclude messing with aid flows. (Even if Hamas steals all the food, you can't turn most food into weapons. And Hamas amassing fighters they have to feed isn't a strategic threat to Israel in the way their ports and tunnels are.)
> war on terror is estimated to have killed 4,5 million people
One, source? Two, the U.S. obviously didn't prosecute a surgical war on the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We invaded, occupied and attempted to rebuild two nation states.
Brett McGurk would push back against the complaints, invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration, as the U.S. attempted to drive ISIS from northern Iraq: We flattened the city. There’s nothing left. What standard are you holding these Israelis to?
It was an argument bolstered by a classified cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Israel in late fall. American officials had embedded in IDF operating centers, reviewing its procedures for ordering air strikes. The cable concluded that the Israeli standards for protecting civilians and calculating the risks of bombardment were not so different from those used by the U.S. military.
When State Department officials chastised them over the mounting civilian deaths, Israeli officials liked to make the very same point. Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, brought up his own education at an American war college. He recalled asking a U.S. general how many civilian deaths would be acceptable in pursuit of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The general replied, I don’t even understand the question. As Halevi now explained to the U.S. diplomats, Everything we do, we learned at your colleges.
whose fault is that though? It's not the Israeli's fault the surrounding countries are blocking refugees and it's certainly not their fault that the terrorist's strategy depends on a large civilian population acting as a shield. It's a rock and a hard place situation because the whole area pretty clearly needs to be pacified from anyone sane living in Israel's perspective, as the raping, pillaging and murder orchestrated against israel that started this latest campaign can not be allowed to happen again and from the Hamas position their whole goal is to exist and cause atrocities against the Israelis until they leave. This all seems like a very measured response given the reality of the situation.
i believe official un position about setting any refugee camps in gaza it's that it will be forced displacement of population. or something like this. going back to days when Israel setup camps for evacuation of population from Rafah.
I don't remember UN asking to setup refugee camps or helping them to evacuate out of war zone
and you ignored the middle, which says that IDF using same procedures like USA (and in other words entire NATO)
Funny, elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45315574) you argue that "'terrorist' is the new n-word", basically an illegitimate term used as cover for racism. Yet here you are, using that term yourself, to score points in a debate.
So which is? Is terrorism a made-up word used by racists? Or is terrorism a legitimate word to designate bad people, and the US is to blame for these bad people existing?
You think the US isn't capable of creating and supporting its own new slave classes for its own nefarious purposes?
The duplicitous ruling elite of the nation with the world's largest prison slavery population definitely has the means to create lesser classes to fight for them.
We have bombed their leadership. This is an entirely different war. Hamas was/is the government of Gaza. They're part of the people there, not outside it.
You're trying to fight an organization that is part of the civilian population, not above it or outside of it. And that organization is deliberately using human shields to blur the lines even further.
It's not easy to figure out who's a random Palestinian or who's going to fire a rocket into Israel five years from now. If we want to keep bombing our way to victory, that's going to continue down the road of genocide.
Humanity needs to be better than this. We need to be better than this.
Turn your electricity off for days on end when someone in your country does something that other country disagrees with.
Hell, turn your fresh water off too.
Bomb your only airport into non-functioning rubble, and tell you that if you try to rebuild it, the same thing will happen. Keep that up for 20 years.
Park destroyers in your harbors to ensure nothing gets in or out of the country without their say so. Keep that up for a few decades as well.
Keep your land border effectively locked down so you can't even leave that way.
Bulldoze your neighborhood and childhood home because a rocket was suspected to be launched from nearby.
When the other kids in your neighborhood throw rocks at the armored bulldozers, watch as they have rubber bullets shot at them by an army. When they throw rocks at the army, watch as those soldiers return fire with live ammunition.
No, I know nothing about you. But don't pretend that having that as the only existence you've known is not going to make you increasingly angry and willing to fight back in any way, shape, or form, against the boot on your throat.
You left out a lot of things.
You are trying to make a point. I don’t expect you to put in all the things that go against your point, but you left out so many that maybe your point is not worth making.
>I can turn anyone, including you, into "someone who will fire a rocket in 5 years". Give me US backing and I can do it in 4
Echoing OP's point, I can turn you into a person who'll fire a rocket in a year, even. Go read through B'Tselem's reports of Israel's torture camps [0] where tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians are systematically raped, murdered, and abused as a matter of state policy. By the time you undergo that from youth, with half the people in your family gone for years, imprisoned in such camps, while half the kids you grew up with have died in senseless state-sanctioned murder, you'll be ready to do something worse that firing rockets.
Of course, you'll argue, from a sheltered perspective that you wouldn't ever do something like that. So, what will you do instead of fighting back? Sue? LMAO. Protest? You'll get shot. Just focus on building a family? Your home will get demolished or bombed just because.
Yes, and at this point I'm not arguing for or against that action. I'm saying the current and previous US administration have very different foreign policy.
Justifying this kind of act, no matter what, opens the doors for such assassinations to occur in any other country in the world.
The precedence has been set. Don't moan when your own politicians, branded terrorists by the governments of some foreign nation, also get blasted away.
Nothing in the real world is held back by “moaning”. Foreign countries mostly don’t assassinate American leaders because we have myriad ways to find out who did it and make life less enjoyable for them. Not because of adherence to some mutual code of conduct.
If they thought they could get away with it, they’d be doing it.
I fully understand the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness with this situation. Lots of people like to imagine what they'd do in certain situations, historical or otherwise. We no longer need to imagine what most people would do in the HOlocaust. We now know: nothing. In WW2, most people could reasonably claim ignorance. Even a lot of Germans could claim ignorance. Now we have livestreamed 4K 60fps evidence that is impossible to ignore.
There's a phrase that's widely attributed (arguably misattributed) to Lenin:
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"
So while the US could end this entire thing with a phone call, it's not true to say that things aren't changing. US support for Israel continues to plummet to new lows [1], to levels I never thought I'd see. Small things like blocking a cycling event in Spain, the future of Eurovision being uncertain, European states recognizing Palestine, problems for the port in Haifa due to changes in shipping because of Houthi rebels, ICC?ICJ investigations, these genocide findings and so on... it all adds up. It all matters. It all compounds to political and economic pressure on the actors involved.
I don't feel hopeless by pointing out that the UN report is a small piece of a puzzle, despite the high level of energy used to collectively create it.
It's easier to talk about these things and seeing consensus shift on consensus driven forums like this. My prior observations about that state's policies and supporting culture have been similar, but seen as extreme and "cancellable" at one point. Espousing my observations would have been conflated with ideas of physical harm to Jewish and Israelis, which I don't harbor. My ideas are much more similar to Jewish Israeli residents that protest their own government within Israel. And it's been nice to see many stateside Jewish people distance themselves, and now even second guess Zionism, which Jewish community leaders initially denounced 120 years ago by foreseeing these specific issues and its inherent extremism.
When it comes to my country's involvement, it's a complete aberration in US foreign policy. The reasons require a contorting ourselves for no real practical reason that isn’t already fulfilled by other countries in the Middle East, it’s just money moved from one account to the account of our politicians and appointed representatives.
So I am happy to see piece by piece, people re-evaluating the state narrative on that country. The politicians with discretion on all the levers are unfortunately a far cry away from changing anything.
Remove exception to AIPAC political status
Reevaluate AIPAC non profit status entirely
Replicate EO 14046 for Israel which adds the entire ruling party and head of state and spouses and military and affiliated business to the OFAC list
all of this is easy and doesn’t require Congress
but nobody is close to considering those actions with regard to Israel. Notably, other nation’s organizations do not enjoy this courtesy
(Don’t sorry guys, Hamas is already on these lists too)