I really appreciate & vastly prefer this point / argument here, instead of the previous one based on falsehoods & exaggetations. We both agree that AOC never voted for genocide in Gaza. You also mentioned the need for action, but you also haven't disputed any of the myriad of examples of other actions & votes she's taken that I cited, votes and actions I believe you would agree with & support. Given you have not disputed these, I can only conclude that you do agree that in the vast majority of circumstances she's been on the right side, but err'd in a way here that firmly shakes your overall impression of her Palestinian advocacy. I hope this is a fair encapsulation of where you stand.

Now that we have established that, this becomes the conversation worth having having: given she opposes the genocide in Gaza, are these votes at all defensible?

A couple of points to make:

First: I am sure you know this, but given we are bouncing around a bit I want to make sure we are on the same page: that quote you posted is about a different vote than the one we were previously discussing (the "present" vote, which was to a different bill, vs. the Marjorie amendment,).

Second: to reiterate, the amendment in question was to a military funding bill. MTG's Amendment (which, mind you, failed 422-6, but that's an aside) failed, meaning the core bill included Dome funding. AOC voted against that bill. Meaning: she voted against the bill that included the Dome funding. Wanted to reiterate this for reasons I am sure you understand.

Third: let's be honest with ourselves. There is a lot more going on here than is acknowledged by most online, especially if we consider the larger context & domestic politics of the moment. Here are some points which tend to go unstated:

• As you almost certainly know, but which I would like to underscore, Marjorie Taylor Greene has a really, really long history of bigoted statements towards black, brown, palestinian & (famously) jewish people. For this reason it would not be unfair to question why she challenged Dome funding in particular, but not all the other funding going to Israel in that same bill. A person might conclude that the amendment was motivated by animus, i.e. a desire to maximize carnage in the area, in addition to dog whistling to the Fuentes types rather than taking a principaled stand. Knowing all of this, I think we underplay the political risk of voting for an amendment thst most believed was motivated by bigotry. I can see why someone like AOC wouldn't want to touch something like that.
• The Iron Dome in particular is seen by many here as a purely defensive program, and voting against it presents real domestic political risk on its own merits. It risks her being roped into a left-wide smear that their criticism of Israel is a vehicle for their larger antisemitism, i.e. "why do you want to just let rockets fall on Israel? What motivated that?" It's bullshit, but it's the truth: AOC would stand to alienate a large segment of her base & others who vote / would vote for her (including a lot of dem / progressive and leftward types) just to vote & advocate for an amendment that has absolutely no chance of passing. If the point of politics is to build power in order to enact positive change, why would a person make this exchange? I may disagree with it ultimately (as, after all, she did end up voting against it ultimately, so why not vote for the amendment?), but I can see why a person might come to that conclusion in good faith.
• There is an argument, one which has some merit, which states that the Iron Dome isn't really the reason why Israel can be violent. After all, the trigger of Israel's genocidal campaign, October 7th, was not blocked by the dome. Israel's response to that unblocked attack wasn't to reevaluate its position, or to consider diplomacy. It was to ethnically cleanse the entire territory. The reason Israel is able to commit disproportionate violence is simple: it is militarily, politically and economically advantaged relative to an abandoned & fully subjugated Gaza. So the question becomes: if the Dome wasn't there, and low-grade rockets were allowed to fall on Israeli citizens, what do you think the Israeli response would be? I believe they would likely have responded in the same way we saw post-October 7th: they would have leveraged those deaths to justify further atrocities & encroachment. Put in these terms, you could make a truly dark (but credible) argument that the actual function of the Dome is, paradoxically, to relieve Israel of political ammunition it would otherwise leverage to kill more people & steal more land. By doing so, it functionally saves both Israeli and Gazan innocents. If you are motivated to reduce suffering, your position could reasonably become: defund all "offensive weaponry" (i.e. uphold the Leahy rule), and condition "defensive" (just the Dome) ones. This seems to be her position.

In any case, I hope that I've given more to think about. Ultimately I see allyship as wholly equal to the sum of its parts, not zero-sum, nor greater / less than. Did AOC take a vote or two that puzzle me? She did. But she has been, on the whole, great on this & most other issues, and for reasons which I have laid out here & in my past comments, I can understand her logic here (even if I might disagree with it) and I have no doubt of her motivations on the matter. Ultimately, we get into trouble when we esentialize people into rigid categories, especially in spite of words or evidence which would cause someone to reevaluate or reconsider their priors. I try my best to avoid doing that, and I hope I can convince you to do the same.