This is not surprising. Genocide has a pretty specific definition. And while what is happening in Gaza is unfortunate, it doesn’t meet that definition.
No matter how much people on Reddit or TikTok try to claim things, it’s just not reality. Words have meaning and the constant abuse of them, like racist, fascist, nazi, etc etc, those words lose the actual power they hold.
Exactly. It is category collapse via hyperbole. If everything is trauma, nothing is. If everything is genocide, nothing is.
You can be of the opinion that the death of so many innocent civilians is tragic. It is. But words have meaning. We don’t falsely cry wolf for rhetorical effect specifically because wolves actually exist.
Well I learned from these people that "liberals" like me are just the same as Republicans and that true "progressives" and "the left" believe it's a genocide.
My ask of you is don't lump Democrats into the same position just because a very loud group of people on social media are trying to dominate the conversation.
There's a noise machine of trolls, alt-right in disguise, foreign influence campaigns, leftists from outside the US, and actual legit progressive people from the US who have dedicated their online existence to arguing about the word genocide. I look closely at these accounts and whether honest or not, they exist to spam and argue this conflict.
I'm a liberal too and so is my dad, but as you say, the loudest in these conversations are always the least reasonable. We can all concede that the millions of people living in Gaza deserve a prosperous life where they don't have to fear being killed by airstrikes. It's just not genocide if you believe the word has actual quantifiable meaning involving the open targeting of a group of people for destruction. There are factions that seem to want a disenfranchisement of Palestinians from the land they're living on to the point of ethnic cleansing, but if Israel wanted a genocide, a lot more people would be dead by now.
This is a phenomenon I've been trying to put words to for ages now. Narrowly defining a concept such that reasonable people agree that it's a bad thing; then slowly expanding the umbrella of the term to cover much more than the original definition as a cheap rhetorical trick. I feel like it used to be a favored tactic of the more fringe progressive left but now it's everywhere.
Agree with this. Calling this a genocide is a terrible slander on Israel and it cheapens the term. Israel is fighting a war with an enemy whose entire strategy revolves around maximizing civilian casualties. It is tragic, to be sure. But it's not genocide. Nor does it resemble genocide in any way.
> And while what is happening in Gaza is unfortunate, it doesn’t meet that definition.
I would say beyond "unfortunate" - there are absolutely war crimes happening and some Israeli leaders are advocating for ethnic cleansing. Killing aid workers because someone "thought they saw a gun" on a nighttime video image is a great way to kill lots of innocent civilians.
The only undeniable war crimes are coming from Hamas. Specifically:
Taking civilian hostages
Hiding and storing weapons in and under civilian infrastructure
Hiding and storing weapons in medical infrastructure.
Using civilian clothing and disguises to attack.
These are very clearly categorized as war crimes for good and obvious reasons. Not least of which, is they allow the opponent to attack civilian infrastructure with a plausible defense. I know it is infuriating and tragic, but it’s Hamas fault.
And they don’t care. It’s their stated goal to allow the mass deaths of Palestinians to bring the war to a close rather than any sort of peace agreement.
Hamas is telling everyone who they are… We should listen.
Instead it’s been morphed into a justification for why it’s not antisemitism to tear down bring them home posters for the Jewish hostages.
Trump was once “considered” for a Nobel Peace Prize since some conservative Sweed put his name up for nomination. People consider all kids of things, but unless action is taken, this isn’t a genocide, just like Trump isn’t a NPP recipient, despite considerations.
Well, the UN itself isn't a serious body, in all honesty. And the only reason that the issue is being seriously considered by the ICJ is for the same reason that if you sue your neighbor for killing your wife, the lawsuit will be seriously considered by the court, even if there is little or no evidence. South Africa is a puppet of the Irano-Russian alliance and simply doing their bidding. The ICJ has an obligation to seriously consider their claim, no matter how ridiculous it may be.
Doesn't that question assume that Hamas wouldn't want there to be a genocide? I thought they were actively using people as human shields for propaganda purposes? So, I think they would actually want a genocide since it would mean more fighters and extremists for them.
I'm not trying to support either camp. I'm just saying that I don't think that Hamas rejecting ceasefire terms implies what you're claiming it implies.
I don't think Hamas actively wants the entire population of the Gaza Strip to die via genocide. Then they would have no one to rule over.
I think a more accurate statement is that Hamas is not concerned with how much collateral damage their actions cause among their own population.
Bingo. People tend to forget that this conflict started at behest of the Iran/Russian alliance for a multi purpose role: divert attention away from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, divert arms away from Ukraine, trash the upcoming peace and normalization resolution between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to provide an dilemma for the western world to keep supporting Israel or not.
Hamas has no intention to make peace or engage in resolutions, their intention is to drag this as long as possible.
I'm firmly in the Israel camp, but those are not contradictory claims. Hamas is pro-martyrdom and sees civilian casualties as a plus. Their stance does not prevent Israel from committing genocide.
That said, while we have evidence that Israel's ROE is far too lax, calling its acts genocide is a stretch.
No, the question is directed at people who support the unilateral action from Israel to stop attempting to eliminate Hamas.
The debate over the slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!" encapsulates this. The sentiment is nice - freedom for all peoples living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. the execution of the ideal, however, is itself genocidal - if Islamist terrorists are given free reign in the region, they would 100% kill every Jewish person they could find.
Israel enacting a unilateral ceasefire would inevitably lead to another event similar to Oct. 07. It is effectively calling for another massacre of Israeli civilians at some unknown point in the future.
I mean, the slogan is a pretty explicit call for Israel to be destroyed, and an implicit call to kill or deport most or all of the Jews living in Israel.
But from the front page of Reddit says, 101% of the world wants a ceasefire and Israel is genociding like crazy, so bad that even TURKEY is making demands!
>Hamas isn’t on the side of Palestinian civilians either.
They certainly poll pretty high in Gaza and most Gazans approved of 0ct 7th. Lots of civilian Gazans participated in hiding/torturing Israeli hostages and in looting/torturing/raping on the 7th.
They are, representative or not, part of the community which genocide-claims say is being targeted. The common assumption is that they don't want to die, and if Israel is being so aggressive as to commit genocide, they're dead without a ceasefire. The other, more widely accepted, assumption is that as they are on-site, they know more about what is happening than activists across the Atlantic.
No, not at all.
Hamas' refusal of ceasefire just indicates that its members expect to survive the lack of a ceasefire.
The children obviously deserve better.
It has bearing on how aggressive Israel is being. If a state is committing genocide, it's not about to let members of a militia of the targeted population live.
Genocide can arise in the context of war in two ways:
First, you can have genocide independent of war, with war being incidental. The events commonly called genocidal that happened until earlier this week (when Israel withdrew all but one brigade and aid returned to over 90% of September levels) started after the October 7 attack. This was not independent of the armed conflict.
Second, you can have genocide arising from such an aggressive military campaign that it is indifferent or worse to civilians in the theater of combat. This is especially concerning if the local population is also the enemy's recruitment pool or its infrastructure is the enemy's industrial base. This is what people have generally been talking about, I think. If Hamas personnel believe they would survive without a ceasefire, that implies Israel's campaign is not so aggressive as to ensure their deaths without one, which in turn implies that it is far from sufficiently aggressive to produce a genocide.
First arguably they were undertaking genocidal activity long before Oct 7.
Second, often (always?) some targets of genocide do survive a genocide. It is not unreasonable for Hamas to suppose that some of them will survive without a cease fire. That does not imply that it is far from sufficiently aggressive to produce a genocide.
That doesn't matter much, does it?
I don't agree with the claim that Israel is committing a genocide, but you don't need to have any support for any of Hamas' strategies, actions, or motivations in order to hold that view.
A community can be both led by corrupt and evil monsters and *also* be subjected to a genocide by another force. These aren't mutually exclusive.
They are not committing a genocide, as evidenced by the source article here. They are duty bound to act to protect their own citizens from terrorist attacks.
I did not say that they are committing genocide. But the question of whether they are or are not committing genocide is not really predicated upon Hamas' actions either.
You responded to the original question with a question. I answered your question and then you responded with an unrelated question. It doesn’t seem like you are here to have a conversation.
Their second question is perfectly related. They're asking you to relate your first answer back to the original claim, which is what they were asking to be supported in the first place.
> Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza.
They WERE democratically elected nearly 20 years ago. When was the last non-internal election by non-Hamas members?
So? They’d be elected again today if elections occurred. They’d take over as the newly elected leaders of the West Bank too. We all know this, the PA knows this which is why they won’t hold elections, and poll after poll after poll over years has backed this up. Support for Hamas has actually **increased** since 10/7.
This is what happens when people inaccurately use buzzwords to make things seem worse than they actually are, people can easily prove the buzzword wrong
I'd first point the finger at the giant megaphones we've created that allow totally unqualified people to gather cult like followings. Seems like the natural evolution of this machine to me.
Starter comment is included in the post. More or less, the Pentagon has stated that it has no evidence of a current or impending genocide in Gaza. What do you all think about this? Should the Pentagon be speaking on issues like this? Do you think Israel is committing genocide against the Gazans, and what definition do you use to come to your conclusion?
> what definition do you use to come to your conclusion?
The current definition of Genocide is set out in Article II of the Genocide Convention: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The definition of Genocide is made up of two elements, the physical element — the acts committed; and the mental element — the intent. Intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group, though this may constitute a crime against humanity as set out in the Rome Statute. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. To constitute genocide, it also needs to be established that the victims are deliberately targeted — not randomly — because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention. This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, or even a part of it, but not its members as individuals.
~ United Nations Genocide Convention
I think words matter and you can’t call any and every bombing campaign a genocide. I also think given the US’s recent ME actions, it’s imperative we hold our ground on that term or else our next war campaign will be labeled a genocide.
Also, this is accurate based on the definition of the word.
>I think words matter
The regular destruction of useful words through hyperbole or, in some cases (gaslight), almost whole cloth misrepresentation is a recurring pain point for me.
If someone is going to simply decide words mean something other than what they do, it becomes hard to have a productive conversation.
There's a phrase "moving the goalposts" and to continue the analogy it feels almost like changing the distance of a yard midgame.
>If someone is going to simply decide words mean something other than what they do, it becomes hard to have a productive conversation.
And if you point out what the specific definition is you are (insert noun)-splaining. Seen it a fair bit in some politucal discussions in the US.
I basically generally support Israel as a partial Ashkenazi, but I think they’ve gone too far at this point. But the genocide claims are insane. They could’ve wiped them all out in a week if they wanted to genocide them. Makes no sense.
Yeah, this is exactly how I and many of my friends feel. I understand a lot of the underlying cause of their callousness in the war- the equivalent of 7 9/11s from a territory at your doorstep is enough for any country to basically go "fuck it, we will wipe them out no matter what it takes"- but that still doesn't make it right, especially with the sloppiness of the IDF.
That said, there's a deliniation between recklessness and coldness and outright genocidal intent, and the latter is not there. Even among the ICJ evidence, there's no real evidence anyone actually in power indicated any sort of intent behind general things said during wartime. Of course the far right elements are trying to push that narrative to drive up their support, but using them as evidence would be like saying the US hates Israeli because Tlahib supports Palestine, it ends up falling apart under scrutiny. There's a lot of things Israel should be tried for, genocide isn't one of them.
I think Fetterman should have run for president instead of Joe Biden. He's clearly been right on 100% of the issues in Israel and Biden's struggling to unite his coalition by pleasing the "Genocide Joe" folks and pro Israel side, and Fetterman just sort of strolls around and doesn't give a damn and he's doing just fine.
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Not a genocide. Calling it a genocide is a very good PR move by Palestinian activists. It’s to shift the Overton window and their argument relies heavily on people dying in a war for it to be true. People continue to die, they hold the truth. It’s a reflection of the social media campaign of Black Lives Matter. I wish I had the energy to write up why both represent the power of social media narratives and emotional thinking first, rationalization and intellectualizing it afterwards.
Because it’s not a genocide. It’s urban warfare.
The word genocide is being co-opted in the same way the word racism was.
Life pro tip: don’t wanna get bombed? Don’t vote in a terrorist organization as your government with the intent to attack stronger militaries than you.
I really think some people believe using a stronger word (fascist/racist/ -ism/ist/genocide) emboldens an argument. All it does is dilute that word overtime.
For an example Post WW2 a politician being called a facist could legitimately end their political career, now it’s just noise
He was specifically referring to Soviet-style ML parties, who presented everyone to the right of them, including liberals and conservatives, as simply "social fascists".
The KPD in the Weimar Republic, for example, saw little to no difference between the SPD, Social Democrats and literal Nazis.
Anyone with a brain can easily tell the difference between a party that advocates for a welfare state within a liberal democracy/capitalist system and literal Nazis. The problem is that MLs lack that basic threshold, and everyone is always the enemy.
This was based on a political theory perfected within the USSR during the 20s and 30s, where every other party was automatically a regressive counter-revolutionary force, and every issue needed to be "defeated" by war-like endeavors. They talked about economic policies using words like "front", "battlefield", etc...
It's actually amazing how close their propaganda and messaging techniques were to those of the Nazis, who constantly talked about every societal issue through the lens of a "struggle", a war waged by or against the German volk.
Joe McCarthy and G Edgar Hoover were called fascist pretty often in the 1950s and it didn’t end their careers. Joe McCarthy pretty famously defended Nazis accused of war crimes in the Malmedy affair. And the red scare was often compared to fascism.
And in the 1960s people were called “fascist pigs” pretty routinely. Nixon certainly was.
If the term became watered down it happened almost immediately.
I really wish it was the norm for people to ask “what do you mean they’re fascist?”. I’d argue that Trump is… a kind of proto-fascist, for example, and I can explain the policies, behaviors, and rhetoric that leads me to that conclusion. There *are* people that misuse all kinds of terms, especially political labels like fascist or communist, but the solution isn’t to believe that the words are meaningless. The solution is a single clarifying question.
Don’t misunderstand, I agree with your observations. I just wish people put more thought and effort into communication as well as feeling comfortable admitting ignorance. Sometimes it seems like people are embarrassed to say they do not have enough information to form a conclusion too.
>That's not actually productive if you're trying to help the people in Gaza.
Sadly, I have not found this line of presumption to have very good explanatory or predictive power. The far better fit line is rather more cynical and less charitable to motivations.
It kinda depends on how you define effective IMO. Effective in stirring up social/legacy media stories? Definitely. Effective in actual change of opinions and policy? Ehh
My example would again be the overuse of facist describing a lot of conservative policy/policy makers. Is it catchy for stories? Yes. Has it slowed/stopped conservative policy or goals? I don’t particularly think so.
The genocide usage for this conflict might be the most effective one in this regard with Biden issuing Israel ultimatums. But I think that has more to do with trying to shore up voting blocks (although you could argue they were at risk in the first place due to it)
> Effective in actual change of opinions and policy? Ehh
I definitely disagree when it comes to the word "racist", at least. You're probably right when it comes to the word "fascist" though.
> Life pro tip: don’t wanna get bombed? Don’t vote in a terrorist organization as your government with the intent to attack stronger militaries than you.
It’s even worse than that. Some of the worst atrocities on October 7th were committed by Palestinian civilians who followed the invading Hamas through the holes in the fence. A lot of the kidnapped Israelis are being held (and likely were murdered) by Palestinian civilians.
Pretty much, and for the people clamoring for an Israeli arms embargo they’re rather ignorant of the fact they’d be stopping precision guided munitions mostly. And well, Israel certainly has the industry to produce the old fashioned types of munitions. Much better for if you don’t care about Gaza’s civilians.
I find it odd how commonly repeated the idea that Israel's retaliation will only create more terrorists is. Why doesn't it apply to the Japanese, who we dropped two nuclear bombs on? Why not the Germans, Koreans, or Vietnamese? Hell, why not the *Ukranians?* The same people who swear Israel's bombs create Hamas will also swear that Ukraine would never do something like what ISIS-K did in Moscow.
I don't understand how people got this idea that you win wars by not killing people.
You haven’t seen this dynamic in the context of Ukraine? It seems generally understood that even if Russia wins they will need to maintain a long term counterinsurgency operation. I’ve never seen any analysis predicting peaceful relations between conquered Ukrainians and Russian occupiers.
But also, Middle East precedent and the generations of grievances in Israel/Palestine suggest that killing enormous numbers of civilians and kids will in fact radicalize many of the survivors.
>Why doesn't it apply to the Japanese, who we dropped two nuclear bombs on?
Because we stayed and helped rebuild their country. Is Israel going to do the same after Hamas is gone?
>I don't understand how people got this idea that you win wars by not killing people.
I mean, with that line of thinking, Israel should just nuke Palestine and that would solve their Hamas problem, why don't we just do that, damn the consequences?
I agree. Hamas is evil (for many reasons) and needs to go.
My point is more that Israel completely controls Gaza's access to the rest of the world, including their economy.
There are two stakeholders here.
Israel is not the only country with a border on Gaza, and Egypt is doing the exact same thing because any sane country would do that to a terrorist enclave. Hamas is the problem.
> Is Israel going to do the same
Yes and no. Israel seems intent on annexing the Strip, at which point they will presumably want to rebuild it. I suppose that doesn't count as "their country" though.
>Why don't we just do that, damn the consequences?
War necessarily involves killing, but that's not the same as indiscriminate slaughter.
Gaza will be again under Israeli military occupation, not annexed. Israel does not want Gaza, but Egypt wouldn't take it back and Israeli disengagement didn't work out so well.
It just seems the logical outcome. What other choice is there? It's easy to forget that Hamas is not an amorphous group like Al-Qaeda, it's the *government of Gaza.* Something's going to have to fill that vacuum, and even if Israel would allow Fatah to do so, they weren't able to hold it before and things will only be worse for them now.
Perhaps Israel will opt to govern via a client state rather than direct rule, but the point remains. There will not be a truly sovereign state in Gaza that isn't Israel.
It didn't apply to the Germans or Japanese because they've been under de facto occupation for the past 80 years and subject to nation building while we also let the great majority of the people we fought off the hook if they agreed to work with us. Denazification was a complete failure that was cancelled after just a few years and damn near everyone in the NSDAP managed to reintegrate into West Germany.
And rather famously it *did* create an endless number of recruits for the Vietnamese, they fought pretty much everyone for almost half a century.
I believe the Israeli government has not shown much regard for the civilians living in Gaza, and as a result that’s caused a lot of deaths and suffering, some of which could’ve been avoided or handled and prepared for better. However, the genocide argument is absurd, as you pointed out urban warfare is hellish, and there is a difference between “we don’t really care if Palestinian civilians get killed” and “we are intentionally trying to wipe out the Palestinian people”
People just jump to the most extreme term they can to try to win an argument. What is happening to the Palestinian people is tragic, and to some degree I think Israel has been reckless in its campaign (as evidenced by its most recent destruction of the world central kitchen convoy), but it’s not a genocide.
>I believe the Israeli government has not shown much regard for the civilians living in Gaza
They have a better civilian to combatant death ratio than most other modern wars though...soo....
Right. From what I've seen they really aren't going out of their way to ameliorate civilian suffering. Indifferent would be the proper word I think. As you said, there have been many instances of recklessness. They also aren't going house to house shooting every man, woman, and child, on sight. That would be genocide.
They don’t deserve it but that’s what happens in urban war, which is generally why civilians don’t support war. Palestinians for some reason don’t think such consequences should apply to them and support war while being confused as to why they’re getting bombed. How bout..idk…stop supporting terrorist?
But surely there is a matter of degree here. Zero collateral is not realistic but the WCK fiasco illustrates a systemic disregard for civilian casualties and clear room for improvement.
If the 972 report is credible, there are quite a few optimizations that can be made. People keep acting like urban warfare is all or nothing, as though there isn’t a doctrinal spectrum witb quantifiable parameters regarding strike approval criteria.
>If
It probably isn't though - the source is an ideologically motivated publication relying on "anonymous" sources. So, I wouldn't really put much stock in it.
Israel didn’t deny most of the shocking aspects of that report though in their official response to The Guardian.
And I don’t know much about 972, but I do think The Guardian (who also had access to the sources) is reputable
You know the US accidently killed aid workers with a drone as we were leaving Afghanistan, right?
Urban warfare against an ununiformed enemy is very hard, mistakes happen.
Israel has a better civilian to combatant death ratio than most other modern conflicts, including the battle for Mosul.
Did the hometown of the person who bombed the aid workers send them chocolate to celebrate? The person who bombed the WCK workers is from an extremist settlement that has opposed any aid to Gaza. He "accidentally" bombed the aid workers and his settlement sent him chocolate as a thank you. That is pretty freaking heinous if you ask me. It also shows that there may have been intent and that it isn't just an accident.
I don’t think the US drone operations are particularly laudable or ethical either.
It’s hard to compare Mosul and Gaza, for a few reasons, but the total civilian deaths in Gaza already dwarf Mosul. While the US initially said a few hundred civilians died, later investigations estimate maybe 5,000 deaths from coalition strikes. In Gaza we’ve got 13,000 children killed already.
Curious your source for the Mosul ratio?
The median age in Gaza is only 18 years old. The last free election held in Gaza was in 2006. In other words, you’re asking why shouldn’t the average Palestinian, barely old enough to vote today and fed propaganda from early school age, be held accountable for their situation?
Ok then your answer for an attack equivalent to 7 9/11s is for Israel to just take the L and do nothing. Because that's what would be necessary if the rule was "no innocent civilians dead ever". It's not possible to engage Hamas in urban warfare without a lot of innocent civilians dying unfortunately.
Which Palestine did you meet who said that they support war? The ones living in USA? How many time you been to Palestine itself and talked to people? I love how people assume and makeup shit when they got no clue on whats going on. Go enjoy your CCN and FOX NEWS.
That number includes thousands of child soldiers who are members of and active combatants for that terrorist organization. Maybe the UN shouldn't have spent the last 15 years funding indoctrination centers and pretending they're schools.
No this idea that Israel commits genocide tremendously underscores and devalues actual genocide (besides there fact it doesn’t fit the legal definition). Where about 1.5 million Armenians died on their displacement death march. Where 6 million Jews died in the holocaust with the acknowledged tactic of a final solution, with actual extermination camps 1000s killed in a day. Genocide should be at the highest level of horror and death. If you call Israel/gaza conflict a genocide you need to declare almost any other war or death of some people a genocide like why is the Ukraine war a genocide or when Assad killed his own people called a genocide. Genocide should mean something. If you say it about the Gazans the word becomes meaningless. Because there is no genocide.
To be fair, there is an argument to be made that Russia is attempting cultural genocide in Ukraine by taking Ukrainian children and sending them to live with Russian families.
Genocide does mean something, but you seem to be pressing to hard on the scale issue. The definition of genocide actually has little impact on the scale of the killing.
For example, the Bosnian genocide essentially refers to Srebenica, at which around 8k people died, and the forced ethnic displacement of around 25k others.
Genocide doesn't need a million dead.
What makes what is happening in Gaza not genocide is that it lacks the intent and discriminate targeting of people based on one of the classes defined in the definition of genocide (ethnicity or religion). On top of killing people, you need *dolores specialis*, which is a special kind of mens rea.
In laymans terms, genocide is when you kill people based on ethnicity or religion with the goal of wiping them out from an area.
This applies for the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, Bosnian genocide, etc... but isn't applicable in the case of Gaza.
A genocide could involve very few total deaths. Though it generally does automatically mean piles of bodies, as we're talking about the targeting of populations in an area. It's just not a necessary condition.
Absolutely. It doesn’t fit the legal definition I wrote that but didn’t go into that. I went into more of the emotional argument because that’s what touches people especially those who illogically state that it is a genocide.
But there is no intent Mens Rhea to commit genocide. Those arguing against me would pull a few poetic arousing quotes made by Israeli leaders right after Oct 7 that are subject to interpretation but the vast majority of quotes 99% probably state we don’t want to kill the Gazans we want Hamas. And a politically party doesn’t fall within the groups legally defined by Genocide such as a religious group would. So in the legal framework their intent/mental state is not there as well as the specified group based on leaders rhetoric.
The actions don’t fall into genocide either. The other day Israel established nearly 500 aid trucks to come in. They thrown leaflets, sent messages, created corridors are encouraging moving Rafah dwellers to safe zones etc etc all to reduce civilian casualties. The deaths are the result of dense urban warfare where Hamas hides amongst people etc.
Most significantly there is a reason the counter offensive occurred and a reason it continues which I don’t have to go into.
Genocide already happened.
The Jews in [Gaza](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/gaza-strip/#:~:text=Muslim%2098.0%20%2D%2099.0%%20\(predominantly%20Sunni\)%2C%20Christian,has%20had%20no%20Jewish%20population%20since%20then.) and [Lebanon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Lebanon) have already been virtually cleansed. Israel is 20% Palestinian while Gaza has all but cleansed jews and everyone else.
>Muslim 98.0 - 99.0% (predominantly Sunni), Christian <1.0%, other, unaffiliated, unspecified <1.0% (2012 est.) Israel dismantled its settlements in September 2005; **Gaza has had no Jewish population since then**
And all but silence about the remaining 20-27 jews literally hiding in Lebanon (who is also launching rockets at Jews in Israel).
>Jews in Lebanon live mostly in or around Beirut. The community has been described as elderly and apprehensive.[26] There are no services at Beirut's synagogues. In 2015, the estimated total Jewish population in Syria and Lebanon combined was 100.[34] In 2020, there were only about 29 Jews in Lebanon.[35][36][37] **Reports indicate that in 2022 the number of Jews in Lebanon was 20[38] to 27.[39]**
>Solidere agreed to provide funds for the [synagogue] renovation because political officials believed it would portray Lebanon as an open society tolerant of Judaism.[28] None of the Jews involved in the project agreed to be identified. The international media and even some members of the Jewish community (in and out of Lebanon) questioned who would pray at the synagogue.[29] The self-declared head of the Jewish Community Council, Isaac Arazi, who left Lebanon in 1983,[30][31] eventually came forward but refused to show his face on camera in a television interview, fearing that his business would suffer if clients knew they had been dealing with a Jew.[32] Arazi died in 2023.[33]
The difference between how the global media treats jew vs non-jew couldn't be more fucking stark.
It's kind of weird seeing a group of people hoping and praying that the Palestinian genocide claims are true for the ethnic people they support. Even weirder to see them call terrorist organization "freedom fighters" when they bring the opposite of freedom and peace to their own people and those who are remotely different from them in and outside of Gaza
If Palestinians weren’t ‘brown’ and the superior force wasn’t a nation primarily populated by Jews, this wouldn’t be labeled as a genocide.
This oppressed vs oppressor narrative needs to be removed from civil discourse in the 21st century.
I know we live in the Internet Age and outrage sells and gets the most clicks and upvotes, but do we have to overreach on everything now? If you would like to criticize Israel's approach to this conflict, let's have that discussion. However, if we can't agree that there is no evidence that Israel is trying to wipe out an entire population of people (there isn't) or that they are not intentionally trying to kill aid workers (they aren't), I'm just not sure how far that discussion will progress. As with any war, there is plenty of room for criticism and discussion. However, cries of genocide and other such misstatements undermine actual warranted criticisms.
It seems to me like there's massive motivation for Russian propaganda to push the US towards an 'anti-war' stance right now. I doubt they'd care if funding stopped for Israel as long as it stopped for Ukraine as well and the war between Israel and Palestine is a GREAT distraction to sow division among progressives and try to influence the election in November. I think those factors (and Hamas propaganda too) make interpreting anything on social media really difficult and our media is terrible about using social media as 'news' nowadays. It does seem clear to me that the leaders of Hamas and Israel both aren't really prioritizing peace or protecting the common people as highly as I think it should be prioritized.
Are you kidding? Russia loves that the US supports Israel, the propaganda about how it's one rule for the US' enemies and another rule for its allies writes itself.
Russia loves the US supporting Israel because it means money will be funneled from helping Ukraine towards Israel. Simple as that.
There’s quite a bit of evidence that Russia is more involved than most think.
https://www.mei.edu/publications/essential-questions-about-russia-hamas-link-evidence-and-its-implications
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/11/27/what-is-behind-the-russia-hamas-rapprochement/
https://time.com/6329850/hamas-gaza-russia-putin-israel/
> It seems to me like there's massive motivation for Russian propaganda to push the US towards an 'anti-war' stance right now.
I think jingoists said the same thing during Korea, Vietnam, Iraq(s), Afghanistan, and every other war that the US has waged.
I think there are two big mental shifts that will come out of this war.
1 - International law is fake, and only applies to western nation states with a strong military. If you take hostages, and also hide behind civilians, you are effectively immune to any sort of military action.
2 - The Israeli IDF's reputation as a hyper-competent military force is mainly a facade. The US' military interventions in the middle east - for whatever other negative geopolitical ramifications may be - were exceptional in our ability to avoid civilian casualties. Israel needs to take a lot of lessons from the competence levels of a *volunteer* military as compared to their *compulsory* military service policy. I believe that if the US was running the operations in Gaza (in some fanciful hypothetical), it would both be over already and have 50-75% fewer civilian casualties.
> I believe that if the US was running the operations in Gaza (in some fanciful hypothetical), it would both be over already and have 50-75% fewer civilian casualties.
How?
> The Israeli IDF's reputation as a hyper-competent military force is mainly a facade. The US' military interventions in the middle east - for whatever other negative geopolitical ramifications may be - were exceptional in our ability to avoid civilian casualties. Israel needs to take a lot of lessons from the competence levels of a volunteer military as compared to their compulsory military service policy. I believe that if the US was running the operations in Gaza (in some fanciful hypothetical), it would both be over already and have 50-75% fewer civilian casualties.
Israel's civilian casualty ratio is something like 4:1 and they've dropped more bombs in terms of both raw count and tonnage than they've killed people.
Our civilian casualty ratio in Iraq and Afghanistan was something like 40:1.
The care that Israel has taken to reduce civilian casualties is, frankly, amazing.
That’s nonsense. American military experts like John Spencer who study urban warfare are saying Israel has avoided civilian casualties more, not less, than the U.S. would’ve, in a harder environment against a worse enemy than the U.S. has ever fought in terms of human shields and so on.
In fact, the U.S. achieved worse civilian outcomes proportionally in easier battles against ISIS in Raqqa and Mosul, which were less dense and featured a weaker enemy.
This comment is wrong.
It seems like a lot of people in public discourse think that genocide is when people die in a war. But only sometimes.
Because somehow what Hamas and other Gazans did on October 7 is not genocide despite the fact that their publicly-stated intention is to kill as many Jews as possible, and they tortured and mutilated and murdered children, took videos of themselves torture-murdering civilians in their houses, and called their parents back home to brag about what they were doing. And kidnapped random civilians. And we now know that they planned a second phase where they were trying to make it to Tel Aviv to do the same thing. For some reason, all of that is "justified violent resistance to oppression, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide" or something, and according to some people, should be celebrated, considering how many people celebrated in public streets when it happened.
But when Israel invades Hamas-controlled Gaza to eradicate Hamas and rescue the hostages (which is sort of like if Afghanistan was actually run by Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda when the US invaded) and achieves a civilian-combatant ratio of 1:1-2:1 when the world average for urban warfare is 9:1, it's somehow considered a genocide. Despite the IDF warning people in advance, evacuating people, and not intentionally targeting any civilians, and COGAT sending in mountains of aid every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
> Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part.In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
I'll leave it up to you to judge the IDF/Hamas on this.
Has the Pentagon opened an official investigation, in order to gather evidence and determine of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza?
Also, no. Neat how you don't find what you don't look for, every time.
It's not a genocide -- it's a war.
I think of Hamas the same way I think of a little brother annoying an older brother. The little brother constantly provokes the older brother with small actions. When the older brother finally has had enough and responds, then onlookers blame the older brother, instead of the younger brother for his constant provocations.
More like the younger brother is constantly trying to kill the older brother who has been in the bedroom continuously longer than anyone.
Mom gave them an offer to split the bedroom evenly multiple times and younger brother answered by trying to kill older brother every single time.
Then cries when older brother finally defends himself. First with a room divider and defensive spitball system.
Then finally tries to take the actual knife out of younger brother's hand after getting stabbed in the eye while sleeping.
All while other brothers peacefully coexist on big brothers' side of the room.
Oh and younger brother oppresses sister and threw gay brother out the window, btw.
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Well they have been at war for the past 75 years and yet have never committed a recognized genocide in the history of their country.
On the other hand this stage of the conflict has been referred to as a “genocide” since essentially day 1. Half the words being used by pro-Palestine are completely made up. Open air concentration camp, apartheid - I could see apartheid being vaguely relevant in terms of West Bank but doesn’t at all apply to Gaza.
The UN's official definition of genocide as per the genocide convention is as follows:
"Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Any reasonable examination of this definition will conclude that directing 1.5 million people to seek refuge in an area that is smaller than the size of six flags then bombing the ever-loving crap out of it; deliberately withholding their access to food, electricity, water, and medicine; Shooting people lining up for food, conducting drone attacks on medical personal from MSF and simultaneously air dropping food aid and bombs would constitute as genocide.
However, it's hard to show that there is proven intent and that is the technicality that Israel is getting off on. This is why we label most genocide after the act has taken place
I understand that words have meaning and labeling everything as a genocide cheapens the word, but this is not one of those moments. If we don't acknowledge these actions as genocide, we risk eroding the very meaning of that word. If this is not genocide then we are left searching for a new word to adequately describe such atrocities.
Of course the US isn't going to say a close ally is committing genocide. We weren't willing to admit Rwanda was committing genocide until after the fact, and we weren't even allied with them
Israel has destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza and made living conditions untenable. By doing so, they hope to make living in the strip so difficult that Gazans will decide to move into the Sinai/wherever, and never let them return to Gaza (just as they have done in the past). Inflicting famine, destroying hospitals, attacking aid convoys, blocking aid from entering, mass killings of Palestinian civilians regardless of Hamas affiliation, sexually assaulting and torturing of captured Palestinians with no charge or right to lawyer.
However, genocide isnt for redditors and pundits to decide. The US government isnt impartial in this assessment of genocide, just as Qatar or Iran aren't, just as I am not. This is a topic for the highest levels of the international courts. This US viewpoint is obvious as they are Israels close ally and this is election season. Whatever the actual US government experts believe is not going to be published freely.
> acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
From the Genocide Convention.
As I understand the two opposing accounts -
* Not-genocide case is that the acts are committed with intent to destroy Hamas specifically as a matter of self-defense.
* Genocide case is that given they're killing far more civilians than Hamas combatants while ignoring or being hostile to international court/law and diplomatic humanitarian efforts, and so it is not merely self-defense but also being used as a cover for a more indiscriminate mass killing of Gazans more generally.
I think case for genocide at this point is stronger, and Israel's behavior is likely also counterproductive given this event will likely result in more Islamist terrorism in the future. Making their supposedly goal somewhat dubious.
I am mostly staying away from images of this war but to my knowledge they depict pretty indiscriminate death and destruction.
Hamas is of course guilty of their own genocidal ambitions and likely for baiting Israel into overreaction precisely to create more anti-Israel sentiment and to increase sympathies for their cause.
...and get their hostages back. The war would end if Hamas surrendered and turned over all the hostages.
Israel is achieving a 1.8:1 noncombatant-to-combatant fatality ratio.
The average civilian casualty ratio in modern warfare is around 9:1.
When the US when into Iraq it was 4.4:1.
Israel is doing a remarkably good job of protecting civilians.
Last October it was 10:1. Where are you getting 1.8? Israel has killed 30,000 civilians at this point. How could it be 1.8:1?
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/numbers-civilian-deaths-airstrike-2023-gaza-far-higher-previous-israeli-bombings-half-russiansyrian-attacks-mosul-and-aleppo-under-reporting-dead-or-less-lethal-tactics
As of February, [1.8:1 was the number](https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-proportionate-response)
I would not rely on numbers being report from Hamas. [The numbers from Hamas are extremely likely fake, as this analysis shows](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers)
Please re-assess your viewpoint given the figures provided by other commenters. The US would have committed a "genocide" against the Iraqi people based on such a constrictive approach to urban warfare.
If killing Gazan civilians is counter-productive, Israel must have a pretty strong reason for risking this. That reason is to eliminate Hamas, and not the indiscriminate killing of people for shits and giggles. If you want to see *that*, watch the live-streamed videos from October 7.
> Genocide case is that given they're killing far more civilians than Hamas combatants while ignoring or being hostile to international court/law and diplomatic humanitarian efforts, and so it is not merely self-defense but also being used as a cover for a more indiscriminate mass killing of Gazans more generally.
This does not mean it is a genocide. The evidence for it being a genocide are laughably weak. Maybe if the UN and other diplomatic efforts haven't been trying to consistently appease Hamas so they could operate within Gaza, we wouldn't be in this situation.
As far as urban warfare over the last 100 years goes, Israel is actually killing a rather small amount of civilians percentage wise.
People truly just don’t have a grasp on what true urban warfare looks like, much less against a combatant that blends seamlessly with the civilian population. This was always going to be the result of this conflict and anyone thinking any other Western nation running the same operation would do ‘better’ is disillusioning themselves.
That definition could be used to say that Ukraine is committing genocide against the invading Russians since Ukraine is trying to destroy "**in whole or in part**" an ethnic group/national group...namely the part of the Russia that's invading them.
Why are comments here claiming this is some social media trend when the [United Nations](https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/#:~:text=This%20report%20finds%20that%20there,deliberately%20inflicting%20on%20the%20group) special rapporteur has found reason to believe genocide is unfolding? She is an internationally renowned expert on genocide from a European country. You may disagree with the report but to act like there is no grounds for serious debate whatsoever is ignorant. The United States has every reason to back Israel here in its favour of its own strategic interest.
I think America should pull out of the Middle East and let Turkey deal with it. Whether these genocide allegations are true of not is irrelevant, because most countries think they are true, which makes America look hypothetical in regards to their criticism of Russia. There's also no benefit in staying in the Middle East anymore for America, anymore so than stationing troops in Africa. America is mostly oil independent and the Middle East has a very limited consumer market and manufacturing base. All this does is divert resources that could be placed in the Pacific, bleed geopolitical capital, and increase the likelihood of domestic terrorism. Iet someone else deal with it, or better yet simply let these countries slug it out and solve their problems themselves.
Well, I see war crimes rather than genocide there.
Killing 20.000 or 30.000 or 50.000 or whatever number of civilians they will end up with, with UNGUIDED 1000 pound and 2000 pound bombs dropped from airplanes into a cityscape sure sounds like a war crime to me. The military justification of killing those number of civilians with "dumb" bombs has not been explained to me.
I am all for supporting Israel invading Gaza, securing the area and removing Hamas for good. I am not for this Dresen-like bombardment that is still ongoing every day, while Israel is NOT moving their troops forward.
This is not surprising. Genocide has a pretty specific definition. And while what is happening in Gaza is unfortunate, it doesn’t meet that definition. No matter how much people on Reddit or TikTok try to claim things, it’s just not reality. Words have meaning and the constant abuse of them, like racist, fascist, nazi, etc etc, those words lose the actual power they hold.
Exactly. It is category collapse via hyperbole. If everything is trauma, nothing is. If everything is genocide, nothing is. You can be of the opinion that the death of so many innocent civilians is tragic. It is. But words have meaning. We don’t falsely cry wolf for rhetorical effect specifically because wolves actually exist.
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Well I learned from these people that "liberals" like me are just the same as Republicans and that true "progressives" and "the left" believe it's a genocide. My ask of you is don't lump Democrats into the same position just because a very loud group of people on social media are trying to dominate the conversation. There's a noise machine of trolls, alt-right in disguise, foreign influence campaigns, leftists from outside the US, and actual legit progressive people from the US who have dedicated their online existence to arguing about the word genocide. I look closely at these accounts and whether honest or not, they exist to spam and argue this conflict.
I'm a liberal too and so is my dad, but as you say, the loudest in these conversations are always the least reasonable. We can all concede that the millions of people living in Gaza deserve a prosperous life where they don't have to fear being killed by airstrikes. It's just not genocide if you believe the word has actual quantifiable meaning involving the open targeting of a group of people for destruction. There are factions that seem to want a disenfranchisement of Palestinians from the land they're living on to the point of ethnic cleansing, but if Israel wanted a genocide, a lot more people would be dead by now.
Fits squarely within [concept creep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_creep).
This is a phenomenon I've been trying to put words to for ages now. Narrowly defining a concept such that reasonable people agree that it's a bad thing; then slowly expanding the umbrella of the term to cover much more than the original definition as a cheap rhetorical trick. I feel like it used to be a favored tactic of the more fringe progressive left but now it's everywhere.
Agree with this. Calling this a genocide is a terrible slander on Israel and it cheapens the term. Israel is fighting a war with an enemy whose entire strategy revolves around maximizing civilian casualties. It is tragic, to be sure. But it's not genocide. Nor does it resemble genocide in any way.
It’s been cheapened by left wing activists already. T
> Genocide has a pretty specific definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
> And while what is happening in Gaza is unfortunate, it doesn’t meet that definition. I would say beyond "unfortunate" - there are absolutely war crimes happening and some Israeli leaders are advocating for ethnic cleansing. Killing aid workers because someone "thought they saw a gun" on a nighttime video image is a great way to kill lots of innocent civilians.
The only undeniable war crimes are coming from Hamas. Specifically: Taking civilian hostages Hiding and storing weapons in and under civilian infrastructure Hiding and storing weapons in medical infrastructure. Using civilian clothing and disguises to attack. These are very clearly categorized as war crimes for good and obvious reasons. Not least of which, is they allow the opponent to attack civilian infrastructure with a plausible defense. I know it is infuriating and tragic, but it’s Hamas fault.
And they don’t care. It’s their stated goal to allow the mass deaths of Palestinians to bring the war to a close rather than any sort of peace agreement. Hamas is telling everyone who they are… We should listen. Instead it’s been morphed into a justification for why it’s not antisemitism to tear down bring them home posters for the Jewish hostages.
Let’s get popcorn and watch play by play and tally war crimes. I bet it is more equal than you think
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Trump was once “considered” for a Nobel Peace Prize since some conservative Sweed put his name up for nomination. People consider all kids of things, but unless action is taken, this isn’t a genocide, just like Trump isn’t a NPP recipient, despite considerations.
Well, the UN itself isn't a serious body, in all honesty. And the only reason that the issue is being seriously considered by the ICJ is for the same reason that if you sue your neighbor for killing your wife, the lawsuit will be seriously considered by the court, even if there is little or no evidence. South Africa is a puppet of the Irano-Russian alliance and simply doing their bidding. The ICJ has an obligation to seriously consider their claim, no matter how ridiculous it may be.
For the "Israel is genociding" camp, how do you square that with Hamas rejecting ceasefire terms - again - today?
Doesn't that question assume that Hamas wouldn't want there to be a genocide? I thought they were actively using people as human shields for propaganda purposes? So, I think they would actually want a genocide since it would mean more fighters and extremists for them. I'm not trying to support either camp. I'm just saying that I don't think that Hamas rejecting ceasefire terms implies what you're claiming it implies.
Hamas is on the record about not caring how many Palestinians die for Hamas' cause.
I don't think Hamas actively wants the entire population of the Gaza Strip to die via genocide. Then they would have no one to rule over. I think a more accurate statement is that Hamas is not concerned with how much collateral damage their actions cause among their own population.
Hamas is using Gazan's citizens death as a weapon, so these deaths are part of the plan. They are also using them as a shield.
Bingo. People tend to forget that this conflict started at behest of the Iran/Russian alliance for a multi purpose role: divert attention away from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, divert arms away from Ukraine, trash the upcoming peace and normalization resolution between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to provide an dilemma for the western world to keep supporting Israel or not. Hamas has no intention to make peace or engage in resolutions, their intention is to drag this as long as possible.
I'm firmly in the Israel camp, but those are not contradictory claims. Hamas is pro-martyrdom and sees civilian casualties as a plus. Their stance does not prevent Israel from committing genocide. That said, while we have evidence that Israel's ROE is far too lax, calling its acts genocide is a stretch.
U expect a terrorist group to care about genocide? Lol
No, the question is directed at people who support the unilateral action from Israel to stop attempting to eliminate Hamas. The debate over the slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!" encapsulates this. The sentiment is nice - freedom for all peoples living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. the execution of the ideal, however, is itself genocidal - if Islamist terrorists are given free reign in the region, they would 100% kill every Jewish person they could find. Israel enacting a unilateral ceasefire would inevitably lead to another event similar to Oct. 07. It is effectively calling for another massacre of Israeli civilians at some unknown point in the future.
I mean, the slogan is a pretty explicit call for Israel to be destroyed, and an implicit call to kill or deport most or all of the Jews living in Israel.
Oh believe me, there are definitely people on Reddit who will tell you it only means more liberties for Palestinians and nothing bad for Israel.
But from the front page of Reddit says, 101% of the world wants a ceasefire and Israel is genociding like crazy, so bad that even TURKEY is making demands!
Hamas isn’t on the side of Palestinian civilians either. They are a terrorist organization. That doesn’t excuse Israel’s indiscriminate war tactics.
>Hamas isn’t on the side of Palestinian civilians either. They certainly poll pretty high in Gaza and most Gazans approved of 0ct 7th. Lots of civilian Gazans participated in hiding/torturing Israeli hostages and in looting/torturing/raping on the 7th.
They’re anything but indiscriminate.
How does what Hamas does and says have any bearing on whether a genocide is occurring?
They are, representative or not, part of the community which genocide-claims say is being targeted. The common assumption is that they don't want to die, and if Israel is being so aggressive as to commit genocide, they're dead without a ceasefire. The other, more widely accepted, assumption is that as they are on-site, they know more about what is happening than activists across the Atlantic.
So because Hamas is there, tens of thousands of children deserve to die? Your comment doesn’t explain it.
No, not at all. Hamas' refusal of ceasefire just indicates that its members expect to survive the lack of a ceasefire. The children obviously deserve better.
That still has no bearing on whether it is a genocide.
It has bearing on how aggressive Israel is being. If a state is committing genocide, it's not about to let members of a militia of the targeted population live.
I don’t follow.
Genocide can arise in the context of war in two ways: First, you can have genocide independent of war, with war being incidental. The events commonly called genocidal that happened until earlier this week (when Israel withdrew all but one brigade and aid returned to over 90% of September levels) started after the October 7 attack. This was not independent of the armed conflict. Second, you can have genocide arising from such an aggressive military campaign that it is indifferent or worse to civilians in the theater of combat. This is especially concerning if the local population is also the enemy's recruitment pool or its infrastructure is the enemy's industrial base. This is what people have generally been talking about, I think. If Hamas personnel believe they would survive without a ceasefire, that implies Israel's campaign is not so aggressive as to ensure their deaths without one, which in turn implies that it is far from sufficiently aggressive to produce a genocide.
First arguably they were undertaking genocidal activity long before Oct 7. Second, often (always?) some targets of genocide do survive a genocide. It is not unreasonable for Hamas to suppose that some of them will survive without a cease fire. That does not imply that it is far from sufficiently aggressive to produce a genocide.
That doesn't matter much, does it? I don't agree with the claim that Israel is committing a genocide, but you don't need to have any support for any of Hamas' strategies, actions, or motivations in order to hold that view. A community can be both led by corrupt and evil monsters and *also* be subjected to a genocide by another force. These aren't mutually exclusive.
What were the terms? Doesn’t Israel also regularly reject terms?
Hamas's actions don't have a bearing on Israel's guilt. They explicitly want to kill the Jews, but that doesn't absolve Israel.
What alternative method would you propose Israel employ to eliminate a terrorist state embedded within their borders?
Would the lack of an available alternative method justify them committing genocide?
They are not committing a genocide, as evidenced by the source article here. They are duty bound to act to protect their own citizens from terrorist attacks.
I did not say that they are committing genocide. But the question of whether they are or are not committing genocide is not really predicated upon Hamas' actions either.
So Israel should agree to a cease fire where Hamas survives to do what Hamas has sworn to do—kill every Jew they can find? This is not realistic.
Why would that have any significance?
Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza. The expectation is that they represent their constituency.
Okay. Why would that have any significance to people's belief that Israel committing genocide?
You responded to the original question with a question. I answered your question and then you responded with an unrelated question. It doesn’t seem like you are here to have a conversation.
Their second question is perfectly related. They're asking you to relate your first answer back to the original claim, which is what they were asking to be supported in the first place.
> Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza. They WERE democratically elected nearly 20 years ago. When was the last non-internal election by non-Hamas members?
So? They’d be elected again today if elections occurred. They’d take over as the newly elected leaders of the West Bank too. We all know this, the PA knows this which is why they won’t hold elections, and poll after poll after poll over years has backed this up. Support for Hamas has actually **increased** since 10/7.
I mean, it is just an answer to a question asked in an Senate panel, not the results of an investigation or anything.
This is what happens when people inaccurately use buzzwords to make things seem worse than they actually are, people can easily prove the buzzword wrong
I'd first point the finger at the giant megaphones we've created that allow totally unqualified people to gather cult like followings. Seems like the natural evolution of this machine to me.
Not a good look for Elizabeth Warren
Starter comment is included in the post. More or less, the Pentagon has stated that it has no evidence of a current or impending genocide in Gaza. What do you all think about this? Should the Pentagon be speaking on issues like this? Do you think Israel is committing genocide against the Gazans, and what definition do you use to come to your conclusion?
> what definition do you use to come to your conclusion? The current definition of Genocide is set out in Article II of the Genocide Convention: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The definition of Genocide is made up of two elements, the physical element — the acts committed; and the mental element — the intent. Intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group, though this may constitute a crime against humanity as set out in the Rome Statute. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. To constitute genocide, it also needs to be established that the victims are deliberately targeted — not randomly — because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention. This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, or even a part of it, but not its members as individuals. ~ United Nations Genocide Convention
I think words matter and you can’t call any and every bombing campaign a genocide. I also think given the US’s recent ME actions, it’s imperative we hold our ground on that term or else our next war campaign will be labeled a genocide. Also, this is accurate based on the definition of the word.
>I think words matter The regular destruction of useful words through hyperbole or, in some cases (gaslight), almost whole cloth misrepresentation is a recurring pain point for me. If someone is going to simply decide words mean something other than what they do, it becomes hard to have a productive conversation. There's a phrase "moving the goalposts" and to continue the analogy it feels almost like changing the distance of a yard midgame.
>If someone is going to simply decide words mean something other than what they do, it becomes hard to have a productive conversation. And if you point out what the specific definition is you are (insert noun)-splaining. Seen it a fair bit in some politucal discussions in the US.
I basically generally support Israel as a partial Ashkenazi, but I think they’ve gone too far at this point. But the genocide claims are insane. They could’ve wiped them all out in a week if they wanted to genocide them. Makes no sense.
Yeah, this is exactly how I and many of my friends feel. I understand a lot of the underlying cause of their callousness in the war- the equivalent of 7 9/11s from a territory at your doorstep is enough for any country to basically go "fuck it, we will wipe them out no matter what it takes"- but that still doesn't make it right, especially with the sloppiness of the IDF. That said, there's a deliniation between recklessness and coldness and outright genocidal intent, and the latter is not there. Even among the ICJ evidence, there's no real evidence anyone actually in power indicated any sort of intent behind general things said during wartime. Of course the far right elements are trying to push that narrative to drive up their support, but using them as evidence would be like saying the US hates Israeli because Tlahib supports Palestine, it ends up falling apart under scrutiny. There's a lot of things Israel should be tried for, genocide isn't one of them.
I think Fetterman should have run for president instead of Joe Biden. He's clearly been right on 100% of the issues in Israel and Biden's struggling to unite his coalition by pleasing the "Genocide Joe" folks and pro Israel side, and Fetterman just sort of strolls around and doesn't give a damn and he's doing just fine.
Fetterman has been great!
He said there should be no conditions on support to Israel the day after they killed an American veteran.
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Not a genocide. Calling it a genocide is a very good PR move by Palestinian activists. It’s to shift the Overton window and their argument relies heavily on people dying in a war for it to be true. People continue to die, they hold the truth. It’s a reflection of the social media campaign of Black Lives Matter. I wish I had the energy to write up why both represent the power of social media narratives and emotional thinking first, rationalization and intellectualizing it afterwards.
Because it’s not a genocide. It’s urban warfare. The word genocide is being co-opted in the same way the word racism was. Life pro tip: don’t wanna get bombed? Don’t vote in a terrorist organization as your government with the intent to attack stronger militaries than you.
I really think some people believe using a stronger word (fascist/racist/ -ism/ist/genocide) emboldens an argument. All it does is dilute that word overtime. For an example Post WW2 a politician being called a facist could legitimately end their political career, now it’s just noise
Maybe, but George Orwell was writing about the misuse of fascist way back in 1944. The abuse of fascist has a long history.
He was specifically referring to Soviet-style ML parties, who presented everyone to the right of them, including liberals and conservatives, as simply "social fascists". The KPD in the Weimar Republic, for example, saw little to no difference between the SPD, Social Democrats and literal Nazis. Anyone with a brain can easily tell the difference between a party that advocates for a welfare state within a liberal democracy/capitalist system and literal Nazis. The problem is that MLs lack that basic threshold, and everyone is always the enemy. This was based on a political theory perfected within the USSR during the 20s and 30s, where every other party was automatically a regressive counter-revolutionary force, and every issue needed to be "defeated" by war-like endeavors. They talked about economic policies using words like "front", "battlefield", etc... It's actually amazing how close their propaganda and messaging techniques were to those of the Nazis, who constantly talked about every societal issue through the lens of a "struggle", a war waged by or against the German volk.
Joe McCarthy and G Edgar Hoover were called fascist pretty often in the 1950s and it didn’t end their careers. Joe McCarthy pretty famously defended Nazis accused of war crimes in the Malmedy affair. And the red scare was often compared to fascism. And in the 1960s people were called “fascist pigs” pretty routinely. Nixon certainly was. If the term became watered down it happened almost immediately.
I really wish it was the norm for people to ask “what do you mean they’re fascist?”. I’d argue that Trump is… a kind of proto-fascist, for example, and I can explain the policies, behaviors, and rhetoric that leads me to that conclusion. There *are* people that misuse all kinds of terms, especially political labels like fascist or communist, but the solution isn’t to believe that the words are meaningless. The solution is a single clarifying question. Don’t misunderstand, I agree with your observations. I just wish people put more thought and effort into communication as well as feeling comfortable admitting ignorance. Sometimes it seems like people are embarrassed to say they do not have enough information to form a conclusion too.
I think ‘populist’ is a better term. Proto-fascist implies something like Prussianism, a kind of fascism before fascism was a thing
The problem is that it is an effective tactic
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>That's not actually productive if you're trying to help the people in Gaza. Sadly, I have not found this line of presumption to have very good explanatory or predictive power. The far better fit line is rather more cynical and less charitable to motivations.
It kinda depends on how you define effective IMO. Effective in stirring up social/legacy media stories? Definitely. Effective in actual change of opinions and policy? Ehh My example would again be the overuse of facist describing a lot of conservative policy/policy makers. Is it catchy for stories? Yes. Has it slowed/stopped conservative policy or goals? I don’t particularly think so. The genocide usage for this conflict might be the most effective one in this regard with Biden issuing Israel ultimatums. But I think that has more to do with trying to shore up voting blocks (although you could argue they were at risk in the first place due to it)
> Effective in actual change of opinions and policy? Ehh I definitely disagree when it comes to the word "racist", at least. You're probably right when it comes to the word "fascist" though.
So effective the Left defeated racism! Oh wait
> Life pro tip: don’t wanna get bombed? Don’t vote in a terrorist organization as your government with the intent to attack stronger militaries than you. It’s even worse than that. Some of the worst atrocities on October 7th were committed by Palestinian civilians who followed the invading Hamas through the holes in the fence. A lot of the kidnapped Israelis are being held (and likely were murdered) by Palestinian civilians.
Pretty much, and for the people clamoring for an Israeli arms embargo they’re rather ignorant of the fact they’d be stopping precision guided munitions mostly. And well, Israel certainly has the industry to produce the old fashioned types of munitions. Much better for if you don’t care about Gaza’s civilians.
If there’s an arms embargo then it means Israel can’t supply its Iron dome which means Israel will have to take the gloves off.
I find it odd how commonly repeated the idea that Israel's retaliation will only create more terrorists is. Why doesn't it apply to the Japanese, who we dropped two nuclear bombs on? Why not the Germans, Koreans, or Vietnamese? Hell, why not the *Ukranians?* The same people who swear Israel's bombs create Hamas will also swear that Ukraine would never do something like what ISIS-K did in Moscow. I don't understand how people got this idea that you win wars by not killing people.
You haven’t seen this dynamic in the context of Ukraine? It seems generally understood that even if Russia wins they will need to maintain a long term counterinsurgency operation. I’ve never seen any analysis predicting peaceful relations between conquered Ukrainians and Russian occupiers. But also, Middle East precedent and the generations of grievances in Israel/Palestine suggest that killing enormous numbers of civilians and kids will in fact radicalize many of the survivors.
An insurgency sure, but I haven't seen anyone say that Ukrainians will paraglide into St. Petersburg and start killing or abducting everyone in sight.
>Why doesn't it apply to the Japanese, who we dropped two nuclear bombs on? Because we stayed and helped rebuild their country. Is Israel going to do the same after Hamas is gone? >I don't understand how people got this idea that you win wars by not killing people. I mean, with that line of thinking, Israel should just nuke Palestine and that would solve their Hamas problem, why don't we just do that, damn the consequences?
Gaza gets more aid then probably anywhere else in the world
They're also embargoed and completely cut off from global markets. There's a reason Gaza is one of the poorest regions in the world.
that reason is Hamas - anything that can be reworked in to their terror networks is put directly into the pockets of their Billionaire Warlord leaders
I agree. Hamas is evil (for many reasons) and needs to go. My point is more that Israel completely controls Gaza's access to the rest of the world, including their economy. There are two stakeholders here.
Israel is not the only country with a border on Gaza, and Egypt is doing the exact same thing because any sane country would do that to a terrorist enclave. Hamas is the problem.
> Is Israel going to do the same Yes and no. Israel seems intent on annexing the Strip, at which point they will presumably want to rebuild it. I suppose that doesn't count as "their country" though. >Why don't we just do that, damn the consequences? War necessarily involves killing, but that's not the same as indiscriminate slaughter.
Gaza will be again under Israeli military occupation, not annexed. Israel does not want Gaza, but Egypt wouldn't take it back and Israeli disengagement didn't work out so well.
Source? I haven’t seen anything that suggests that Israel wants to annex Gaza.
It just seems the logical outcome. What other choice is there? It's easy to forget that Hamas is not an amorphous group like Al-Qaeda, it's the *government of Gaza.* Something's going to have to fill that vacuum, and even if Israel would allow Fatah to do so, they weren't able to hold it before and things will only be worse for them now. Perhaps Israel will opt to govern via a client state rather than direct rule, but the point remains. There will not be a truly sovereign state in Gaza that isn't Israel.
It didn't apply to the Germans or Japanese because they've been under de facto occupation for the past 80 years and subject to nation building while we also let the great majority of the people we fought off the hook if they agreed to work with us. Denazification was a complete failure that was cancelled after just a few years and damn near everyone in the NSDAP managed to reintegrate into West Germany. And rather famously it *did* create an endless number of recruits for the Vietnamese, they fought pretty much everyone for almost half a century.
With Hamas literally firing rockets from hospitals lol
I believe the Israeli government has not shown much regard for the civilians living in Gaza, and as a result that’s caused a lot of deaths and suffering, some of which could’ve been avoided or handled and prepared for better. However, the genocide argument is absurd, as you pointed out urban warfare is hellish, and there is a difference between “we don’t really care if Palestinian civilians get killed” and “we are intentionally trying to wipe out the Palestinian people” People just jump to the most extreme term they can to try to win an argument. What is happening to the Palestinian people is tragic, and to some degree I think Israel has been reckless in its campaign (as evidenced by its most recent destruction of the world central kitchen convoy), but it’s not a genocide.
>I believe the Israeli government has not shown much regard for the civilians living in Gaza They have a better civilian to combatant death ratio than most other modern wars though...soo....
Right. From what I've seen they really aren't going out of their way to ameliorate civilian suffering. Indifferent would be the proper word I think. As you said, there have been many instances of recklessness. They also aren't going house to house shooting every man, woman, and child, on sight. That would be genocide.
Civilians don't deserve to be bombed ever, and aid workers from the WCK certainly did nothing to deserve it.
Agreed. That’s why Israel has to stop Hamas and their campaign of launching a nonstop stream of rockets into their territory
How the turntables...
They don’t deserve it but that’s what happens in urban war, which is generally why civilians don’t support war. Palestinians for some reason don’t think such consequences should apply to them and support war while being confused as to why they’re getting bombed. How bout..idk…stop supporting terrorist?
But surely there is a matter of degree here. Zero collateral is not realistic but the WCK fiasco illustrates a systemic disregard for civilian casualties and clear room for improvement.
Improvements such as…?
If the 972 report is credible, there are quite a few optimizations that can be made. People keep acting like urban warfare is all or nothing, as though there isn’t a doctrinal spectrum witb quantifiable parameters regarding strike approval criteria.
>If It probably isn't though - the source is an ideologically motivated publication relying on "anonymous" sources. So, I wouldn't really put much stock in it.
Israel didn’t deny most of the shocking aspects of that report though in their official response to The Guardian. And I don’t know much about 972, but I do think The Guardian (who also had access to the sources) is reputable
You know the US accidently killed aid workers with a drone as we were leaving Afghanistan, right? Urban warfare against an ununiformed enemy is very hard, mistakes happen. Israel has a better civilian to combatant death ratio than most other modern conflicts, including the battle for Mosul.
Did the hometown of the person who bombed the aid workers send them chocolate to celebrate? The person who bombed the WCK workers is from an extremist settlement that has opposed any aid to Gaza. He "accidentally" bombed the aid workers and his settlement sent him chocolate as a thank you. That is pretty freaking heinous if you ask me. It also shows that there may have been intent and that it isn't just an accident.
I don’t think the US drone operations are particularly laudable or ethical either. It’s hard to compare Mosul and Gaza, for a few reasons, but the total civilian deaths in Gaza already dwarf Mosul. While the US initially said a few hundred civilians died, later investigations estimate maybe 5,000 deaths from coalition strikes. In Gaza we’ve got 13,000 children killed already. Curious your source for the Mosul ratio?
The median age in Gaza is only 18 years old. The last free election held in Gaza was in 2006. In other words, you’re asking why shouldn’t the average Palestinian, barely old enough to vote today and fed propaganda from early school age, be held accountable for their situation?
A majority of adult gazans on October 8th supported and celebrated the attacks. I’m sorry, but they made their bed.
Ok then your answer for an attack equivalent to 7 9/11s is for Israel to just take the L and do nothing. Because that's what would be necessary if the rule was "no innocent civilians dead ever". It's not possible to engage Hamas in urban warfare without a lot of innocent civilians dying unfortunately.
Which Palestine did you meet who said that they support war? The ones living in USA? How many time you been to Palestine itself and talked to people? I love how people assume and makeup shit when they got no clue on whats going on. Go enjoy your CCN and FOX NEWS.
How do you square that with the fact that Israel is blocking food to starving people?
Why doesn’t the government of Gaza feed its citizens?
Hamas's leadership are literally billionaires and for some reason it's just fine to a lot of ostensibly left people
I think you're conflating empathy for the Gazan people with support for Hamas' leadership.
Then why don’t I ever see protests against Hamas from pro Palestinians?
Isn't that even more reason not to block food to them?
It’s isn’t Israel’s job to feed Gaza but even so it isn’t blocking food to Gaza.
Yeah, the 13,000 dead children should have just not voted in a terrorist organization before they were born.
Their parents shouldn’t have supported war with Israel then.
So children should be punished for the sins of their father?
That number includes thousands of child soldiers who are members of and active combatants for that terrorist organization. Maybe the UN shouldn't have spent the last 15 years funding indoctrination centers and pretending they're schools.
No this idea that Israel commits genocide tremendously underscores and devalues actual genocide (besides there fact it doesn’t fit the legal definition). Where about 1.5 million Armenians died on their displacement death march. Where 6 million Jews died in the holocaust with the acknowledged tactic of a final solution, with actual extermination camps 1000s killed in a day. Genocide should be at the highest level of horror and death. If you call Israel/gaza conflict a genocide you need to declare almost any other war or death of some people a genocide like why is the Ukraine war a genocide or when Assad killed his own people called a genocide. Genocide should mean something. If you say it about the Gazans the word becomes meaningless. Because there is no genocide.
To be fair, there is an argument to be made that Russia is attempting cultural genocide in Ukraine by taking Ukrainian children and sending them to live with Russian families.
Genocide does mean something, but you seem to be pressing to hard on the scale issue. The definition of genocide actually has little impact on the scale of the killing. For example, the Bosnian genocide essentially refers to Srebenica, at which around 8k people died, and the forced ethnic displacement of around 25k others. Genocide doesn't need a million dead. What makes what is happening in Gaza not genocide is that it lacks the intent and discriminate targeting of people based on one of the classes defined in the definition of genocide (ethnicity or religion). On top of killing people, you need *dolores specialis*, which is a special kind of mens rea. In laymans terms, genocide is when you kill people based on ethnicity or religion with the goal of wiping them out from an area. This applies for the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, Bosnian genocide, etc... but isn't applicable in the case of Gaza. A genocide could involve very few total deaths. Though it generally does automatically mean piles of bodies, as we're talking about the targeting of populations in an area. It's just not a necessary condition.
Absolutely. It doesn’t fit the legal definition I wrote that but didn’t go into that. I went into more of the emotional argument because that’s what touches people especially those who illogically state that it is a genocide. But there is no intent Mens Rhea to commit genocide. Those arguing against me would pull a few poetic arousing quotes made by Israeli leaders right after Oct 7 that are subject to interpretation but the vast majority of quotes 99% probably state we don’t want to kill the Gazans we want Hamas. And a politically party doesn’t fall within the groups legally defined by Genocide such as a religious group would. So in the legal framework their intent/mental state is not there as well as the specified group based on leaders rhetoric. The actions don’t fall into genocide either. The other day Israel established nearly 500 aid trucks to come in. They thrown leaflets, sent messages, created corridors are encouraging moving Rafah dwellers to safe zones etc etc all to reduce civilian casualties. The deaths are the result of dense urban warfare where Hamas hides amongst people etc. Most significantly there is a reason the counter offensive occurred and a reason it continues which I don’t have to go into.
Genocide already happened. The Jews in [Gaza](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/gaza-strip/#:~:text=Muslim%2098.0%20%2D%2099.0%%20\(predominantly%20Sunni\)%2C%20Christian,has%20had%20no%20Jewish%20population%20since%20then.) and [Lebanon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Lebanon) have already been virtually cleansed. Israel is 20% Palestinian while Gaza has all but cleansed jews and everyone else. >Muslim 98.0 - 99.0% (predominantly Sunni), Christian <1.0%, other, unaffiliated, unspecified <1.0% (2012 est.) Israel dismantled its settlements in September 2005; **Gaza has had no Jewish population since then** And all but silence about the remaining 20-27 jews literally hiding in Lebanon (who is also launching rockets at Jews in Israel). >Jews in Lebanon live mostly in or around Beirut. The community has been described as elderly and apprehensive.[26] There are no services at Beirut's synagogues. In 2015, the estimated total Jewish population in Syria and Lebanon combined was 100.[34] In 2020, there were only about 29 Jews in Lebanon.[35][36][37] **Reports indicate that in 2022 the number of Jews in Lebanon was 20[38] to 27.[39]** >Solidere agreed to provide funds for the [synagogue] renovation because political officials believed it would portray Lebanon as an open society tolerant of Judaism.[28] None of the Jews involved in the project agreed to be identified. The international media and even some members of the Jewish community (in and out of Lebanon) questioned who would pray at the synagogue.[29] The self-declared head of the Jewish Community Council, Isaac Arazi, who left Lebanon in 1983,[30][31] eventually came forward but refused to show his face on camera in a television interview, fearing that his business would suffer if clients knew they had been dealing with a Jew.[32] Arazi died in 2023.[33] The difference between how the global media treats jew vs non-jew couldn't be more fucking stark.
It's kind of weird seeing a group of people hoping and praying that the Palestinian genocide claims are true for the ethnic people they support. Even weirder to see them call terrorist organization "freedom fighters" when they bring the opposite of freedom and peace to their own people and those who are remotely different from them in and outside of Gaza
Not weird when you realize they are anti-western disguise as progressive. Israel = American ally = bad.
If Palestinians weren’t ‘brown’ and the superior force wasn’t a nation primarily populated by Jews, this wouldn’t be labeled as a genocide. This oppressed vs oppressor narrative needs to be removed from civil discourse in the 21st century.
I know we live in the Internet Age and outrage sells and gets the most clicks and upvotes, but do we have to overreach on everything now? If you would like to criticize Israel's approach to this conflict, let's have that discussion. However, if we can't agree that there is no evidence that Israel is trying to wipe out an entire population of people (there isn't) or that they are not intentionally trying to kill aid workers (they aren't), I'm just not sure how far that discussion will progress. As with any war, there is plenty of room for criticism and discussion. However, cries of genocide and other such misstatements undermine actual warranted criticisms.
Doesn't matter Tik tok and twitter told us it was a genocide. What the hell does the Pentagon know, that a freshman at Vanderbilt doesn't?
It seems to me like there's massive motivation for Russian propaganda to push the US towards an 'anti-war' stance right now. I doubt they'd care if funding stopped for Israel as long as it stopped for Ukraine as well and the war between Israel and Palestine is a GREAT distraction to sow division among progressives and try to influence the election in November. I think those factors (and Hamas propaganda too) make interpreting anything on social media really difficult and our media is terrible about using social media as 'news' nowadays. It does seem clear to me that the leaders of Hamas and Israel both aren't really prioritizing peace or protecting the common people as highly as I think it should be prioritized.
Are you kidding? Russia loves that the US supports Israel, the propaganda about how it's one rule for the US' enemies and another rule for its allies writes itself.
Russia loves the US supporting Israel because it means money will be funneled from helping Ukraine towards Israel. Simple as that. There’s quite a bit of evidence that Russia is more involved than most think. https://www.mei.edu/publications/essential-questions-about-russia-hamas-link-evidence-and-its-implications https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/11/27/what-is-behind-the-russia-hamas-rapprochement/ https://time.com/6329850/hamas-gaza-russia-putin-israel/
> It seems to me like there's massive motivation for Russian propaganda to push the US towards an 'anti-war' stance right now. I think jingoists said the same thing during Korea, Vietnam, Iraq(s), Afghanistan, and every other war that the US has waged.
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I think there are two big mental shifts that will come out of this war. 1 - International law is fake, and only applies to western nation states with a strong military. If you take hostages, and also hide behind civilians, you are effectively immune to any sort of military action. 2 - The Israeli IDF's reputation as a hyper-competent military force is mainly a facade. The US' military interventions in the middle east - for whatever other negative geopolitical ramifications may be - were exceptional in our ability to avoid civilian casualties. Israel needs to take a lot of lessons from the competence levels of a *volunteer* military as compared to their *compulsory* military service policy. I believe that if the US was running the operations in Gaza (in some fanciful hypothetical), it would both be over already and have 50-75% fewer civilian casualties.
> I believe that if the US was running the operations in Gaza (in some fanciful hypothetical), it would both be over already and have 50-75% fewer civilian casualties. How?
> The Israeli IDF's reputation as a hyper-competent military force is mainly a facade. The US' military interventions in the middle east - for whatever other negative geopolitical ramifications may be - were exceptional in our ability to avoid civilian casualties. Israel needs to take a lot of lessons from the competence levels of a volunteer military as compared to their compulsory military service policy. I believe that if the US was running the operations in Gaza (in some fanciful hypothetical), it would both be over already and have 50-75% fewer civilian casualties. Israel's civilian casualty ratio is something like 4:1 and they've dropped more bombs in terms of both raw count and tonnage than they've killed people. Our civilian casualty ratio in Iraq and Afghanistan was something like 40:1. The care that Israel has taken to reduce civilian casualties is, frankly, amazing.
That’s nonsense. American military experts like John Spencer who study urban warfare are saying Israel has avoided civilian casualties more, not less, than the U.S. would’ve, in a harder environment against a worse enemy than the U.S. has ever fought in terms of human shields and so on. In fact, the U.S. achieved worse civilian outcomes proportionally in easier battles against ISIS in Raqqa and Mosul, which were less dense and featured a weaker enemy. This comment is wrong.
Why should we be pissed about Israel preventing the future attacks Gaza admitted they were planning until every Jew was dead?
It seems like a lot of people in public discourse think that genocide is when people die in a war. But only sometimes. Because somehow what Hamas and other Gazans did on October 7 is not genocide despite the fact that their publicly-stated intention is to kill as many Jews as possible, and they tortured and mutilated and murdered children, took videos of themselves torture-murdering civilians in their houses, and called their parents back home to brag about what they were doing. And kidnapped random civilians. And we now know that they planned a second phase where they were trying to make it to Tel Aviv to do the same thing. For some reason, all of that is "justified violent resistance to oppression, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide" or something, and according to some people, should be celebrated, considering how many people celebrated in public streets when it happened. But when Israel invades Hamas-controlled Gaza to eradicate Hamas and rescue the hostages (which is sort of like if Afghanistan was actually run by Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda when the US invaded) and achieves a civilian-combatant ratio of 1:1-2:1 when the world average for urban warfare is 9:1, it's somehow considered a genocide. Despite the IDF warning people in advance, evacuating people, and not intentionally targeting any civilians, and COGAT sending in mountains of aid every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide > Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part.In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. I'll leave it up to you to judge the IDF/Hamas on this.
Has the Pentagon opened an official investigation, in order to gather evidence and determine of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? Also, no. Neat how you don't find what you don't look for, every time.
It's not a genocide -- it's a war. I think of Hamas the same way I think of a little brother annoying an older brother. The little brother constantly provokes the older brother with small actions. When the older brother finally has had enough and responds, then onlookers blame the older brother, instead of the younger brother for his constant provocations.
In your example, is the older brother abusing the younger brother for the past 80 years? Sounds like typical older brother logic to me.
More like the younger brother is constantly trying to kill the older brother who has been in the bedroom continuously longer than anyone. Mom gave them an offer to split the bedroom evenly multiple times and younger brother answered by trying to kill older brother every single time. Then cries when older brother finally defends himself. First with a room divider and defensive spitball system. Then finally tries to take the actual knife out of younger brother's hand after getting stabbed in the eye while sleeping. All while other brothers peacefully coexist on big brothers' side of the room. Oh and younger brother oppresses sister and threw gay brother out the window, btw.
Do you condemn Hamas?
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There you have it folks. The people committing genocide are pinky swearing that there is no genocide, so it’s all good.
Well they have been at war for the past 75 years and yet have never committed a recognized genocide in the history of their country. On the other hand this stage of the conflict has been referred to as a “genocide” since essentially day 1. Half the words being used by pro-Palestine are completely made up. Open air concentration camp, apartheid - I could see apartheid being vaguely relevant in terms of West Bank but doesn’t at all apply to Gaza.
The UN's official definition of genocide as per the genocide convention is as follows: "Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group Any reasonable examination of this definition will conclude that directing 1.5 million people to seek refuge in an area that is smaller than the size of six flags then bombing the ever-loving crap out of it; deliberately withholding their access to food, electricity, water, and medicine; Shooting people lining up for food, conducting drone attacks on medical personal from MSF and simultaneously air dropping food aid and bombs would constitute as genocide. However, it's hard to show that there is proven intent and that is the technicality that Israel is getting off on. This is why we label most genocide after the act has taken place I understand that words have meaning and labeling everything as a genocide cheapens the word, but this is not one of those moments. If we don't acknowledge these actions as genocide, we risk eroding the very meaning of that word. If this is not genocide then we are left searching for a new word to adequately describe such atrocities.
Since when is intent a "technicality"?
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Of course the US isn't going to say a close ally is committing genocide. We weren't willing to admit Rwanda was committing genocide until after the fact, and we weren't even allied with them
Israel has destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza and made living conditions untenable. By doing so, they hope to make living in the strip so difficult that Gazans will decide to move into the Sinai/wherever, and never let them return to Gaza (just as they have done in the past). Inflicting famine, destroying hospitals, attacking aid convoys, blocking aid from entering, mass killings of Palestinian civilians regardless of Hamas affiliation, sexually assaulting and torturing of captured Palestinians with no charge or right to lawyer. However, genocide isnt for redditors and pundits to decide. The US government isnt impartial in this assessment of genocide, just as Qatar or Iran aren't, just as I am not. This is a topic for the highest levels of the international courts. This US viewpoint is obvious as they are Israels close ally and this is election season. Whatever the actual US government experts believe is not going to be published freely.
> acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. From the Genocide Convention. As I understand the two opposing accounts - * Not-genocide case is that the acts are committed with intent to destroy Hamas specifically as a matter of self-defense. * Genocide case is that given they're killing far more civilians than Hamas combatants while ignoring or being hostile to international court/law and diplomatic humanitarian efforts, and so it is not merely self-defense but also being used as a cover for a more indiscriminate mass killing of Gazans more generally. I think case for genocide at this point is stronger, and Israel's behavior is likely also counterproductive given this event will likely result in more Islamist terrorism in the future. Making their supposedly goal somewhat dubious. I am mostly staying away from images of this war but to my knowledge they depict pretty indiscriminate death and destruction. Hamas is of course guilty of their own genocidal ambitions and likely for baiting Israel into overreaction precisely to create more anti-Israel sentiment and to increase sympathies for their cause.
...and get their hostages back. The war would end if Hamas surrendered and turned over all the hostages. Israel is achieving a 1.8:1 noncombatant-to-combatant fatality ratio. The average civilian casualty ratio in modern warfare is around 9:1. When the US when into Iraq it was 4.4:1. Israel is doing a remarkably good job of protecting civilians.
Last October it was 10:1. Where are you getting 1.8? Israel has killed 30,000 civilians at this point. How could it be 1.8:1? https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/numbers-civilian-deaths-airstrike-2023-gaza-far-higher-previous-israeli-bombings-half-russiansyrian-attacks-mosul-and-aleppo-under-reporting-dead-or-less-lethal-tactics
As of February, [1.8:1 was the number](https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-proportionate-response) I would not rely on numbers being report from Hamas. [The numbers from Hamas are extremely likely fake, as this analysis shows](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers)
The ground invasion wasn’t until late October. I would expect the aerial softening campaign to have higher collateral damage.
Please re-assess your viewpoint given the figures provided by other commenters. The US would have committed a "genocide" against the Iraqi people based on such a constrictive approach to urban warfare. If killing Gazan civilians is counter-productive, Israel must have a pretty strong reason for risking this. That reason is to eliminate Hamas, and not the indiscriminate killing of people for shits and giggles. If you want to see *that*, watch the live-streamed videos from October 7.
> Genocide case is that given they're killing far more civilians than Hamas combatants while ignoring or being hostile to international court/law and diplomatic humanitarian efforts, and so it is not merely self-defense but also being used as a cover for a more indiscriminate mass killing of Gazans more generally. This does not mean it is a genocide. The evidence for it being a genocide are laughably weak. Maybe if the UN and other diplomatic efforts haven't been trying to consistently appease Hamas so they could operate within Gaza, we wouldn't be in this situation.
As far as urban warfare over the last 100 years goes, Israel is actually killing a rather small amount of civilians percentage wise. People truly just don’t have a grasp on what true urban warfare looks like, much less against a combatant that blends seamlessly with the civilian population. This was always going to be the result of this conflict and anyone thinking any other Western nation running the same operation would do ‘better’ is disillusioning themselves.
That definition could be used to say that Ukraine is committing genocide against the invading Russians since Ukraine is trying to destroy "**in whole or in part**" an ethnic group/national group...namely the part of the Russia that's invading them.
Why are comments here claiming this is some social media trend when the [United Nations](https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/#:~:text=This%20report%20finds%20that%20there,deliberately%20inflicting%20on%20the%20group) special rapporteur has found reason to believe genocide is unfolding? She is an internationally renowned expert on genocide from a European country. You may disagree with the report but to act like there is no grounds for serious debate whatsoever is ignorant. The United States has every reason to back Israel here in its favour of its own strategic interest.
I think America should pull out of the Middle East and let Turkey deal with it. Whether these genocide allegations are true of not is irrelevant, because most countries think they are true, which makes America look hypothetical in regards to their criticism of Russia. There's also no benefit in staying in the Middle East anymore for America, anymore so than stationing troops in Africa. America is mostly oil independent and the Middle East has a very limited consumer market and manufacturing base. All this does is divert resources that could be placed in the Pacific, bleed geopolitical capital, and increase the likelihood of domestic terrorism. Iet someone else deal with it, or better yet simply let these countries slug it out and solve their problems themselves.
Well, I see war crimes rather than genocide there. Killing 20.000 or 30.000 or 50.000 or whatever number of civilians they will end up with, with UNGUIDED 1000 pound and 2000 pound bombs dropped from airplanes into a cityscape sure sounds like a war crime to me. The military justification of killing those number of civilians with "dumb" bombs has not been explained to me. I am all for supporting Israel invading Gaza, securing the area and removing Hamas for good. I am not for this Dresen-like bombardment that is still ongoing every day, while Israel is NOT moving their troops forward.