"People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population is somehow a “genocide”"
Per UN definition[1]:
In the present 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:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
If what is currently going on in Gaza isn't that then what is a genocide?
A couple weeks or so ago after some UN official was in the news for resigning in protest over what was happening in Gaza and called it a genocide, NPR interviewed someone who has actually prosecuted genocide cases and asked him if the UN official was right.
According to the prosecutor he didn't think a case could be made. The key is that "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" part.
To prove that you need statements from officials that show they intended such destruction, and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction. Prime ministers and generals, for example.
If someone is going after legitimate military targets but a lot of members of some national, ethnical, racial or religious group is getting killed as collateral damage that is not enough to support a genocide charge. You need to statement of intent.
He added that there is a genocide case that can be made in the region--against Hamas. They have stated their intent to wipe out a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and thousands of their attacks on Israel over the last 20+ years have been directed at purely civilian targets.
> According to the prosecutor he didn't think a case could be made. The key is that "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" part.
That's a different prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, who was an ICC prosecutor. NPR talked to [1] David M. Crane, who is a founding chief prosecutor on the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone.
So in other words, even experts on this topic disagree. So I don't think one prosecutor saying "no, this isn't genocide" is definitive -- just like another saying "yes, this is genocide" isn't either.
Ultimately we may never know if Netanyahu has sat behind closed doors and has said things about his intentions in Palestine that would meet the UN definition of genocide. So we can only guess based on what we do know and have seen.
FWIW, to me, this feels pretty genocide-y. The funny thing about the bit you paraphrased from Crane:
> and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction
... is that by this definition, I don't think we can classify Hamas as genocidal, as they don't seem to have the war capability to actually "carry out or cause to be carried out" a genocide upon Israel.
There is a very high risk of famine[1] and there is already an extreme food shortage. If the Israelis don't allow more food to enter and open more borders/allow see access a famine is guaranteed. The UN resolution that passed yesterday should prevent that but we have to wait and see if Israel accepts it. IMO starving a population is a genocide.
The target is Hamas. Some innocents are dying, but the intent isn’t to deliberately kill them. And there is no evidence any of those other criteria are even happening.
The article continues to explain that Gaza health ministry casualty counts for past conflicts have been confirmed after the fact by third party international organizations, like the WHO.
The records they release include names, genders, ages and ID numbers of deceased people. If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
> past conflicts have been confirmed after the fact by third party international organizations, like the WHO.
This is not my reading that WHO or any other org confirmed anything.
They say in 2014 both Israel and Palestinians agreed on number of casualties, but this time discrepancy is 10x.
> If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
say they made up some ID, name, gender and age. How exactly I could identify this?
1) Israel asked civilians to move south to be relatively safer, some important Hamas officers moved south along with them, and Israel targeted them.
2) The strikes weren't about Hamas officers, but just a deliberate killing of civilians.
If you're saying this is evidence of genocide, that means you're discounting (1) and assuming (2)? Why?
I'm not condoning (1), which suggests IDF is prioritizing its concerns (expediency etc) over civilian lives, but that clearly doesn't meet the definition of genocide.
The Israelis admitted that they are fighting "human animals" (remember who else used dehumanization tactics in WWII?), and that their goal was "damage, not accuracy".
It is estimated that about 70% of killed people (which has gone over 20000 recently) are women and children. Those are not Hamas fighters. Even if you assume that every adult male that has been killed was a Hamas fighter (which is obviously not going to be the case), that is still 70% of people who are killed by IDF being innocent civilians.
> the intent isn’t to deliberately kill them. And there is no evidence any of those other criteria are even happening
On the contrary, even the mere evidence in form of public statements by the leaders of Israel strongly suggests intent to harm civilians. The statements suggest that they are pursuing revenge on the whole Gaza strip, and aiming to inflict as many casualties as they can get away with.
- Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to reduce parts of Gaza “to rubble” and invoked the people of Amalek, the foe that God ordered the ancient Israelites to genocide in the Bible, in a recent speech. [1]
- Defense minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza and stated that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” [1]
- Army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said forces would turn Gaza into a “city of tents” and admitted that Israel’s “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” in dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. [1]
- Ariel Kallner, a member of parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote on X after the Hamas attack: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” [2]
- Giora Eiland, a reservist major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in a popular Hebrew-language newspaper, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” Elsewhere, he specified that “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf” and indeed that Israel must demand that “The entire population of Gaza will either move to Egypt or move to the Gulf.” Finally, he said that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” [2]
- “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”, IDF general Ghassan Aliyan [3]
- Revital Gotliv, a Parliament member from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, called for Israel to use nuclear weapons in Gaza: “It’s time for a doomsday weapon. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza.” [1]
- Galit Distel Atbaryan, also of Likud, posted on X in Hebrew that Israelis should invest their energy in one thing: “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and forcing the “Gazan monsters” either to flee the strip to Egypt or to face their death. [1]
Israel deliberately cut off power, water, and all crossings into Gaza for delivering food and aid. Even worse than what Russia did to the power plants. Literal collective punishment, another war crime to add to their list.
I have supported Ukraine in the war for a long time but this claim I do not understand.
Surely a power plant has military value right? If you destroy the power plant, you impact the country's economic and manufacturing ability which would definitely impact the country's ability to wage war.
Obviously it also severely impacts civilians but many other "acceptable" actions in war do the same.
In my head I imagine a war between a military run off of portable gas generators and a military run off of power plants. The difference in capability between the two would be huge!
I’m guessing you haven’t served. The front line military brings its own power, exactly portable gas/diesel generators, to run everything. If there is a usable power line with a transformer to a usable voltage and it hasn’t been yet damaged in the fighting, it’s amazing, but also fragile.
A non trivial chunk of signal corps training is learning the ins and outs of standard generators, conventions and apparatus for distributing power, equipment for converting between various voltages used by equipment 1 to 80 years old, etc.
> Frankly, given that there have been actual genocides in the recent past that have gone largely ignored, the over representation of Palestinian views in today’s media is likely the work of bad faith actors ...
This argument is made often on the internet, but the Occam's Razor explanation is that people are paying attention to Gaza because it's much easier to do reporting from Israel than from other conflict zones. Israel is a developed country with functioning airports, communications, roads, and legal protections. It's quite a bit harder to report from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, Shan State in Myanmar, or Darfur in Sudan
I read a post a few weeks ago on the Sudan subreddit where an OP asked if people were frustrated with how much attention Gaza was getting compared to the Sudanese civil war. The Sudanese diaspora responses were overwhelmingly happy to see the coverage of Gaza, and they wished they had the same level of information out of Sudan. It's almost impossible to tell what's happening on the ground.
Additionally, people care because America is a party to the conflict by backing the Israeli government. So the conflict in Gaza matters to the international world in a way that other internal civil wars just don't, unfortunately.
The devastation in Gaza is staggering. It is quite a stretch to say that people are paying attention because of bad faith actors instead of genuine concerns. Of course people will care when a war of this size, supported by the U.S., happens in plain view.
You can't dismiss "think of the children" as a talking point when children are actually dying. This isn't FOSTA, this is an actual war with bullets and bombs and dead children on both sides. You should be thinking about the children.
The reason is you can kill a group of adult males and later claim they were Hamas. This same tactic doesn't work with children (not that it hasn't been tried, "No innocent civilians in Gaza").
Children have always been treated differently because they are fully and absolutely dependent on their care givers.
A puppy and a grown dog don’t actually apply here because we’re talking about humans and not dogs. It’s not even appropriate to make that comparison here.
You anthroprocentric chauvinist. Just because you've firmly categorized everything else as "an inferior being" with a lesser claim to remaining alive doesn't mean that's actually the case.
It just means you're selfishly unconcerned with the consequences of collateral damage up until it might be something that could figure out a way to waltz over and bite back.
You've posted several flamewar comments to this thread already. Would you please stop? It's exactly what we're trying to avoid on this site, and this topic is the worst place to do it.
Actually, I haven’t. I said that the comparison of a human child to a dog is not appropriate. Considering that exact language (e.g. “they are animals”) has helped perpetuate a genocide of Palestinians.
I’m not entirely sure if you’re even disagreeing with me here tbh.
I urge you to look up the definition of a genocide as defined by the United Nations. It's not just an accusation being thrown around for rhetorical purposes. This slaughter meets all the criteria.
It does not. The war is being waged with the intent to destroy Hamas (which has itself stated that its goal is to destroy Israel, if given the chance), not to kill every last Palestinian. See also https://youtu.be/L9n77DPJ7AE
You're taking Israeli intent at face value. Anyone paying attention to the discourse in Israeli society and amongst their leadership class will understand that this is a war against the Palestinian people.They have been quite open about destroying systems of life to create a self-sustaining humanitarian catastrophe that will force the relocation of Gazans to the Sinai. And the virtual certainty of eye-watering civilian casualties is baked into their rules of engagement. Kill 300 people to get one Hamas fighter? Sure! They have been coddled and shielded by the United States to the point where they genuinely don't seem to understand that this is a war crime.
Do you have some relatively neutral sources that are reporting on the discourse among the leadership? I've heard bits here and there, and of course Netanyahu is a human piece of shit who is unfortunately still in power.
But most pro-Palestine sources are both-sidesing and merely comparing raw civilian casualty numbers. They ignore the fact that Hamas's intention on Oct 7 was to target and brutally murder civilians, and that Hamas is intentionally making it hard for Israel to minimize civilian casualties as it wages this war.
Not a bad video, but I think there is missing context. It also doesn't really "absolve" Israel on what might be a technicality (Genocide vs other Crimes AH).
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
-- Netanyahu, via theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister
"People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population is somehow a “genocide”. This is the consequence of totally unmoderated content."
There is a lot of hyperbole and hypocracy, sure, but there are also official statements from israeli politicians and the IDF, to give up all military restraint.
And statements wanting to make Gaza inhabitable.
That goes in the direction of (modern definition of) genozide, when you want to permanently destroy the land of other people, so they have to go away. As they then cannot exist as a culture anymore.
If a murderer lives in your house for decades and you knew they were a murderer and were plotting more murders but you did nothing to root them out yourself, maybe you’re an accessory.
It probably doesn’t justify the death penalty, but it also doesn’t help.
I would note that no one in Palestine has chosen for Hamas to be there. They are more like a criminal organization with populist propaganda, with a focus on smuggling and sanctions evasion as a business model. Even the election they “won,” they really didn’t in the conventional sense, and there hasn’t been another in 10 years.
I’m not taking sides, as someone raised Quaker and a later life Buddhist, I know everyone killing others is wrong and there’s no excuse for everything horrible that’s happening. But no one listens to the guy in the corner saying “could we just stop killing each other?”
But it’s absurd to say that somehow Hamas is a legitimate democratically elected government and the populace has had any say in the things they’ve done in their name.
Hamas decided to do October 7 assuming Israel would do something awful so they could martyr their own people for propaganda purposes. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission to volunteer the lives of the 20,000 people killed, nor the horrors of October 7.
Israel played directly, and in greater magnitude, into their stated goals of inciting Israel into atrocities. The goal isn’t to defeat Israel militarily but to destroy its international standing and by proxy the US. They wanted to end the idea of a two state solution forever and make the only options destruction of Israel or genocide of Palestinians.
The general populace of Palestine has no desire to be wiped out, they don’t want to live like this. They want to live a normal life like everyone does. But they don’t get to choose if Hamas controls their fate. Sitting in a western democracy it seems inconceivable that you can’t choose your government. But most of the world can’t, and they are at the mercy of whoever has the most guns and psychopaths to hold them.
Thank you for the color and the insight. It’s really helpful to remind myself how lucky we are to live in western democracies, a relatively new invention, and how 99% of humans who have ever lived have had no agency in the rules of the world they inhabit.
I am curious what you think should be done in this israel conflict. What are the paths forward?
So you are saying the ~14,000 women and children killed are accessories, b/c they failed to personally expel Hamas? Do you believe "There are no innocent Palestinians"?
It's also funny how the label "murderer" works, apparently not applying to Israel. Can we at least hold Israel to account for the extrajudicial assassinations conducted by Mossad?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_assassinations
"Mossad had assassinated Salameh. However, the blast also killed four innocent bystanders, including a British student and a German nun, and injured 18 other people in the vicinity. Immediately following the operation the three Mossad officers fled without trace, as well as up to 14 other agents believed to have been involved in the operation" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad_assassinations_followin...
Hamas is a strategic asset to the current set of hardliners in control of the Israeli government. They are "the town murderer" pointed to by the authorities, but conspicuously done nothing about as a justification of why they are the only sane choice to run things. Hamas and Israel's government are thus in a symbiotic relationship.
I don’t particularly know what to think about the common separation of woman from the population in these discussions.
I understand that Palestine is probably somewhat misogynistic compared to my American sensibilities, so I might be completely off base, but it feels like women would have a lot of political influence, even if it’s soft.
Or maybe they’re just treated like property and don’t know better due to poor educational prospects and tradition.
Expand that a bit, if the murder runs into your house and then uses it as a staging ground to start killing your neighbors, there is a high risk the SWAT team is coming in guns a blazing.
> People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population
Nearly 7 times the amount of people than died in 9/11, and using illegal tactics such as starvation, along with hateful/genocidal rhetoric ("We are fighting human animals", "put to death men and women, children and infants").
Is it relevant that there are a lot more Palestinians left to suffer; Or does that make it more urgent to end it?
> A lot of Palestinian content descends straight into hyperbole. People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population is somehow a “genocide”. This is the consequence of totally unmoderated content.
A genocide is the indiscriminate distruction of a population, that is exactly what Israel (with the support of the USA) is doing to Palestine.
Words have meanings. You truly think the current targeting has absolutely no distinction from just chunking bombs into a population centers at random.
If you actually want to engage people on this topic, you are going to have to learn to moderate your language. Saying Israel is not using enough discretion when picking targets and the number of civilian casualties is too high, actually invites a nuanced discussion.
...In the same sense that not calling a spade a spade ends up channeling everyone else's energies away from dealing with a spade problem, and into needless quibbling on defintions to provide an aggressor someone might sympathize with some "intellectual cover"?
Is that what you mean by invites "nuanced" discussion?
Because what you're coaching to have happen is not even "nuanced". It's just intellectual judo. If it weren't you wouldn't be refusing to deal with it as is.
Sorry, you can't redefine every word and have useful discussions with people. If you think using the correct terms for things so people can have a better understanding of what you are talking about is "intellectual judo", I don't know what to say.
Things like "you americans can't reason objectively" aren't OK on HN; it's no more OK when Americans write slurs about Europeans. You're wading into one of the most contentious and complicated geopolitical conflicts in the world. People are going to disagree with you. If you can't deal with that, don't engage on this topic here.
