It is a war and an urban warfare with civilian to combatant death ratio less than 2:1, while according to civiliansinconflict.org, typical ratio is more like 10:1.
You might want to argue it is an unjustified war, but genocide it is not.
Some scholars, like Verdeja, say that debates on whether the current conflict can be called a genocide are a “bad use of focus.” Part of that is because proving whether something is a genocide takes time, and does not actually stop people from being killed. Hinton agrees, noting that because genocide is seen as the crime of all crimes, people focus too rigidly on defining a particular moment as such. May be, legal jargon could be restrained until a thorough investigation is conducted. But thorough investigations are rarely conducted when it comes to Israeli crimes in Gaza or anywhere else in Palestine. Segal clearly points to how the U.S. government refused to call crimes committed against the Hutus in Rwanda a genocide. Without sticking to the truth, we’ll never have a truthful reckoning of how we arrived at the seventh of October, and how we go forward,” Segal says. “We need to name it for what it is.” source
You might want to make up definitions for genocide but 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. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.
Then technically, ALL wars are genocide.
EDIT: so many downvotes, so little arguments against it. Predictable as it gets.
The key feature is the first part about “intent to destroy.” Russia isn’t trying to destroy the concept of Ukraine, either as an ethnicity or a country (they just want it to be a puppet-state obedient to their dictates). The US wasn’t trying to destroy the concept of Vietnam or Vietnamese people.
Other people could draw different conclusions I guess, but to me it’s undeniable that Israel’s goal is to steadily destroy the whole concept of Palestine, with maybe some isolated individuals of Palestinian ethnicity still surviving in some location inside or outside Israel, but with Palestine itself completely erased.
Yes the intent matters. Israel intent is to destroy Hamas. That’s not genocide.
It is when they consider every Palestinian to be hamas (and anyone who they don’t like on a particular day)
The precursors to genocide are actively unfolding before our eyes. On 10 October, the head of the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”. The same day, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Raz Segal, the program director of genocide studies at Stockton University, concretely says it is a “textbook case of genocide.”
Intent does not matter when the direct results of premeditated actions slaughter children and innocent civilians. These aren’t mistakes, they are literally being explained by Israel as the war rages on as collateral damage.
If this is acceptable on the world stage, then the only people “winning” in the near future will be government officials and very high ranking military personnel. What’s the point of peace when it comes at such a cost?
The amount of aid alone that Israel continues to block, and even destroy, is absolutely sickening.
genocide it is not.
It wasn’t really in question when this was published back in October. It was genocide then and it continues to be genocide.
“The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.””
These are act of genocide. True, but the intent matters too (and I am sure it is described in the document you are linking to). And destruction of Hamas is not the intent compatible with genocide. If Israel wants to destroy citizens of Gaza as a group, then it is doing really shitty job, since somehow the civilian to military ratio is well below expectations for urban warfare.
- Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Which are also what Hamas perpetrated on 10/7.
But what about….
Yes we know that Hamas is awful, evil, etc. That doesn’t give a moral pass to do just whatever to people who aren’t Hamas.
Like if you squint at the numbers hard enough you cannot see starving children or murdered aid workers? Maybe that’s why I keep hearing about how they’re killing journalists.
Not sure where you’re getting those figures since the people keeping track of deaths were killed months ago.
Fucking ghoul
There are Hamas estimates of total death (~35,000). UN estimates are just Hamas estimates. There are Israel estimates ~30,000. Hamas estimates are for all deaths (including from natural causes and including due to Hamas rockets falling in Palestine). So the numbers are quite similar. I have seen different estimates how many Hamas militants were killed. The smallest is ~13K. If we take the largest number for total population killed (35K) then it is 22K civilians and 13K militants, with the ratio less than 2:1.
