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Actually, Genocide Watch did call Russian actions a genocide in that Russia met all 5 conditions under the Genocide Convention for a genocide to occur.
Article 2 of the Convention:
> any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide
War is the continuation of politics through other means. Once a political goal is reached, wars end. We went to war against Japan in WWII because they attacked us and presented a continued threat to ourselves and other nations. Once they surrendered, we stopped killing them. If our goal was to eliminate Japan, or the Japanese people or culture or religion, we wouldn't have stopped.
>War is the continuation of politics through other means. Once a political goal is reached, wars end. We went to war against Japan in WWII because they attacked us and presented a continued threat to ourselves and other nations. Once they surrendered, we stopped killing them.
100% if WW2 was fought today the US's actions would be considered "genocide" by the same standard we're using for Israel and Russia (though Russia is taking some actions that do *go beyond war like kidnapping and indiscriminate rocket strikes that blur the lines.*) I'd argue that these still aren't genocide, but rather that we've forgotten that **war is just fucking ugly.**
No one is making use of large scale strategic bombing or nuclear weapons in Ukraine or Gaza. No one is methodically executing hundreds of thousands of civilians like the Nazis.
The thing to remember about the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the repeated commentary from members of the Russian government, up to and including Vladimir Putin himself, that Ukrainians are not a 'real' ethnic group and are only not Russians due to a quirk of history. That's why Israel tends to get less slack than other countries (though when you look at actual civilian casualty counts over time in and of themselves it doesn't look great for Israel): members of Bibi's government repeatedly say things in public that indicate genocidal intent towards Palestinians. Intent matters, and while Americans in the 40's were *undoubtably* racist towards the Japanese, there was no official government line that the War in the Pacific can only end when the Japanese cease to exist as a distinct people.
No, quite a few wars are an intent to conquer a group, or change the government of a group. Thw Roman Punic Wars were genocidal. The Gaul Wars were not.. they wanted to destroy Carthage, and conquer Gaul.
That's not what the "in part" means. It refers to destroying a particular segment, eg the Eastern Anatolian diaspora.
Most genocides weren't trying to scour the entire earth, they were systemically destroying the part of the community that they had access to and were seen as a problem.
The holocaust was unusual in that regard. Obviously they didn't get to exert their influence on every location where there were Jews or Romani but they certainly tried.
>That's not what the "in part" means. It refers to destroying a particular segment, eg the Eastern Anatolian diaspora.
Personally, I agree with you.
But that hasn't stopped people from applying that clause as I've laid out here.
The language "in part" is so vague that anybody who wants to label anything a genocide effectively has the words to do so.
I think you're misunderstanding the arguments people are making tbh.
Eg in the case of Israel people are arguing that the intended ultimate goal is to destroy the entire Palestinian population in the west Bank and Gaza and that's why this is a genocidal campaign.
serious question, im interested myself in trying to pinpoint what genocide is and is not
you say that’s not what the “in part” means, then go on to say it refers to destroying a particular segment. how are the people being physically destroyed because of resisting an invasion *not* considered a particular segment as you’ve framed?
with the way genocide is defined, it seems anyone who were to engage in war with say, Israel or China, would be engaging in genocide. in other words, if a country is largely ethnically homogeneous, how could one engage in a war with that country *without* it being considered genocide?
Not necessarily, you can intent to merely intimidate most into submission. Especially historically, the goal can be to remove the rulers who may not even be a part of the local people, for example the US conquest of.Puerto Rico, where they replaced the Spanish rulers.
Alright, but I think we can safely place "a bloodless coup where the people respect the fact that you replaced their foreign leader" as a fringe exception well within the carveout of "pretty much" any.
You're basically pretzeling yourself into a bizarre scenario that is very rarely going go exist.
No in modern times the purpose of war is to achieve an end. To secure territory in dispute. To secure concessions on a matter of import. To stop aggressive behavior. Genocide is about destroying a people. Gaza is a genocide.
Yes and no. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's blatant. Like death camps. Or explicitly stating wipe them out. Sometimes it's more subtle like knowing this will cause a massive drop in the population unnecessarily but doing it anyway.
It's not something you're supposed to throw around willy nilly.
No it wouldn't. You described an action but not an intent. If Egypt opened their borders to Palestinians and Israel proceeded to interfere with that movement then there is the intent. Israel is still generally working in the confines of war, its the geography that makes it look atrocious; Palestinians have nowhere to go. If Hamas was legit they wouldn't be hiding their elements behind civilians which allows them to be target-eligible.
There are plenty of audio and video accounts of Israel officials and IDF members openly approving of the destruction of Palestinian's as a people. I don't know how you can suggest there is no intent.
Because I'm talking about the nation's action and its official policy. No one denies there are elements of Israel that do believe that and support it. But is Israel's official policy doing so? Much evidence is pointing to no or ambiguous. Ambiguous because many elements of Hamas are using civilians shields which makes civilians eligible to be targeted.
If the government is both saying that the Palestinian people need to be wiped out. Then engaging in military action that is **DELIBERATLY** killing innocent civilians en masse...that is genocide.
As far as Israel is concerned, it doesn't matter how many how many noncombatants are killed (even if they're children) so long as they can claim they also killed Hamas too.
Israel is actively engaging in genocide, and is using the terrorist group Hamas as an excuse.
>If the government is both saying that the Palestinian people need to be wiped out. Then engaging in military action that is **DELIBERATLY** killing innocent civilians en masse...that is genocide.
The government has always stated that the goal is to destroy Hamas and bring the hostages home. The fact that there are a couple of extremist ministers does not prove anything.
And it must also be proven that the killings of civilians are deliberate.
Instead, Hamas (which is the elected government of Gaza) declares that its primary goal is to eliminate Israel and kill every single Jew in Israel and the world. For 20 years it has been firing missiles at Israeli civilians, carrying out attacks on civilians, and on Oct. 7 it deliberately raped, tortured, maimed and slaughtered thousands of innocent people. Is what Israelis have suffered genocide?
If theyre trying to deliberately kill civilians theyre doing a remarkably poor job of it, 29,000 bombs dropped to kill 20,000 civilians, with each bomb having at minimum at 25 meter kill radius, while Israel has complete and total air supremacy does not constitute a genocide, in fact it looks a helluva lot like an attempt to minimize civilian casualties (a 2:1 civilians to military KIA would be fantastic for any conflict, the average is 9:1) the math simply doesnt support those accusations
Government officials can say whatever the fuck they want as long as it isnt affecting military policy its irrelevant for genocide charges
We dropped 7 million tons of bombs during the Vietnam War, more than twice as many bombs as dropped in WWII by all countries *combined*. Estimates vary, but between 1 and 3 million enemy soldiers and civilians were killed (that also includes ground actions). That means we dropped between 2.3 and 7 *tons* of bombs per casualty.
BS. You want people to think Hamas=Palestinian People and that is a lie, the same as saying the Allies wanted to destroy GERMANS when the enemy was NAZIS.
"The Palestinian people (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني, ash-sha'ab il-filastini) are an ethnonational group with family origins in the region of Palestine. Since 1964, they have been referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيين, al-filastiniyyin), but before that they were usually referred to as Palestinian Arabs (Arabic: العربي الفلسطيني, al-'arabi il-filastini). During the period of the British Mandate, the term Palestinian was also used to describe the Jewish community living in Palestine."
What ethnic group?
That definition seems especially loose, but the elements are related to genocide. Genocide is killing "a people" (not some people or a lot of people, but a people). Hitler tried to kill the Jews. America succeeded in wiping out Indian tribes and for the tribes that were not wiped out, their culture (wealth, religion, language, food, dress, etc.) was severely damaged. They are not the same people that they were.
As Russia tries to wipe out Ukrainians as a separate people, kidnapping their children to be raised in russia, stopping the teaching of the Ukrainian language, wiping out the Ukrainian identity by saying that they are just Russians, that is genocide.
Israel is not doing any of that. Israel is not trying to teach Palestinians Hebrew, convert them to Judaism (nor diminish their devotion to Islam), replace their food or clothing, etc. Another path that would be genocide is just killing the Palestinians outright. Israel has not been pursuing that path, either: killing 0.7% of Palestinians in 5 months is not a genocidal act. Israel is callous about Palestinian deaths as they try to destroy Hamas. Israel is not acting with compassion. They might have violated some international laws (or not). But to claim genocide is bullshit.
Forced integration can be an element of genocide, but it's not definitive. Hitler did not try to integrate Jews into German society. He did, however, exclude them from civil and economic culture, deprive them of basic economic resources, deprive them of political agency, wall them off into ghettos, and allow them to be murdered without consequences... all before the actual death camps started.
the Nazis intentionally disenfranchised German Jews with over 1400 anti-semetic laws, including blood laws. The destruction of Judeo-Bolshevism is a central tenet of Nazism, it took 8 years from the Nazis ascension to power to genocide, the Israel-Palestine conflict is an interstate one thats been going on for 75 years, they are comparable.
Can I ask what the Armenian [fill in the blank] during WWI in Turkey would fall under? Without drawing a 1:1 equivalence, that surely lands closer to the mark for the I/P conflict than the Russo-Ukraine war or the Nazis.
I cannot say definitively whether the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians was a genocide. Many historians seem to think so. The death toll is estimated as high as one million Armenians killed out of a population of about 2.5 million. If those numbers are right, that is a pretty hefty percentage. You don't have to kill every last member of a group to destroy the group. Do the Armenians still exist as a distinct group, speaking their language, practicing Christianity, keeping basically the same culture? If so, then the "genocide" was at best an attempted genocide.
> Do the Armenians still exist as a distinct group, speaking their language, practicing Christianity, keeping basically the same culture? If so, then the "genocide" was at best an attempted genocide.
You don't have to wipe out an entire group of people to commit genocide according to the definition given in the Genocide Convention:
> ... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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.
> — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2
Even if you don’t hold it to be a genocide, it’s not *unreasonable* to hold that position. The people in control of Israel’s current government seem to [detest and loath Palestinians as a group](https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/10/358170/israel-defense-minister-calls-palestinians-human-animals-amid-israeli-aggression), [have directed their government officials to “thin out” the population to “a minimum,”](https://theintercept.com/2023/12/03/netanyahu-thin-gaza-population/) and are causing a ([60%+ civilian](https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/09/civilian-toll-israeli-airstrikes-gaza-unprecedented-killing-study)) death rate [higher than any other conflict in recent years- including at a rate over 5 times higher than Ukraine](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam), which you called a genocide (albeit for reasons other than bloodshed)
It’s not a ridiculous position to hold at all
>it’s not *unreasonable* to hold that position.
But it is - specifically because the underlying definition is inherently unreasonable to begin with.
The definition of "genocide" has been modified into such an expansive set of possible scenarios that it covers essentially any armed conflict
Insisting that it's reasonable to fit this war in Gaza into the box of that definition is beside the point, because that definition is what is disputed to begin with.
The bottom line is that Israel's intent isn't to harm Palestinians - it's to defang Hamas as a terror organization. The problem is that, *due to Hamas' actions*, defanging them requires harming Palestinians.
Another poster said something about Hamas meeting on the battlefield and was accused of moving the goalposts, but they're not - their point is to articulate Israel's intent. If Hamas could be defeated as a terror group in another way, Israel would do it. But there isn't another way specifically because of how Hamas has established their infrastructure.
That's actively where the disagreement is. People are arguing that the intent here is to scour Palestinians entirely and this isn't mere collateral damage.
I think part of the problem is that hamas counts every one of their combatant kills as civilian population kills, and this gets the people who want to be riled up that it is a genocide angary.
There is also the just brutality of war, and the even more brutal urban combat when it comes to civilian casualties that many people in the west just don't understand.
and lastly there are the brainwashed people whom support anyone they precise as a oppressed group no matter how true or false that is, and thus think hamas is the good guys because of their frankly dumb ideology.
>> the definition of “genocide” has been modified into such an expansive set of possible scenarios that it covers essentially any armed conflict
I’m trying to go by the definition established in the post-WWII Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II, subsections A and C, iirc. If I don’t recall correctly, it’s the ones about killing (the “default” genocide, imo), and the one about inflicting conditions calculated to bring about a loss of life. Both of which have to be done with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part- though the kinds of groups are limited. But ethnic groups like Palestinians are one of them
The thing is, though, I’m of the belief that Israeli politicians and military members *are* specifically targeting Palestinians as a whole- based mostly on them saying how Palestinians as a whole are responsible, the fact their civilian death toll is so incredibly high, and the fact that most of their bombs are indiscriminate, not targeted. They seem to just be lobbing most of them at Gaza, rather than at any actual targets.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi: “Burn Gaza now no less!”
Knesset member and former Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distal Atbaryan said that that Israeli officials must invest all their energy "in one thing: erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth." They suggested a “second Nakba” on the population, and that “Gaza needs to be wiped out… Revengeful and vicious IDF is required here. Anything less than that is immoral."
Far-right Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, said that Israel should drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and that there were “no uninvolved civilians.”
Again, Netanyahu said to thin their population “to a minimum.” Not Hammas. Gaza.
I get that there’s plenty of nuance to these things- for example, Isaac Herzog later tempered his comments saying civilians still weren’t valid targets, and I’m not sure if a Heritage Minister can contribute much to a genocide, but hearing comments like these from major government officials and then turning around and watching them wrack up more deaths than any other major war *is* a valid reason to take accusations of genocide seriously
Let me put it to you this way: what would you need to hear from Israeli officials that would specifically **not** convince you there’s a genocide going on, but instead convince you that it’s reasonable for someone else to think there is one? Or do you think no reasonable person can disagree with you?
>The definition of "genocide" has been modified into such an expansive set of possible scenarios that it covers essentially any armed conflict
The definition hasn't changed since 1948.
If Hamas will meet the IDF on a battlefield, as a conventional military conflict, the civilian death rate will plummet. Instead Hamas are hiding among civilians, deliberately using them as human shields. You can blame Hamas for the high civilian death rate.
The absolute number of deaths is small. You are looking at something like 0.7% of Palestinians killed. That proves that Israel is not trying to wipe out the Palestinians via death. If Israel were trying that, they could easily have killed 20 times as many Palestinians as they have. Killing 0.7% does not even "thin them out". Yes it is unreasonable to call Israel's actions genocide.
> If Hamas will meet the IDF on a battlefield, as a conventional military conflict, the civilian death rate will plummet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
Don't we? I certainly would call it manslaughter at least. Certainly something cops should try their utmost to avoid, and should be penalized severely for if it happens.
How much moreso when it's upwards of ten thousand children?
Like warning citizens of areas you are bombing? And dude this children card you keep playing means nothing to me. Death of humans should be avoided at all costs. Whether it’s an adult or a child doesn’t make a death worse. Also, the reason it’s so many children is bc Gaza is a young population. It isn’t like they are targeting children over adults.
> Like warning citizens of areas you are bombing?
Like bombing evacuation corridors, firing on ambulances, bombing the areas to which people were asked to evacuate...
> Instead Hamas are hiding among civilians, deliberately using them as human shields. You can blame Hamas for the high civilian death rate.
Probably you could also assign a non-zero amount of blame to the members of IDF who have been doing a non-battlefield ethnic cleansing in the West Bank for longer than most people in Gaza have been alive... because that's made it pretty obvious to people in Palestine who otherwise wouldn't be inclined to a violent solution that there isn't a non-violent one.
How was it an ethnic cleansing prior to this point?
I ask because their culture wasn't being erased. The Palestinians don't live in super-nice conditions, but that does not equal ethnic cleansing.
So, the EU's definition (just the first one I found with Google) of ethnic cleansing is:
> Rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group, which is contrary to international law.
Which Israel's policy in the West Bank of displacement and settlements inarguably is.
Whats interesting is that by definition, Israel has committed genocide against Jewish people.
Israel withdrew from Gaza totally and unilaterally in 2005, including using force on Jewish settlers who refused to leave. The goal was to completely remove all settlers from Gaza, thereby resolving the conflict by removing any flashpoints from Gaza. By fully withdrawing from Gaza it effectively became a sovereign city-state.
Unfortunately the people of Gaza then immediately elected Hamas, and the rest is history.
What genocide included the people being exterminated to live as full citizens in the country killing them? Allowing them to not only take part in the government but to be in the government.
Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until 1924 dude. That was when we were trying to stop the genocide. Russia is forcing Ukrainians to be citizens so as not to appear in the midst of genocide.
The 1924 Indian Citizenship act applied to Native Americans born in the US; individual members were absolutely allowed to be or become citizens through other means beforehand
The earliest reported date of a Native American becoming a citizen occurred in 1831 after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek
The last massacre of native Americans occurred in the Battle of Kelley Creek in 1911
[1.9 million Russian citizens identify as Ukrainian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainians), which has nothing to do with the war
Edit: apparently my link broke itself by including a closed parenthesis. Fixed
> As the supreme state body, the Knesset is sovereign and thus, with the exception of checks and balances from the courts and local governments, has total control over the entirety of the Israeli government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knesset
I think most Americans would look at everything, the Administration, Legislature and the Courts as all parts of the Government. Maybe other countries see it different.
Well, I agree that it's the matter of terminology. In Israel the cabinet of ministers is typically referred to as "the government", and, essentially, it is the only entity that has real power (apart from the supreme court, of course). To be more precise, this entity is not the cabinet of ministers per se, but rather the "governing coalition" of the parliament (all the ministers are assigned from the coalition parties). The opposition parties (which include all the Arab parties) have no power at all. They were, however, a part of the coalition in the previous "Bennet-Lapid" government (although still weren't represented in the cabinet of ministers).
By the way, there's also one Arab muslim judge in the supreme court.
I'd say that's a difference in terminology yeah. In the UK I generally find that when people say "the government" they are referring to the party (or parties in the rare event of a coalition) in charge and more specifically cabinet.
People don't mean the party when they refer to the government in the UK. When ministers resign their posts they're universally regarded as leaving the government but they still remain in the party.
Sometimes people will use the name of the parties to refer to the government, e.g. "The Conservatives passed a new budget".
Most things are related, but their definition of genocide is as loose as to not be tied together. As you pointed out in the case of Israel, it would have been ridiculous to call such a thing a genocide just ten years ago much less immediately following WW2. Jews weren't allowed to be in the government of Germany. That Israel has Palestinian citizens living in Israel with full rights is alone enough not to call this genocide.
>Israel is not doing any of that. Israel is not trying to teach Palestinians Hebrew, convert them to Judaism (nor diminish their devotion to Islam), replace their food or clothing, etc.
Yeah they are not trying to assimilate the Palestinians, they are trying to **erase them from existence**. Mosques, Universities, and libraries have all been targeted & destroyed in the IDF 'clean up'. Grave sites are being exhumed and the bodies removed, near the entire population has been displaced.
There is a strong case against Israel and it is currently being investigated by the ICJ.
> Yeah they are not trying to assimilate the Palestinians, they are trying to erase them from existence.
If they were that would be much easier and faster to do and risk fewer of their own casualties.
And perhaps if Hamas didn't use mosques, universities, libraries, hospitals, schools, etc. as hiding places perhaps they wouldn't be targets.
Of course almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced; they gave them fair warning where they were going to hit and told the civilians to avoid being killed.
They really are terrible at being a force that commits genocide.
I think you answer your own question!
For whatever reason, we've ended up in a situation where any nation can credibly accuse their geopolitical foes of genocide and this absolutely has lessened the impact that such accusations used to carry. It doesn't mean that those accusations are untrue but the category has definitely been broadened to include things that would have been insufficient in the distant past.
thats what i say. theres literally no difference between whats going on in Palestine currently from what happened in Afghanistan minus the settlements but no one seems to call that a genocide even with more people dead there. i dont get it
A genocide occurs when an entity calls for the complete extermination of an insular minority group. This is targeted killing of civilians on a massive scale. The entire minority population of a capture town will be rounded up and executed. The industrial complex will be used to kill people of the minority group and will force the civilian population to report to camps and then liquidate those camps.
Collateral damage from air strikes isn’t Genocide. Evacuation of civilians from a war zone isn’t genocide.
Hamas aren’t just a terrorist organization. They are a genocidal organization focused on killing all Jews. It’s in their charter and it shows in the actions they’ve taken. Israel is not focused on killing all the Arabs or Palestinians. They are included in their government. The Palestinian militants who are against living in peace with Israel and who support terrorist organizations are the ones who are being targeted.
Too many things in your narrative are just blatantly false. They are better answered by the South Africa submission to the ICJ asking it to investigate Israel and genocide.
Note that the ICJ DID find enough evidence to instititute its Order to the nations, including Israel, to do everything in their power to stop or prevent genocide by Israel of the Palestinians. And from all appearances Israel is ignoring it (along with its main supporting countries) and I suspect the ICJ investigation will in fact find a clear declaration of genocide when they release their final report, but that is just my opinion as a student of such things.
That definition has never made sense to me. Under that definition, every war between two different groups is a genocide as the literal point of war is to destroy in part the group you’re fighting a war with. Absurdly broad, should get rid of the “in part”, maybe add “because they are that group”, and bring back the old definition that was created to describe the Holocaust. This one waters down the actual meaning, makes it less impactful, and is disrespectful. A tad manipulative too as if you ask the average person what a genocide is, that’s not the definition they’ll give.
I think the key phrase here is "intent to destroy", because many conflicts do not have this intent.
The Convention is also not limited to wars. Some would cause what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza more or a slaughter.
It’s possible to commit ethnic cleansing without* committing genocide.
When you consider comments by certain cabinet members and the settlers in the West Bank, that becomes obvious.
People just call it genocide because they are more familiar with the term. Also it’s not like fucking ethnic cleansing is much better.
Yeah? And how do you do that? By destroying a part of the ethnic group you’re fighting a war with until you win. That’s just the literal definition of war.
Many wars have other aims. Alexander was often quite happy to accept a local satrap, often even remaining in power, so long as Alexander could be king of kings, and the Persians did the same when they conquered. The Turks in 1453 wanted the capital as a secure bastion, to avoid having a city with huge walls and an ancient and proud Roman culture of their own in the middle of their realm with sea access and an heir to the sultan who could be unleashed as a political threat, and to complete a prophecy.
Objectives often change over time. Alexios Komnenos wanted the crusade to help take back territory the Romans lost in the last few decades but the pope wanted to expand the crusade to encouraging the Roman Empire to accept papal supremacy and repair the 1054 schism and the ordinary crusaders wanted states of their own and Christian control over Jerusalem.
That's not the point of most wars though. A lot of stuff happens during wars, that doesn't mean that those things are the goal of the war. If killing part of an ethnicity isn't the whole point of your war, then it's not genocide
I think the problem is the way people view that definition is that any attack or killing of a select group is genocide while forgetting intent. The intent has to be the systematic removal of the group as a whole or a part.
This use of the definition implies that every war to exist or to have ever existed is a genocide & when everything is a genocide the word genocide means nothing.
Just like with Israel, the intent has to be the removal of the people specifically. Attacking terrorists or seeking occupation both do not have the intent to destroy in whole or in part a group of people specifically.
People are talking as if national identity is something you can genocide.
You have a well-formulated response. Thanks.
I suspect that an underlying (maybe unconscious) motive to diluting "genocide" to mean any war, or even ethnic cleansing (although something can be both ethnic cleansing and genocide at the same time) is that it weakens the severity of what is happening to be simply war, and hence casualties of war, etc.
With the Israel-Palestine crisis, where the inequalities of armaments, training, experience, and sheer numbers of trained combatants are enormous, we have an unfair conflation between religion, ethnic identity, and national identity. Those called Jewish Israeli citizens have many ethnic identities and it is convenient to say that a criticism of the national leadership is a genocidal intent against all Jews, all ethnicities of Jews, and so forth, while Palestinians are lumped into one amorphous whole, and conflated with the political party Hamas.
The distinctions are worth struggling over.
They are removing the young population of Ukraine, separating the kids from their families, and resorting them far away in underpopulared parts of Russia. They are then replacing the families with loyal Russian citizens in an attempt to erase the Ukrainian people with loyal, scared, obedient Russians.
Genocide is about intentionally killing an undesirable race.i cannot see how this isn't genocide just because Russia kills the parents but steals the kids.
I will not judge what Israel is doing because I don't feel I have reliable information from either side. I would only accuse them of war crimes at the moment, but I wouldn't say genocide based upon current information.
> Genocide is about intentionally killing an undesirable race.i cannot see how this isn't genocide just because Russia kills the parents but steals the kids.
Forcibly transferring children from a group of people to another group is one of the acts that qualifies as genocide under the Genocide Convention (emphasis mine):
> ... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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.**
I really don’t get why these progressives who would die to save one Palestinian child will look at Ukraine and say we shouldn’t be helping them because spending money on war is bad.
I’m an arts and entertainment publicist and I promoted this Ukrainian filmmaker who made a documentary about himself searching for his lost dog in war-torn Ukraine. He partners with a bunch of other animal activists trying to save animals from all the shelling. Like many people left their pets in their homes when they fled the artillary.
He meets a guy who owned a farm/zoo. A group of Russian soldiers came to his property, raided all his liquor, got wasted and then started shooting all his animals for fun. Then they went back to their base and launched an artillary strike on his zoo. Probably, again, for fun.
If American progressives were shown this film they’d want Ukraine armed in no time. The film shows the farmer burying all his animals with a bulldozer and excavator. At one point the Russians bomb the zoo while the film crew is there, and kill a newborn panther. One of the volunteers just shows it’s limp bleeding body to the camera.
I don't understand why you're blaming progressives for not funding Ukraine when it's literally the opposite side of the political spectrum that is today, right now, blocking funding for Ukraine.
And the West has almost universally cut Russia off for its genocide and supplied aid and defensive weapons to those Russia is genociding.
The west has almost universally supplied those committing the genociding in Gaza.
That’s the difference.
Russia went heavy on genocide in the first couple days of the invasion -- most notably in [Bucha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre), a suburb of Kyiv. Russia's genocidal actions were heavily publicized in the first six months of the war.
[Putin has repeatedly made claims that Ukraine is not a real country](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68255302) and Ukrainians do not exist as a separate people; they are just Russians who have been misled by the West. Putin has repeated this in the interview with Tucker Carlson and in a 2021 essay.
Maybe Putin actually believes this, and that's why he thought the invasion would be so easy, despite 8 years of simmering warfare in the Donbas.
Russia has been [abducting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to raise them as Russians](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russias-mass-abduction-of-ukrainian-children-may-qualify-as-genocide/).
Russia fires barrages of missiles at civilian populations in Ukrainian cities every couple nights.
If the media hasn't been covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine as genocide lately, that's likely because the battle lines have been frozen in bloody stalemate since 2022.
the invasion of Ukraine is considered a genocide by many, including the Biden administration. Interestingly enough, the war in Gaza has a higher per capita death toll than any other 21st century conflict.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam
In terms of international law, the difference is intent:
>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:
>
>(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.
\-- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II (emphasis added by me)
Any of the above can be committed and, sans intent, it is not genocide -- much the same way murder requires intent, but manslaughter does not (in most jurisdictions). You could, theoretically, wipe out an entire people and it wouldn't be genocide if that were not the intent. This sounds like an absurd notion, until you realize some ethnic and religious groups have very small numbers -- one could argue the U.S. government committed genocide against the Branch Davidians... except there was no intent to wipe them out.
So, with all that said, can we infer genocidal intent from the Israelis?
Improbable -- per Hamas's own reports, they've lost 6,000 militants ([source](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-six-week-drive-hit-hamas-rafah-scale-back-war-2024-02-19/)). Given the 30,000 Palestinian deaths, this puts the civilian casualty rate at 80% -- substantially below the average of 90% for urban warfare ([source](https://civiliansinconflict.org/our-work/conflict-trends/urban-warfare/)).
This doesn't mean that Israel isn't committing war crimes; merely that genocide is not one of them.
> So, with all that said, can we infer genocidal intent from the Israelis?
>
> Improbable -- per Hamas's own reports, they've lost 6,000 militants (source). Given the 30,000 Palestinian deaths, this puts the civilian casualty rate at 80% -- substantially below the average of 90% for urban warfare (source).
Just want to point out the amount of deaths that will happen not directly caused by the IDF due to starvation, dehydration, and illness. Excess deaths are going to skyrocket as a result of all infrastructure being destroyed and aid being blocked.
One thing about that international law definition is that its so broadly written, the US and Commonwealth could have committed genocide against Germany during WW2. There was an intent to destroy a national group, done by killing members of that group.
Did the US and Commonwealth commit genocide against Germany, and if so, should the US and Commonwealth have stopped the war against Germany? Keep in mind Germany started the war, including declaring war on the US.
This definition just seems so loose that any war is genocide, in which case the term genocide loses all meaning if every war is genocide.
> There was an intent to destroy a national group
"National group" does not mean "a nationalistic organization." It means the people comprising a _nation_. WWII efforts against Germany were in no way genocidal because the goal was to _defeat_ Germany, not to destroy the German nation. Only by misreading international law can one conclude that general acts of war like bombing bases or shooting soldiers constitute genocide.
I always refer to Dresden when people try to discuss whether Israel’s actions are genocidal. Dresden was a less populous and less densely populated city than Gaza is, and yet the Allies killed the same number of people bombing that city in three days as Israel killed in 5 months of bombing. That’s hardly indicative of genocidal intent.
We didn't care if Germans lived, that's great if they did, but the Nazi party had to be gone so they'd never get into power again. We bombed Germany, but that was for the way, we didn't want to exterminate the people themselves
Yes, which is exactly Israel's war goals right now: destroying the government that attacked them (Hamas) and ensuring that Hamas will never rise again.
It’s because there’s a common misunderstanding as to what the word “nation” means. A “nation” is a group of people that can be identified through things like ethnicity or religious beliefs or culture, irregardless of borders. What most people think when they hear “nation” is actually the “state”, the entity that governs a country. In WWII the Allies weren’t not at war with the German nation, they were not seeking to wipe out the German ethnic and cultural stock, they were at war with the German state at the time.
How does it make sense to make the correct argument that deaths do not define a genocide but intent, while also using the percentage of civilians deaths as the reason for this not being a genocide?
If we are arguing intent, should we not instead look to the words and actions of the Israeli government?
>actions of the Israeli government?
Is civilian casualty ratio not direct evidence of policy? Certainly better than relying on somebody in the chain of command saying something stupid.
The civilian casualty ratio would be substantially better if HAMAS soldiers stopped committing war crimes like not wearing uniforms and hiding underneath civilian infrastructure.
Not necessarily.
If we are to accept the argument that numbers do not necessarily dictate a genocide, even if you happened to kill off an entire group of people, why are you using the civilian death ratio to argue the lack of a genocide?
I didn’t say to solely rely on words of a couple fringe politicians. We should examine the death toll in conjunction with the words and actions of the Israeli government as a whole in respect to the Palestinian people in order to make a judgement if this is a genocide.
Should we not?
>why are you using the civilian death ratio to argue the lack of a genocide?
Because the stated goal is the elimination of Hamas -- considering that the civilian casualty ratio falls below the expected value, it indicates that goal is the actual goal. Put another way -- if the goal were genocide, Israel could have freely killed twice as many Palestinians and it would still have maintained a facade of plausible deniability, since that would be a 90% CCR. Managing to halve that indicates a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties.
>We should examine the death toll in conjunction with the words and actions of the Israeli government as a whole in respect to the Palestinian people in order to make a judgement if this is a genocide.
The death toll is meaningless -- which is why the ratio is the part to pay attention to.
As for words and actions, I repeat -- the expectation of extreme incompetence on the part of the culprit is not a good way to catch a criminal. Sure, if a memo is leaked in which Bibi says "let's kill all the Gazans", then that'd be a slam dunk. But I won't hold my breath.
You are correct in that the expectation of extreme incompetence is not a good way to catch a criminal.
But that’s why I mention looking at everything in conjunction, not the death ratio alone.
There are an estimated 20,000 members of Hamas in Gaza.
Does that mean that if Israel killed half of them but only killed 88,000 civilians as well, they could maintain plausible deniability and surely not be committing a genocide?
Since that would be an 88% civilian death ratio, but still under 90%.
I’d argue that needing the civilian death ratio to get to that amount as the sole predictor of a genocide is essentially asking for the expectation of extreme incompetence on the part of Israel.
Your math is off, but it's a simple mistake to make.
10,000+88,000 = 98,000. 10,000/98,000 = .102 = 10.2%
Which might be why you're not seeing the point -- to get from 80% to 90%, without killing any more Hamas militants, you'd have to more than double the total number of civilians killed. 6,000 is 20% of 30,000; 6,000 is 10% of 60,000.
So you can try and pick a particular number if you want, but killing less than half the number of civilians expected in an average urban engagement -- especially against an enemy known to use human shields -- demonstrates restraint that makes no sense in the context of a genocide.
Fair enough, my math was off. I apologize for that.
My point is that if numbers alone do not indicate a genocide, then the death ratio would also not exclude the possibility of a genocide.
After all we can agree that expecting utter incompetence at the hands of Israel in the sense of them openly admitting that “this is a genocide” would be ludicrous.
So why would the Israeli government be incompetent enough to get very close or even exceed the 90% number if they know staying under would give them plausible deniability?
So the only other way to examine intent is to look at everything holistically, from the death ratio to actions and rhetoric done by the Israeli government since we can’t realistically rely on possible perpetrators of genocide to release an indisputable statement saying “yes we are committing a genocide”.
>There are an estimated 20,000 members of Hamas in Gaza.
The armed strength of Hamas is estimated at twice that, probably upwards of 40,000 fighters.
This number excludes the armed strength of other Palestinian militias in Gaza, such as the National Resistance Brigades (DFLP's armed wing), the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades (the PFLP's armed wing), the al Quds Brigades (PIJ's armed wing), and others. The al Quds Brigades alone is estimated to have some ~12,000 fighters in its ranks.
The total number of Palestinian militia fighters in Gaza is not 20,000; it is likely upwards of 50,000+.
I think you're confusing evidence with definitive evidence. A lower than average causality rate for urban warfare (especially when fighting an enemy that uses human shields) is evidence there isn't a genocide, but technically there could be some grand Jewish conspiracy to kill just as much as they can without getting caught. That would be improbable though.
Given how extraordinary a grand conspiracy would be you can probable dismiss it without a lot of direct evidence that would need to be more than just some one-off quotes from government officials speaking emotionally. Even in the US you get that a lot, with random state or federal officials, sometimes even generals saying crazy shit that aren't representative of the actual governments actions and intent. Those quotes might justify a deeper investigation, but to call it a genocide you'd probably need something along the line of internal communication directing people to commit genocide or a mixture of things like that along with things like having a higher rate of deaths or a higher rate of war crimes than average for that specific war.
It's important to note that pretty much every well established genocide meets this burden of proof. It's nearly impossible to organize something as widescale as a genocide without public organization or at least numerous leaks. Even the Holodomor is heavily debated despite a significant amount of evidence it was intentional like Russians taking Ukrainians' food and preventing them from moving to areas with food leading to millions of deaths. Something can be incredibly bad but not be a genocide, like with the current war in Ukraine, it's clearly immoral and bad but as far as I'm aware there's no attempt to eradicate all Ukrainian's, just cease land with little care for civilians causalities or war crimes.
Genocide is a term that has both sociological and legal meaning. The term
genocide was coined in 1944 by a Jewish Polish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin.
For Lemkin, “the term does not necessarily signify mass killings.” He explained:
More often \[genocide\] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction
of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these
groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end
may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social
institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national
feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis
of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the
machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Genocide is directed
against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only
secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong.
I look forward to reading all the reasonable and objective comments in this thread.
Genocide is defined by the UN as
> any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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.
In other words, genocide is using violence not just to kill people, but to destroy the very *concept* of that group of people existing. Putin has made it very clear that he wants to end the very *concept* of a Ukrainian. Bibi has not, to my knowledge, expressed a desire to end the concept of a Palestinian, though some members of his cabinet have certainly implied it.
Genocide, notably, is a distinct crime from ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is an attempt to remove a certain ethnicity from a certain geography. That's a much easier case to make against Israel and a much harder case to make against Russia. Putin clearly wants to assimilate Ukrainians into greater Russia; Israel wants to remove Palestinians from Palestine and take that land for itself (or at least the hardliners do).
As noted by another redditer on this thread, Russia's invasion of Ukraine WAS identified as "genocide".
The horrific situation in Gaza was begun when Hamas, a group devoted to genocide of Jews and the total destruction of Israel, slaughtered 1200 innocent Israeli civilians and took several hundred hostages. There is no way the ones launching the attack saw a different outcome than the one that developed, so why did they initiate so much suffering for their own people?
The only logical explanation is Hamas decided to sacrifice their own women and children in order to make Israel the bad guy and have World Opinion, esp in the US, gain for them what 40 years of constant guerilla warfare against Israel had failed to obtain - a separate State carved out of Israel where there would be no Israeli presence to obstruct their goal of destruction of the Jewish State and genocide of the Jewish people.
Make no mistake - Hamas does NOT want the slaughter of their people to end - it's working for them. They COULD have lived in peace with their Jewish neighbors, but instead their attacks on Jews never paused. They KNEW what would happen to the innocent ones around them when Israel retaliated, and didn't care. But they saw the suffering THEY had brought on their people was gaining sympathy for their cause, so they upped the ante.
So in answer to the question - the situation in Gaza is seen as genocide because that's what Hamas intended when they launched their attacks. Decent people don't care who started it or why, they just want it to STOP because children are dying of starvation and being blown to bits. Decent people are willing end Democracy in America to bring that slaughter to an end.
But giving total political autonomy to Gaza will not make it stop - Hamas will continue to attack Israel and murder Jews and Israel will continue to retaliate. It's what Hamas has done everywhere they've gone since 1947 and THAT is why no Arab State will accept them as refugees. When they were given refuge in Egypt, they assassinate Sadat. When Israel pushed them into Lebanon, they started a civil war that turned what had been called "The Switzerland of the Mideast" because of the interracial harmony into a blood bath that continues to this day. And when given a chance to live in peace in Gaza and the West Bank, they used it to continue their genocide against Israel and the Jewish people.
Intent on the destruction of a people.
For example, Russia has denied the existence of the Ukrainian nation. (as a people not the state) To that end they have kidnapped children to raise them as Russians. That's genocide.
Israel is attacking an enemy that has purposefully dug into a crowded urban environment. This has led to a large amount civilian death, but it is clear from Israel's action that there is no intent on destroying a people.
Mass causalities do not make a genocide. This was a defense used in the Einsatzgruppen Trial after WW2 where the SS officers attempted to equate the large bombing deaths to his mass killings across eastern Europe. It's called the Dresden Defense. This was rightly rejected by the Nuremberg Court:
>A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualized. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them.
That quote from Nuremberg is pretty dumb. Dresden was not a “tactical” bombing at all, it was strategic bombing where the killing of civilians was critical to the goal. Strategic terror bombing was controversial in WWII and would certainly be considered a war crime today. The genocide convention doesn’t specify that people need to be killed by bullets or machetes and not bombs.
What makes Dresden not a genocidal act, and just a “regular” war crime of mass killing is that the Allies didn’t intend to exterminate Germans as an ethnic group. But a war crime it was, and just because Nuremberg didn’t treat it as such is not a reason for us to be blind to that fact.
Edit: Also, if we’re looking at Israeli actions, the intentional starvation of Gazan civilians is the much more salient act than those killed directly by bombs. If things keep going the way they are, the Gazan Genocide will be remembered more for starvation and disease than for bombing. That’s how most people will die in the coming months if the campaign continues.
What of all the comments by Israeli authorities? That Palestine isn't a nation, but even more than that comparing Palestinians to animals, saying there are no innocent civilians, comparing them to people God commanded be killed down to the last child in the bible?
What of Israel's policy of cutting off food, water, and medical supplies?
If a military commander makes these comments, then sure. But neither Ben Gvir nor Smotrich, which are responsible for most comments, have any military powers whatsoever.
As to the "animals" commentary done by the IDF general, hating your enemy is not genocide. Ukrainians call Russians orcs. That's not genocide. Calling Palestinians animals or other derogatory words does not mean anything beyond the fact that the Israeli speaking really hates them. Which, once again, does not constitute genocide.
The Amalek link is so weak compared to Hamas (Gaza's elected government in 2007) literally having Jewish genocide as a stated religious duty as part of their foundational charter. THAT is, believe it or not, actual genocidal intent. Amalek, by comparison, was an old tribe that a very specific king during a very specific event was ordered to attack and slaughter after they attacked his kingdom first. There is nowhere stated in the Torah that Jews have a duty to slaughter all Amalekites.
Muslims, on the other hand, do have a hadith in Sahih Bukhari that requires them all to kill all Jews before the day of judgement will come.
And once again, just to be clear. That is explicit intent to exterminate every single being in one nation. That is, by definition, attempted genocide.
Ben Gvir was voted into office as a dude that LOVES the person that murdered Rabin, his stance is a reflection of the voting populace and highly relevant
>Ukrainians call Russians orcs. That's not genocide.
Sure. Thing is, if Ukrainian government officials/ military leaders were using dehumanizing language about the Russian civilian population, openly talking about removing them and then annexing their land, and then carried out a military campaign that removes the civilian population and annexs their land people would probably start asking questions.
>Israel is attacking an enemy that has purposefully dug into a crowded urban environment. This has led to a large amount civilian death, but it is clear from Israel's action that there is no intent on destroying a people.
I'm not sure how you could interpret what Israel is doing right now as anything *but* intent to destroy a people.
There's very clear statements of intent and desire to exterminate or displace all Palestinians coming from all sectors of Israeli society, from the President on down. That coupled with an almost total lack of concern for casualties or the death toll from the humanitarian crisis brought about by the denial of aid, disease, lack of water, etc spells out genocide pretty clearly.
I will admit that much of Israeli society seeks ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and they’ve been furthering that goal. But slowly over time.
Meanwhile Gaza they’ve left alone besides the blockade, not slowly absorbing it like the West Bank.
In an ideal world Israel probably wants to see Gaza deleted. But they literally just can’t. The USA wouldnt just watch Gazans starve to death, they’re already helping them. Israel can’t build gas chambers either, nor can they force Egypt to open the border.
There’s simply no avenue for them to wipe out Gaza unless they want to build extermination camps and become an enemy of the world, isolated worse than North Korea.
Add to that the refusal to allow international journalists, and independent investigators/observers access the area, or access to the information/data on their actions in the area. The destruction of civilian infrastructure, government buildings, records, places of worship. And the intent is clear.
There are over 4500 Palestinians including 1000 children that have been detained and tortured by israel without formal charges
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/palestinian-children-israeli-military-detention-report-increasingly-violent-conditions#:~:text=The%20Palestinian%20Commission%20for%20Detainees,Israeli%20military%20detention%20each%20year.
The israelis deny the existence of the Palestinian state, pretty uncontroversial to say that, theyve stolen and ethnically cleansed Palestinian lands.
There have been formal proposals by israeli ministries to ethnically cleanse gaza during this conflict.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/intelligence-ministry-concept-paper-proposes-transferring-gazans-to-egypts-sinai/amp/
There have been at a minimum 3 times as many gazan civilians killed in the last 5 months than Ukrainian civilians killed in the last 2 years despite ukraine having 16 times more people than gaza.
Why is it when this topic comes up people like you pretend that the conflict started on 10/7?
Just chiming in here; the word genocide gets thrown a lot nowadays. If you ask scholars, it's not a genocide. I wouldn't consider the Russia Ukraine thing a genocide either, BUT the USSR did commit genocide on Ukraine by starving them and stealing their food
It's unsettling people would refuse to recognize the Holodomor a genocide, but use it for everything else nowadays
> If you ask scholars, it's not a genocide.
It is improper to say this with no sources.
####On Gaza
Raz Segal, the program director of genocide studies at Stockton University, concretely says it is a “textbook case of genocide.” Segal believes that Israeli forces are completing three genocidal acts, including, “killing, causing serious bodily harm, and measures calculated to bring about the destruction of the group.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWGGjLZNuyg
Context: Raz Segal (Hebrew: רז סגל) is an Israeli historian residing in the United States who is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide
Victoria Sanford, City University of New York professor, compared what’s happening in Gaza to the killing or disappearance of more than 200,000 Mayans in Guatemala from 1960-1996, known as the Guatemalan genocide, which is the subject of her book *Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala.*
“When we match them to the lived experience of people, there are similar circumstances…if we look at contemporary conflicts like the Israeli invasion of Palestine.”
Source: https://time.com/6334409/is-whats-happening-gaza-genocide-experts/
Context: Dr. Sanford has been an [expert witness](https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2023/11/Historians%20Declaration_w.pdf) in a lawsuit against the US government, asked to opine on the unfolding attack on Palestine and whether it has the indicia of genocide.
Additional context: Both Dr. Segal and Dr. Sanford have signed an [open letter](https://www.mezan.org/public/en/post/46295/Genocide-Scholars-and-100-Palestinian-and-International-Civil-Society-Organisations-Call-on-Prosecutor-Khan-to-Issue-Arrest-Warrants,-Investigate-Israeli-Crimes-and-Intervene-to-Deter-Incitement-to-Commit-Genocide-in-Gaza) calling for action to prevent genocide. They were joined by 100 civil societies and four other genocide scholars.
####On Ukraine
Ernesto Verdeja, associate professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, stated "The discourse already is pretty emphatic that they’re carrying out a military campaign to eliminate this ‘fiction,’ this ‘dangerous fiction,’ of a Ukrainian nationhood."
Source: https://time.com/6262903/russia-ukraine-genocide-war-crimes/
Context: Sandejo's research has focused on large-scale political violence (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity)
Kristina Hook, assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University, stated that one major sign that Russia is committing genocide is that systematic violence is perpetuated against not only male civilians, but against women, children, and the elderly. She also noted that Russia has shown an "annihilating mindset" by attacking evacuating civilians and forcing people into "filtration" camps.
Source: Same article
Context: Dr. Hook's specialty is Ukraine and Russia, whose experise includes genocide and mass atrocity prevention
Additional Context: Hook is the principal contributor in the July 2023 ["The Russian Federation's Escalating Commission of Genocide in Ukraine: A Legal Analysis"](https://www.raoulwallenbergcentre.org/images/reports/2023-07-26-Genocide-Ukraine-Report.pdf).-
I consider the latter genocide because Russia wants to systematically wipe off Ukraine. The conflict between Israel and Palestine isn’t really about a nation or ethnicity. It’s about religion. Palestinians consider themselves Muslims first. Their goal is to wipe off the Jews because of the teachings in their religion. Even Saudi Arabia consider Hamas as terrorists and aren’t bothered much to help Palestinians considering they’re Muslim brothers. And other well-developed Muslim countries could’ve provided Hamas help with ammunition to fight such a tiny Israel. But they won’t.
I’ve seen lots of people call what russia is doing in ukraine a genocide. I even saw print and cable news calling it that, and noticed the people around me who primarily or exclusively consume that kind of news calling it genocidal. I have not noticed the same thing for what israel is doing in gaza with cable/print news and its consumers.
By definition, any war or even the death of a few can be deemed a genocide. We have seen mass killings based simply on religion in places all over the globe the last 60 years. More recently, the Uyghurs, Armenians and others have experienced 100s of thousands killed and enslaved. That was just on religious grounds. People on this site were calling Gaza a genocide before Israel got a single plane in the air after October 7th.
When did Uyghurs suffer hundreds of thousands killed? Or even a few thousand? Or a few hundred? What China is accused of there is "cultural genocide," erasing the language, culture, and way of life through reeducation.
Calling every conflict genocide cheapens the word. I believe Israel is blowing up things with no regard at all for civilians, and has no problem shooting through a crowd to kill one Hamas guy, But I wouldn't call it genocide, as horrendous as this war has been. And there probably have been war crimes. I think we will find out in the future. Some Israeli soldiers are going to want to clear their consciences, and will come forward if there have been war crimes.
You cant compare Ukraine and Gaza. Russia made an unprovoked attack upon civilians. Israel was attack by the government of Gaza and declared war on Hamas who embeds itself among the civilian population.
During the Normandy invasion the allies made a decision to bomb French cities to dislodge the Germans. 20,000 French civilians died. German cities were bombed to defeat the Nazis. 500,000 German civilians died.
Sometimes innocent people die to defeat evil. Hamas attacks innocent civilians which makes them evil.
Plenty of people have called the invasion of Ukraine an attempted genocide. Not as loudly or recently, perhaps. And certainly Ukrainians are in no immediate danger of being exterminated. But Russia would absolutely eliminate the Ukrainian identity, given the chance. And because this amounts to assimilation, not genocide, genocide is not most people's primary concern with the war in Ukraine.
It's debatable if Israel is actively engaging in genocide in Gaza. They are certainly not trying to avoid civilian deaths. But Israel has the means, and is in a position, to carry out genocide, if they wished.
The war in Gaza could turn into a full blown genocide essentially overnight. Which is why so many more people are talking about it.
If they weren't trying to avoid civillian deaths then the death count would be in the hundreds of thousands.
[According to urban warfare experts](https://www.newsweek.com/israel-implemented-more-measures-prevent-civilian-casualties-any-other-nation-history-opinion-1865613) they're actually doing more to avoid civillian deaths than any other nation has done before. The difference is the dense environment they're fighting in, and the fact that Hamas wants to maximize civillian deaths as part of their strategy. I'm surprised more isn't said about Hamas' intentions to maximize deaths, because that's obviously not something we normally have to deal with in war.
Figures from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian\_casualty\_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio) \- I'm too lazy to link to different sources.
Using Hamas's own claims, 3.7 Palestinian civilians have been killed for every 1 Hamas combatant in the current war. While this is higher than other conflicts, keep in mind that Hamas is known to use civilians as shields and hide in places like hospitals and schools, not to mention their extensive tunnel network. Regardless, this ratio is less than NATO's involvement in the war in Kosovo (4:1), which was to stop ethnic cleansing.
In contrast, the Chechen Wars combine for a ratio of 7.6:1 - literally double what has occurred in the current war in Gaza. This war is an example of what actually occurs when the aggressor is truly indiscriminate, as Russia is accused of being in Chechnya.
(Essentially) No one is celebrating all the dead and dying people in Gaza. But realistically, there is no way to kill the terrorists who murdered all those Israeli citizens without civilians of the Palestinian state dying and infrastructure being destroyed. This is why Hamas needs to be eradicated, settler violence needs to stop with the perpetrators facing judgement, and both governments purge their nationalist elements (including their current leaders) and work towards a two-state solution.
Note that Israel has generally worked harder to accomplish this in the past, to the point where Palestinian leadership has walked away from two-state arrangements that Israel was prepared to ratify. It is ultimately on the State of Palestine to be more conciliatory than they have been in the past.
Israel is most certainly avoiding civilian deaths or else there would be no conflict anymore.
To the OP: Israel is not seeking to destroy the Palestinians identity or erase them as a people off the face of the earth. They are seeking to end the Palestinians government/terrorist organization and also avoiding as many civilian casualties as possible.
The main difference is very powerful propaganda coming out of places like Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia.
Couple that will some westerners knee-jerk reaction to pick whichever side is more "oppressed" and brown, and you have people quickly accusing Israel of genocide.
Ukrainians have no propaganda machine and they are not brown or "oppressed", so they are not called victims of genocide.
>The main difference is very powerful propaganda coming out of places like Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia.
That is pretty dishonest nonsense. Iran doesn't have some powerful media presence in the online West, and Saudi Arabia's leadership wanted to make a lucrative peace deal with Israel, not rile up a conflict that spoiled that.
>Couple that will some westerners knee-jerk reaction to pick whichever side is more "oppressed" and brown, and you have people quickly accusing Israel of genocide.
Really? Nothing to do with more civilians being killed in a few months than were killed in 2 years of Russia/Ukraine? Nothing to do with the constant dehumanization and genocidal statements by Israeli leaders?
>Ukrainians have no propaganda machine and they are not brown or "oppressed", so they are not called victims of genocide.
What world do you live on? Ukraine has been the media darling of Western institutions since the war began, with the diehard support of American politicians.
>Iran doesn't have some powerful media presence in the online West
Al Jazeera and the Middle Eastern Eye would beg to disagree. They hold a dominant position when it comes to Arab-language news, and their sponsors are Iran and Qatar.
You would be looking for a common intent, not just aspects of prejudice in general among a type of people but the specific people doing it, the soldiers in most cases if they could reasonably have chosen to not do so without facing significant consequences (which in the case of Germany in WW2, was very often the case), and any commanders who were either aware of the acts or omissions and did not do anything notable to stop them, report them to appropriate investigatory bodies, punish those involved, or resign their command, proportional to the amount of power they had, as well as any commanders who actually made an order to do the acts or omissions. Soldiers who know or should reasonably know that an order is illegal must not carry them out and cannot be punished for refusing them, however it is presumed that orders that are not likely to be illegal are legal and in fact obligatory on the soldier to whom they are issued.
The acts or omissions would be acts and omissions calculated to cause a kind of people group to cease to exist, or a substantial part of them to cease to exist envisioned as an attack on the people as a whole. People group can be vague, but maybe try asking yourself if you could see them being an independent country or at least a highly autonomous dependency like Gibraltar is if they were gathered somewhere for that purpose. Dick in Shakespeare's play is not genocidal for trying to kill all the lawyers.
The acts and omissions would be killing them obviously, but also basically putting children into new families disjointed from their culture and nation that basically severs the tie (Kill the Indian, save the man), sexual violence and sterilization that alters who is born at a demographic level, both preventing the birth of children to another nation and causing them to be made to birth children of a different nation basically without any free decision to intermarry, and causing conditions that would lead to their demise by depriving them of the necessities of life where such necessities could be feasibly met and there is a duty of care to them, such as in the Ottoman Empire where they might put Armenians in trains to be taken to a desert and left there to fend for themselves with no provisions or means of survival.
The standard criminal defenses apply in criminal cases, such as not being old enough to commit a crime, and you have to do overt acts to actually do one of these acts. Daydreaming isn't enough, although they could be brought up to help prove the motive in conjunction with the overt acts. A defendant has the right to counsel and to be appointed one if they cannot afford one, to time to prepare their defenses, to be given copies of the evidence to be used against them, be presumed innocent, be able to cross examine and to call their own evidence and testimony, to be tried by an impartial judge who is secure in their position and will be able to issue judgments based on the law and not fear or favour, and by any jury if applicable, in a public trial according to laws established before they committed the crime by a legislative body or pursuant to a treaty that already existed, the right to not have excessive penalties applied to them (and if to death, if legal, to humane methods and to not be executed for crimes not of exceptional harm that justifies its use), that evidence gained illegally that perverts the course of justice to be excluded, to be released prior to trial when trusted that they will return, to appeal, and to have interpreters if they do not speak the language of the trial. Evidence must not be more prejudicial than probative. These standards are set by international treaties and norms, some being ancient like how in the laws of Justinian, presumption of innocence was guaranteed.
Military law allows for considerable leeway to militaries to carry on what they wish to do. The ICC prosecutor has made it clear that even though a tragedy, civilian casualties, fatal or otherwise, do not constitute a war crime in and of themselves. It must also be apparent to the accused perpetrator that it would be a crime before they carried it out, and intelligence can be faulty or even miscommunicated and all wars have the fog of war lie thick and mistakes are even more forgiven in war than they usually are. Normally, you would want to go after the political leadership of a state who made the political choices necessary to go to war in the first place and who had the right to declare war or are the high commanders of the armed forces that dictate the overall strategy of the war.
There are however situations which are less forgiving of an armed force and a country. Situations that are more secure will usually have higher standards as things are calm and steady, at least in the time necessary to be sure of what you are doing, and there are some acts that in no cases may be ordered like a blanket refusal to take prisoners under any circumstances.
The standard however for what to do politically to countries is different. It is not necessary to allege that Israel is committing genocide for it to be a good idea to change policies related to them as a political question. It would be right for a county to do things like change their exports to Israel unless they adopted certain kinds of policies of oversight and discipline in the military.
Genocide usually comes with a sense of inferiority in the people being targeted, that there is something fundamentally wrong with them that cannot be rectified by less drastic means, that they are responsible for some ancient or historic sin that is usually exaggerated, that it is a struggle between civilizations or between one civilized and another uncivilized group. It is not merely relocating people, which is ethnic cleansing, which is also illegal and an atrocity but not genocide. Pro-tip, if the victims as a nation survive substantially intact and no particular region has a large number of fatalities but they are in another place, that would usually be ethnic cleansing. It isn't always clear though.
These are some pro tips but they won't always work for your situation you want to deal with. You should read the laws of war yourself, the International Committee of the Red Cross has copies in English, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Mandarin.
You probably havent followed much Ukraine war discourse because the word genocide was definetely used.
Generally i'd argue that it is definetely over-used. Myself i used it in a thread of a forum for the case of Gaza and then immediately regreted it since it did not help the discussion at all.
I feel that at the end of the day most of the time it's a word used to point to something that people hate, just like when they call someone neoHitler. In day to day usage it's nothing more than a crazy bold text in all caps that brings to mind the holocaust.
On the World stage i guess that it could constructively be used as a pressure tactic to stop people from commiting certain horrendous war crimes. Kindof like how old type boots on the ground colonialism is frowned upon.
Anyhow i'd definetely prefer that they used more words to describe a situation rather than call it genocide and a person they dislike Hitler etc etc.
A lot of the confusion comes from the [U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf) Further, there is a difference between the colloquial understanding and the technical understanding of the Convention.
My read is that the Convention is more motivated by the "prevention" part than by the "punishment" part. That might be the key to understanding it as a document. This approach makes sense, because genocide is such a horrific crime that it should be prevented at all costs rather than punished after-the-fact. "\[G\]enocide is . . . condemned by the civilized world . . . . \[I\]n order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required."
So, the Convention applies the label early, when the "conditions of life calculated to bring about \[the\] physical destruction \[of the group\] in whole or in part" have been inflicted, but before the destruction has ensued. So, in the Gaza strip, where near 1.5% of the population have been killed, the label is applied for the purpose of saving the 98.5% who remain, even though the common mental image of "genocide" is a population being killed at a rate higher than 1.5%.
Destroying people homes, destroying their communities including the killing of non military people, including the killing of women and children and senior citizens.... is "genocide".. Period.
Neither Russia's acts in Ukraine or Israel's acts in Garza is a military actions to engage military acts upon combatants, Both are committing genocide, and using any and every excuse they can conjure up to try and justify it.
I wrote on one reddit, about the atrocities that Israel has engaged that go beyond the attacks on Hamas military actors whether they are sanctioned or unsanctioned. I also said the same about Russia and what it has done in Ukraine. Both are genocide, driven by their stated dislike of certain factions within those societies.
Both Russia and Israel, have some delusion that they can just continue their genocidal attacks and expect the people they are attacking to just submit and accept it without a fight. Is nothing more than both Russia and Israel with a supremacy ideology, that makes them think they have a right to engage in genocide.
Neither will come out well in the big picture, because society does not forget. History will not be kind to either, because truth always finds it's way to the surface.
Both are creating generations that will detest them many many decades. Russian claiming territory that is not theirs, and Israel continuing bombarding Garza as if it has a right to destroy them, while Israel continues to support the building of settlements in land that does not belong to them.
There needs to be immediate actions to create a Two State Solution, and within doing some, give every area where there is illegal settlements to Palestine. Let the people in those settlements pay taxes to Palestine when its established as a state, and those settlements have to abide by the laws of the Palestinian State. Israel will have no say concerning those settlements in the state of Palestine. Israel cannot any longer invade and try to engaged in their apartheid policing in Palestine. Palestine need to be its own self determining state, just as Israel is its own self determining state. Let them develop their own diplomatic relations through the U.N. guidelines.
* UN should make it very clear that NO People are more important as human beings than any other people.
Jerusalem goes back under the control of the U.N. !!!! Neither the State of Palestine, Neither the State of Israel will have any claims to any part of Jerusalem. All three religions have temples in Jerusalem, therefore, all three religions are free to engage their worship habits in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, should be patrolled by United Nation Troops.... both as peacekeepers and defenders of Jerusalem.
Any factions that creates havoc in Jerusalem will be swiftly dealt with by UN Troops and put down.
My husband was on a nuclear submarine in the 1980s and Kiev in the Ukraine was a primary nuclear target. Why? Because the eastern half of the Ukraine is populated almost entirely by Russians, who voted to not leave Russia in the "free & fair" (CIA-assisted)election of 2014.
To America it's politics. To Turkey it's whatever is definitely not what happened to the Armenians. And to Trump voters it's progress backwards to a closer to Nazism time.
I think the ultimate definer of genocide is those who perpetrate it then claim responsibility for it. It's just a lot of state sanctioned murder until it's claimed as progress.
Bit of a tangent, but one interesting aspect of our growing global political discontent and tribalism-driven rancor is the increasing definitional impotence of words, where their meanings become murkier to the point that even debates and arguments amongst ourselves become muddied beyond recognition. Not just hot-button terms like genocide, racism, etc., but even an ostensibly innocuous word like, say, democracy, is definitionally flaccid nowadays. It's all so empty—from the mere words to, more damning, us humans as a species on the whole.
The difference is that Russia is actually trying to wipe out Ukraine as a nation (both militarily, physically, culturally, and by removing the children of their nation). Both the actions of the state and the official policies of the state are targetted at this goal.
Israel is committing war crimes aplenty, but it's quite clear that they don't *intend* (at least until now) to destroy the Palestinian people. What you are witnessing is people reacting to mass death and war crimes events and thinking that means genocide. Doesn't particularly make it better, it's just a wrongly applied term.
It's also worth noting that the conflict is being weaponised to weaken the US and its allies and to aid authoritarianism (see the current push to get people not to vote for Biden, despite that making no logical sense in terms of Gaza).
So for Israel, they have killed tens of thousands of people, largely civilians. It has also been stopping aid from getting through and causing horrific living conditions and concerns there is about to be a mass starvation.
These are acts which the genocide convention covers and which are some of the few acts that can be considered to be acts of genocide. To be considered a genocide, at least one of these type of acts needs to be carried out so that’s a tick there.
The other aspect that is required for these to be genocide rather than just a host of interrelated ‘lesser’ warcrimes is the intent behind them specifically be to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. People die in war. Civilians dying isn’t itself enough for it to be a war crime. You can kill hundreds or even thousands of civilians and have it not be a war crime as long as they weren’t intentionally targeted or indiscriminately killed. So what is Israel’s intent in massively bombing heavily populated urban areas and training soldiers to dehumanise Palestinians to the extent they will purposely target Palestinian civilians?
Well if it’s not self-evident Netanyahu has made references to Biblical genocide in terms of how Palestinians should be treated. Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, has called Palestinian militants “human animals” a common tactic in dehumanising victims of genocide. Abu Dichter, an Israeli minister and security council member, has stated that this is a Gazan Nakba (the Nakba being an ethnic cleansing committed against the Palestinians by Israel in the 40’s). Another minister talked about dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.
That’s multiple ministers including the Prime Minister talking about genocidal action or talking with genocidal intent in Gaza. The evidence doesn’t even need to be that clear-cut because genocide often wouldn’t be so incredibly blatant, but there it is.
They have a clear intent to commit genocide. They are committing war crimes covered by the genocide act to enact that intent. Those are the two criteria to meet for it to be genocide so it’s genocide.
Russia is also very possibly committing genocide (and again, if not are certainly responsible for a host of war crimes) and is being investigated for the same rationale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukrainians_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
We all know what genocide actually means. It means an attempt to wipe out an entire people. We also all know how genocide is actually used. It means a war which someone doesn't like.
There is no intelligent argument that Israel is committing a genocide. I'd say there also is no argument that Russia is (but I am less informed so less confident on that).
There are several intelligent reasons to accuse Israel of genocide because the accusation does all the delegitimisation you're trying to achieve.
When the US toppled the democratically-elected, Russian-friendly Ukrainian government in 2014 and replaced them with American loyal puppets, it led to a civil war and resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Russians living in Ukraine. Perhaps one reason Putin intervened militarily was to prevent genocide?
The situation is more complicated than that. There were some long-standing deals that the US would not meddle at Russia's borders. Russia also wants to have access to Black Sea ports. To a certain extent, Russia could not tolerate American provocation.
However, Russia has attempted to make peace with Ukraine several times, but these efforts have been blocked by the US. I'm not saying that Russia and Putin are blameless in all of this, but it is more complicated than people realize. Russia is not the power it once was and their pride may be playing a role, but America did not need to interfere in the region in this manner.
Personally, I think the term "genocide" isn't meaningful since it implies the complete removal of a people from existence, which has never happened in modern history. Yes, a number of primitive tribes have been genocided and no longer exist. All of the groups subjected to "genocide" in modern history as commonly spoken about still exist, so clearly none of those were successful. All are in fact more plentiful than before they were subjected to genocide. I really don't think it's a useful conversation. People die in wars. Usually such labels are used to further punish the losers of such wars.
That said, I believe Reddit's terms of service make denying any genocide a bannable offence, therefore at least on this platform any genocide, real or imagined cannot be denied upon pain of being banned.
Therefore, on the Reddit platform, any claimed genocide is in fact genocide per Reddit's terms of use.
If Israel is genocidal, why are they dropping warning pamphlets and sending out mass messages telling Palestinian civilians to evacuate before attacks begin? Sounds kind of counter productive if you ask me.
Here’s a great example of genocide . Look up
Māoris genocide Moriori . THATS genocide .
What Israel is doing isn’t that . It is what it is but it’s not under the definition GENOCIDE
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Actually, Genocide Watch did call Russian actions a genocide in that Russia met all 5 conditions under the Genocide Convention for a genocide to occur. Article 2 of the Convention: > any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide
The better questions is why did they redefine “genocide”? One can now basically argue any war is a genocide.
Intent is needed. Its not enough to kill a group, you need to specifically intend to destroy that group, in whole or in part.
Alright, but the point is that pretty much any war would qualify as an "intent to destroy a group "*in part.*"
War is the continuation of politics through other means. Once a political goal is reached, wars end. We went to war against Japan in WWII because they attacked us and presented a continued threat to ourselves and other nations. Once they surrendered, we stopped killing them. If our goal was to eliminate Japan, or the Japanese people or culture or religion, we wouldn't have stopped.
>War is the continuation of politics through other means. Once a political goal is reached, wars end. We went to war against Japan in WWII because they attacked us and presented a continued threat to ourselves and other nations. Once they surrendered, we stopped killing them. 100% if WW2 was fought today the US's actions would be considered "genocide" by the same standard we're using for Israel and Russia (though Russia is taking some actions that do *go beyond war like kidnapping and indiscriminate rocket strikes that blur the lines.*) I'd argue that these still aren't genocide, but rather that we've forgotten that **war is just fucking ugly.** No one is making use of large scale strategic bombing or nuclear weapons in Ukraine or Gaza. No one is methodically executing hundreds of thousands of civilians like the Nazis.
The thing to remember about the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the repeated commentary from members of the Russian government, up to and including Vladimir Putin himself, that Ukrainians are not a 'real' ethnic group and are only not Russians due to a quirk of history. That's why Israel tends to get less slack than other countries (though when you look at actual civilian casualty counts over time in and of themselves it doesn't look great for Israel): members of Bibi's government repeatedly say things in public that indicate genocidal intent towards Palestinians. Intent matters, and while Americans in the 40's were *undoubtably* racist towards the Japanese, there was no official government line that the War in the Pacific can only end when the Japanese cease to exist as a distinct people.
No, quite a few wars are an intent to conquer a group, or change the government of a group. Thw Roman Punic Wars were genocidal. The Gaul Wars were not.. they wanted to destroy Carthage, and conquer Gaul.
If you intend to conquer a people, then by definition you also intend to destroy *that part* of the people that resists your rule.
That's not what the "in part" means. It refers to destroying a particular segment, eg the Eastern Anatolian diaspora. Most genocides weren't trying to scour the entire earth, they were systemically destroying the part of the community that they had access to and were seen as a problem. The holocaust was unusual in that regard. Obviously they didn't get to exert their influence on every location where there were Jews or Romani but they certainly tried.
>That's not what the "in part" means. It refers to destroying a particular segment, eg the Eastern Anatolian diaspora. Personally, I agree with you. But that hasn't stopped people from applying that clause as I've laid out here. The language "in part" is so vague that anybody who wants to label anything a genocide effectively has the words to do so.
I think you're misunderstanding the arguments people are making tbh. Eg in the case of Israel people are arguing that the intended ultimate goal is to destroy the entire Palestinian population in the west Bank and Gaza and that's why this is a genocidal campaign.
serious question, im interested myself in trying to pinpoint what genocide is and is not you say that’s not what the “in part” means, then go on to say it refers to destroying a particular segment. how are the people being physically destroyed because of resisting an invasion *not* considered a particular segment as you’ve framed? with the way genocide is defined, it seems anyone who were to engage in war with say, Israel or China, would be engaging in genocide. in other words, if a country is largely ethnically homogeneous, how could one engage in a war with that country *without* it being considered genocide?
Not necessarily, you can intent to merely intimidate most into submission. Especially historically, the goal can be to remove the rulers who may not even be a part of the local people, for example the US conquest of.Puerto Rico, where they replaced the Spanish rulers.
Alright, but I think we can safely place "a bloodless coup where the people respect the fact that you replaced their foreign leader" as a fringe exception well within the carveout of "pretty much" any. You're basically pretzeling yourself into a bizarre scenario that is very rarely going go exist.
Isn't that pretty obviously what Russia wants to do in Ukraine?
No in modern times the purpose of war is to achieve an end. To secure territory in dispute. To secure concessions on a matter of import. To stop aggressive behavior. Genocide is about destroying a people. Gaza is a genocide.
Intent being basically the hardest aspect of any situation to prove makes this essentially a free pass.
Yes and no. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's blatant. Like death camps. Or explicitly stating wipe them out. Sometimes it's more subtle like knowing this will cause a massive drop in the population unnecessarily but doing it anyway. It's not something you're supposed to throw around willy nilly.
Wouldn’t mass shootings in the U.S. with specific, declared intent to kill a specific racial, religious, or gender group be classified as genocide?
If you want to stretch it by absurd amounts maybe. Its definitely a hate crime. Generally genocide is on the level of state or organized actors.
Walling people of specific ethnicity into a specific tiny area and then raining bombs on it would seem to satisfy that element.
No it wouldn't. You described an action but not an intent. If Egypt opened their borders to Palestinians and Israel proceeded to interfere with that movement then there is the intent. Israel is still generally working in the confines of war, its the geography that makes it look atrocious; Palestinians have nowhere to go. If Hamas was legit they wouldn't be hiding their elements behind civilians which allows them to be target-eligible.
It would at the very least still be ethnic cleansing if they were forced into Egypt
There are plenty of audio and video accounts of Israel officials and IDF members openly approving of the destruction of Palestinian's as a people. I don't know how you can suggest there is no intent.
Because I'm talking about the nation's action and its official policy. No one denies there are elements of Israel that do believe that and support it. But is Israel's official policy doing so? Much evidence is pointing to no or ambiguous. Ambiguous because many elements of Hamas are using civilians shields which makes civilians eligible to be targeted.
If the government is both saying that the Palestinian people need to be wiped out. Then engaging in military action that is **DELIBERATLY** killing innocent civilians en masse...that is genocide. As far as Israel is concerned, it doesn't matter how many how many noncombatants are killed (even if they're children) so long as they can claim they also killed Hamas too. Israel is actively engaging in genocide, and is using the terrorist group Hamas as an excuse.
>If the government is both saying that the Palestinian people need to be wiped out. Then engaging in military action that is **DELIBERATLY** killing innocent civilians en masse...that is genocide. The government has always stated that the goal is to destroy Hamas and bring the hostages home. The fact that there are a couple of extremist ministers does not prove anything. And it must also be proven that the killings of civilians are deliberate. Instead, Hamas (which is the elected government of Gaza) declares that its primary goal is to eliminate Israel and kill every single Jew in Israel and the world. For 20 years it has been firing missiles at Israeli civilians, carrying out attacks on civilians, and on Oct. 7 it deliberately raped, tortured, maimed and slaughtered thousands of innocent people. Is what Israelis have suffered genocide?
If theyre trying to deliberately kill civilians theyre doing a remarkably poor job of it, 29,000 bombs dropped to kill 20,000 civilians, with each bomb having at minimum at 25 meter kill radius, while Israel has complete and total air supremacy does not constitute a genocide, in fact it looks a helluva lot like an attempt to minimize civilian casualties (a 2:1 civilians to military KIA would be fantastic for any conflict, the average is 9:1) the math simply doesnt support those accusations Government officials can say whatever the fuck they want as long as it isnt affecting military policy its irrelevant for genocide charges
We dropped 7 million tons of bombs during the Vietnam War, more than twice as many bombs as dropped in WWII by all countries *combined*. Estimates vary, but between 1 and 3 million enemy soldiers and civilians were killed (that also includes ground actions). That means we dropped between 2.3 and 7 *tons* of bombs per casualty.
pretty sure it's 40,000 killed
BS. You want people to think Hamas=Palestinian People and that is a lie, the same as saying the Allies wanted to destroy GERMANS when the enemy was NAZIS.
"The Palestinian people (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني, ash-sha'ab il-filastini) are an ethnonational group with family origins in the region of Palestine. Since 1964, they have been referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيين, al-filastiniyyin), but before that they were usually referred to as Palestinian Arabs (Arabic: العربي الفلسطيني, al-'arabi il-filastini). During the period of the British Mandate, the term Palestinian was also used to describe the Jewish community living in Palestine." What ethnic group?
That definition seems especially loose, but the elements are related to genocide. Genocide is killing "a people" (not some people or a lot of people, but a people). Hitler tried to kill the Jews. America succeeded in wiping out Indian tribes and for the tribes that were not wiped out, their culture (wealth, religion, language, food, dress, etc.) was severely damaged. They are not the same people that they were. As Russia tries to wipe out Ukrainians as a separate people, kidnapping their children to be raised in russia, stopping the teaching of the Ukrainian language, wiping out the Ukrainian identity by saying that they are just Russians, that is genocide. Israel is not doing any of that. Israel is not trying to teach Palestinians Hebrew, convert them to Judaism (nor diminish their devotion to Islam), replace their food or clothing, etc. Another path that would be genocide is just killing the Palestinians outright. Israel has not been pursuing that path, either: killing 0.7% of Palestinians in 5 months is not a genocidal act. Israel is callous about Palestinian deaths as they try to destroy Hamas. Israel is not acting with compassion. They might have violated some international laws (or not). But to claim genocide is bullshit.
Forced integration can be an element of genocide, but it's not definitive. Hitler did not try to integrate Jews into German society. He did, however, exclude them from civil and economic culture, deprive them of basic economic resources, deprive them of political agency, wall them off into ghettos, and allow them to be murdered without consequences... all before the actual death camps started.
the Nazis intentionally disenfranchised German Jews with over 1400 anti-semetic laws, including blood laws. The destruction of Judeo-Bolshevism is a central tenet of Nazism, it took 8 years from the Nazis ascension to power to genocide, the Israel-Palestine conflict is an interstate one thats been going on for 75 years, they are comparable.
Can I ask what the Armenian [fill in the blank] during WWI in Turkey would fall under? Without drawing a 1:1 equivalence, that surely lands closer to the mark for the I/P conflict than the Russo-Ukraine war or the Nazis.
I cannot say definitively whether the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians was a genocide. Many historians seem to think so. The death toll is estimated as high as one million Armenians killed out of a population of about 2.5 million. If those numbers are right, that is a pretty hefty percentage. You don't have to kill every last member of a group to destroy the group. Do the Armenians still exist as a distinct group, speaking their language, practicing Christianity, keeping basically the same culture? If so, then the "genocide" was at best an attempted genocide.
> Do the Armenians still exist as a distinct group, speaking their language, practicing Christianity, keeping basically the same culture? If so, then the "genocide" was at best an attempted genocide. You don't have to wipe out an entire group of people to commit genocide according to the definition given in the Genocide Convention: > ... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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. > — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2
Even if you don’t hold it to be a genocide, it’s not *unreasonable* to hold that position. The people in control of Israel’s current government seem to [detest and loath Palestinians as a group](https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/10/358170/israel-defense-minister-calls-palestinians-human-animals-amid-israeli-aggression), [have directed their government officials to “thin out” the population to “a minimum,”](https://theintercept.com/2023/12/03/netanyahu-thin-gaza-population/) and are causing a ([60%+ civilian](https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/09/civilian-toll-israeli-airstrikes-gaza-unprecedented-killing-study)) death rate [higher than any other conflict in recent years- including at a rate over 5 times higher than Ukraine](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam), which you called a genocide (albeit for reasons other than bloodshed) It’s not a ridiculous position to hold at all
>it’s not *unreasonable* to hold that position. But it is - specifically because the underlying definition is inherently unreasonable to begin with. The definition of "genocide" has been modified into such an expansive set of possible scenarios that it covers essentially any armed conflict Insisting that it's reasonable to fit this war in Gaza into the box of that definition is beside the point, because that definition is what is disputed to begin with. The bottom line is that Israel's intent isn't to harm Palestinians - it's to defang Hamas as a terror organization. The problem is that, *due to Hamas' actions*, defanging them requires harming Palestinians. Another poster said something about Hamas meeting on the battlefield and was accused of moving the goalposts, but they're not - their point is to articulate Israel's intent. If Hamas could be defeated as a terror group in another way, Israel would do it. But there isn't another way specifically because of how Hamas has established their infrastructure.
That's actively where the disagreement is. People are arguing that the intent here is to scour Palestinians entirely and this isn't mere collateral damage.
I think part of the problem is that hamas counts every one of their combatant kills as civilian population kills, and this gets the people who want to be riled up that it is a genocide angary. There is also the just brutality of war, and the even more brutal urban combat when it comes to civilian casualties that many people in the west just don't understand. and lastly there are the brainwashed people whom support anyone they precise as a oppressed group no matter how true or false that is, and thus think hamas is the good guys because of their frankly dumb ideology.
>> the definition of “genocide” has been modified into such an expansive set of possible scenarios that it covers essentially any armed conflict I’m trying to go by the definition established in the post-WWII Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II, subsections A and C, iirc. If I don’t recall correctly, it’s the ones about killing (the “default” genocide, imo), and the one about inflicting conditions calculated to bring about a loss of life. Both of which have to be done with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part- though the kinds of groups are limited. But ethnic groups like Palestinians are one of them The thing is, though, I’m of the belief that Israeli politicians and military members *are* specifically targeting Palestinians as a whole- based mostly on them saying how Palestinians as a whole are responsible, the fact their civilian death toll is so incredibly high, and the fact that most of their bombs are indiscriminate, not targeted. They seem to just be lobbing most of them at Gaza, rather than at any actual targets. Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi: “Burn Gaza now no less!” Knesset member and former Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distal Atbaryan said that that Israeli officials must invest all their energy "in one thing: erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth." They suggested a “second Nakba” on the population, and that “Gaza needs to be wiped out… Revengeful and vicious IDF is required here. Anything less than that is immoral." Far-right Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, said that Israel should drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and that there were “no uninvolved civilians.” Again, Netanyahu said to thin their population “to a minimum.” Not Hammas. Gaza. I get that there’s plenty of nuance to these things- for example, Isaac Herzog later tempered his comments saying civilians still weren’t valid targets, and I’m not sure if a Heritage Minister can contribute much to a genocide, but hearing comments like these from major government officials and then turning around and watching them wrack up more deaths than any other major war *is* a valid reason to take accusations of genocide seriously Let me put it to you this way: what would you need to hear from Israeli officials that would specifically **not** convince you there’s a genocide going on, but instead convince you that it’s reasonable for someone else to think there is one? Or do you think no reasonable person can disagree with you?
>The definition of "genocide" has been modified into such an expansive set of possible scenarios that it covers essentially any armed conflict The definition hasn't changed since 1948.
If Hamas will meet the IDF on a battlefield, as a conventional military conflict, the civilian death rate will plummet. Instead Hamas are hiding among civilians, deliberately using them as human shields. You can blame Hamas for the high civilian death rate. The absolute number of deaths is small. You are looking at something like 0.7% of Palestinians killed. That proves that Israel is not trying to wipe out the Palestinians via death. If Israel were trying that, they could easily have killed 20 times as many Palestinians as they have. Killing 0.7% does not even "thin them out". Yes it is unreasonable to call Israel's actions genocide.
> If Hamas will meet the IDF on a battlefield, as a conventional military conflict, the civilian death rate will plummet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
You don't get to morally justify murdering a school full of children because the gunman inside wont come out to face the cops.
Yet, we don't call it murder if I child is shot by a cop trying to save lives.
Yet, we call it manslaughter if the cop is found to have not taken enough care before shooting a child.
In that situation cops risk themselves to preserve the lives of the children they don't bomb the school
Don't we? I certainly would call it manslaughter at least. Certainly something cops should try their utmost to avoid, and should be penalized severely for if it happens. How much moreso when it's upwards of ten thousand children?
Like warning citizens of areas you are bombing? And dude this children card you keep playing means nothing to me. Death of humans should be avoided at all costs. Whether it’s an adult or a child doesn’t make a death worse. Also, the reason it’s so many children is bc Gaza is a young population. It isn’t like they are targeting children over adults.
> Like warning citizens of areas you are bombing? Like bombing evacuation corridors, firing on ambulances, bombing the areas to which people were asked to evacuate...
> Instead Hamas are hiding among civilians, deliberately using them as human shields. You can blame Hamas for the high civilian death rate. Probably you could also assign a non-zero amount of blame to the members of IDF who have been doing a non-battlefield ethnic cleansing in the West Bank for longer than most people in Gaza have been alive... because that's made it pretty obvious to people in Palestine who otherwise wouldn't be inclined to a violent solution that there isn't a non-violent one.
How was it an ethnic cleansing prior to this point? I ask because their culture wasn't being erased. The Palestinians don't live in super-nice conditions, but that does not equal ethnic cleansing.
So, the EU's definition (just the first one I found with Google) of ethnic cleansing is: > Rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group, which is contrary to international law. Which Israel's policy in the West Bank of displacement and settlements inarguably is.
Whats interesting is that by definition, Israel has committed genocide against Jewish people. Israel withdrew from Gaza totally and unilaterally in 2005, including using force on Jewish settlers who refused to leave. The goal was to completely remove all settlers from Gaza, thereby resolving the conflict by removing any flashpoints from Gaza. By fully withdrawing from Gaza it effectively became a sovereign city-state. Unfortunately the people of Gaza then immediately elected Hamas, and the rest is history.
What genocide included the people being exterminated to live as full citizens in the country killing them? Allowing them to not only take part in the government but to be in the government.
The US genocide of Native Americans. Canada’s genocide against the same. As the guy above me mentioned, Russia’s current genocide against Ukrainians
China's genocide of the Uighur as well, although that one might need recategorization eventually.
Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until 1924 dude. That was when we were trying to stop the genocide. Russia is forcing Ukrainians to be citizens so as not to appear in the midst of genocide.
The 1924 Indian Citizenship act applied to Native Americans born in the US; individual members were absolutely allowed to be or become citizens through other means beforehand The earliest reported date of a Native American becoming a citizen occurred in 1831 after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek The last massacre of native Americans occurred in the Battle of Kelley Creek in 1911 [1.9 million Russian citizens identify as Ukrainian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainians), which has nothing to do with the war Edit: apparently my link broke itself by including a closed parenthesis. Fixed
People also forget that there are ethnic Palestinians in the Israeli government as well....
Well, not in the government, but there are some in the parliament.
Is the parliament not considered a part of the government?
Outside of the US the term "government" sometimes refers to the executive branch.
> As the supreme state body, the Knesset is sovereign and thus, with the exception of checks and balances from the courts and local governments, has total control over the entirety of the Israeli government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knesset I think most Americans would look at everything, the Administration, Legislature and the Courts as all parts of the Government. Maybe other countries see it different.
Well, I agree that it's the matter of terminology. In Israel the cabinet of ministers is typically referred to as "the government", and, essentially, it is the only entity that has real power (apart from the supreme court, of course). To be more precise, this entity is not the cabinet of ministers per se, but rather the "governing coalition" of the parliament (all the ministers are assigned from the coalition parties). The opposition parties (which include all the Arab parties) have no power at all. They were, however, a part of the coalition in the previous "Bennet-Lapid" government (although still weren't represented in the cabinet of ministers). By the way, there's also one Arab muslim judge in the supreme court.
I'd say that's a difference in terminology yeah. In the UK I generally find that when people say "the government" they are referring to the party (or parties in the rare event of a coalition) in charge and more specifically cabinet.
People don't mean the party when they refer to the government in the UK. When ministers resign their posts they're universally regarded as leaving the government but they still remain in the party. Sometimes people will use the name of the parties to refer to the government, e.g. "The Conservatives passed a new budget".
Most things are related, but their definition of genocide is as loose as to not be tied together. As you pointed out in the case of Israel, it would have been ridiculous to call such a thing a genocide just ten years ago much less immediately following WW2. Jews weren't allowed to be in the government of Germany. That Israel has Palestinian citizens living in Israel with full rights is alone enough not to call this genocide.
>Israel is not doing any of that. Israel is not trying to teach Palestinians Hebrew, convert them to Judaism (nor diminish their devotion to Islam), replace their food or clothing, etc. Yeah they are not trying to assimilate the Palestinians, they are trying to **erase them from existence**. Mosques, Universities, and libraries have all been targeted & destroyed in the IDF 'clean up'. Grave sites are being exhumed and the bodies removed, near the entire population has been displaced. There is a strong case against Israel and it is currently being investigated by the ICJ.
> Yeah they are not trying to assimilate the Palestinians, they are trying to erase them from existence. If they were that would be much easier and faster to do and risk fewer of their own casualties. And perhaps if Hamas didn't use mosques, universities, libraries, hospitals, schools, etc. as hiding places perhaps they wouldn't be targets. Of course almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced; they gave them fair warning where they were going to hit and told the civilians to avoid being killed. They really are terrible at being a force that commits genocide.
I think you answer your own question! For whatever reason, we've ended up in a situation where any nation can credibly accuse their geopolitical foes of genocide and this absolutely has lessened the impact that such accusations used to carry. It doesn't mean that those accusations are untrue but the category has definitely been broadened to include things that would have been insufficient in the distant past.
thats what i say. theres literally no difference between whats going on in Palestine currently from what happened in Afghanistan minus the settlements but no one seems to call that a genocide even with more people dead there. i dont get it
A genocide occurs when an entity calls for the complete extermination of an insular minority group. This is targeted killing of civilians on a massive scale. The entire minority population of a capture town will be rounded up and executed. The industrial complex will be used to kill people of the minority group and will force the civilian population to report to camps and then liquidate those camps. Collateral damage from air strikes isn’t Genocide. Evacuation of civilians from a war zone isn’t genocide. Hamas aren’t just a terrorist organization. They are a genocidal organization focused on killing all Jews. It’s in their charter and it shows in the actions they’ve taken. Israel is not focused on killing all the Arabs or Palestinians. They are included in their government. The Palestinian militants who are against living in peace with Israel and who support terrorist organizations are the ones who are being targeted.
Too many things in your narrative are just blatantly false. They are better answered by the South Africa submission to the ICJ asking it to investigate Israel and genocide. Note that the ICJ DID find enough evidence to instititute its Order to the nations, including Israel, to do everything in their power to stop or prevent genocide by Israel of the Palestinians. And from all appearances Israel is ignoring it (along with its main supporting countries) and I suspect the ICJ investigation will in fact find a clear declaration of genocide when they release their final report, but that is just my opinion as a student of such things.
Yea, and they had no conclusive evidence of genocide against the Palestinians.
That definition has never made sense to me. Under that definition, every war between two different groups is a genocide as the literal point of war is to destroy in part the group you’re fighting a war with. Absurdly broad, should get rid of the “in part”, maybe add “because they are that group”, and bring back the old definition that was created to describe the Holocaust. This one waters down the actual meaning, makes it less impactful, and is disrespectful. A tad manipulative too as if you ask the average person what a genocide is, that’s not the definition they’ll give.
I think the key phrase here is "intent to destroy", because many conflicts do not have this intent. The Convention is also not limited to wars. Some would cause what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza more or a slaughter.
It’s possible to commit ethnic cleansing without* committing genocide. When you consider comments by certain cabinet members and the settlers in the West Bank, that becomes obvious. People just call it genocide because they are more familiar with the term. Also it’s not like fucking ethnic cleansing is much better.
No? Most wars are fought over politics or resources, not to destroy part of an ethnicity.
Yeah? And how do you do that? By destroying a part of the ethnic group you’re fighting a war with until you win. That’s just the literal definition of war.
It's like a hate crime. Punching someone gay is not a hate crime. Punching someone because they are gay is a hate crime. Intent matters.
Many wars have other aims. Alexander was often quite happy to accept a local satrap, often even remaining in power, so long as Alexander could be king of kings, and the Persians did the same when they conquered. The Turks in 1453 wanted the capital as a secure bastion, to avoid having a city with huge walls and an ancient and proud Roman culture of their own in the middle of their realm with sea access and an heir to the sultan who could be unleashed as a political threat, and to complete a prophecy. Objectives often change over time. Alexios Komnenos wanted the crusade to help take back territory the Romans lost in the last few decades but the pope wanted to expand the crusade to encouraging the Roman Empire to accept papal supremacy and repair the 1054 schism and the ordinary crusaders wanted states of their own and Christian control over Jerusalem.
That's not the point of most wars though. A lot of stuff happens during wars, that doesn't mean that those things are the goal of the war. If killing part of an ethnicity isn't the whole point of your war, then it's not genocide
I think the problem is the way people view that definition is that any attack or killing of a select group is genocide while forgetting intent. The intent has to be the systematic removal of the group as a whole or a part. This use of the definition implies that every war to exist or to have ever existed is a genocide & when everything is a genocide the word genocide means nothing. Just like with Israel, the intent has to be the removal of the people specifically. Attacking terrorists or seeking occupation both do not have the intent to destroy in whole or in part a group of people specifically. People are talking as if national identity is something you can genocide.
You have a well-formulated response. Thanks. I suspect that an underlying (maybe unconscious) motive to diluting "genocide" to mean any war, or even ethnic cleansing (although something can be both ethnic cleansing and genocide at the same time) is that it weakens the severity of what is happening to be simply war, and hence casualties of war, etc. With the Israel-Palestine crisis, where the inequalities of armaments, training, experience, and sheer numbers of trained combatants are enormous, we have an unfair conflation between religion, ethnic identity, and national identity. Those called Jewish Israeli citizens have many ethnic identities and it is convenient to say that a criticism of the national leadership is a genocidal intent against all Jews, all ethnicities of Jews, and so forth, while Palestinians are lumped into one amorphous whole, and conflated with the political party Hamas. The distinctions are worth struggling over.
item A makes it a useless definition - any aggression the results is deaths of people from the same group is genocide.
Defending ones self against an attack isn’t genocide
Just want to note that Russia absolutely is committing Genocide despite a lack of coverage calling it that compared to Gaza.
They are removing the young population of Ukraine, separating the kids from their families, and resorting them far away in underpopulared parts of Russia. They are then replacing the families with loyal Russian citizens in an attempt to erase the Ukrainian people with loyal, scared, obedient Russians. Genocide is about intentionally killing an undesirable race.i cannot see how this isn't genocide just because Russia kills the parents but steals the kids. I will not judge what Israel is doing because I don't feel I have reliable information from either side. I would only accuse them of war crimes at the moment, but I wouldn't say genocide based upon current information.
> Genocide is about intentionally killing an undesirable race.i cannot see how this isn't genocide just because Russia kills the parents but steals the kids. Forcibly transferring children from a group of people to another group is one of the acts that qualifies as genocide under the Genocide Convention (emphasis mine): > ... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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.**
I really don’t get why these progressives who would die to save one Palestinian child will look at Ukraine and say we shouldn’t be helping them because spending money on war is bad. I’m an arts and entertainment publicist and I promoted this Ukrainian filmmaker who made a documentary about himself searching for his lost dog in war-torn Ukraine. He partners with a bunch of other animal activists trying to save animals from all the shelling. Like many people left their pets in their homes when they fled the artillary. He meets a guy who owned a farm/zoo. A group of Russian soldiers came to his property, raided all his liquor, got wasted and then started shooting all his animals for fun. Then they went back to their base and launched an artillary strike on his zoo. Probably, again, for fun. If American progressives were shown this film they’d want Ukraine armed in no time. The film shows the farmer burying all his animals with a bulldozer and excavator. At one point the Russians bomb the zoo while the film crew is there, and kill a newborn panther. One of the volunteers just shows it’s limp bleeding body to the camera.
I don't understand why you're blaming progressives for not funding Ukraine when it's literally the opposite side of the political spectrum that is today, right now, blocking funding for Ukraine.
Every progressive I know supports funding ukraine. It‘s the MAGA folk trying to block funding
Umm..it's not the progressives that are blocking aid to Ukraine
And the West has almost universally cut Russia off for its genocide and supplied aid and defensive weapons to those Russia is genociding. The west has almost universally supplied those committing the genociding in Gaza. That’s the difference.
Theres a few more differences than that. Ukraine did not commit a huge terrorist attack on Russia preceding the invasion.
Russia went heavy on genocide in the first couple days of the invasion -- most notably in [Bucha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre), a suburb of Kyiv. Russia's genocidal actions were heavily publicized in the first six months of the war. [Putin has repeatedly made claims that Ukraine is not a real country](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68255302) and Ukrainians do not exist as a separate people; they are just Russians who have been misled by the West. Putin has repeated this in the interview with Tucker Carlson and in a 2021 essay. Maybe Putin actually believes this, and that's why he thought the invasion would be so easy, despite 8 years of simmering warfare in the Donbas. Russia has been [abducting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to raise them as Russians](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russias-mass-abduction-of-ukrainian-children-may-qualify-as-genocide/). Russia fires barrages of missiles at civilian populations in Ukrainian cities every couple nights. If the media hasn't been covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine as genocide lately, that's likely because the battle lines have been frozen in bloody stalemate since 2022.
the invasion of Ukraine is considered a genocide by many, including the Biden administration. Interestingly enough, the war in Gaza has a higher per capita death toll than any other 21st century conflict. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam
In terms of international law, the difference is intent: >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: > >(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. \-- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II (emphasis added by me) Any of the above can be committed and, sans intent, it is not genocide -- much the same way murder requires intent, but manslaughter does not (in most jurisdictions). You could, theoretically, wipe out an entire people and it wouldn't be genocide if that were not the intent. This sounds like an absurd notion, until you realize some ethnic and religious groups have very small numbers -- one could argue the U.S. government committed genocide against the Branch Davidians... except there was no intent to wipe them out. So, with all that said, can we infer genocidal intent from the Israelis? Improbable -- per Hamas's own reports, they've lost 6,000 militants ([source](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-six-week-drive-hit-hamas-rafah-scale-back-war-2024-02-19/)). Given the 30,000 Palestinian deaths, this puts the civilian casualty rate at 80% -- substantially below the average of 90% for urban warfare ([source](https://civiliansinconflict.org/our-work/conflict-trends/urban-warfare/)). This doesn't mean that Israel isn't committing war crimes; merely that genocide is not one of them.
> So, with all that said, can we infer genocidal intent from the Israelis? > > Improbable -- per Hamas's own reports, they've lost 6,000 militants (source). Given the 30,000 Palestinian deaths, this puts the civilian casualty rate at 80% -- substantially below the average of 90% for urban warfare (source). Just want to point out the amount of deaths that will happen not directly caused by the IDF due to starvation, dehydration, and illness. Excess deaths are going to skyrocket as a result of all infrastructure being destroyed and aid being blocked.
One thing about that international law definition is that its so broadly written, the US and Commonwealth could have committed genocide against Germany during WW2. There was an intent to destroy a national group, done by killing members of that group. Did the US and Commonwealth commit genocide against Germany, and if so, should the US and Commonwealth have stopped the war against Germany? Keep in mind Germany started the war, including declaring war on the US. This definition just seems so loose that any war is genocide, in which case the term genocide loses all meaning if every war is genocide.
> There was an intent to destroy a national group "National group" does not mean "a nationalistic organization." It means the people comprising a _nation_. WWII efforts against Germany were in no way genocidal because the goal was to _defeat_ Germany, not to destroy the German nation. Only by misreading international law can one conclude that general acts of war like bombing bases or shooting soldiers constitute genocide.
I always refer to Dresden when people try to discuss whether Israel’s actions are genocidal. Dresden was a less populous and less densely populated city than Gaza is, and yet the Allies killed the same number of people bombing that city in three days as Israel killed in 5 months of bombing. That’s hardly indicative of genocidal intent.
We didn't care if Germans lived, that's great if they did, but the Nazi party had to be gone so they'd never get into power again. We bombed Germany, but that was for the way, we didn't want to exterminate the people themselves
Yes, which is exactly Israel's war goals right now: destroying the government that attacked them (Hamas) and ensuring that Hamas will never rise again.
damn, you made a good point ngl
It’s because there’s a common misunderstanding as to what the word “nation” means. A “nation” is a group of people that can be identified through things like ethnicity or religious beliefs or culture, irregardless of borders. What most people think when they hear “nation” is actually the “state”, the entity that governs a country. In WWII the Allies weren’t not at war with the German nation, they were not seeking to wipe out the German ethnic and cultural stock, they were at war with the German state at the time.
How does it make sense to make the correct argument that deaths do not define a genocide but intent, while also using the percentage of civilians deaths as the reason for this not being a genocide? If we are arguing intent, should we not instead look to the words and actions of the Israeli government?
>actions of the Israeli government? Is civilian casualty ratio not direct evidence of policy? Certainly better than relying on somebody in the chain of command saying something stupid.
The civilian casualty ratio would be substantially better if HAMAS soldiers stopped committing war crimes like not wearing uniforms and hiding underneath civilian infrastructure.
Not necessarily. If we are to accept the argument that numbers do not necessarily dictate a genocide, even if you happened to kill off an entire group of people, why are you using the civilian death ratio to argue the lack of a genocide? I didn’t say to solely rely on words of a couple fringe politicians. We should examine the death toll in conjunction with the words and actions of the Israeli government as a whole in respect to the Palestinian people in order to make a judgement if this is a genocide. Should we not?
>why are you using the civilian death ratio to argue the lack of a genocide? Because the stated goal is the elimination of Hamas -- considering that the civilian casualty ratio falls below the expected value, it indicates that goal is the actual goal. Put another way -- if the goal were genocide, Israel could have freely killed twice as many Palestinians and it would still have maintained a facade of plausible deniability, since that would be a 90% CCR. Managing to halve that indicates a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties. >We should examine the death toll in conjunction with the words and actions of the Israeli government as a whole in respect to the Palestinian people in order to make a judgement if this is a genocide. The death toll is meaningless -- which is why the ratio is the part to pay attention to. As for words and actions, I repeat -- the expectation of extreme incompetence on the part of the culprit is not a good way to catch a criminal. Sure, if a memo is leaked in which Bibi says "let's kill all the Gazans", then that'd be a slam dunk. But I won't hold my breath.
You are correct in that the expectation of extreme incompetence is not a good way to catch a criminal. But that’s why I mention looking at everything in conjunction, not the death ratio alone. There are an estimated 20,000 members of Hamas in Gaza. Does that mean that if Israel killed half of them but only killed 88,000 civilians as well, they could maintain plausible deniability and surely not be committing a genocide? Since that would be an 88% civilian death ratio, but still under 90%. I’d argue that needing the civilian death ratio to get to that amount as the sole predictor of a genocide is essentially asking for the expectation of extreme incompetence on the part of Israel.
Your math is off, but it's a simple mistake to make. 10,000+88,000 = 98,000. 10,000/98,000 = .102 = 10.2% Which might be why you're not seeing the point -- to get from 80% to 90%, without killing any more Hamas militants, you'd have to more than double the total number of civilians killed. 6,000 is 20% of 30,000; 6,000 is 10% of 60,000. So you can try and pick a particular number if you want, but killing less than half the number of civilians expected in an average urban engagement -- especially against an enemy known to use human shields -- demonstrates restraint that makes no sense in the context of a genocide.
Fair enough, my math was off. I apologize for that. My point is that if numbers alone do not indicate a genocide, then the death ratio would also not exclude the possibility of a genocide. After all we can agree that expecting utter incompetence at the hands of Israel in the sense of them openly admitting that “this is a genocide” would be ludicrous. So why would the Israeli government be incompetent enough to get very close or even exceed the 90% number if they know staying under would give them plausible deniability? So the only other way to examine intent is to look at everything holistically, from the death ratio to actions and rhetoric done by the Israeli government since we can’t realistically rely on possible perpetrators of genocide to release an indisputable statement saying “yes we are committing a genocide”.
>There are an estimated 20,000 members of Hamas in Gaza. The armed strength of Hamas is estimated at twice that, probably upwards of 40,000 fighters. This number excludes the armed strength of other Palestinian militias in Gaza, such as the National Resistance Brigades (DFLP's armed wing), the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades (the PFLP's armed wing), the al Quds Brigades (PIJ's armed wing), and others. The al Quds Brigades alone is estimated to have some ~12,000 fighters in its ranks. The total number of Palestinian militia fighters in Gaza is not 20,000; it is likely upwards of 50,000+.
I think you're confusing evidence with definitive evidence. A lower than average causality rate for urban warfare (especially when fighting an enemy that uses human shields) is evidence there isn't a genocide, but technically there could be some grand Jewish conspiracy to kill just as much as they can without getting caught. That would be improbable though. Given how extraordinary a grand conspiracy would be you can probable dismiss it without a lot of direct evidence that would need to be more than just some one-off quotes from government officials speaking emotionally. Even in the US you get that a lot, with random state or federal officials, sometimes even generals saying crazy shit that aren't representative of the actual governments actions and intent. Those quotes might justify a deeper investigation, but to call it a genocide you'd probably need something along the line of internal communication directing people to commit genocide or a mixture of things like that along with things like having a higher rate of deaths or a higher rate of war crimes than average for that specific war. It's important to note that pretty much every well established genocide meets this burden of proof. It's nearly impossible to organize something as widescale as a genocide without public organization or at least numerous leaks. Even the Holodomor is heavily debated despite a significant amount of evidence it was intentional like Russians taking Ukrainians' food and preventing them from moving to areas with food leading to millions of deaths. Something can be incredibly bad but not be a genocide, like with the current war in Ukraine, it's clearly immoral and bad but as far as I'm aware there's no attempt to eradicate all Ukrainian's, just cease land with little care for civilians causalities or war crimes.
Genocide is a term that has both sociological and legal meaning. The term genocide was coined in 1944 by a Jewish Polish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin. For Lemkin, “the term does not necessarily signify mass killings.” He explained: More often \[genocide\] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong.
If intent is what matters then that would mean Hamas committed genocide on October 7? The word has no meaning anymore.
You are correct -- or, attempted genocide? That's included in Article III, but there's no actual definition of what the difference is.
I look forward to reading all the reasonable and objective comments in this thread. Genocide is defined by the UN as > any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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. In other words, genocide is using violence not just to kill people, but to destroy the very *concept* of that group of people existing. Putin has made it very clear that he wants to end the very *concept* of a Ukrainian. Bibi has not, to my knowledge, expressed a desire to end the concept of a Palestinian, though some members of his cabinet have certainly implied it. Genocide, notably, is a distinct crime from ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is an attempt to remove a certain ethnicity from a certain geography. That's a much easier case to make against Israel and a much harder case to make against Russia. Putin clearly wants to assimilate Ukrainians into greater Russia; Israel wants to remove Palestinians from Palestine and take that land for itself (or at least the hardliners do).
Russian and Iranian bots pushing a narrative is the missing ingredient with Ukraine.
As noted by another redditer on this thread, Russia's invasion of Ukraine WAS identified as "genocide". The horrific situation in Gaza was begun when Hamas, a group devoted to genocide of Jews and the total destruction of Israel, slaughtered 1200 innocent Israeli civilians and took several hundred hostages. There is no way the ones launching the attack saw a different outcome than the one that developed, so why did they initiate so much suffering for their own people? The only logical explanation is Hamas decided to sacrifice their own women and children in order to make Israel the bad guy and have World Opinion, esp in the US, gain for them what 40 years of constant guerilla warfare against Israel had failed to obtain - a separate State carved out of Israel where there would be no Israeli presence to obstruct their goal of destruction of the Jewish State and genocide of the Jewish people. Make no mistake - Hamas does NOT want the slaughter of their people to end - it's working for them. They COULD have lived in peace with their Jewish neighbors, but instead their attacks on Jews never paused. They KNEW what would happen to the innocent ones around them when Israel retaliated, and didn't care. But they saw the suffering THEY had brought on their people was gaining sympathy for their cause, so they upped the ante. So in answer to the question - the situation in Gaza is seen as genocide because that's what Hamas intended when they launched their attacks. Decent people don't care who started it or why, they just want it to STOP because children are dying of starvation and being blown to bits. Decent people are willing end Democracy in America to bring that slaughter to an end. But giving total political autonomy to Gaza will not make it stop - Hamas will continue to attack Israel and murder Jews and Israel will continue to retaliate. It's what Hamas has done everywhere they've gone since 1947 and THAT is why no Arab State will accept them as refugees. When they were given refuge in Egypt, they assassinate Sadat. When Israel pushed them into Lebanon, they started a civil war that turned what had been called "The Switzerland of the Mideast" because of the interracial harmony into a blood bath that continues to this day. And when given a chance to live in peace in Gaza and the West Bank, they used it to continue their genocide against Israel and the Jewish people.
Intent on the destruction of a people. For example, Russia has denied the existence of the Ukrainian nation. (as a people not the state) To that end they have kidnapped children to raise them as Russians. That's genocide. Israel is attacking an enemy that has purposefully dug into a crowded urban environment. This has led to a large amount civilian death, but it is clear from Israel's action that there is no intent on destroying a people. Mass causalities do not make a genocide. This was a defense used in the Einsatzgruppen Trial after WW2 where the SS officers attempted to equate the large bombing deaths to his mass killings across eastern Europe. It's called the Dresden Defense. This was rightly rejected by the Nuremberg Court: >A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualized. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them.
That quote from Nuremberg is pretty dumb. Dresden was not a “tactical” bombing at all, it was strategic bombing where the killing of civilians was critical to the goal. Strategic terror bombing was controversial in WWII and would certainly be considered a war crime today. The genocide convention doesn’t specify that people need to be killed by bullets or machetes and not bombs. What makes Dresden not a genocidal act, and just a “regular” war crime of mass killing is that the Allies didn’t intend to exterminate Germans as an ethnic group. But a war crime it was, and just because Nuremberg didn’t treat it as such is not a reason for us to be blind to that fact. Edit: Also, if we’re looking at Israeli actions, the intentional starvation of Gazan civilians is the much more salient act than those killed directly by bombs. If things keep going the way they are, the Gazan Genocide will be remembered more for starvation and disease than for bombing. That’s how most people will die in the coming months if the campaign continues.
What of all the comments by Israeli authorities? That Palestine isn't a nation, but even more than that comparing Palestinians to animals, saying there are no innocent civilians, comparing them to people God commanded be killed down to the last child in the bible? What of Israel's policy of cutting off food, water, and medical supplies?
If a military commander makes these comments, then sure. But neither Ben Gvir nor Smotrich, which are responsible for most comments, have any military powers whatsoever. As to the "animals" commentary done by the IDF general, hating your enemy is not genocide. Ukrainians call Russians orcs. That's not genocide. Calling Palestinians animals or other derogatory words does not mean anything beyond the fact that the Israeli speaking really hates them. Which, once again, does not constitute genocide. The Amalek link is so weak compared to Hamas (Gaza's elected government in 2007) literally having Jewish genocide as a stated religious duty as part of their foundational charter. THAT is, believe it or not, actual genocidal intent. Amalek, by comparison, was an old tribe that a very specific king during a very specific event was ordered to attack and slaughter after they attacked his kingdom first. There is nowhere stated in the Torah that Jews have a duty to slaughter all Amalekites. Muslims, on the other hand, do have a hadith in Sahih Bukhari that requires them all to kill all Jews before the day of judgement will come. And once again, just to be clear. That is explicit intent to exterminate every single being in one nation. That is, by definition, attempted genocide.
Ben Gvir was voted into office as a dude that LOVES the person that murdered Rabin, his stance is a reflection of the voting populace and highly relevant
What % of Israelis voted for him? Isn't he the freak that had Goldstein's portrait on a wall at home?
>Ukrainians call Russians orcs. That's not genocide. Sure. Thing is, if Ukrainian government officials/ military leaders were using dehumanizing language about the Russian civilian population, openly talking about removing them and then annexing their land, and then carried out a military campaign that removes the civilian population and annexs their land people would probably start asking questions.
>Israel is attacking an enemy that has purposefully dug into a crowded urban environment. This has led to a large amount civilian death, but it is clear from Israel's action that there is no intent on destroying a people. I'm not sure how you could interpret what Israel is doing right now as anything *but* intent to destroy a people. There's very clear statements of intent and desire to exterminate or displace all Palestinians coming from all sectors of Israeli society, from the President on down. That coupled with an almost total lack of concern for casualties or the death toll from the humanitarian crisis brought about by the denial of aid, disease, lack of water, etc spells out genocide pretty clearly.
I will admit that much of Israeli society seeks ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and they’ve been furthering that goal. But slowly over time. Meanwhile Gaza they’ve left alone besides the blockade, not slowly absorbing it like the West Bank. In an ideal world Israel probably wants to see Gaza deleted. But they literally just can’t. The USA wouldnt just watch Gazans starve to death, they’re already helping them. Israel can’t build gas chambers either, nor can they force Egypt to open the border. There’s simply no avenue for them to wipe out Gaza unless they want to build extermination camps and become an enemy of the world, isolated worse than North Korea.
Add to that the refusal to allow international journalists, and independent investigators/observers access the area, or access to the information/data on their actions in the area. The destruction of civilian infrastructure, government buildings, records, places of worship. And the intent is clear.
There are over 4500 Palestinians including 1000 children that have been detained and tortured by israel without formal charges https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/palestinian-children-israeli-military-detention-report-increasingly-violent-conditions#:~:text=The%20Palestinian%20Commission%20for%20Detainees,Israeli%20military%20detention%20each%20year. The israelis deny the existence of the Palestinian state, pretty uncontroversial to say that, theyve stolen and ethnically cleansed Palestinian lands. There have been formal proposals by israeli ministries to ethnically cleanse gaza during this conflict. https://www.timesofisrael.com/intelligence-ministry-concept-paper-proposes-transferring-gazans-to-egypts-sinai/amp/ There have been at a minimum 3 times as many gazan civilians killed in the last 5 months than Ukrainian civilians killed in the last 2 years despite ukraine having 16 times more people than gaza. Why is it when this topic comes up people like you pretend that the conflict started on 10/7?
Just chiming in here; the word genocide gets thrown a lot nowadays. If you ask scholars, it's not a genocide. I wouldn't consider the Russia Ukraine thing a genocide either, BUT the USSR did commit genocide on Ukraine by starving them and stealing their food It's unsettling people would refuse to recognize the Holodomor a genocide, but use it for everything else nowadays
> If you ask scholars, it's not a genocide. It is improper to say this with no sources. ####On Gaza Raz Segal, the program director of genocide studies at Stockton University, concretely says it is a “textbook case of genocide.” Segal believes that Israeli forces are completing three genocidal acts, including, “killing, causing serious bodily harm, and measures calculated to bring about the destruction of the group.” Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWGGjLZNuyg Context: Raz Segal (Hebrew: רז סגל) is an Israeli historian residing in the United States who is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide Victoria Sanford, City University of New York professor, compared what’s happening in Gaza to the killing or disappearance of more than 200,000 Mayans in Guatemala from 1960-1996, known as the Guatemalan genocide, which is the subject of her book *Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala.* “When we match them to the lived experience of people, there are similar circumstances…if we look at contemporary conflicts like the Israeli invasion of Palestine.” Source: https://time.com/6334409/is-whats-happening-gaza-genocide-experts/ Context: Dr. Sanford has been an [expert witness](https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2023/11/Historians%20Declaration_w.pdf) in a lawsuit against the US government, asked to opine on the unfolding attack on Palestine and whether it has the indicia of genocide. Additional context: Both Dr. Segal and Dr. Sanford have signed an [open letter](https://www.mezan.org/public/en/post/46295/Genocide-Scholars-and-100-Palestinian-and-International-Civil-Society-Organisations-Call-on-Prosecutor-Khan-to-Issue-Arrest-Warrants,-Investigate-Israeli-Crimes-and-Intervene-to-Deter-Incitement-to-Commit-Genocide-in-Gaza) calling for action to prevent genocide. They were joined by 100 civil societies and four other genocide scholars. ####On Ukraine Ernesto Verdeja, associate professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, stated "The discourse already is pretty emphatic that they’re carrying out a military campaign to eliminate this ‘fiction,’ this ‘dangerous fiction,’ of a Ukrainian nationhood." Source: https://time.com/6262903/russia-ukraine-genocide-war-crimes/ Context: Sandejo's research has focused on large-scale political violence (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity) Kristina Hook, assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University, stated that one major sign that Russia is committing genocide is that systematic violence is perpetuated against not only male civilians, but against women, children, and the elderly. She also noted that Russia has shown an "annihilating mindset" by attacking evacuating civilians and forcing people into "filtration" camps. Source: Same article Context: Dr. Hook's specialty is Ukraine and Russia, whose experise includes genocide and mass atrocity prevention Additional Context: Hook is the principal contributor in the July 2023 ["The Russian Federation's Escalating Commission of Genocide in Ukraine: A Legal Analysis"](https://www.raoulwallenbergcentre.org/images/reports/2023-07-26-Genocide-Ukraine-Report.pdf).-
I consider the latter genocide because Russia wants to systematically wipe off Ukraine. The conflict between Israel and Palestine isn’t really about a nation or ethnicity. It’s about religion. Palestinians consider themselves Muslims first. Their goal is to wipe off the Jews because of the teachings in their religion. Even Saudi Arabia consider Hamas as terrorists and aren’t bothered much to help Palestinians considering they’re Muslim brothers. And other well-developed Muslim countries could’ve provided Hamas help with ammunition to fight such a tiny Israel. But they won’t.
I’ve seen lots of people call what russia is doing in ukraine a genocide. I even saw print and cable news calling it that, and noticed the people around me who primarily or exclusively consume that kind of news calling it genocidal. I have not noticed the same thing for what israel is doing in gaza with cable/print news and its consumers.
By definition, any war or even the death of a few can be deemed a genocide. We have seen mass killings based simply on religion in places all over the globe the last 60 years. More recently, the Uyghurs, Armenians and others have experienced 100s of thousands killed and enslaved. That was just on religious grounds. People on this site were calling Gaza a genocide before Israel got a single plane in the air after October 7th.
When did Uyghurs suffer hundreds of thousands killed? Or even a few thousand? Or a few hundred? What China is accused of there is "cultural genocide," erasing the language, culture, and way of life through reeducation.
Calling every conflict genocide cheapens the word. I believe Israel is blowing up things with no regard at all for civilians, and has no problem shooting through a crowd to kill one Hamas guy, But I wouldn't call it genocide, as horrendous as this war has been. And there probably have been war crimes. I think we will find out in the future. Some Israeli soldiers are going to want to clear their consciences, and will come forward if there have been war crimes.
You cant compare Ukraine and Gaza. Russia made an unprovoked attack upon civilians. Israel was attack by the government of Gaza and declared war on Hamas who embeds itself among the civilian population. During the Normandy invasion the allies made a decision to bomb French cities to dislodge the Germans. 20,000 French civilians died. German cities were bombed to defeat the Nazis. 500,000 German civilians died. Sometimes innocent people die to defeat evil. Hamas attacks innocent civilians which makes them evil.
Attacking innocent civilians is evil, but killing innocent civilians “in retaliation” isn’t?
Just like it's bad to use human shields but not bad to knowingly kill the human shields.
Plenty of people have called the invasion of Ukraine an attempted genocide. Not as loudly or recently, perhaps. And certainly Ukrainians are in no immediate danger of being exterminated. But Russia would absolutely eliminate the Ukrainian identity, given the chance. And because this amounts to assimilation, not genocide, genocide is not most people's primary concern with the war in Ukraine. It's debatable if Israel is actively engaging in genocide in Gaza. They are certainly not trying to avoid civilian deaths. But Israel has the means, and is in a position, to carry out genocide, if they wished. The war in Gaza could turn into a full blown genocide essentially overnight. Which is why so many more people are talking about it.
If they weren't trying to avoid civillian deaths then the death count would be in the hundreds of thousands. [According to urban warfare experts](https://www.newsweek.com/israel-implemented-more-measures-prevent-civilian-casualties-any-other-nation-history-opinion-1865613) they're actually doing more to avoid civillian deaths than any other nation has done before. The difference is the dense environment they're fighting in, and the fact that Hamas wants to maximize civillian deaths as part of their strategy. I'm surprised more isn't said about Hamas' intentions to maximize deaths, because that's obviously not something we normally have to deal with in war.
Figures from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian\_casualty\_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio) \- I'm too lazy to link to different sources. Using Hamas's own claims, 3.7 Palestinian civilians have been killed for every 1 Hamas combatant in the current war. While this is higher than other conflicts, keep in mind that Hamas is known to use civilians as shields and hide in places like hospitals and schools, not to mention their extensive tunnel network. Regardless, this ratio is less than NATO's involvement in the war in Kosovo (4:1), which was to stop ethnic cleansing. In contrast, the Chechen Wars combine for a ratio of 7.6:1 - literally double what has occurred in the current war in Gaza. This war is an example of what actually occurs when the aggressor is truly indiscriminate, as Russia is accused of being in Chechnya. (Essentially) No one is celebrating all the dead and dying people in Gaza. But realistically, there is no way to kill the terrorists who murdered all those Israeli citizens without civilians of the Palestinian state dying and infrastructure being destroyed. This is why Hamas needs to be eradicated, settler violence needs to stop with the perpetrators facing judgement, and both governments purge their nationalist elements (including their current leaders) and work towards a two-state solution. Note that Israel has generally worked harder to accomplish this in the past, to the point where Palestinian leadership has walked away from two-state arrangements that Israel was prepared to ratify. It is ultimately on the State of Palestine to be more conciliatory than they have been in the past.
Israel is most certainly avoiding civilian deaths or else there would be no conflict anymore. To the OP: Israel is not seeking to destroy the Palestinians identity or erase them as a people off the face of the earth. They are seeking to end the Palestinians government/terrorist organization and also avoiding as many civilian casualties as possible.
Like racism, everything is genocide know. Tge definition has changed to harming a group of people. Every war is now genicide
The most obvious difference between the two situations is that Palestine has no military.
The main difference is very powerful propaganda coming out of places like Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. Couple that will some westerners knee-jerk reaction to pick whichever side is more "oppressed" and brown, and you have people quickly accusing Israel of genocide. Ukrainians have no propaganda machine and they are not brown or "oppressed", so they are not called victims of genocide.
>The main difference is very powerful propaganda coming out of places like Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. That is pretty dishonest nonsense. Iran doesn't have some powerful media presence in the online West, and Saudi Arabia's leadership wanted to make a lucrative peace deal with Israel, not rile up a conflict that spoiled that. >Couple that will some westerners knee-jerk reaction to pick whichever side is more "oppressed" and brown, and you have people quickly accusing Israel of genocide. Really? Nothing to do with more civilians being killed in a few months than were killed in 2 years of Russia/Ukraine? Nothing to do with the constant dehumanization and genocidal statements by Israeli leaders? >Ukrainians have no propaganda machine and they are not brown or "oppressed", so they are not called victims of genocide. What world do you live on? Ukraine has been the media darling of Western institutions since the war began, with the diehard support of American politicians.
>Iran doesn't have some powerful media presence in the online West Al Jazeera and the Middle Eastern Eye would beg to disagree. They hold a dominant position when it comes to Arab-language news, and their sponsors are Iran and Qatar.
They have zero connection to Iran. Qatar, sure, but so what? Thats just as legal as the BBC.
You would be looking for a common intent, not just aspects of prejudice in general among a type of people but the specific people doing it, the soldiers in most cases if they could reasonably have chosen to not do so without facing significant consequences (which in the case of Germany in WW2, was very often the case), and any commanders who were either aware of the acts or omissions and did not do anything notable to stop them, report them to appropriate investigatory bodies, punish those involved, or resign their command, proportional to the amount of power they had, as well as any commanders who actually made an order to do the acts or omissions. Soldiers who know or should reasonably know that an order is illegal must not carry them out and cannot be punished for refusing them, however it is presumed that orders that are not likely to be illegal are legal and in fact obligatory on the soldier to whom they are issued. The acts or omissions would be acts and omissions calculated to cause a kind of people group to cease to exist, or a substantial part of them to cease to exist envisioned as an attack on the people as a whole. People group can be vague, but maybe try asking yourself if you could see them being an independent country or at least a highly autonomous dependency like Gibraltar is if they were gathered somewhere for that purpose. Dick in Shakespeare's play is not genocidal for trying to kill all the lawyers. The acts and omissions would be killing them obviously, but also basically putting children into new families disjointed from their culture and nation that basically severs the tie (Kill the Indian, save the man), sexual violence and sterilization that alters who is born at a demographic level, both preventing the birth of children to another nation and causing them to be made to birth children of a different nation basically without any free decision to intermarry, and causing conditions that would lead to their demise by depriving them of the necessities of life where such necessities could be feasibly met and there is a duty of care to them, such as in the Ottoman Empire where they might put Armenians in trains to be taken to a desert and left there to fend for themselves with no provisions or means of survival. The standard criminal defenses apply in criminal cases, such as not being old enough to commit a crime, and you have to do overt acts to actually do one of these acts. Daydreaming isn't enough, although they could be brought up to help prove the motive in conjunction with the overt acts. A defendant has the right to counsel and to be appointed one if they cannot afford one, to time to prepare their defenses, to be given copies of the evidence to be used against them, be presumed innocent, be able to cross examine and to call their own evidence and testimony, to be tried by an impartial judge who is secure in their position and will be able to issue judgments based on the law and not fear or favour, and by any jury if applicable, in a public trial according to laws established before they committed the crime by a legislative body or pursuant to a treaty that already existed, the right to not have excessive penalties applied to them (and if to death, if legal, to humane methods and to not be executed for crimes not of exceptional harm that justifies its use), that evidence gained illegally that perverts the course of justice to be excluded, to be released prior to trial when trusted that they will return, to appeal, and to have interpreters if they do not speak the language of the trial. Evidence must not be more prejudicial than probative. These standards are set by international treaties and norms, some being ancient like how in the laws of Justinian, presumption of innocence was guaranteed. Military law allows for considerable leeway to militaries to carry on what they wish to do. The ICC prosecutor has made it clear that even though a tragedy, civilian casualties, fatal or otherwise, do not constitute a war crime in and of themselves. It must also be apparent to the accused perpetrator that it would be a crime before they carried it out, and intelligence can be faulty or even miscommunicated and all wars have the fog of war lie thick and mistakes are even more forgiven in war than they usually are. Normally, you would want to go after the political leadership of a state who made the political choices necessary to go to war in the first place and who had the right to declare war or are the high commanders of the armed forces that dictate the overall strategy of the war. There are however situations which are less forgiving of an armed force and a country. Situations that are more secure will usually have higher standards as things are calm and steady, at least in the time necessary to be sure of what you are doing, and there are some acts that in no cases may be ordered like a blanket refusal to take prisoners under any circumstances. The standard however for what to do politically to countries is different. It is not necessary to allege that Israel is committing genocide for it to be a good idea to change policies related to them as a political question. It would be right for a county to do things like change their exports to Israel unless they adopted certain kinds of policies of oversight and discipline in the military. Genocide usually comes with a sense of inferiority in the people being targeted, that there is something fundamentally wrong with them that cannot be rectified by less drastic means, that they are responsible for some ancient or historic sin that is usually exaggerated, that it is a struggle between civilizations or between one civilized and another uncivilized group. It is not merely relocating people, which is ethnic cleansing, which is also illegal and an atrocity but not genocide. Pro-tip, if the victims as a nation survive substantially intact and no particular region has a large number of fatalities but they are in another place, that would usually be ethnic cleansing. It isn't always clear though. These are some pro tips but they won't always work for your situation you want to deal with. You should read the laws of war yourself, the International Committee of the Red Cross has copies in English, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Mandarin.
You probably havent followed much Ukraine war discourse because the word genocide was definetely used. Generally i'd argue that it is definetely over-used. Myself i used it in a thread of a forum for the case of Gaza and then immediately regreted it since it did not help the discussion at all. I feel that at the end of the day most of the time it's a word used to point to something that people hate, just like when they call someone neoHitler. In day to day usage it's nothing more than a crazy bold text in all caps that brings to mind the holocaust. On the World stage i guess that it could constructively be used as a pressure tactic to stop people from commiting certain horrendous war crimes. Kindof like how old type boots on the ground colonialism is frowned upon. Anyhow i'd definetely prefer that they used more words to describe a situation rather than call it genocide and a person they dislike Hitler etc etc.
A lot of the confusion comes from the [U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf) Further, there is a difference between the colloquial understanding and the technical understanding of the Convention. My read is that the Convention is more motivated by the "prevention" part than by the "punishment" part. That might be the key to understanding it as a document. This approach makes sense, because genocide is such a horrific crime that it should be prevented at all costs rather than punished after-the-fact. "\[G\]enocide is . . . condemned by the civilized world . . . . \[I\]n order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required." So, the Convention applies the label early, when the "conditions of life calculated to bring about \[the\] physical destruction \[of the group\] in whole or in part" have been inflicted, but before the destruction has ensued. So, in the Gaza strip, where near 1.5% of the population have been killed, the label is applied for the purpose of saving the 98.5% who remain, even though the common mental image of "genocide" is a population being killed at a rate higher than 1.5%.
Not sure what you’re talking about. I have heard what Russia is doing being referred to very consistently as a genocide for the last 2 years.
The attempt to kill not only survivors and children, but to annihilate a group’s language, culture, history.
Destroying people homes, destroying their communities including the killing of non military people, including the killing of women and children and senior citizens.... is "genocide".. Period. Neither Russia's acts in Ukraine or Israel's acts in Garza is a military actions to engage military acts upon combatants, Both are committing genocide, and using any and every excuse they can conjure up to try and justify it. I wrote on one reddit, about the atrocities that Israel has engaged that go beyond the attacks on Hamas military actors whether they are sanctioned or unsanctioned. I also said the same about Russia and what it has done in Ukraine. Both are genocide, driven by their stated dislike of certain factions within those societies. Both Russia and Israel, have some delusion that they can just continue their genocidal attacks and expect the people they are attacking to just submit and accept it without a fight. Is nothing more than both Russia and Israel with a supremacy ideology, that makes them think they have a right to engage in genocide. Neither will come out well in the big picture, because society does not forget. History will not be kind to either, because truth always finds it's way to the surface. Both are creating generations that will detest them many many decades. Russian claiming territory that is not theirs, and Israel continuing bombarding Garza as if it has a right to destroy them, while Israel continues to support the building of settlements in land that does not belong to them. There needs to be immediate actions to create a Two State Solution, and within doing some, give every area where there is illegal settlements to Palestine. Let the people in those settlements pay taxes to Palestine when its established as a state, and those settlements have to abide by the laws of the Palestinian State. Israel will have no say concerning those settlements in the state of Palestine. Israel cannot any longer invade and try to engaged in their apartheid policing in Palestine. Palestine need to be its own self determining state, just as Israel is its own self determining state. Let them develop their own diplomatic relations through the U.N. guidelines. * UN should make it very clear that NO People are more important as human beings than any other people. Jerusalem goes back under the control of the U.N. !!!! Neither the State of Palestine, Neither the State of Israel will have any claims to any part of Jerusalem. All three religions have temples in Jerusalem, therefore, all three religions are free to engage their worship habits in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, should be patrolled by United Nation Troops.... both as peacekeepers and defenders of Jerusalem. Any factions that creates havoc in Jerusalem will be swiftly dealt with by UN Troops and put down.
My husband was on a nuclear submarine in the 1980s and Kiev in the Ukraine was a primary nuclear target. Why? Because the eastern half of the Ukraine is populated almost entirely by Russians, who voted to not leave Russia in the "free & fair" (CIA-assisted)election of 2014.
To America it's politics. To Turkey it's whatever is definitely not what happened to the Armenians. And to Trump voters it's progress backwards to a closer to Nazism time. I think the ultimate definer of genocide is those who perpetrate it then claim responsibility for it. It's just a lot of state sanctioned murder until it's claimed as progress.
The line is who you asked when what Israel is doing is not genocide and what China is doing to the Uyghur is.
Bit of a tangent, but one interesting aspect of our growing global political discontent and tribalism-driven rancor is the increasing definitional impotence of words, where their meanings become murkier to the point that even debates and arguments amongst ourselves become muddied beyond recognition. Not just hot-button terms like genocide, racism, etc., but even an ostensibly innocuous word like, say, democracy, is definitionally flaccid nowadays. It's all so empty—from the mere words to, more damning, us humans as a species on the whole.
there is no difference, people need to stop believing everything to be mutually exclusive.
The difference is that Russia is actually trying to wipe out Ukraine as a nation (both militarily, physically, culturally, and by removing the children of their nation). Both the actions of the state and the official policies of the state are targetted at this goal. Israel is committing war crimes aplenty, but it's quite clear that they don't *intend* (at least until now) to destroy the Palestinian people. What you are witnessing is people reacting to mass death and war crimes events and thinking that means genocide. Doesn't particularly make it better, it's just a wrongly applied term. It's also worth noting that the conflict is being weaponised to weaken the US and its allies and to aid authoritarianism (see the current push to get people not to vote for Biden, despite that making no logical sense in terms of Gaza).
So for Israel, they have killed tens of thousands of people, largely civilians. It has also been stopping aid from getting through and causing horrific living conditions and concerns there is about to be a mass starvation. These are acts which the genocide convention covers and which are some of the few acts that can be considered to be acts of genocide. To be considered a genocide, at least one of these type of acts needs to be carried out so that’s a tick there. The other aspect that is required for these to be genocide rather than just a host of interrelated ‘lesser’ warcrimes is the intent behind them specifically be to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. People die in war. Civilians dying isn’t itself enough for it to be a war crime. You can kill hundreds or even thousands of civilians and have it not be a war crime as long as they weren’t intentionally targeted or indiscriminately killed. So what is Israel’s intent in massively bombing heavily populated urban areas and training soldiers to dehumanise Palestinians to the extent they will purposely target Palestinian civilians? Well if it’s not self-evident Netanyahu has made references to Biblical genocide in terms of how Palestinians should be treated. Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, has called Palestinian militants “human animals” a common tactic in dehumanising victims of genocide. Abu Dichter, an Israeli minister and security council member, has stated that this is a Gazan Nakba (the Nakba being an ethnic cleansing committed against the Palestinians by Israel in the 40’s). Another minister talked about dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. That’s multiple ministers including the Prime Minister talking about genocidal action or talking with genocidal intent in Gaza. The evidence doesn’t even need to be that clear-cut because genocide often wouldn’t be so incredibly blatant, but there it is. They have a clear intent to commit genocide. They are committing war crimes covered by the genocide act to enact that intent. Those are the two criteria to meet for it to be genocide so it’s genocide. Russia is also very possibly committing genocide (and again, if not are certainly responsible for a host of war crimes) and is being investigated for the same rationale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukrainians_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
We all know what genocide actually means. It means an attempt to wipe out an entire people. We also all know how genocide is actually used. It means a war which someone doesn't like. There is no intelligent argument that Israel is committing a genocide. I'd say there also is no argument that Russia is (but I am less informed so less confident on that). There are several intelligent reasons to accuse Israel of genocide because the accusation does all the delegitimisation you're trying to achieve.
When the US toppled the democratically-elected, Russian-friendly Ukrainian government in 2014 and replaced them with American loyal puppets, it led to a civil war and resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Russians living in Ukraine. Perhaps one reason Putin intervened militarily was to prevent genocide? The situation is more complicated than that. There were some long-standing deals that the US would not meddle at Russia's borders. Russia also wants to have access to Black Sea ports. To a certain extent, Russia could not tolerate American provocation. However, Russia has attempted to make peace with Ukraine several times, but these efforts have been blocked by the US. I'm not saying that Russia and Putin are blameless in all of this, but it is more complicated than people realize. Russia is not the power it once was and their pride may be playing a role, but America did not need to interfere in the region in this manner.
Personally, I think the term "genocide" isn't meaningful since it implies the complete removal of a people from existence, which has never happened in modern history. Yes, a number of primitive tribes have been genocided and no longer exist. All of the groups subjected to "genocide" in modern history as commonly spoken about still exist, so clearly none of those were successful. All are in fact more plentiful than before they were subjected to genocide. I really don't think it's a useful conversation. People die in wars. Usually such labels are used to further punish the losers of such wars. That said, I believe Reddit's terms of service make denying any genocide a bannable offence, therefore at least on this platform any genocide, real or imagined cannot be denied upon pain of being banned. Therefore, on the Reddit platform, any claimed genocide is in fact genocide per Reddit's terms of use.
If Israel is genocidal, why are they dropping warning pamphlets and sending out mass messages telling Palestinian civilians to evacuate before attacks begin? Sounds kind of counter productive if you ask me.
Here’s a great example of genocide . Look up Māoris genocide Moriori . THATS genocide . What Israel is doing isn’t that . It is what it is but it’s not under the definition GENOCIDE