Comment by wesselbindt
3 days ago
> If genocide was a goal of any of the Israeli leadership, they abjectly failed
This take is incredibly callous. Suppose 8% of everyone you gets killed. This is a shockingly brutal thing to happen to a population. Aside from that you're wrong on a factual level. The "in part" part of the '51 convention is there precisely so people don't say "there's still Jews left so technically the Holocaust wasn't a genocide". The holocaust was a genocide, and this is a genocide (yes, "is", they're still dropping bombs on a population half of which is under 18). There's a reason the relevant cases haven't been thrown out of the ICJ and ICC.
But genocidal people are callous! I'm not being callous towards the people living through this. You don't need to convince me it's horrible.
But put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical evil genocidal person. Assume 8% of Gaza was killed (though this figure is wrong). Having Gaza at it's 2020 population is negligible to them. They were hoping to murder everyone and reclaim their holy land or something and instead (purely from a population standpoint) they're basically just back to the status quo after the truce. Even most Nazis would say they ultimately failed in their genocidal ambitions and they killed two thirds of the Jews in Europe and 90% in Poland.
Second, 8% of Gaza hasn't been killed. By the Gaza health ministry's estimate, about 2% have been killed. Your source arrived at 8% literally by just quadrupling the number without any basis in data from Gaza. This is out of line with all the estimates from Gaza.
> Aside from that you're wrong on a factual level. The "in part" part of the '51 convention is there precisely so...
I'm aware and I didn't say anything factually wrong. Killing just part of a people doesn't legally exempt it from being genocide. But killing part of a people also doesn't imply genocide. Every war has killed part of a people. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars each killed far more people than the Gaza war, but neither is considered genocide.
If Israel were acting like the Nazis, there wouldn't be any Palestinians left in Gaza. They'd all be carpet bombed, shot on sight, or sent to forced labor camps. There's a world of difference between the two.
> If Israel were acting like the Nazis, there wouldn't be any Palestinians left in Gaza.
This is literally the "if the holocaust were a genocide, how come there's still jews" take. Please go and get a grip.
That's not even remotely what anyone is saying. If you're denying there's a difference in quality between what the Nazis did and what Israel did, that's also rather appalling.
To qualify Israel's actions as a genocide, lawyers don't have to show that Israel killed every Palestinian in Gaza, but they will have to prove they intended to. The ICC is not going to rule this a genocide.
As should be obvious, the "in part" wording of "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic group" does not mean killing any part of a ethnic group can be genocide (e.g. killing 7 people of an ethnicity in an airstrike is not a genocide). The part must be an identifiable subgroup. For example, intent to kill all Palestinians in Gaza, rather than all Palestinians everywhere, would qualify as genocidal intent. There has to be intent to physical eradicate an identifiable group. Forcing people to leave is also not genocide (it's an ethnic cleansing). Other war crimes do not qualify as genocide.