Comment by jajuuka
1 month ago
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
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> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket...
Forensic-architecture published a report on that too: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-disi...
> problem is that both sides lie flagrantly
And yet one side is committing genocide.
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
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And the other side just. won’t. stop. attacking.
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
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> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket,
This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!
No. This is about a specific claim. Hamas claimed that Israel killed 500 people in a hospital bombing, and that was indisputably a lie. Videos show that it was a Hamas rocket, not a bomb. Pictures show that the damage was limited to a few burned cars and broken windows and a pothole sized dent in the asphalt. There were no mass casualties and every credible news outlet that initially reported that there were, walked it back when evidence proved otherwise.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1207173798/fake-accounts-old-...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/media/gaza-hospital-coverage-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/10/26/gaz...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/gaza-hospi...\
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The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
It's gonna happen again and again and again until the end of humanity.
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And which country will welcome the 8 million people living there?
The ones featured in their secondary passports.
It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
This is one of the worst pro-Israel arguments; I can't believe people still make it. Israel isn't going to drop a nuke on the "holy land", where they want to start building Jewish settlements, a few dozen miles from Tel Aviv. No matter how much they hate Palestinians, people don't want to live in an irradiated wasteland.
By nuclear-armed I’m pointing out that they’re a well-funded, first class military, not that they’re going to nuke the place. They’re arguably the second strongest military in the world.
They could have achieved genocide very quickly with conventional weapons and boots on the ground too.
>If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
And the retaliation from the rest of the world in those circumstances would be swift and measured in hours, and there would be a smoking pile of rubble in that particular part of the world that would be uninhabitable for centuries.
So instead, Israel is cooking the frog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human...
So by your logic if you slowly exterminate a people its not genocide?
You cannot exterminate a people too slowly because they can (and do) move. Ethnic cleansing can happen over centuries (see the last 500 years of our hemisphere for examples). Israel has let tens of thousands of them out of the country. Nazis did not let injured Jews go to hospitals in other countries.
Which, again, is not dismissing war crimes, or denying that any have occurred. Just pointing out, this is not genocide but ethnic cleansing. Israel has a vocal right wing faction that advocates for ethnic cleansing, and a vocal left wing that is against it.
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Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.
It's a ridiculous argument. The Nazis went through a LOT of effort and resources to gather Jews from all the corners of Europe, and even more effort into exterminating them as fast as they could, within the logistical and economic constraints of fighting a 3 front war.
There's no comparison at all to the ease with which Israel could just drop a couple of bombs on Gaza, had it decided to do so.
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Huh? If the Nazis could have killed all the Jews faster, they would have. They sought to eliminate Jews all throughout Europe. I’ve never heard this argument, but it’s unintelligent and I am not making it.
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“Your honor and members of the jury: my client could have easily committed way worse crimes!”
How is long term ethnic cleansing different from genocide?
Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to remove a people from the area. It can be accomplished by methods other than killing.
Genocide is an attempt to kill them all.
The Venn diagram has a lot of overlap for sure but they are not the same.
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> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
They have remotely guided bulldozers and enough non-nuclear weapons to do the job several times over conventionally too though.
Why does israel use expensive precise munitions wherever possible rather than their stockpiles of much more deadly "dumb" ones?
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Yes, there is a long term effort by the State of Israel to remove Palestinian life from Palestinian land.
The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.
> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.
See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).
Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.