Comment by mattmaroon
1 month ago
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.
That definition of genocide is so narrow that it would also exclude the Armenian genocide, since many were allowed to flee.
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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.
The only thing stopping Israel from doing that is international outrage. Israel is entirely dependent on its benefactor states like the US and, while it pushes the limits to the extreme, must at least contend with world opinion.
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You seem to be ignoring the retaliation that would be enacted at a drop of a couple of those bombs.
The fact that I just spent five minutes thinking about it proves that it's not ridiculous at all. The scale is different (so far), but I’m not convinced there’s a qualitative difference.
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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.
The existence of camps where jews and other "undesirables" were kept for long periods of time disproves this entirely. The Nazi's were not trying to speed run the process. They were systematically eliminating people. That's why it's a genocide and not a series of massacres. I would suggest sticking with the definition of genocide instead of coming up with your own convenient version.
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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.
> 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?
maybe because they are trying to act ethically toward a murderous neighbor that is conducting asymmetric warfare and those are the best tools to accomplish that.
or, maybe because they came to the conclusion that the repercussions on the world stage of even more horrific media coming out of Gaza is too steep of a price to pay.
i don't know which, but i do know it is naive to conclude that because they COULD end the war in a day and did not, they are driven by morality and ethical concerns rather than pragmatic ones.
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Expensive for whom? US taxpayers?
because it would be admitting to the world that it has said weapons.
Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.
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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.