This is a reminder to everyone that we have one rule on beehaw and that you need to follow it or you will catch a ban and if these comments turn into a slug fight we will lock them
If this is Israel trying to ethnic cleanse like the headline, they’re doing an absolutely shit job of it. They haven’t even killed 1% of the population in 5 months.
I really wish people would use the right words to describe the situation.
Palestine is being given arms by Iran and friends to attack Israel, Israel is being given arms by the US and friends to protect itself from Iran and friends.
This is called a proxy war, not a genocide. It sucks thay civilians are caught up in it. However that’s one of the upsides for Iran and friends, and completely intentional, they don’t give a shit about sacrificing Palestinians in their crusade against the western powers.
This war would be over tomorrow if Palestinians had no constant supply of smuggled weapons. They sure as hell can’t support the fight themselves.
For fucks sake, we’re putting a requirement on how many people have to die for something to be considered bad? Using your logic I should ban you permanently from our instance, because a shorter term ban means that I’m doing ‘an absolutely shit job of it’. Luckily for you, I don’t prescribe to your world view and wish to give you a chance to self reflect on the fact that the intent to kill a large number of people is, in itself, bad. Whether you’re able to execute on murdering a large number of folks doesn’t change the evil of the intent.
If Israel is trying to target Hamas, why by their own admission have the majority of the bombs and artillery systems fired been systems that lack the accuracy necessary to target a specific vehicle or even building?
Why does the IDF refuse to send forces into these soposed tunnel networks in order to actually capture Hamas commanders for the intelligence necessary to actually target them?
Why are the refugees constantly being pushed closer and closer to the Egyptian border when that is the ONLY part of Gaza that has ever needed to be secured in order to stop the flow of all Iranian weapons into Gaza?
Why shut off power and water, actions which can only work to strengthen Hamas’s support among the civilian population?
Why limit IDF support and protection to humanitarian aid convoys to such an extreme that even the US has had to resort to air power because it can’t get through Israeli territory?
The definition of genocide does not and has never required that a force try and kill every last person of the targeted population, only that they try and expel or erase them from the population.
Why does the IDF refuse to send forces into these soposed tunnel networks
They’re real, not supposed; but there’s more to the story…
Amid widespread condemnation about Israel’s targeting of the hospital, CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour asked Barak if the IDF and the Israeli government had done a “good enough job of proving their claim” that there was a “major” Hamas command center and bunker under Shifa.
Barak replied “It’s already been known for many years that they have a bunker that originally was built by Israeli constructors underneath Shifa,” which was used as a “command post” for Hamas and as a “junction of several tunnels”
“When you say it was built by Israeli engineers, did you misspeak?” asked Amanpour.
Barak, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1999 to 2001, responded, “decades ago, we were running the place, so we helped them.” The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas since 2007.
“It was many decades ago…that we helped them build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of these compounds.”
You say “Hamas” like they’re a set of uniformed people that can be targeted. They aren’t, they’re a guerilla group operating intentionally inside civilian locations and even households in order to shield themselves or at least cause public outcry when Israel goes after them.
Why does the IDF refuse to send people into bunkers? Because it’s a great way to lose a lot of soldiers, bunkers literally exist to prevent entry and capturing them will cost tens of thousands of Israeli lives. Why should Israel have to fight fair if Hamas will not?
Why are they being pushed closer to the border? Because if nobody lives up north, then Hamas can’t use the northern areas to attack the adjacent areas.
Also important to remember, is that Gaza itself was created by an invasion from Egypt the day after Israel declared independence, and was controlled by Egypt for almost 20 years before Israel took it back. Now Egypt locks that border and doesn’t want these people either, while simultaneously not giving much of a shit about the tunnels being used to smuggle arms into Gaza.
Israel isn’t even trying to kill a large number of the supposedly targeted population, there are a couple of million people in Gaza, and they’re only at a few tens of thousands after months. That’s near the birth rate of the area. They may be trying to expel them from the area, but I don’t really classify that alone as genocide, given what genocide has historically looked like.
What’s happening to the 8 million Uyghurs right now in China is genocide with forced marriages and banning of cultural practices, what’s happening to the hundreds of thousands of forcibly transferred children in the Ukraine-Russia conflict is genocide, what happened to the millions of Jews killed by the Germans was genocide.
Killing 30,000 out of over two million Palestinians and pushing them into a smaller area at the south part of Israel so they stop attacking them just doesn’t meet the bar of genocide for me. Israel had to build a multi-billion dollar fucking rocket defence system just to keep civilian deaths down from this neighbor that wants peace so badly. That worked so well that Hamas instead decided to just build some tunnels and kill a thousand Israeli civilians directly, and their people cheered them on for it. I call that a war.
I’ll admit, your comment is amazing.
You start by saying that Hamas is so unlike a government or even an organized terrorist group like Isis that no one can possibly use common counter terror tactics against them, and by the end your saying that they are the government of Gaza repeating civilians who don’t want peace and which is actively fighting a war.
As to your point about bunkers. Yes soldiers die in combat, that is why Isreal gives them combat pay. If you never send soldiers to fight against Hamas to gather intelligence from the places where you say there is the intelligence necessary to fight them, then by your own admission you are not trying to fight Hamas.
Their was a reason why for instance the US sent actual soldiers with training in intelligence gathering into Osama Bin Ladin’s compound instead of just launching a few unguided bombs which lacked the physical accuracy to hit a specific building, even though doing so risked the soldiers getting shot at. But hay, maybe if the Israeli soldiers are unable to clear bunkers they can beg for the US to send the soldiers it used to clear the far more heavily fortified bunkers networks in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Because going to where the enemy is and trying to get basic intelligence isn’t fighting fair, it is what you need to do to fight period.
Moreover, why would Egypt want a bunch of Israeli refugees? Because at the end of the day, Palestinians are people who lived on the land that is now called Isreal for thousands of years, and now live in locked down territories that are administered and controlled by the Israeli government, and who by the Isreali governments own policy are dependent on Israel for their safety. Surely it is Isreal’s responsibility to intograte them into its population, not some foreign government.
But as to your original point. Irregardless of what you personally think the word means.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”
Palestinians are an ethnic group native to Palesitine, read Isreal, and not Egypt. Removing them from their houses in Palestine, after they were expelled from their homes in Isreal for being the wrong race, and putting them in the desert south of Gaza seems like an effort to destroy an ethnic group by a prolonged effort of ethnic cleaning.
Although if you want to be more specific and talk about the words your original comment was about.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
I really don’t see how the forced relocation by property destruction could be contested, seeing as the IDF is again by its own admission not using weapons capable of targeting specific buildings. Pushing all the civilians further south so that ‘they’ stop attacking is also, fun fact, called collective punishment and is prohibited by section 33 of the Geneva convention.
Israel’s attack in Beirut in January that killed several Hamas guys always makes me wonder, “how can they succesfully target a single apartment on valid intelligence and pull it off in Lebanon, but in Gaza they level city after city, civilians and all?”
Genocide. The answer is genocide.
To add insult to injury, they’re also not quiet about their desire to make money from a trade route they want to build through Gaza, and the offshore oil reserves there they want to drill for so desperately. They would rather kill innocent people to level Gaza for monetary gain and positioning in the Middle East. Active, calculated cruelty.
Yea, Israel sold drilling rights to Gazas gas last year. https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2023/12/08/bp-israel-gas-licences-protest/
This is a cool website, thank you for sharing.
After seeing the sign they held up in Illinois, I’m confused now how the word genocide should be used. It says “Israeli genocide in Palestine”, which brings to mind the Armenian genocide (Armenians were the victims) and Nazi genocide (Nazis were the perpetrators). Can the word genocide be used to refer to both the victims and perpetrators of genocide?
Hard to say, I suspect people decide on a case by case basis, though I myself often hear the term genocide used after the group targeted or the location. The genocide in Germany and its occupied territories during World War II was uniquely historically bad to warrant its own terminology (hence “Holocaust” in many instances).
Most genocides actually don’t have as high a percentage of people killed as the Holocaust did, the Armenian and Greek genocides by Turkey during WW1 are actually more historically representative in that significantly more of the population are displaced, assaulted, and/or culturally destroyed than outright killed. The Holocaust combined the typical traits of genocide with a truly monstrous murder-industrial complex.
This is also why the Gaza genocide is particularly worrying, because unlike many other historical genocides (and none are acceptable), the people of Gaza are boxed in to a very small space, told to migrate to different parts of it, and then attacked in the places they move to. There is no escape for them, and this situation was entirely manufactured by Israel. Whatever the official death toll is at this moment, the real death toll might never be known and is likely significantly higher.
uniquely historically bad to warrant its own terminology
Actually in that context Holocaust only refers to the Jewish victims of genocide. To not erase the 5 million other vuctims it’s necessary to use the term Nazi genocide.
The thing with the Palestinian genocide is that the Israelis were
- killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, but doing it so slowly as to not arouse a response. I mean, it was happening before the current war, especially the “inflicting on the group conditions of life” part. It’s truly sick.
