Even if X is 5? Or 2?
If Israel said “Oct 7 was bad, let’s go grab 5, or 2, or 1 Palestinians and kill them as a warning to others” this would be horrificly wrong. Surely you agree with that? That’s the way Hamas behaves, not civilized countries.
Surely you see the difference between that, and “let’s target Hamas members”, even if the Hamas members are all Palestinians, because you are targeting based on their membership in a terrorist group, not based on their ethnicity.
But, as far as I can tell, the proffered definition doesn’t limit itself to ethnicity; it covers “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
…its a genocide because the evidence shows that Israel leadership are deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
If you support the genocide of the Palestinians, (and I gave you EVERY chance to withdraw that support, you declined) then, as per the submission to the ICJ, you support the mass murder of thousands of Palestinians, including over 14,000 children. You support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. You support the starvation of innocent Palestinians. You support destroying their healthcare system.
And with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that will die over the next year due to the siege and the bombing and disease, illness and famine, you support all of that as well.
Because that is what genocide means. This is what you actually support. The definition is just the starting point. How that definition is supported by the evidence, and how that is interpreted by the courts: all of that is relevant here. The plain-text wording only takes you so far. Which is why I suggested you read the rest of the submission.
That you read it, understood how the evidence related to the definitions related to the convention, and still decided that yes, you support the genocide of the Palestinian people leads me to believe that you still don’t understand what the definition in the convention actually means. Because I can’t imagine anyone else on the boards openly supporting the genocide of a people. I think the only reason you support it is because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the statute. Because I can’t bring myself to believe that you actually think starvation of millions of people is a good thing and even remotely defensible in any war.
Let me get this straight: you believe that Israel is okaying this, but you can’t believe that I’m okaying this?
OK, and what’s the problem with that?
Israel’s goal is not to destroy the Palestinian people, the Arab or Muslim peoples, or any other national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in part or in full.
It is to destroy Hamas, preferably in full. But Hamas is a terrorist organization, not one of those prior categories.
The fact that the overwhelming majority of Hamas fighters are Palestinian, or Muslim, does not mean that targeting Hamas members is equivalent to targeting Palestinians or Muslims or Arabs “in part”.
You are correct that the definition of genocide is poorly written. I understand why the phrase in part is in there, but it is the sort of thing that should be in a longer discussion of the topic and not in the basic definitions of terms.
In an effort to end this lengthy sidetrack let me ask you this. You approve of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack. Is it possible that Israel could do something in Gaza that would cause you to change your mind, or will you support them no matter what actions they take?
…well, you’ve never struck me as a poster that would support a genocide before.
Obviously I was mistaken.
…in major news, the World Food Programme has suspended food delivery in the north of Gaza as its no longer safe. There had been a three-week suspension in deliveries due to an attack by the IDF on a UNRWA convoy. Upon resumption today the convoy faced “chaos and violence” due to the collapse of civil order.
This makes getting food and supplies to the north of Gaza almost impossible.
Reports from Euromed right now that they have “separated Rafah in the southern Strip from the adjacent cities and areas.” People had been trying to move back to the north to escape the upcoming attack. But those routes have been cut off now. 1.5 million people…and nowhere for them to go.
Reports of an attack on a shelter housing Doctors without Borders staff and their family: at least two dead, multiple injured.
Israel could nuke Gaza. They could start shooting all Arabs on sight. They could round the population into camps and start working them until they either drop dead or can’t work anymore and then kill them. They could march them into the desert and leave them there.
You know, actual genocide, not the “Israel is better at war than Hamas is and THAT’S NOT FAIR” kind getting bandied about.
That would be going too far.
Bro, if you’ve been looking to the USA for moral guidance, you’ve been barking up the wrong tree. It’s been over three decades since this country fought a just war and I doubt we will again unless and until the Republican party is destroyed.
I’m not sure that killing many thousands of children you presumably didn’t intend to kill meets the qualifications for being “better at war”.
…please don’t address me as “bro.”
The thing is — as Banquet_Bear has noted, and as I have to agree — I’m not an expert on the subject; I’m starting off by figuring that Israel is acting in its own best interests, as it sees them, and I’m going to err on the side of figuring that Israel is the best judge of what that is. Until I have reason to think otherwise, then any time you ask me why they’re bombing here but not there — or why they’re ignoring a decision that a court has no power to enforce, or any one of a hundred other things — then I see no reason not to default to saying, “well, I figure that they figure that it’s in their best interests.”
So, in a sense, it’s a rebuttable presumption; they’d have to do something that leaves me thinking, hang on; even as a layman who maybe can’t even be trusted to read plain-text wording, I can’t help but conclude that this right here is pretty clearly not in Israel’s best interests. But, so far, their response to the 10/7 attack has left me thinking, time and again, is it plausible that they believe that what they’ve done this week is the least bad approach? Well: could be, yeah. I mean, sure, they could get it wrong; but I don’t see any reason to conclude that yet.
Because the thing is, if we’re talking (a) not about hypotheticals, but (b) about actions that Israel in fact decided to take, and is taking — and I ask you why Israel is pursuing that course of action, instead of doing something else — would you tell me that they presumably think it’s in their best interests to do so? Because if that’s where the discussion starts, I’d then need a reason to think they’re mistaken.
… Israel is acting with genocidal intent.
Because the “best interests” doesn’t come into play when we are talking about issues of International Humanitarian Law. Nobody argued that Bin Laden was right because he thought he was fighting for the best interests of his terror organization. Nobody argued that Hitler was right because he waged a war that he considered in the best interests of Germany.
It isn’t relevant to the discussion. It wasn’t a factor in the case at the ICJ.
The discussion doesn’t actually start here. It’s a non-sequitur. The intention of the genocide conventions is to prevent the ethnic cleansing and mass killings of groups of people either because of their nationality, their religion, or their ethnicity. Killing those people because its in the “best interests of the people doing the killing” isn’t a defence.
At this point, you are taking a lot of effort to not answer a fairly simple question. I didn’t want to go with a hypothetical because I was hoping to end this tail chasing exercise. At the very least you are actively ignoring the possibility that choices made by the current government of Israel may not actually in their nation’s best interest. Which is true of every government ever.
False.
The difference is that Israel is acting in the best interests of Israel and Gaza. If you really care about the lives of the Palestinian people then you should be supporting the only people capable of liberating them from Hamas’ death cult.
…I’ve provided a massive amount of evidence that supports my position. And again, I’ll refer you to Section D of the submission to the International Court of Justice titled “Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others” from page 59 to page 69.
Do you have any rebuttal to that other than a single word?
Killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians isn’t acting in the best interests of Gaza, or the Palestinians.
They are dying the most horrific of ways. From bombing. From starvation. From preventable means like the absence of cancer care.
Parents are losing children. Children are losing parents. Thousands of orphans. Thousands of children who have lost limbs.
You are describing a fiction. You are describing a situation either where the Palestinians in Gaza are under permanent, oppressive occupation where, just like now, humiliation, beatings and torture are the norm, or a situation where there are no Palestinians in Gaza at all.
The biggest danger to the Palestinian people are Israel. They are being slaughtered in the tens of thousands, being deliberately starved.
If you really care about the lives of the Palestinian people, you would be calling for a ceasefire now. Because nothing short of a ceasefire will stop the mass killing.
And then what happens to the Gazans when their country is in ruins and Hamas is still in power? Do you think Hamas is going to be building schools and hospitals and handing out food to the hungry masses? Is Hamas going to dig sewers and put up power lines? Is Hamas going to build houses? Or are they just going to keep diverting every last drop of “humanitarian” aid into their own coffers so they can get ready for the next 10/7, exaxtly like they spent the last seventeen years doing, now that they’ve learned that blinkered pacifists will cry “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?!” whenever Israel tries to stop them?
Besides, Israel already tried doing it your way and Hamas broke the ceasefire. A ceasefire requires two parties acting in good faith and Hamas clearly is not.
Nothing improves for the people of Gaza - nothing - until Hamas has been destroyed. To call for a ceasefire now is to condemn the Gazan people to a lifetime of slavery and oppression.
Nothing
Then Hamas should surrender. If Hamas surrenders then Israel has no reason to keep fighting.
My rebuttal is that the ICJ is illegitimate.
That seems to assume that Israel has the right to subject Gazans to slavery and oppression as long as Hamas is not destroyed. I think that’s, at the least, a debatable claim. There’s a case to be made that Palestinians are entitled to basic rights whether or not Hamas exists.
And that’s not even taking into account OldOlds’s point that oppressing, enslaving and indiscriminately slaughtering Palestinians is not a plausibly viable strategy for getting Palestinians to reject Hamas. The more thousands of unintended civilian deaths Israel inflicts, the more they’re just reinforcing Hamas narratives about Israeli ethnosupremacist aggression and ethnic-cleansing aims.
This sounds like a rather trivializing take on the plight of Palestinians. It’s routine to make sneering references to “won’t somebody please think of the children?” rhetoric in situations where the sneerer is making the point that children aren’t actually endangered by the supposed threat to them.
But I think it’s undeniable that in the current situation, Gazan children are indeed in very grave and ongoing danger, and are dying at appalling rates. You don’t have to be any kind of “pacifist” to consider that a genuinely serious problem.