…I respectfully disagree.
What the word genocide tells us is intent.
There are a few responses in this thread from people that otherwise have perfectly uncontroversial post history that left me rather shocked.
Some quotes from that thread:
“the Palestinians are going to get little more than thoughts and prayers from me. They are not a priority for me.”
“I don’t think Palestinian babies should get to live over Israeli babies.”
“Some of us see what is happening in Gaza as something the Palestinians chose”
“how treating them as innocent brown victims”
“Stopping one genocide is simply helping another one begin.”
“The Palestinian people are less like innocent brown victims of the white judeo-christian war machine and more like white nationalists in alabama.”
“You’re assuming everyone in the democratic party views the people of Gaza as innocent civilians.”
There is a very nasty, prevailing undercurrent not just here, but basically everywhere you look, that Palestinians are somehow less than human. It’s why the decades of inhumane treatment they’ve had to live through has been tolerated. Because many believe they deserve it.
And when people hear that they are “starving a population and bombing their homes and water supplies and hospitals” they don’t fucking care. Because it isn’t happening to people. It’s happening to Palestinians. And they don’t matter as much.
What genocide defines is intent. The starvation isn’t happening “because it’s just a war.” It’s because it’s a deliberate attempt to destroy the Palestinian people.
This isn’t a mere quibble over definitions. Multiple organisations and a near complete consensus of genocide scholars are calling this a genocide. They’ve done that after a thorough examination of the evidence. And that changes things. When this all started, calling what was happening in Gaza a genocide was controversial. Now it is not.
The reality is that “being fucking horrible” isn’t confronting enough, because there are plenty of people that think Palestinians had these fucking horrible things coming to them. If you don’t want to use the word genocide, that’s fine. But what is happening to Palestinians (not just in Gaza) are attempts to destroy them. Its more than just attacks on the ground. Its what we are seeing in the West Bank, its why we are seeing the attacks on UNRWA, because they are trying to delegitimise refugee status.
It’s why I think the word genocide is not only appropriate here, but it should be used because it most accurately describes what is happening in totality.
And I think the same goes for trans people. What they are facing is genocide. What MAGA want, what the government in the UK is doing, what many Democrats want, and again it’s another case of letting people know what the stakes are. It’s just “sports” at the moment. “Protecting women” in bathrooms. “Protecting the kids” in healthcare. But they are all incremental steps with the goal of removing trans people from society. We need to put a stop to it now. Stop conceding ground.