Genocide

[saythatagaintome]

AIBU to think/say that those saying what’s happening in Gaza is genocide?

The word is being grossly misused and, tbh… it’s offensive. Yes, IDF could be more careful, but they are not exterminating an entire race of people.

What happened to the Jews was genocide.
What happened to the Armenians was genocide.
Rohingya was genocide.
Darfur, Hutus, Rwanda = GENOCIDE.

The content of your post is false.

“Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times. Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not in genetic, differences.”

The Palestinians are directly genetically linked with the Biblical people of Canaan, and are not genetically Arab, they just identify as Arab due to culture and religion. The same is true of Egyptians.

Full research paper here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11802415_HLA_Genes_in_Palestinians_The_Origin_of_Palestinians_and_Their_Genetic_Relatedness_With_Other_Mediterranean_Populations

This is really basic and widely known, so please stop peddling demonstrably false nonsense.

Why do people keep asking this? It’s an attempt to say “look away, nothing to see here.”

The numbers speak volumes as to why Palestine matters and as to why the British public are protesting in the numbers that they are, whilst our government tacitly supports the deaths of these babies and children.

See attached.

It's many things (including exactly what Hamas wanted; it has always prioritised murder and destruction over protecting its people) and an absolute horror. But it doesn't need to be genocide to be such a horror, or wrong, and it isn't one.

The term is used to weaponise the Holocaust against the Jewish state.

What Israel is doing is as if, following an IRA bombing, they had blockaded the city of Derry so no-one could escape and then razed it to the ground.

I hate making these comparisons as they can be facile (not saying yours is!) and don't take into account historical context, but if we are going to do that then we probably need to make the numbers proportionate and make up some more relevant politics to go with it. So instead of IRA bombing / Derry, a better (fictional comparison) would be if a load of Scottish people, funded by a very wealthy breakaway Scots Nat group based in Norway, parachuted into the North of England and killed / kidnapped 500,000 Northerners and posted their torture and murder online.

This breakaway Scots Nat group has in its charter that its founding aim is to kill all English people and make all of England Scottish. They sing "From John O'Groats to Landsend, Scotland shall be free!" They refuse to negotiate a two state solution which will allow Scotland and England to co-exist and indicate their intent to move into the Midlands and the South until every English person is detroyed.

Intelligence indicates that this breakaway Scots Nat group is storing its arsenal and fighters in an underground network under Aberdeen. The Westminster Govt announces its intention to bomb Aberdeen in the areas where it believes the arsenal is. Westminster repeatedly asks the breakaway Scots Nat group to let Aberdonians leave Aberdeen but the Scots Nat Group refuses, even though the nominally ruling SNP part is game. Even worse, Norway to the North and Wales to the South West refuse to take any Aberdonian refugees even though they do say that they totally support the Scots Nat group and also beleve that England should be destroyed.

The Westminster Govt sends the army into Aberdeen, doing its best to clear civilians away from the targets, very much not always successfully as you would imagine. As casualties mount up, Wales eventually grudgingly says it will allow in some Aberdonian refugees but only along a small corridor through Shropshire which it will open and close at will.

The world is split with some condemning the Scots Nat group and others condemning England. The English of Northumbria mourn their dead and tortured family members and are in desperate fear of the next attack. The English as a whole dislike the fact that innocent Aberdonians are being killed, and many don't like the Westminster Govt anyway, but they're also terrified of what this Scots Nat gorup will do next, since they seem to have a load of funding and arms from a group based in Norway (which, it turns out, has $billions in property investments in Sweden) and are stating that they want to wipe out anyone with English blood, and the SNP say they're powerless to stop them.

English expats in other countries start having their Marmite and McVities shops smashed up. There's lots of anti-England marches in OECD countries the world over. Especially in the US. This increases the fears of the English that they are alone in this fight and makes the Westminster Govt increasingly bellicose.

Not sure if thats a genocide in Aberdeen or not, but it is a somewhat closer parallel than your Derry example.

It's genocide by the UN definition, but by the UN definition any action that results killing people could be called genocide. Everyone is part of an ethnic, national or religious group.

I'd like to see the term genocide restricted to being used when the intention is to wipe out an entire group of people. Otherwise it's just mass-killing, mass-murder, a war crime or whatever other terms are appropriate to a given incident.

In the case of Gaza I don't think it's genocide because I can't see a concerted effort to kill every last person. Carelessness and an attitude of "better to kill a 100 innocent people than miss one guilty person" but not genocide.

Maybe it needs to become more like Holocaust/holocaust. Holocaust with a capital "H" used to refer to the specific German/Polish-led killing during WWII, and holocaust with a lower case "h" to describe general acts of mass destruction or slaughter.

I'd say what's happening in Gaza is a holocaust but not genocide.

Are you really suggesting, with a straight face, that Palestinians living in Israel are treated the same as Jewish Israelis?

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, said:
“Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem, Hebron or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights.

“We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act.

“For Palestinians, the difficulty of travelling within and in and out of the OPT is a constant reminder of their powerlessness. Their every move is subject to the Israeli military’s approval, and the simplest daily task means navigating a web of violent control.

“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalised and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people.”

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/israel-palestinians-are-living-under-system-apartheid-major-new-report

Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied a nationality, establishing a legal differentiation from Jewish Israelis and resulting in multiple forms of systematic discrimination. In 2018 this discrimination was crystallised in a constitutional law which, for the first time, enshrined Israel exclusively as the “nation state of the Jewish people”.

In parallel, Israel has controlled the population registry in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. Palestinians here have no citizenship and most are considered stateless, requiring ID cards from the Israeli military to live and work in the territories.

While Israel grants any Jew the right to immigrate to Israel and gain citizenship, it denies the right to return to millions of Palestinian refugees. Palestinians who were displaced in the 1947-49 and 1967 conflicts, and their descendants, have an internationally-protected right to return to their former places of residence or property. Israel’s flagrant violation of this right is crucial for retaining its control over demographics - in order to minimise the Palestinian presence in Israel and the OPT, Israeli authorities ban refugees from returning, leaving them in a perpetual limbo of forced displacement.

———

In the wider context of how members of Knesset and the Israeli government speak about Palestinians (“children of darkness”, “human animals”, “rats” and calls for another Nakba), to suggest that the type of hateful rhetoric present in Nazi Germany against the Jews is not present in the Israeli government against the Palestinians is wilful ignorance.

I don’t understand the motivation for trying to cover this up. If more decent people spoke out against this, peace in the region would be much more likely. Hate fuels hate.

Both of these articles were also written within the past two years:

Human Rights Watch:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

UN report on Israeli apartheid:
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-year-occupation-palestinian-territory-apartheid-un-human-rights

It’s important to look at the intention of the Israeli government to force Palestinians in Gaza to flee to Egypt (which was shown in a leaked documenthttps://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9jqx/israel-gaza-leak-displacement-nakba ), and to take into account the wider system of apartheid, in order to assess whether or not the intention of the Israeli government is genocide.

At the very least, it is mass ethnic cleansing, with an indefensible loss of civilian life.

There are 1.6m people who are full Israeli citizens, who consider themselves to be Palestinian, and who are afforded the same rights as an Israeli citizen of Jewish decent, of Arab decent, of European decent, of African decent, or of any other decent.

They can vote, stand for election, open businesses, work, attend school, etc, etc. Hell, there's quite a few who have been elected to serve in the Knesset.

Thats not to say there isn't systemic issues within Israel but under the law all Israeli citizens are considered equal.

How non-Israeli citizens are treated is a different matter and your report is focused on that aspect but if Israel was genuinely committing genocide surely they'd be rounding up the 1.6m Israeli Palestinians who currently live in Israel, not just focusing on those in Gaza?

Tbh it's clear that many hold Israel, and specifically the Jewish contingent of Israel, to a completely different standard than any other nation / race. Can't recall Amnesty or any other organisation claiming Russia's invasion of Ukraine was genocide or that their seizure of the Crimea was tantamount to apartheid.

Hell, when people speak about Israel they don't even acknowledge that there are different factions and ideologies within the country and government, with many dissenting voices opposed to the Israeli government's action. No, Israel is just seen as one big homogeneous group of bloodthirsty Jews, hellbent on slaughtering Palestinians.

There are 1.6m people who are full Israeli citizens, who consider themselves to be Palestinian, and who are afforded the same rights as an Israeli citizen of Jewish decent, of Arab decent, of European decent, of African decent, or of any other decent.

I do believe one difference is that they're not required to serve in the army; they can volunteer but they will not be conscripted.

I do hope you had fun with that little thought experiment. Seriously you bloody child. Go watch the news.

What you're doing vis a vis PIRA in Londonderry is what's called a False or Weak Analogy Fallacy. It really doesn't stand up by any means.

Especially given these are two completely different conflicts with very different weapons capabilities and so on.

Enough of that, really. The only real link between the two conflicts is the fact PIRA and Hamas trained together in Libya under Colonel Gaddafi. Republican murals demonstrate their support of and links with Hamas.

Proportionality in conflicts is not done on the basis of numbers of people dead on either side, but by the balancing of that with the anticipated outcome of military operations. One side having a higher civilian death toll is more likely to be explained by the persistent use of civilians as human shields by terrorists who are trying to render areas immune from military attacks by using them. There is no such immunity under Law Of Armed Conflict.

You lost me at Tik Tok 😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣

But why are mostly children and women dying? It’s not deliberate that they are attacking children and women… the population just has more of them.

Thank you!

How?? Careful, as in, they could try harder to kill militants. Ffs. I don’t agree with the death of these innocent children. I have one myself that looks just like them.

im not trying to minimize the suffering and death.

About 50% of Gaza's population is under 18 and presumably 50% are women. Therefore around 75% of Gaza's population is either a woman or under 18 (or both).

@saythatagaintome You have a child who looks like all Palestinian children? That’s quite a claim.

Tik Tok?

That's the arbiter of truth these days?

What do you mean its not genocide? Is your only news source ITV/Daily Mail?

Bidens team has starved palestinians for 50 years,they have lived in an outdoor jail-water,food,freedom to move around restrictions not allowed to walk on the roads but have to use corridors and checkpoints(sounds very much like Germany a while back). On top of it getting bombed

Bidens team has switched off electricity, water, stopped food and medication and diesel deliveres,so they have had to operate on injured with no light and anasthesia,people sleeping on top of each other in hospital corridors,these get bombed too

Seeing children being chopped in half in apartment building rubbles, one guy lifted a toddler out and his guts spilled out of the stomach,heads and limbs are missing, many children in shell shock shivering left without parents-every day footage on x/twitter,i cant even watch it anymore they are literally killing off everyone, one streamer interviewed israeli woman and asked how can they support children being murdered,not hanas but over half of population in gaza over. Amillion are children- she laighed and said the more the better

Palestinians are trying to show the world whata going on there using any media outlet that allows them to upload footage, do you expect rishi sunak to tell u that your taxpayers pounds will be used to bomb children in gaza?

Children are being bombed in the refugee camps Israel directed people to evacuate to.

The camp that got bombed was in the area that Israel told them to evacuate from

I think UK has a lot to answer for,they should have never gone giving away lands that were not theirs to give, should have left Palestine alone and UK and USA and are also the reason why over half of Europe got occupied by the Societ Union and over hundred million deaths that followed because of the executions and gulags.

As usual UK is always doing the wrong thing,supporting war and keeping the war industry going, not much else London can launder money with these days.

Ukraine has lost over half a million men in their prime,now pregnant women are being sent to the front, any woman who has worked in medical field has to leave family,boys as young as 16 and men as old as in their 60s-they truly are going for lets keep going until the last ukranian

now promising british taxpayers money for team biden, pretty rich coming from an unelected PM,instead of advocating for peace and discussion how to create two states,thats hard to so foc as israel has no interestes in two states,hence the idea yeaterday thay they should drop nuclear bomb on gaza

Israel haa bimbed hospitals,civilian apartment blocks and the roads they told refugees to use and birder crossing to egypt only one that was open and threatened to bomb egyptian aid trucks, keep up

If the aim of Israel was to kill them all they'd have done it about 74 years ago and it would have taken a few days.

I know this! So it’s not deliberate to wipe out children and women.