@Lottie2shoes It is ongoing genocide with no one saying anything.
But it’s not though is it? There is no statistical warrant to justify the claim that Israel is committing genocide.
Since October 7, the term “genocide” gets thrown around by people who demonstrate an astonishingly lack of intellectual engagement with the actual evidence.
To Israelis, Hamas’s murder, rape, and kidnapping of more than 1,400 people prove that Hamas is committed to its goals of making Palestine Judenrein through violent jihad and exterminating Jews.
On MN and on other social media accounts, on uni campuses and in the partisan halls of the UN, Israel’s response to Hamas’s orgy of death is self-evident genocide. This rhetoric is awash in certainty, even though factual analyses yield little evidence of actual genocide.
Mass killing by itself does not constitute genocide - World Wars I and II demonstrate the distinction. It is estimated that the number of World War I war-related deaths stands at 16-17 million, yet only the Ottoman murders of Armenians (1-1.5 million), Assyrians (750,000), and ethnic Greeks (348,000) were genocidal in that same war.
Currently some argue that large number of deaths in are proof of Israeli genocide. Recently Gaza Ministry of Health (Hamas) claimed that 33,137 Gazans had been killed in the war, while Israel maintains that more than 13,000 of those deaths were Hamas combatants. If we accept these unconfirmed figures, approximately 20,000 Gazan civilians have died.
To determine whether these deaths constitute genocide, compare the Gaza war to other modern wars: The percentages of Gazans killed (1.52%) and civilians killed out of the total population (0.92%) are all dramatically lower than their corresponding categories in other major wars. During World War I, 3.8% of all Russians died, while 8.57% of its civilians were killed. In World War II, 6.1% of German citizens died and 1.13% of German civilians were killed, while 10.5% of all Russians and 4.1% of Russian civilians were killed. In the Korean War, 12-15% of North Koreans were killed, while 10.2% of North Korean civilians died.
None of those campaigns were categorized as genocide since they reflect only the lethal nature of these wars. If those vastly more lethal campaigns were not genocide, it is difficult to see how the Israeli campaign in Gaza, with its immensely lower percentages of population and civilians killed, could qualify as genocide.
Another important indicator of genocide is the ratio of civilian casualties to enemy combatant deaths. If the intent is the destruction of a group, then civilians will represent a high casualty ratio relative to combatants. BUT, a low ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths augurs for general lethality, not genocide.
In the non-genocidal campaigns of World War II, the civilian-to-combatant death ratio was approximately 2:1. In the Korean War, it was 3:1; in the Persian Gulf War, it was 9:1; and in the Iraq War, it was 2:1.
In today’s Gaza war, it is 20,000/13,000 or 1.54:1. The low 1.54:1 Gaza ratio is notable because the war is being fought in dense urban areas where civilians have little protection, while Hamas fighters are protected in underground tunnels.
Hamas has also cynically positioned its military assets in and under schools, hospitals, and residential buildings. They have perfected the method of deploying “the human shield”, fundamentally .
Still, it’s impossible to remain insensitive to the immense tragedy in Gaza. As you’ve pointed out, seeing dead children being pulled from the rubble is intolerable. And so is knowing that Kfir Bibas (1 year old) and his brother Ariel (4) are being held captive by murderous monsters. They are not the only ones.
Emotional recoil easily overcomes careful thinking. Meanwhile, there is great political value for some in describing Israel’s actions as genocide: it condemns Israel of the most heinous of crimes, thereby strengthening the radical argument to dismantle the Jewish state. And this radical argument is being pushed most vociferously by those who hate the West also, so be very wary of it.
You parroting this line without a solid understanding of international law or any tangible evidence (in other words, assumptions made on “just a feeling”) are emboldening the very people that want to dispose of liberal values entirely. That’s not a future I want, and I’m not sure it’s one you want either, if you’re being perfectly honest.
We CANNOT conflate genocide with the general hellishness of war, otherwise the term genocide losses unique descriptive and prescriptive meaning.
If the war in Gaza constitutes genocide, then so do World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and all conflicts with horrific lethality. This is problem because, for example, then Nazi extermination campaigns against Jews, Roma, ethnic Slavs etc. become no worse than any bloody war. The creates immense harm because genocide as a distinctive concept of extreme evil will have died, as will our conviction to prevent its recurrence.