| The two operative words in the UN Convention are "intent" and "destroy". To effectively accuse a party of attempting a genocide according to the Convention, you have to prove: (1) that whatever horrible things they are doing have the effect of destroying a group; note that destruction doesn't necessarily involve killing --- for instance, Russia's kidnapping and "re-parenting" of Ukrainian children is widely viewed as a genocidal act. But either way, the outcome involved has to be the elimination of the group; displacement doesn't necessarily qualify. (2) that the horrible things were done with the intent of destroying a group; the Convention leaves no wiggle room here, as you might find in US criminal law, for recklessness or negligence. It's genocide if you did it deliberately in order to destroy the group. What you're going to find in these discussions is that many people acknowledge the Netanyahu war cabinet as deeply reckless, inhumane, savage, murderous, choose-your-own words --- but that at the same time what they're doing simply doesn't fit the Convention's definition. These long lists of quotes aren't especially persuasive as rhetoric (and they're too easy to skim, and, not for nothing, and this has nothing to do with you personally, but they are also a hallmark of crank HN comments --- I'm not calling you a crank, just giving you something to avoid pattern matching with). That said: Netanyahu's "We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents... This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism" isn't genocidal on its face. You can battle things without destroying them. Churchill's "Fight them on the beaches" speech didn't promise a genocide of Germans. You could argue that it's dehumanizing. If you read it charitably as applying only to Hamas, and not to the broader population of people you could accuse of supporting Hamas, it might not even be that; you have to be human to be dehumanized, etc. On the other hand: "One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray & hope for their [hostages] return, but there is also a price in war." This is a straightforward appeal to genocide! Of course, the flip side of it is (a) Eliyahu has absolutely no power over what the IDF does, and (b) nobody seriously believes the IDF will deploy nuclear weapons against Gaza (in fact, the emerging consensus seems to be that they're going to back off on airstrikes). But, like, if you had Netanyahu or Gallant or Gantz saying this, you'd have a stronger argument. I do not expect you to agree with any of this. There are non-legalistic conceptions of genocide that reasonable people use. If you believe someone is engaged in a genocide, it is vanishingly unlikely that an HN comment, even the greatest HN comment ever written, is going to change your mind. I only hope to illustrate one flavor of good-faith opposition you're going to find to your argument. By picking apart pro-Palestinian rhetoric here, I'm going to come off as supportive of Israel. I'd caution you against drawing those kinds of conclusions. My personal belief is that all these discussions on HN are cursed, and that as soon as anyone openly declares for "a side" here, conversational potential basically ends. I'll go as far as saying that I believe Palestinians exist as a distinct people and deserve self-determination. I try to pick apart pro-Israel stuff here too; be aware, though, that pro-Israel seems at times to be a minority position on HN, so there are fewer examples of it. |
I know it's repetitive, but I don't think of it as being pro-Israel or being pro-Palestine. Especially since this right-wing messianic stuff paints Israel into a very, very dark corner. Blind support of it is helping Netanyahu and some very cruel and ultimately sad people, maybe some arms manufacturers, but not really anyone else, not even in Israel.
> displacement doesn't necessarily qualify
Not necessarily, but possibly. E.g. from Wikipedia on genocide:
> The term Bosnian genocide is used to refer either to the killings committed by Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, or to ethnic cleansing that took place elsewhere during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War.
Just scattering people in the world to never return, to settle their land, is destroying them as a national group in my books. But we'll see.
The bulk of the quotes I saw can basically be summarized as "we don't care, ethnic cleansing is fine, genocide is fine too, as long as Israel controls the land afterwards", and if anything beyond that is said, everything is blamed on Hamas, case closed.
That is bad enough, but that messianic stuff goes a farther than that IMO. When Netanyahu invoked Amalek, which he and others did more than once, that implies wiping out everyone, children and even animals, showing no mercy, blotting out their memory. And his reference to "fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah"..
> "Destruction has been decreed, overwhelming and righteous. The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out the destruction decreed upon the whole land."
I can't tell you what exactly Netanyahu means by that, but you'd have to squint harder than I am able to to not be pretty sure it's not within international law.
> "When there is absolute evil, one must not look back, one must not express empathy. The actions of the oppressors on Black Sabbath [meaning October 7th] are tens of times worse than the actions of Sodom and Gomorrah. The war is not about territory or Economy but a war for the loss of evil from the world and the perpetuation of the absolute good." -- Avishai Levy, Lieutenant Colonel and Rabbi of the Northern command, 03/11/2023
I do think we have tacit approval of genocidal statements, combined with the atrocities we know about, which in turn are probably just the tip of the iceberg. If the stuff people proudly post on social media is so sickening, singing "Gaza is a cemetery" and all that, obviously not fearing for their military careers at all, what are people doing that they don't film? We know enough to know it needs to be stopped and investigated, of that I'm confident.