[artninja1988]

Agree with Peter Woit's reply to Aaronson's post.

From the article: Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I was very wrong.

In his latest blog posting, he explains that the current situation in Gaza is analogous to an evil murderer kidnapping your child and strapping her to train tracks before an oncoming train. If you pull a lever to divert the train it will instead kill five of the murderer’s children. This situation provides for him a definition of Zionism:

> Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob…

> Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have.

Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.

Source: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15191

[richardfeynman]

The population of Gaza has increased during the war. Roughly 60k deaths and roughly 103k births, using the UN statistics of 150 births per day in Gaza.

[throw310822]

The statistics of 150 births/day in Gaza are from 2023- is it clear to you that the population now is undernourished, forced to flee from place to place, their homes demolished and their relatives dead or injured? Life expectancy in Gaza plummeted from 75 years to around 40.

And how do you even know that there have been 60k deaths in Gaza? That number is likely a vast underestimate.

[richardfeynman]

No matter how you slice the data, births have exceeded deaths in Gaza during the war.

Elsewhere in the thread, I supplied data showing 130 births/day in April 2025, the most recent month for which data is available. No matter how you slice it, (100 births/day, 130 births/day, 150 births/day, or 180 births/day) there have been at least 70,000 births in Gaza since the war started, though likely many, many more. This exceeds the number of known deaths by any measure. Were you familiar with these figures previously? Can you supply alternative data showing a lower birth rate? No and no.

As for the deaths, you asked if I know there have been ~60k deaths. The truth is I don't know there have been 60k deaths in gaza, and neither do you - that figure comes from Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization and belligerent to the war, and it includes natural deaths, deaths reported in google forms,terrorist deaths, palestinian deaths caused by Hamas, and has had to be downward revised (including cutting the known number of female and child deaths by half) several times in the conflict - so for most of the conflict at least, people citing these figures would have been wrong. But I'm willing to use this figure here because I consider it an upper limit.

Source: "About 130 children are being born daily in Gaza as Israeli authorities' total siege on supplies enters its second month, putting mothers and newborns at risk as medical and food supplies run out and a lack of flour closes all bakeries" https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...

[konmok]

Source? Also, even if this is true, it doesn't actually negate claims of genocide. That is still a colossal number of deaths, and conditions in Gaza are rapidly worsening to the point that few of those born will survive.

[richardfeynman]

Source on birth data is the un. You can Google it, they actually say 180 births per day in some documents, I'm using their figure.

Yes, conditions are bad in Gaza, and yes there have been many deaths, but it's not a genocide if the population is rising.

[konmok]

No, I really can't find any documents like that. Could you post a URL to the document you're referring to? Additionally, your claim of 60,000 deaths is an extreme underestimate. The dataset provided by data.techforpalestine.org lists more than 60,000 deaths, despite only including people whose corpses could be identified and directly linked to an Israeli attack. In other words, this does not include deaths from starvation, exposure, or illness. It also does not include unconfirmed deaths, and, of course, cannot include unreported deaths.

You may think data.techforpalestine.org is a biased source, but their total identified death count roughly agrees with every other source I could find.

[anatoly]

It's hard to get good data on current birth rates in Gaza, but the recently published preprint of a demographic study of the death toll in Gaza (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797v...) provides some evidence that the death toll in Gaza is approximately balanced by births. Specifically, the project directed in-person interviews of Gazan citizens representing ~2k households and ~9k people in them, and recorded ~390 violent deaths and ~360 births in that cohort, both from 10/7 and until January 2025.

[konmok]

Thank you for providing a source! That data certainly contradicts @richardfeynman's claim, in that it suggests a shrinking population. Additionally, since total deaths will be greatly in excess of violent deaths, I would say it suggests a rapidly shrinking population. I would not call the birth and death rates "approximately balanced" in this case, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion.

[throw310822]

I think this answer partially misses the point, because at the core of Aaronson's argument is the idea that they are the victims, that some crazy murderer moved by a hatred as deep as it's nonsensical has forced them to this horrible choice.

And yet it's Israel that is illegally occupying parts of Palestine, not the other way around; it's Israel that has closed Gaza in a total blockade for twenty years and bombarded it any time it liked, claiming many more civilian lives that Oct 7 did; it's Israel that imposes apartheid on Palestinians in the West Bank. It's Israel that constantly builds new illegal settlements in other people's territory. It's Jewish colonists that invaded a land to build an ethno-religious state that excludes the natives.

It's the whole victimhood narrative that justifies the apparently immoral solution to the ethical dilemma: "fuck it, I'm done being a victim, I will not uphold high moral principles when I'm constantly being beaten by others"- except that Israel is a nuclear power that has enjoyed for the past 50 years at least the complete economic, military and diplomatic support of the US and the West, is illegally occupying other people's land, implementing apartheid and building new settlements with the obvious long-term goal of ethnically cleansing the whole land. And has obviously no trouble whatsoever reducing to rubble all of Palestine and the capitals of a few neighbouring countries- at the same time.

Whenever someone says "I'm done being a victim, I will only look after my own interest from now on" remember- that's exactly how Nazism justified itself.

[breppp]

Genocide is an attempt to destroy a people, how is it "obvious" it is going on in Gaza?

Even if this war continues in the exact same trajectory for another two years, do you see an obvious destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza?

[DaveZale]

Did the Nazi homocaust of Jews seek to destroy all Jewish people, no. The UN has a working definition of genocide. The whole world, outside of the US (thanks AIPAC!) and maybe the UK is convinced that Israeli atrocities on Palestinians is clearly genocide.

"Never Again!" - really, Israelis? It's only okay if it's you doing the killing?

[breppp]

> Did the Nazi homocaust of Jews seek to destroy all Jewish people, no.

The entire goal of the holocaust was destroying all Jewish people (and many who weren't). This was exactly why this was dubbed "The final solution to the jewish problem". You might want to educate yourself a bit more on the subject

> The whole world, outside of the US (thanks AIPAC!) and maybe the UK is convinced that Israeli atrocities on Palestinians is clearly genocide.

The whole world was convinced that the Germans were mere victims who only need one more concession, Hitler was merely trying to fix the injustice of Versailles. Further, there was wide support for the German efforts to solve their "Jewish problem", As Jews of course have caused World War 1 through bond trading and caused millions of deaths, famine in Germany as well as Communism and its subsequent millions.

That may sound funny to you now, but that was a popular opinion in elite universities. When words lose meaning and truth become second, all kind of stories seem true

[DaveZale]

Well what are your thoughts on reducing Gaza to rubble? On forced starvation and repeated forced relocation of Palestinians? On killing called "mowing the lawn" by Israelis? On expanding Israeli terrority to include the property of neighboring countries and calling it "Greater Israel" ???? Where do the Zionists (many who are athiests) plan to stop, if ever? Does Netanyahu refrain from peace agreements simply to remain in power? Why does much the Israeli population reject all of this spilling of innocents' blood?

[breppp]

My thoughts are that when Hamas kidnapped 200 Israeli citizens including babies and massacred a 1000 more, which included mass rapes, beheading and burnings, there was no choice left to Israel but to remove that organization completely.

Because Hamas as the governing political party in Gaza, decided to use all of their resources to build fortifications below civilian neighborhoods, this endeavour entails the destruction of entire Gazan neighborhoods. Not unlike the Battle of Berlin or the bombings of Dresden.

It's cliche to say war is terrible, but it is, that's why you don't start one, and that's why Israel always tried to do quick operations which amounted to nothing ('mowing the lawn' as you incorrectly quoted out of context). An advice Gazans have surely needed.

If you finally do start a war, you should really start a war you have a chance at winning. If even that isn't true, at the very least you don't go on such a barbaric rampage making your enemy extremely determined at removing your force completely, at great expense at your civilian population which elected you

Regarding starvation in Gaza, due to racism, media rage bating and general long cultural tradition in the west to scape goat a certain ethnicity, the perception is far different than reality. For example, a recent Gazan instagram account:

https://www.instagram.com/moh_z_co