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No specific news item for this culture war post, but perusing the comments on the various Iran war takes, I'm consistently baffled by people's attitudes towards Israel that I think are willfully uncharitable and blind to the history of the Middle East in general.
First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
Secondly, it's extremely impractical, if not impossible to remove 6 million Jews from land they've now lived on for (at least) three generations. A second Nakba to correct for the first Nakba doesn't exactly seem just to me, and it's not like many of those Jews can actually go back to where they were from before emigrating to Israel. The Arab countries forcibly expelled all Sephardic Jews in 1948 after Israel won its independence (also weird how this was totally okay but Israel actions during the 1948 war are "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing". Israel also hasn't actually lost a war yet, and they won in 1948 without any outside help except for some weapons for the Czech Republic, so this would be an extremely hard sell to a population that really doesn't want to leave.
Thirdly, it's not like Israel hasn't tried to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine question or with its neighbors. Rabin actually signed the Oslo accords (before he was assassinated) and it looked like the Palestinians would be able to move towards self governance. Unfortunately, every government the Palestinians have elected have made it their central platform to destroy Israel, so it's somewhat logical that Israel decided that they couldn't self-govern (similar logic to why Israel and Iran are fighting). When I was living in Israel in the summer of 2019 (not a Jew, just doing research), it looked this might be changing, but unfortunately October 2023 changed all that. In terms of its Arab neighbors, Israel has repeatedly given up territory for peace. Of course unfortunately neither Jordan nor Egypt want the West Bank/Gaza (and also refuse to treat second, third and even fourth generation Palestinian refuges as citizens).
Fourthly, there's a (somewhat true) idea that Israel has an outsized influence in US politics. But the US also has an extremely outsized influence in Israeli politics. Up until the mid 1970s, Israel was heavily socialist country that had far more ties to the Soviet Union than the US wanted. Market liberalization similar to what happened under Reagen/Thatcher destroyed the Israeli Kibbutz system economically (among other things, I have a very long essay on my blog about this) that completely destroyed the Israeli left. Netenyahu is the logical result of this.
Fifthly, the claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza seem to be greatly exaggerated and very selective when it comes to comparisons of other actual genocides going on in the world right now (Sudan). I've been hearing claims of genocide for at least ten years now, but somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza now than there were then? If the Israelis are trying to genocide the Palestinians they're clearly not very good at it (might be more effective to give out birth control). Claims of apartheid are more fair, but are no different from how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries. Why the special criticism of Israel?
Maybe making a Jewish state in the Middle East wasn't a great idea. So what? We live in the world where that's been the case for nearly 80 years and it's not going away without another ethnic cleansing. Israel does cause a lot of chaos and conflict in the region, but 90% is in direct response to its neighbors wanting to destroy it and kill its entire population. Why is the answer to somehow endorse that, rather than admit that maybe its time for the Palestinians to give up claims to land they haven't lived on since WW2, and the population of the Middle East to accept (as their leaders by and large have) that Israel is here to stay.
I roughly calculated that, before the ceasefire, it would have taken the IDF over 100 years to kill everyone in Gaza, assuming no population growth. Which must be the least competent genocide in history, given that the IDF is a modern military and their targets are kettled into a tiny coastal strip.
https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
The first three conditions are already fulfilled. so the only relevant question left is whether Israel intends to destroy the Palestinians / views this current act as a stepping stone to get there or not.
Looking at Israeli actions in a modern context, the question is not whether they 'physically' could, since we know they could, but how a modern nation would go about genociding a population. Given a modern nation would understand that overtly killing a lot of people at once would garner a drastic response they could potentially not afford.
So if you had credible evidence that there was a great plan for something similar to 'lebensraum' in the area, and a population or political class with firm belief in a distinct and exclusive ethno supremacist identity, along with a healthy doze of otherizing rhetoric from public officials, then you certainly have a recipe.
That being said, I would not care if we use the word genocide or 'ethnic cleansing' or 'politically motivated mass murder on an industrial scale' to describe this. But I would want some reconciliation over the fact that one side is trying to amplify what is going on whilst another is trying to do the opposite.
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"Genocide" is commonly used without meaning total elimination. Not ideal for words to be vague, but hardly a new problem. Israelis were not single-mindedly going for total elimination.
Surely the term has to mean something stronger than 'lots of civilians died in a war'? Because if it doesn't, then every large war prior to (and including) WW2 was a genocidal war, as well as many afterwards.
There's a reason we talk about Hitler committing genocides against the Jews, Slavs and Romani, but not against the French, British and Americans, even though the Nazis bombed London and shelled French cities (and the Allies committed similar violence against German civilians).
Activists aren't using the word 'genocide' because it is a meaningful description of what is going on in Gaza. They're using it because it's the worst word they know.
Agreed. You could say that there is motte genocide and bailey genocide, motte feminism and bailey feminism; motte trafficking and bailey trafficking; etc.
Basically every word used by social justice types has a motte meaning and a bailey meaning.
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I've yet to find a definition of "genocide" that includes the most recent round of the Gaza conflict, but excludes the US Civil War.
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I believe at one point there were at <1 death per bomb dropped, which is... significant.
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