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Israel boasts of genocidal intent. Everyone from former policymakers to children singing war propaganda songs talks about how the Israelis are going to stamp out the Palestinians, annihilate them.
There's been a lot of discussion about how the slogan 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' is a genocidal mantra. If so, then there can be no doubt that 'within a year we will annihilate everyone and then return to our fields' is a genocidal slogan. Moving on from rhetoric, Israel is genocidal in action, blowing up an enormous amount of Gaza without regard for civilian casualties.
Well, that's how borders are formed, that's how nations move or get moved around. Survival of the fittest. History is written in blood.
What I object to is how Israeli expansion is somehow turned into this normative, moralistic end as opposed to the cold functioning of nature, tooth and claw. They can't reasonably cry 'help us we're being attacked by genocidal inhuman monsters' as they kill 20x more than they've lost. If Hamas and the Palestinians generally are genocidal, it follows that Israel and Israelis generally are also genocidal. And they clearly need no help in defending themselves.
Israel is using US-supplied weapons, US-supplied diplomatic and military coverage to wage this war. It's geopolitical cuckoldry to subsidize the imperial operations of other powers, assist Israel de facto with its settlement-building and colonization of Palestine (since that's what US aid unarguably does, by strengthening Israel's position). I live in a colonized country, the essence of civilization is conquest. But the big idea is that if you do the conquering, you enjoy the spoils. You don't do the conquering for other peoples. We are literally paying so the Israelis don't have to come to any reasonable accord with the Palestinians or other Arabs, so they can take more land, annex it, ignore the NPT and attack their neighbours with impunity. They know that they won't have to pay the price of their actions in Arab hostility, that we'll shield them militarily like we are now.
The US and the West more broadly doesn't need Israel, Israel has never joined the US in any war. They've made a lot of enemies for us, they provided phoney intelligence to encourage the Iraq War, they sold US tech to China, they brought down the Arab Oil Embargo on us. Israel clearly doesn't consider itself part of the Western bloc, they've never contributed anything. They only cause us problems, lap up aid and beg for more assistance like the aforementioned cuckoo bird. Now they've gotten us into another conflict in the Red Sea with their zeal for bombing. So be it if they want to kill lots of Palestinians - why is that our problem? Why do we have to guard their container ships from the Houthis and get ourselves targeted, start yet another expensive war? Why do we have to provide them munitions (out of already depleted stocks) and make Arabs angry with us? Strength is needed elsewhere, we've expended about 4 years worth of Tomahawk production (yes, that amounts to 80 missiles) on this campaign, which hasn't yet yielded any results.
Even this proposed moral trade 'if we get to expel our troublesome Palestinians from their own land as we annex it, that means you get to expel your troublesome migrants from your land' is unnecessary. I have no doubt that the plethora of Jewish refugee/migration NGOs would reject it, many are consistent in their contempt for both Israeli and Western national homogeneity: Soros and Ignatiev for example. The fact is that the Western world can do a great deal because there are hundreds of millions of us and we wield vast resources. Israel is a small country that acts as though it's a great power, having us shoulder the cost of its supersized ambitions.
Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse, and Assad’s reconquests of major Syrian cities, which are also way way worse.
So, a question I keep asking when people make this claim, and which no one has answered thus far(or even engaged with)- why is Israel’s genocide killing fewer civilians than Russia and Syria are doing on accident in campaigns with the goal of controlling the civilian population to subjugate as normal citizens of their respective regimes? While the IDF is probably more competent than the Russian army and definitely dramatically more competent than either the SAA or NDF, this shouldn’t matter that much if it’s an attempt at genocide-by-collateral damage, because after all Israel could easily get away with making Gaza look like Mariupol and then say sorry, we definitely not really regret the collateral damage, can’t make a shakshuka without breaking some eggs.
Can you?
Russian actions and intentions are considered genocidal.
How many civilians dead in Gaza (and West Bank, and Syria, and…)? 10k, 20k? I don't want to cite Hamas-affiliated sources. But no, it doesn't sound a lot a lot worse.
Russians are currently in mourning about the (admittedly cute) cat Twix who got tossed out of the train near Kirov (really tragic), they don't give much of a fuck about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed by the Russian army. Had we higher verbal IQ, everyone else would also have cared more about Twix. Jews care about Jews, and they're smarter and more influential than we are, though not remotely as smart as they seem to imagine.
It is what it is.
Genocide is now like fascist— a slur that doesn’t really mean anything outside of “I don’t like X.” By any reasonable standard, Russia is not committing genocide. Ditto Israel.
Now that doesn’t mean complaints about civilian causalities are necessarily wrong. But seems to me the real complaint is about war per se.
Or about the existence of Israel full stop. If you're anti-Zionist, any stick to beat Israel with is fine.
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By Ukrainians and in a very limited sense by some observers around stuff like the Ukrainian kids taken to Russian orphanages or adopted or whatever (I don’t know whether that’s actually true). Russian actions are only genocidal around the expanded late-20th century definition of genocide that includes the Uyghurs and other cultural reeducation efforts (or ambitions toward such efforts). By this logic of course Napoleon repeatedly genocided his own people to make France and so on. Public schooling is essentially genocide by these standards.
Actually it was the second-most read article on BBC News (UK) yesterday, so maybe you do. That said, they then followed up with this.
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For the record, I don't believe Russian bombing ought to be considered genocidal at the current rate. Its insinuations towards "destroying Ukrainism", however...
Who makes those insinuations?
Nuts on telegram channels? Russian equivalents of Ann Coulter, she of "We must invade theur countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" fame?
At least one major Russian mass media outlet. I googled Ann Coulter and she is labeled as "a conservative columnist". I must remind you that there is no such division in official mass media as there is between Democrat newspapers and Republican ones in USA. You get pro-government TV and mass media, and nuts on telegram of various sorts.
Apparently, in late 2013, in an auspicious coincidence with Ukrainian Maidan troubles, RIA Novosti was directly reorganized by Putin's edict, and since then there has been a trend of anti-Ukrainian messaging.
edit: does Dmitry Medvedev, ex-chairwarmer for Putin of 2008-2012, count as a nut on telegram or as an Ann Coulter? He does post on telegram, and he does sound like a nut, and his posts are similar to what you quoted. I could dig some up if you're interested. You know, when Putin doesn't outright say "we really should paint Ukraine our color on the map and call Ukrainian 'an outdated Russian dialect'", but everyone around him says so, it gets one thinking.
You aren't familiar with Ann Coulter? She was a conservative political pundit known for telling it like it is or saying the quiet part out loud, depending on your politics. Sort of respected in the nineties but a joke to most people after the culture shift of the noughts (although not conservatives generally of course). I think No_one's point was that she was a political pundit, not an official member of the government (telegram nut and Coulter being of a kind, as opposed to alternatives). So Medvedev is definitely closer to authoritative than either the telegram nut or Coulter, but still not someone representing Russia's official position. As for that news piece, denazification of the Ukraine might be a fig leaf, but it's a pretty good one.
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