Palestine is operating under Occupation Law so the rules are different for them. They are allowed to take up arms to liberate their country, and UN law also understands that in this endeavour civilian deaths will happen. The occupier is not allowed to bring their population to the territory they occupy.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Killing all of the indigenous people in a colonized place results in there being no more of that people. The same isn't true of killing all the settlers in a colonized area, because they came from somewhere else by definition. My vulgar understanding of genocide is the elimination of an ethnic group, but if you're going by the UN definition, I see your concern.
My problems with the UN definition is that it emphasizes intent rather than effect, that it includes actions as abstract as "causing mental harm", and that it encompasses nearly any grouping of people "in part". This definition can be stretched by those with power and motivation to fit almost anything. Did your post irritate me? Well, my friend, you have just committed acts that caused mental harm to part of the white racial group. I conclude despite your claims to the contrary that your act was committed with intent to destroy me, an individual part of a racial group. Congrats on doing a genocide. The UN definition is constructed such that, in practical terms, whoever has power at the UN gets to determine whether any action is a genocide regardless of context or conditions. That is to say, in practical terms, that a genocide is whatever the the imperial core says it is at any given time. Given that the imperial core is composed of the largest historical perpetrators of genocide, you can see the contradiction.
Oh wow, that's a succinct way to put it. Appreciate the comment comrade.
Just look at the usage of the word over time. It really came into usage as a weapon against Yugoslavia. It's social use is heavily anti-communist.
I’ve talked about this before. Aside from the nationalist motivations in coining ‘genocide’, it’s too broad and too disputed to be very useful, so I avoid it whenever possible. There have been and still are other ways one can discuss extermination.
What really made me question the usefulness of the term genocide when examining contemporary conflicts was reading that Milošević was posthumously exonerated for his alleged participation in genocide during the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia.
Even liberals cannot agree that genocide was the driving motivator for the conflict. However, the staunchest opponents to socialism -- those hawks who eviscerated a multicultural nation in favor of replacing it with smaller ethnostates -- are staunch in their support of the accusation.
It, 'genocide', is an easily weaponized thought-killer best reserved for discussion and examination of historical atrocities, imo. Hawks love comparing everything to the shoah. We see it weaponized against China, Yugoslavia, Russia, the USSR... hell, even the DPRK is regularly accused of having "genocidal" ambitions, somehow. Against Koreans? Who knows.
It's no use arguing definitions without also discussing ideology. No one except logic-brained online dweebs treat dictionaries like the gospel.
Instead of abstracting away all context, you should be focusing in on it. Israel is a recent colonial invention, Palestine has centuries of history (and millenia more under different names). Isrealis are almost exclusively immigrants, Palestinians are indigenous. Israel is conquering territory, Palestine is being stolen from. Israelis live a life comparable to Western countries, Palestinians live in concentration camps. Violence between these two groups are not at all comparable even if the same words are being used to describe them.
No one except logic-brained online dweebs treat dictionaries like the gospel.
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Violence between these two groups are not at all comparable even if the same words are being used to describe them.
I definitely agree, but I actually do think words matter. Not dictionary definitions, necessarily, but the word "genocide" is a thought-terminating cliche that shuts down discussion. How many people have decided to condemn both sides because both want genocide? It's nonsense, of course, the genocide of settlers is vastly different from the genocide by settlers, but once genocide is invoked the conversation is over.
I agree that words are important which is why you shouldn't cede an inch on this topic - the removal of an occupying force isn't genocide, it's liberation. People who label the situation as a mutual genocide are using words not to describe reality, but to obfuscate it.
If someone brings it up, ask them what they think about the Irish War of Independence or the Haitian Revolution.
I have! However, I was convinced that's distinctly different because the occupiers have a nation to go back to after the occupation is defeated. French slave owners in Haiti still got to keep their French national identity. British occupiers in Ireland still got to keep their British identity.
Israeli settlers, once the Zionist entity is defeated and Israel is dismantled, will have no national identity. They'll just be Palestinians.
By the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, that's genocide. And that can't be right.
Netanyahu is from Philadelphia. He can easily go back there.
Isreali settlers can all trace their nationality to some other country since Israel didn't exist until 1948. Netanyahu would be a American Palestinian for example. We could also come up with a new word to describe the settlers as a district group like we do with Afrikaners (Dutch South Africans).
Either way, Israel isn't real and treating Israeli nationality as equivalent to Palestinians' is a mistake. That's like carving a chunk out of Mexico, calling it "Freeland", then crying genocide against Freelandians when Mexico takes its land back.
A lot of Israeli settlers are from mixed national backgrounds, the only national identity they have is Israeli.
Though if Israel isn't real then that kinda solves that problem; they're not Israeli, they're Zionist settlers and pretending they're different because they drew some lines on a map and have a flag and use brutal violence to enforce apartheid.
I don't know the answer but it could be that Zionism is not a nation, race, ethnicity, or religion?
Israel is Zionism. They're inextricably linked.
well yeah, genocide is genocide, even if you think your flavor is justified. However, I don't think abolishing Israel and replacing it with Palestine would qualify as genocide in and of itself. Hypothetically, if in that Palestinian state Jews were allowed to live unharmed, and to procreate, there'd be nothing genocidal about that.
Hypothetically, if in that Palestinian state Jews were allowed to live unharmed, and to procreate, there’d be nothing genocidal about that.
It's getting there that is the problem. There's no peaceful way to implement a free Palestine and Hamas knows this.
Creating a Palestinian state necessarily requires killing or causing serious bodily/mental harm to settlers on a very large scale. The civilian death toll would be necessarily immense - and even the concept of "civilian" is complicated because the majority of Israel's civilian population are IDF reservists and veterans, and civilian settlers have been deputized to murder Palestinians with the protection of active IDF.
Do I just accept "yeah, I support settler genocide" and deal with the baggage that necessarily has?
I read this piece earlier today which I thought articulated the meaning behind "from the river to the sea" quite well.
https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/from-the-river-to-the-sea-is-a-call-to-genocide/
Thanks for this, but it sort of side-steps the question I have which is specifically about Hamas and the intent to destroy the Israeli national group through violence. Obviously a peaceful solution where the Zionist entity is dismantled isn't genocide (well I'm sure disingenuous Zionists would claim it was, but lets ignore them), but Hamas recognizes that this is idealistic and that their freedom requires killing settlers. Obviously not all Israelis need to die, but genocide doesn't actually require everyone to die. It just requires the end of the national identity.
It sure seems to fit the technical definition of genocide, and I don't know what to do or think about that.
The convention about genocide don't protect people that share a ideology (i.e. Zionism)
Also, the Hamas goals are not genocidal per se:
- The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means.
- Source: Hamas (May 2017) A Document of General Principles and Policies
Well also from the political document:
The Israeli entity is the plaything of the Zionist project and its base of aggression
The destruction of the Zionist project necessarily means the destruction of Israeli state. That means it is not just the destruction of a people that share an ideology, but also the destruction of a national identity. It could hypothetically be peaceful, but we all know it won't be.
I guess you can sidestep this by not recognizing the existence of Israel as a legitimate nation-state?
I guess you can sidestep this by not recognizing the existence of Israel as a legitimate nation-state?
Nops :-( A state it's a political construct, as national identity is a social construct. The recognition could be used against the state, but not against the national identity.
But what I was trying to point out was the false dichotomy presented: Israel is genocidal and so is Hamas.
Israel has the material conditions to commit genocide, Hamas does not. At most, Hamas could commit massacres in some settlements, which I don't see it fits the definition of genocide.
If we ignore that fact, we can use the political program of Hamas, but it also don't call for a genocide of jews or Israelians, even seems that they could reluctantly accept a 2-state solution.