"I don’t believe there’s any meaningful sense in which what is happening in Gaza could be described as a genocide. The attacks targeting the Hamas leadership and their sponsors are clearly legitimate; the attacks on Hamas fighters are legitimate; and if Hamas were to surrender tomorrow and release all of Israel’s hostages, the attack on …
"I don’t believe there’s any meaningful sense in which what is happening in Gaza could be described as a genocide. The attacks targeting the Hamas leadership and their sponsors are clearly legitimate; the attacks on Hamas fighters are legitimate; and if Hamas were to surrender tomorrow and release all of Israel’s hostages, the attack on Gaza would stop. This is not how actual genocides work."
Thank you. This is correct, and genocide is a serious word that should not be trivialized--lest it be watered down into meaning nothing and rendering it as a useless descriptor when new genocides actually *do* happen. You can call what the IDF doing a "Nakba," or a "violently-forced displacement," or whatever other term you want to come up with, but it is *not* a genocide. Ask the Rwandan Tutsis what a genocide looks like and they'll tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Iraqi Yazidis what a genocide looks like, and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the folks in Darfur what a genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Rohingya in Myanmar what a genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Bosnians what genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask Holocaust survivors--and not just the Jewish ones--what a genocide looks like and they will tell you that it does not look like Gaza. Words matter, and trivializing real genocides by declaring that what the IDF are doing is one risks delegitimizing the descriptor when it happens to the next set of ethnic minorities that it *actually* happens to.
"Despite the claims of many on the far left and MAGA right, the president has not started any new wars. In fact, he got America out of the decades long-war that both of his immediate predecessors had failed to extricate us from despite a stated desire to do so. (I didn’t like how he extricated us from that war, but that’s beside the point.) In addition, Biden dramatically scaled back the number of drone strikes that those presidents had executed."
This is exactly correct. Despite how awful our exit from Afghanistan was, that was something that the American public had been calling for for a very long time, and Biden was the only president with the guts to follow through on it and shoulder whatever fallout came from it--unlike Trump, who had personally authorized that withdrawal in his final months via the surrender agreement that released 5k Talib fighters and set up the timeline for withdrawal into 2021 beyond the election. And Trump damn-near started a war with Iran by killing their top hero general of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani! We had not conducted publicly-open kinetic military operations against the Iranians since the 1980's to my knowledge (during the "tanker wars" of the Iran-Iraq conflict), and a modern war with Iran would have made the Iraq war look like a walk in the park by comparison. Trump almost brought us to that point because he's a loose cannon who doesn't understand these things and doesn't listen to his military, intelligence, or geopolitical advisors (unlike Biden, who does the opposite).
And if you think the WCK strike by the IDF was bad, just know that that exact kind of thing happened *constantly* in places like Pakistan/Afghanistan/Yemen/Somalia from 2009-2020. Biden scaled those drone strikes back--many of which were the "signature strikes" that caused the most civilian casualties by chasing "pattern-of-life"--based targets who were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing things that looked suspicious to thermal drone camera observers looking for "targets of opportunity." So if you felt sick to your stomach about the WCK strike--as I did--just know that Joe Biden significantly cut back the US military and intelligence community from doing those kinds of strikes on a rolling basis. Joe Biden is a lot closer to a peace-seeking president than a "genocidal" president via his record, and thems are the facts, whether people want to acknowledge them or not.
The Genocide Convention, signed by both the US and Israel:
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Tim's various reasons the Gazan War is obviously is not genocide were spurious, he made no attempt to seriously analyze the situation against the Genocide Convention. A serious analysis is not dispositive, what emerges is that it is a close call.
The Geneva Convention is more a set of guidelines than an actual ruleset abided by signatories. Russia signed the Geneva Convention, is a permanent member of the UN security council, and yet still bombs maternity wards and kidnaps children by the thousands. The UN is a toothless tiger and the Geneva Conventions are a dead letter at this point. The “Rules Based International Order” is only as strong as the countries with wealth and firepower willing to enforce it, and it’s come up short since the 1940’s. You might as well be invoking rules struck by the League of Nations right now.
Best I can estimate is that because this is the IDF doing things within their own borders to their own citizens—yes, until Palestinians have their own state then they are Israeli citizens—then it’s viewed kind of like how the start of the Syrian civil war was when Assad was gassing his own people via chemical agents and “barrel bombs” dropped from air assets.
It makes me wonder if there was already a 2-state solution in place prior to 10/7 and Gaza was a part of an established Palestinian state then would this be treated more like the US vs Iraq than Israel vs its own citizens? Or is this higher visibility and criticism level simply because it is Jews doing this to Muslims? Hard to tell without knowing what the public response to the counter-factual scenario would look like.
IMO the best term is "Israeli subjects." The land and people are not formally Israel-proper, but are entirely under the umbrella of Israeli law (in this sense only, akin to a place like American Samoa, under US law).
There are 2 million ethnic-Palestinian citizens of Israel (blue IDs), with voting rights, but we're talking about the 5 million West Bank and Gaza residents (green IDs), who are *subject* to Israeli law but have no say in it.
I think the Jews doing this to Muslims piece you mention probably is the overriding factor. Given the dynamics of the region, it plays into the oppressor vs oppressed theme, and I think there are also varying levels of anti-semitism at play. Did anyone mention genocide when Assad was gassing his own people?
Thank you, Travis. I read Will Selber's substack this morning and he also laid out attacks that killed innocents including a hit on a Doctor's Without Borders in 2015 that killed twenty two. It's tragic, but it happens.
He also points out that the very last drone strike we did while we still had a footprint in Afghanistan killed an aid worker and his family of 9--which included 7 children, the youngest of which was 2 years old:
Absolutely not, because there's more overlap than white space between ethnic cleansing and genocide on that Venn diagram. Again, ask groups like the Tutsis or Bosnians or Yazidis if what the IDF are doing in Gaza is ethnic cleansing and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they say it is not. If those groups had dropped their arms they still would be slaughtered rather than spared by their oppressors, unlike Hamas and the Palestinians who either join or materially-support Hamas. If Hamas lays down its arms and releases the hostages there would be no more mass-violence in Gaza. Because they (Hamas and the Palestinians who support them) refuse to lay down their arms the mass-violence there continues, and will likely continue as martyrdom culture gets passed down from generation to generation of Palestinians.
I think the back half of your statement here is far from the clear-cut case you make it out to be. First, because implicit in it is the assumption that so long as *ANY* Gazan is engaged in armed resistance, then that means Israel is “justified” in continuing apace. Maybe not what you intend, but pretty crucial given your repeated references to the need to “lay down their arms”.
Secondly, and more importantly, what I fear the most is that events have spiraled out of control and taken on a life of their own such that turning the violence “off”, so to speak, is impossible. Both sides have a perverse incentive to keep the fight going. And I fear that within the Israeli polity and among a number of its supporters, there is a growing sense to remove Palestinians from Gaza wholesale—whether by force or making conditions so intolerable there is a mass exodus— a troubling willingness bordering on eagerness amongst the hardliners to do so. Hamas, meanwhile, has the incentive to continue because every innocent death only serves to increase anger and bolster their ranks.
"Secondly, and more importantly, what I fear the most is that events have spiraled out of control and taken on a life of their own such that turning the violence “off”, so to speak, is impossible. Both sides have a perverse incentive to keep the fight going."
I've witnessed similar violence cycles break down personally, and as much as both sides have incentives to continue the violence--vengeance-based motivations--they likewise have incentives to end the violence--savings countless numbers of their children and grandchildren. I watched the Iraqi Sunni-Shia civil war of '06-'08 die down--at least until ISIS grew out of the Syrian civil war (a convo for another day)--specifically because the Sunnis had had enough of Al Qaeda in Iraq running their lives (much like Hamas runs the Palestinian's lives), and they turned their backs on AQI who were their fellow Sunnis in an ethnic civil war. Palestinians face this same choice between selfish vengeance-based motives and selfless desires to not have their children and grandchildren find the same fate that they did. Palestinians have agency, and to deny this fact is to rob them of their own societal agency. Palestinians have the real choice to turn on Hamas--just as Iraqi Sunnis did against AQI, they just don't do it (at least not that I've seen). And if you think the Iraqi Sunnis didn't fear for their lives in turning against AQI then you should give a look as to what AQI did to Sunnis suspected of being American sympathizers. AQI was proto-ISIS well before Hamas learned to do terrorism the way ISIS did.
"...implicit in it is the assumption that so long as *ANY* Gazan is engaged in armed resistance, then that means Israel is “justified” in continuing apace."
Armed resistance against whom exactly? If the Palestinians want to do Intifada shit and go after the IDF, that's fair game. The moment they start doing 10/7-style attacks against *Israeli civilians* they throw their lot in with ISIS. Armed resistance and horrific terrorism are two very very different things and it's important to understand that difference in tactics.
You know who else materially and morally supported Hamas? Netanyahu! This is basically a known fact to everyone in Israel. He helped the Qataris send them suitcases full of money through the tunnels under Rafah.
Why? Because he thought it would weaken the PA if the Gazans supported Hamas instead of Fatah (who are the dominant party in the West Bank) - divide and conquer. Can you imagine the outrage if an American President supported a terrorist organization like the Mujahideen because they thought it was in their best interest? Oh wait no, we already did that in 1979 - except they started calling themselves the Taliban.
Just because a Western Democracy is better than a theocracy or a dictatorship doesn’t always mean they have a very principled stance when it comes to foreign policy.
I've never condoned the IDF's tactics and I despise Netanyahu (and the Likud party), so don't confuse my condemnation of Hamas, its Palestinian supporters, and people who call Biden "Genocide Joe" with blind allegiance to Israeli hardliners or what the IDF is doing.
The US also supported a whole shitload of horrors and horrible leaders in South and Central America (like Manuel Noriega) from the 1950's-1990's, supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War (ask me about digging up American-made munitions in Iraq), and supported Ghaddafi (I'm sure I'm forgetting other notable mentions). We've got a long history of shoveling shit onto 5 continents (Australia and Antarctica were spared I suppose).
I’m late to this party but have to throw in my 2 (or 3) cents. Travis’s, your comments regarding a clear delineation between actual genocide and what is horribly occurring in Palestine are very accurate. I recently finished an insightful review of Africa in the 80’s and 90’s entitled, “The Graves are not yet full”, {2001 Basic Books} by Bill Berkeley, who had spent the ‘80’s and 90’s covering Africa fr various entities. A lot of US excuses for backing really bad leaders in countries all over Africa, from Liberia to Sudan to South Africa, through multiple administrations was, as per usual always viewed through the lens of US v USSR and countering soviet influence. But more to the point, we backed or acquiesced to horrible leaders for poor reasons. When you note we should ask the Tutsi in Rwanda- those who miraculously survived, about what genocide looks like, I think they’d concur with your point of view. That is not what is occurring in Palestine. It doesn’t make the situation any better to know this. Similarly our support of South and Central American Dictators out of fear of communism (and liking our own oligarchs financial gain) is also horrible. But there larger issue to me vis-a-vie the Palestine situation is the misidentified nature of the term genocide. Genocide is what Hamas has as a platform towards the Israelis. I wonder if we had a group of Mexicans or Canadians ( not the citizens and not even the government- just a group) who had a platform espousing the destruction of all Americans (from the pacific to the Atlantic) entering the US and slaughtering a thousand or so Americans, whether we might retaliate similarly to the Israelis with even less consideration for those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think I don’t have to think what the response would be….
I’ve made the same point you make at the end of the comment elsewhere. Like if Native American tribes were launching rockets at the suburbs and blowing up whatever police come into the reservations to arrest them with TOW missiles and suicide bombings, or if Mexican cartels were doing ISIS-style cross-border raids while demanding that they be given back the American southwest. Don’t think we’d be talking about any 2-state solutions in that scenario, given how we responded to 9/11 alone.
Full concur on the rest of your commentary with respect to backing really bad people/groups in the War Against Communism on a number of continents as well.
The children starving in Gaza are not supporters of Hamas or combatants in any sense. They are innocent bystanders. Israel is turning back aid trucks with capricious excuses such as the pallets are the "wrong" size.
Whatever word you want to use for that it is still very wrong.
It *is* very wrong, but it’s not genocide. The children aren’t supporters but enough of a critical mass of their parents are. The children are suffering from the collective decisions of their parents just as much as they are from what the IDF is doing because their parents are guaranteeing more of the same for their children in the future by materially supporting Hamas.
In addition to the prior vote you cites, they’ve allowed Hamas to use their homes as entry/exit points for the tunnel network. They’ve also allowed Hamas to use hospitals and schools as stash houses, weapons caches, and/or operations centers. That’s materially supporting a terror group who even before 10/7 was always launching rockets at Israeli civilians rather than engaging only the IDF.
Aside from that material support, they also don’t ever try to fight against Hamas physically, rather they allow/encourage their male children to join the group rather than fight to overthrow it.
The president of the United States cannot stop the Israeli government from doing anything but a family from an apartment should die because they could not stop Hamas from building a tunnel exit in the basement of their building.
In addition: if known Hamas members are your neighbors, rat them out to the IDF rather than just sitting there and allowing a terror group to proliferate inside of your society. 10/7 was the result of 15+ years of Palestinians tolerating the presence of Hamas rather than either 1) violently overthrowing them or 2) ratting them out to the IDF en masse. Because they tolerated the presence of Hamas rather than snitching on or killing them, they gave Hamas the space to build a force 20,000+ strong and eventually capable of carrying out an attack like 10/7. Because Palestinian society tolerated the presence of Hamas for all of that time, Hamas returned the favor by using their fellow Palestinians as protective sandbags for IDF strikes. How’d all those years of tolerating Hamas work out for the Palestinians?
A lot of them take kickbacks from Hamas for allowing the exit to be built under their property, and they *can* do something if they don’t want a tunnel exit there: tell the IDF. If they allow the tunnel exit to be built on their property they are inviting lethal IDF raids and/or strikes designed to destroy the tunnel.
Pretty simple: don’t want the tunnels? 1) tell Hamas they can’t build them there instead of offering to help, and if Hamas doesn’t listen then 2) tell the IDF about the construction so that they can kill the Hamas builders.
Let's not forget Pinochet in that list. I'll never forget when he died Maggie Thatcher describing him as "such a dear, dear friend."
You make some very valid points, and I concur with much if not most of what you're saying. But I also think that given Israel’s conduct since the atrocity of Oct. 7, and the utter destruction of Gaza - in which Hamas is not only complicit, but equally responsible because they are using the civilian population effectively as sandbags against artillery - it still is the case that what Israel is doing amounts to genocide. Regardless of Hamas, Israel is an overwhelming military force in this conflict. It is sustained and supported militarily by the US, and it has shown little to no restraint. We're supposed to be the good guys. Ostensibly seeking to limit civilian casualties, ensure medical and humanitarian aid is provided and protected as unimpeded as is possible, and to ensure the basic infrastructure that supports the local society is as intact as is practicable. Israel has done none of these things. It has done the opposite, and is in clear violation of not only the framework set out in the Geneva Convention, but also anything anyone would recognize as basic human decency.
And on the Geneva Convention, it’s more a set of guidelines than established laws to follow at this point. Russia is a signatory party as well but they’re still bombing maternity hospitals and kidnapping children en masse now aren’t they? This is why the UN has very little teeth and Russia is a permanent UN security council member lol.
So we're supposed to be using Putin's Russia as the benchmark now, are we? In fact, the Geneva Convention isn't a mere set of "guidelines", it's a pact the signatories are pledged to adhere to, under international law. Law that is enforced at the ICC at the Hague.
It's been a really busy day. I do intend to respond to your other reply more fully and will get to it tomorrow, because it does deserve a meaningful response. In the interim, you might want to acquaint yourself with this link. BTW, prosecutor Jack Smith was engaged in prosecuting war crimes at the ICC before taking on the prosecution of Trump (though you probably knew that).
Who’s prosecuting Russia since they’re a signatory party? Because they’re not adhering to that pledge they took as a signatory party and nobody seems to be doing much about it.
Yes they’re a benchmark for the effectiveness of the pact because if they’re a signatory party who violates said pledges and nothing happens then what does that say about the seriousness of the pact?
You have to be able to arrest someone in order to prosecute them. Putin is officially wanted for war crimes. If he were to travel to certain countries, he could be detained, rendered to be the ICC and prosecutored.
I still don’t think it’s genocide because the killing of civilians is incidental rather than intentional. If this were genocide, the IDF wouldn’t even be looking for Hamas, we’d just see the IDF troops lining up *any* Palestinians they find against the wall in the streets and executing them on the spot whether or not they were combatants. THAT is genocide, when the targets *are* the civilians rather than sandbags that are merely in the way. When we see the IDF going house to house and executing every Palestinian they find there—including children—THEN we can call it a genocide. Otherwise you’re just watering down a term that has a real meaning. Words matter.
And the bulk of the arms the US sends Israel were sent there prior to 10/7 before this kind of military conduct was observed. Would you rather the IDF arm up with *less* precise munitions than the kind the US supplies? Because if they end up with a larger mix of less-precise munitions that translates to more civilians dying, not less. It’s not as though if the US cut off arms the IDF would simply run out. They also have their own domestic arms industry and a number of other countries ready and willing to sell to them if we weren’t doing so. Besides, Mike Johnson has Israeli aid on hold (in addition to Ukrainian military aid) so it’s not exactly like we’re still funneling arms over there at this very moment.
"I don’t believe there’s any meaningful sense in which what is happening in Gaza could be described as a genocide. The attacks targeting the Hamas leadership and their sponsors are clearly legitimate; the attacks on Hamas fighters are legitimate; and if Hamas were to surrender tomorrow and release all of Israel’s hostages, the attack on Gaza would stop. This is not how actual genocides work."
Thank you. This is correct, and genocide is a serious word that should not be trivialized--lest it be watered down into meaning nothing and rendering it as a useless descriptor when new genocides actually *do* happen. You can call what the IDF doing a "Nakba," or a "violently-forced displacement," or whatever other term you want to come up with, but it is *not* a genocide. Ask the Rwandan Tutsis what a genocide looks like and they'll tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Iraqi Yazidis what a genocide looks like, and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the folks in Darfur what a genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Rohingya in Myanmar what a genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Bosnians what genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask Holocaust survivors--and not just the Jewish ones--what a genocide looks like and they will tell you that it does not look like Gaza. Words matter, and trivializing real genocides by declaring that what the IDF are doing is one risks delegitimizing the descriptor when it happens to the next set of ethnic minorities that it *actually* happens to.
"Despite the claims of many on the far left and MAGA right, the president has not started any new wars. In fact, he got America out of the decades long-war that both of his immediate predecessors had failed to extricate us from despite a stated desire to do so. (I didn’t like how he extricated us from that war, but that’s beside the point.) In addition, Biden dramatically scaled back the number of drone strikes that those presidents had executed."
This is exactly correct. Despite how awful our exit from Afghanistan was, that was something that the American public had been calling for for a very long time, and Biden was the only president with the guts to follow through on it and shoulder whatever fallout came from it--unlike Trump, who had personally authorized that withdrawal in his final months via the surrender agreement that released 5k Talib fighters and set up the timeline for withdrawal into 2021 beyond the election. And Trump damn-near started a war with Iran by killing their top hero general of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani! We had not conducted publicly-open kinetic military operations against the Iranians since the 1980's to my knowledge (during the "tanker wars" of the Iran-Iraq conflict), and a modern war with Iran would have made the Iraq war look like a walk in the park by comparison. Trump almost brought us to that point because he's a loose cannon who doesn't understand these things and doesn't listen to his military, intelligence, or geopolitical advisors (unlike Biden, who does the opposite).
And if you think the WCK strike by the IDF was bad, just know that that exact kind of thing happened *constantly* in places like Pakistan/Afghanistan/Yemen/Somalia from 2009-2020. Biden scaled those drone strikes back--many of which were the "signature strikes" that caused the most civilian casualties by chasing "pattern-of-life"--based targets who were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing things that looked suspicious to thermal drone camera observers looking for "targets of opportunity." So if you felt sick to your stomach about the WCK strike--as I did--just know that Joe Biden significantly cut back the US military and intelligence community from doing those kinds of strikes on a rolling basis. Joe Biden is a lot closer to a peace-seeking president than a "genocidal" president via his record, and thems are the facts, whether people want to acknowledge them or not.
The Genocide Convention, signed by both the US and Israel:
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Tim's various reasons the Gazan War is obviously is not genocide were spurious, he made no attempt to seriously analyze the situation against the Genocide Convention. A serious analysis is not dispositive, what emerges is that it is a close call.
The Geneva Convention is more a set of guidelines than an actual ruleset abided by signatories. Russia signed the Geneva Convention, is a permanent member of the UN security council, and yet still bombs maternity wards and kidnaps children by the thousands. The UN is a toothless tiger and the Geneva Conventions are a dead letter at this point. The “Rules Based International Order” is only as strong as the countries with wealth and firepower willing to enforce it, and it’s come up short since the 1940’s. You might as well be invoking rules struck by the League of Nations right now.
Thank you!
People seem to be conflating war with genocide, but only selectively, and I’m trying to understand what’s behind the selective treatment.
Best I can estimate is that because this is the IDF doing things within their own borders to their own citizens—yes, until Palestinians have their own state then they are Israeli citizens—then it’s viewed kind of like how the start of the Syrian civil war was when Assad was gassing his own people via chemical agents and “barrel bombs” dropped from air assets.
It makes me wonder if there was already a 2-state solution in place prior to 10/7 and Gaza was a part of an established Palestinian state then would this be treated more like the US vs Iraq than Israel vs its own citizens? Or is this higher visibility and criticism level simply because it is Jews doing this to Muslims? Hard to tell without knowing what the public response to the counter-factual scenario would look like.
To be clear here Travis, the Palestinians in Gaza and The West Bank are not Israeli citizens.
Okay, “residents” of Israel rather than citizens, but still….
IMO the best term is "Israeli subjects." The land and people are not formally Israel-proper, but are entirely under the umbrella of Israeli law (in this sense only, akin to a place like American Samoa, under US law).
There are 2 million ethnic-Palestinian citizens of Israel (blue IDs), with voting rights, but we're talking about the 5 million West Bank and Gaza residents (green IDs), who are *subject* to Israeli law but have no say in it.
They're not even residents of Israel. Gaza and the West Bank are not part of Israel at all.
I think the Jews doing this to Muslims piece you mention probably is the overriding factor. Given the dynamics of the region, it plays into the oppressor vs oppressed theme, and I think there are also varying levels of anti-semitism at play. Did anyone mention genocide when Assad was gassing his own people?
Good point. When a Muslim gov is gassing their own people nobody gave a shit because it’s Muslim-on-Muslim.
Thank you, Travis. I read Will Selber's substack this morning and he also laid out attacks that killed innocents including a hit on a Doctor's Without Borders in 2015 that killed twenty two. It's tragic, but it happens.
He also points out that the very last drone strike we did while we still had a footprint in Afghanistan killed an aid worker and his family of 9--which included 7 children, the youngest of which was 2 years old:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655
Would you settle for “ethnic cleansing”?
Absolutely not, because there's more overlap than white space between ethnic cleansing and genocide on that Venn diagram. Again, ask groups like the Tutsis or Bosnians or Yazidis if what the IDF are doing in Gaza is ethnic cleansing and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they say it is not. If those groups had dropped their arms they still would be slaughtered rather than spared by their oppressors, unlike Hamas and the Palestinians who either join or materially-support Hamas. If Hamas lays down its arms and releases the hostages there would be no more mass-violence in Gaza. Because they (Hamas and the Palestinians who support them) refuse to lay down their arms the mass-violence there continues, and will likely continue as martyrdom culture gets passed down from generation to generation of Palestinians.
I think the back half of your statement here is far from the clear-cut case you make it out to be. First, because implicit in it is the assumption that so long as *ANY* Gazan is engaged in armed resistance, then that means Israel is “justified” in continuing apace. Maybe not what you intend, but pretty crucial given your repeated references to the need to “lay down their arms”.
Secondly, and more importantly, what I fear the most is that events have spiraled out of control and taken on a life of their own such that turning the violence “off”, so to speak, is impossible. Both sides have a perverse incentive to keep the fight going. And I fear that within the Israeli polity and among a number of its supporters, there is a growing sense to remove Palestinians from Gaza wholesale—whether by force or making conditions so intolerable there is a mass exodus— a troubling willingness bordering on eagerness amongst the hardliners to do so. Hamas, meanwhile, has the incentive to continue because every innocent death only serves to increase anger and bolster their ranks.
"Secondly, and more importantly, what I fear the most is that events have spiraled out of control and taken on a life of their own such that turning the violence “off”, so to speak, is impossible. Both sides have a perverse incentive to keep the fight going."
I've witnessed similar violence cycles break down personally, and as much as both sides have incentives to continue the violence--vengeance-based motivations--they likewise have incentives to end the violence--savings countless numbers of their children and grandchildren. I watched the Iraqi Sunni-Shia civil war of '06-'08 die down--at least until ISIS grew out of the Syrian civil war (a convo for another day)--specifically because the Sunnis had had enough of Al Qaeda in Iraq running their lives (much like Hamas runs the Palestinian's lives), and they turned their backs on AQI who were their fellow Sunnis in an ethnic civil war. Palestinians face this same choice between selfish vengeance-based motives and selfless desires to not have their children and grandchildren find the same fate that they did. Palestinians have agency, and to deny this fact is to rob them of their own societal agency. Palestinians have the real choice to turn on Hamas--just as Iraqi Sunnis did against AQI, they just don't do it (at least not that I've seen). And if you think the Iraqi Sunnis didn't fear for their lives in turning against AQI then you should give a look as to what AQI did to Sunnis suspected of being American sympathizers. AQI was proto-ISIS well before Hamas learned to do terrorism the way ISIS did.
"...implicit in it is the assumption that so long as *ANY* Gazan is engaged in armed resistance, then that means Israel is “justified” in continuing apace."
Armed resistance against whom exactly? If the Palestinians want to do Intifada shit and go after the IDF, that's fair game. The moment they start doing 10/7-style attacks against *Israeli civilians* they throw their lot in with ISIS. Armed resistance and horrific terrorism are two very very different things and it's important to understand that difference in tactics.
You know who else materially and morally supported Hamas? Netanyahu! This is basically a known fact to everyone in Israel. He helped the Qataris send them suitcases full of money through the tunnels under Rafah.
Why? Because he thought it would weaken the PA if the Gazans supported Hamas instead of Fatah (who are the dominant party in the West Bank) - divide and conquer. Can you imagine the outrage if an American President supported a terrorist organization like the Mujahideen because they thought it was in their best interest? Oh wait no, we already did that in 1979 - except they started calling themselves the Taliban.
Just because a Western Democracy is better than a theocracy or a dictatorship doesn’t always mean they have a very principled stance when it comes to foreign policy.
I've never condoned the IDF's tactics and I despise Netanyahu (and the Likud party), so don't confuse my condemnation of Hamas, its Palestinian supporters, and people who call Biden "Genocide Joe" with blind allegiance to Israeli hardliners or what the IDF is doing.
The US also supported a whole shitload of horrors and horrible leaders in South and Central America (like Manuel Noriega) from the 1950's-1990's, supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War (ask me about digging up American-made munitions in Iraq), and supported Ghaddafi (I'm sure I'm forgetting other notable mentions). We've got a long history of shoveling shit onto 5 continents (Australia and Antarctica were spared I suppose).
I’m late to this party but have to throw in my 2 (or 3) cents. Travis’s, your comments regarding a clear delineation between actual genocide and what is horribly occurring in Palestine are very accurate. I recently finished an insightful review of Africa in the 80’s and 90’s entitled, “The Graves are not yet full”, {2001 Basic Books} by Bill Berkeley, who had spent the ‘80’s and 90’s covering Africa fr various entities. A lot of US excuses for backing really bad leaders in countries all over Africa, from Liberia to Sudan to South Africa, through multiple administrations was, as per usual always viewed through the lens of US v USSR and countering soviet influence. But more to the point, we backed or acquiesced to horrible leaders for poor reasons. When you note we should ask the Tutsi in Rwanda- those who miraculously survived, about what genocide looks like, I think they’d concur with your point of view. That is not what is occurring in Palestine. It doesn’t make the situation any better to know this. Similarly our support of South and Central American Dictators out of fear of communism (and liking our own oligarchs financial gain) is also horrible. But there larger issue to me vis-a-vie the Palestine situation is the misidentified nature of the term genocide. Genocide is what Hamas has as a platform towards the Israelis. I wonder if we had a group of Mexicans or Canadians ( not the citizens and not even the government- just a group) who had a platform espousing the destruction of all Americans (from the pacific to the Atlantic) entering the US and slaughtering a thousand or so Americans, whether we might retaliate similarly to the Israelis with even less consideration for those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think I don’t have to think what the response would be….
I’ve made the same point you make at the end of the comment elsewhere. Like if Native American tribes were launching rockets at the suburbs and blowing up whatever police come into the reservations to arrest them with TOW missiles and suicide bombings, or if Mexican cartels were doing ISIS-style cross-border raids while demanding that they be given back the American southwest. Don’t think we’d be talking about any 2-state solutions in that scenario, given how we responded to 9/11 alone.
Full concur on the rest of your commentary with respect to backing really bad people/groups in the War Against Communism on a number of continents as well.
The children starving in Gaza are not supporters of Hamas or combatants in any sense. They are innocent bystanders. Israel is turning back aid trucks with capricious excuses such as the pallets are the "wrong" size.
Whatever word you want to use for that it is still very wrong.
It *is* very wrong, but it’s not genocide. The children aren’t supporters but enough of a critical mass of their parents are. The children are suffering from the collective decisions of their parents just as much as they are from what the IDF is doing because their parents are guaranteeing more of the same for their children in the future by materially supporting Hamas.
I'm curious how their parents have been materially supporting Hamas. My understanding is that there was only the one pro-Hamas vote in 2006..?
In addition to the prior vote you cites, they’ve allowed Hamas to use their homes as entry/exit points for the tunnel network. They’ve also allowed Hamas to use hospitals and schools as stash houses, weapons caches, and/or operations centers. That’s materially supporting a terror group who even before 10/7 was always launching rockets at Israeli civilians rather than engaging only the IDF.
Aside from that material support, they also don’t ever try to fight against Hamas physically, rather they allow/encourage their male children to join the group rather than fight to overthrow it.
The president of the United States cannot stop the Israeli government from doing anything but a family from an apartment should die because they could not stop Hamas from building a tunnel exit in the basement of their building.
Got it.
In addition: if known Hamas members are your neighbors, rat them out to the IDF rather than just sitting there and allowing a terror group to proliferate inside of your society. 10/7 was the result of 15+ years of Palestinians tolerating the presence of Hamas rather than either 1) violently overthrowing them or 2) ratting them out to the IDF en masse. Because they tolerated the presence of Hamas rather than snitching on or killing them, they gave Hamas the space to build a force 20,000+ strong and eventually capable of carrying out an attack like 10/7. Because Palestinian society tolerated the presence of Hamas for all of that time, Hamas returned the favor by using their fellow Palestinians as protective sandbags for IDF strikes. How’d all those years of tolerating Hamas work out for the Palestinians?
A lot of them take kickbacks from Hamas for allowing the exit to be built under their property, and they *can* do something if they don’t want a tunnel exit there: tell the IDF. If they allow the tunnel exit to be built on their property they are inviting lethal IDF raids and/or strikes designed to destroy the tunnel.
Pretty simple: don’t want the tunnels? 1) tell Hamas they can’t build them there instead of offering to help, and if Hamas doesn’t listen then 2) tell the IDF about the construction so that they can kill the Hamas builders.
Let's not forget Pinochet in that list. I'll never forget when he died Maggie Thatcher describing him as "such a dear, dear friend."
You make some very valid points, and I concur with much if not most of what you're saying. But I also think that given Israel’s conduct since the atrocity of Oct. 7, and the utter destruction of Gaza - in which Hamas is not only complicit, but equally responsible because they are using the civilian population effectively as sandbags against artillery - it still is the case that what Israel is doing amounts to genocide. Regardless of Hamas, Israel is an overwhelming military force in this conflict. It is sustained and supported militarily by the US, and it has shown little to no restraint. We're supposed to be the good guys. Ostensibly seeking to limit civilian casualties, ensure medical and humanitarian aid is provided and protected as unimpeded as is possible, and to ensure the basic infrastructure that supports the local society is as intact as is practicable. Israel has done none of these things. It has done the opposite, and is in clear violation of not only the framework set out in the Geneva Convention, but also anything anyone would recognize as basic human decency.
And on the Geneva Convention, it’s more a set of guidelines than established laws to follow at this point. Russia is a signatory party as well but they’re still bombing maternity hospitals and kidnapping children en masse now aren’t they? This is why the UN has very little teeth and Russia is a permanent UN security council member lol.
So we're supposed to be using Putin's Russia as the benchmark now, are we? In fact, the Geneva Convention isn't a mere set of "guidelines", it's a pact the signatories are pledged to adhere to, under international law. Law that is enforced at the ICC at the Hague.
It's been a really busy day. I do intend to respond to your other reply more fully and will get to it tomorrow, because it does deserve a meaningful response. In the interim, you might want to acquaint yourself with this link. BTW, prosecutor Jack Smith was engaged in prosecuting war crimes at the ICC before taking on the prosecution of Trump (though you probably knew that).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
Who’s prosecuting Russia since they’re a signatory party? Because they’re not adhering to that pledge they took as a signatory party and nobody seems to be doing much about it.
Yes they’re a benchmark for the effectiveness of the pact because if they’re a signatory party who violates said pledges and nothing happens then what does that say about the seriousness of the pact?
You have to be able to arrest someone in order to prosecute them. Putin is officially wanted for war crimes. If he were to travel to certain countries, he could be detained, rendered to be the ICC and prosecutored.
Again, pretty toothless enforcement mechanism so long as war criminals don’t travel to western countries 🤷♂️
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/world/europe/putin-saudi-arabia-visit.html
I still don’t think it’s genocide because the killing of civilians is incidental rather than intentional. If this were genocide, the IDF wouldn’t even be looking for Hamas, we’d just see the IDF troops lining up *any* Palestinians they find against the wall in the streets and executing them on the spot whether or not they were combatants. THAT is genocide, when the targets *are* the civilians rather than sandbags that are merely in the way. When we see the IDF going house to house and executing every Palestinian they find there—including children—THEN we can call it a genocide. Otherwise you’re just watering down a term that has a real meaning. Words matter.
And the bulk of the arms the US sends Israel were sent there prior to 10/7 before this kind of military conduct was observed. Would you rather the IDF arm up with *less* precise munitions than the kind the US supplies? Because if they end up with a larger mix of less-precise munitions that translates to more civilians dying, not less. It’s not as though if the US cut off arms the IDF would simply run out. They also have their own domestic arms industry and a number of other countries ready and willing to sell to them if we weren’t doing so. Besides, Mike Johnson has Israeli aid on hold (in addition to Ukrainian military aid) so it’s not exactly like we’re still funneling arms over there at this very moment.