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Per UN definition[1]:
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:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
According to the prosecutor he didn't think a case could be made. The key is that "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" part.
To prove that you need statements from officials that show they intended such destruction, and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction. Prime ministers and generals, for example.
If someone is going after legitimate military targets but a lot of members of some national, ethnical, racial or religious group is getting killed as collateral damage that is not enough to support a genocide charge. You need to statement of intent.
He added that there is a genocide case that can be made in the region--against Hamas. They have stated their intent to wipe out a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and thousands of their attacks on Israel over the last 20+ years have been directed at purely civilian targets.
Moreno Ocampo, the former ICC prosecutor interviewed, actually said the opposite you're claiming. See https://www.aljazeera.com/program/upfront/2023/12/1/former-i...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/21/1214341050/prosecutor-weighs-...
Ultimately we may never know if Netanyahu has sat behind closed doors and has said things about his intentions in Palestine that would meet the UN definition of genocide. So we can only guess based on what we do know and have seen.
FWIW, to me, this feels pretty genocide-y. The funny thing about the bit you paraphrased from Crane:
> and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction
... is that by this definition, I don't think we can classify Hamas as genocidal, as they don't seem to have the war capability to actually "carry out or cause to be carried out" a genocide upon Israel.
Technically, any "killing a member of a group" would be a genocide under this definition.
Even if someone commits a mass murder against a group, we typically call it mass murder or a hate crime -- not genocide.
So there has to be some idea of what genocide is -- what is the scale, what is the intent? Is it to wipe out a people? Or is it something else?
25,000 death is a lot. I'd say its a war crime. An atrocity, perhaps. But a genocide? Against a population of 2 million? Idk. Maybe?
It seems that we have no common definition of the word
Ok, here is a list of armed conflicts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict... Some are conflicted as being power struggles between groups of certain ethnicities; not all involve ethnic cleansing.
Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war that seems not to have any relation to genocide.
"Two Thirds of Gaza War Dead Are Women and Children"
"The Hamas-run health ministry is Gaza's official source for death numbers"
The records they release include names, genders, ages and ID numbers of deceased people. If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
This is not my reading that WHO or any other org confirmed anything. They say in 2014 both Israel and Palestinians agreed on number of casualties, but this time discrepancy is 10x.
> If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
say they made up some ID, name, gender and age. How exactly I could identify this?
1) Israel asked civilians to move south to be relatively safer, some important Hamas officers moved south along with them, and Israel targeted them.
2) The strikes weren't about Hamas officers, but just a deliberate killing of civilians.
If you're saying this is evidence of genocide, that means you're discounting (1) and assuming (2)? Why?
I'm not condoning (1), which suggests IDF is prioritizing its concerns (expediency etc) over civilian lives, but that clearly doesn't meet the definition of genocide.
to be specific: actual content says Israel asked civilians to move to South Gaza, while claim is that they still targeted targets there.
It is estimated that about 70% of killed people (which has gone over 20000 recently) are women and children. Those are not Hamas fighters. Even if you assume that every adult male that has been killed was a Hamas fighter (which is obviously not going to be the case), that is still 70% of people who are killed by IDF being innocent civilians.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini...
> the intent isn’t to deliberately kill them. And there is no evidence any of those other criteria are even happening
On the contrary, even the mere evidence in form of public statements by the leaders of Israel strongly suggests intent to harm civilians. The statements suggest that they are pursuing revenge on the whole Gaza strip, and aiming to inflict as many casualties as they can get away with.
- Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to reduce parts of Gaza “to rubble” and invoked the people of Amalek, the foe that God ordered the ancient Israelites to genocide in the Bible, in a recent speech. [1]
- Defense minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza and stated that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” [1]
- Army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said forces would turn Gaza into a “city of tents” and admitted that Israel’s “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” in dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. [1]
- Ariel Kallner, a member of parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote on X after the Hamas attack: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” [2]
- Giora Eiland, a reservist major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in a popular Hebrew-language newspaper, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” Elsewhere, he specified that “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf” and indeed that Israel must demand that “The entire population of Gaza will either move to Egypt or move to the Gulf.” Finally, he said that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” [2]
- “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”, IDF general Ghassan Aliyan [3]
- Revital Gotliv, a Parliament member from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, called for Israel to use nuclear weapons in Gaza: “It’s time for a doomsday weapon. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza.” [1]
- Galit Distel Atbaryan, also of Likud, posted on X in Hebrew that Israelis should invest their energy in one thing: “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and forcing the “Gazan monsters” either to flee the strip to Egypt or to face their death. [1]
[1] https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/13/23954731/genoc...
[2] https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23933707/israel-palestine...
[3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/cogat-chief-add...
Genocide was in Ukraine for example, when Russia targeted powerplants during winter, which didn't have any military value.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fP-J8m-BF0 [NY Times: Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza Civilians to Go ]
Can you give a good, relevant example?
Surely a power plant has military value right? If you destroy the power plant, you impact the country's economic and manufacturing ability which would definitely impact the country's ability to wage war.
Obviously it also severely impacts civilians but many other "acceptable" actions in war do the same.
In my head I imagine a war between a military run off of portable gas generators and a military run off of power plants. The difference in capability between the two would be huge!
Is there something I'm missing here?
A non trivial chunk of signal corps training is learning the ins and outs of standard generators, conventions and apparatus for distributing power, equipment for converting between various voltages used by equipment 1 to 80 years old, etc.
What is your proof of the intent?
Hamas, on the other hand, make their genocidal intent very clear, every chance they get. "then what is a genocide?" That is.
This argument is made often on the internet, but the Occam's Razor explanation is that people are paying attention to Gaza because it's much easier to do reporting from Israel than from other conflict zones. Israel is a developed country with functioning airports, communications, roads, and legal protections. It's quite a bit harder to report from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, Shan State in Myanmar, or Darfur in Sudan
I read a post a few weeks ago on the Sudan subreddit where an OP asked if people were frustrated with how much attention Gaza was getting compared to the Sudanese civil war. The Sudanese diaspora responses were overwhelmingly happy to see the coverage of Gaza, and they wished they had the same level of information out of Sudan. It's almost impossible to tell what's happening on the ground.
Additionally, people care because America is a party to the conflict by backing the Israeli government. So the conflict in Gaza matters to the international world in a way that other internal civil wars just don't, unfortunately.
The devastation in Gaza is staggering. It is quite a stretch to say that people are paying attention because of bad faith actors instead of genuine concerns. Of course people will care when a war of this size, supported by the U.S., happens in plain view.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-12-21-2023-...
But most pro-Palestine sources are both-sidesing and merely comparing raw civilian casualty numbers. They ignore the fact that Hamas's intention on Oct 7 was to target and brutally murder civilians, and that Hamas is intentionally making it hard for Israel to minimize civilian casualties as it wages this war.
There is a pretty good comment there though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9n77DPJ7AE&lc=Ugxo07TPIYWoI...
I think the quotes there are pretty telling:
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
-- Netanyahu, via theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister
There is a lot of hyperbole and hypocracy, sure, but there are also official statements from israeli politicians and the IDF, to give up all military restraint. And statements wanting to make Gaza inhabitable.
That goes in the direction of (modern definition of) genozide, when you want to permanently destroy the land of other people, so they have to go away. As they then cannot exist as a culture anymore.
Nearly 7 times the amount of people than died in 9/11, and using illegal tactics such as starvation, along with hateful/genocidal rhetoric ("We are fighting human animals", "put to death men and women, children and infants").
Is it relevant that there are a lot more Palestinians left to suffer; Or does that make it more urgent to end it?
Here's one definition of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention It doesn't mention anything about percentages.
A genocide is the indiscriminate distruction of a population, that is exactly what Israel (with the support of the USA) is doing to Palestine.
If you actually want to engage people on this topic, you are going to have to learn to moderate your language. Saying Israel is not using enough discretion when picking targets and the number of civilian casualties is too high, actually invites a nuanced discussion.
Is that what you mean by invites "nuanced" discussion?
Because what you're coaching to have happen is not even "nuanced". It's just intellectual judo. If it weren't you wouldn't be refusing to deal with it as is.