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Comment by emseetech | Hacker News Reader

Bob Vylan said "death to the IDF." He didn't call for the death of Israelis. It's the difference between saying "death to the RMP" in Ireland during the troubles versus calling for the deaths of British people themselves.

You can disagree with Mr. Vylan or that the BBC should have cut the broadcast but let's not misrepresent the situation.

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It's true the phrase, as he uttered it, is ambiguous.

Amusingly, he probably didn't intend for it to be ambiguous, since on a previous occasion he chose the wording "death to every single IDF soldier out there"

https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2025/0702/1521558-uk-police...

As they say, a lie travels across the world before the truth can get its boots on.

Pretty much all Israeli serve in the IDF. He called for their death. The mental gymnastics. He chanted for death but he didn't call for the death of Israelis. Right. He also chanted "From the River to the Sea" which is another call for the death of Israelis and he had some other antisemitic content to add to that. But yeah, he's just a great guy and BBC just let him have a stage.

I believe there are religious exemptions for some Israeli Jews that legally permits them to not serve in the IDF. In addition, I believe that Israeli Arabs are not required to serve in the IDF, but some do serve willingly. Finally, there are Israeli conscientious objectors who end up serving a prison sentence in order to avoid serving in the IDF.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Yes, but I don't see how that helps - it's still mostly conscripts who didn't really choose to enlist, let alone choose to fight in Gaza, let alone commit any war crimes.

> Pretty much all Israeli serve in the IDF. He called for their death. The mental gymnastics.

This argument makes no sense to me. You're basically saying that it's bad to call for the deaths of a genocidal military… once a certain percentage of the country enlists? Like, at what threshold do you think it would have been unacceptable to chant "death to the Nazis" or "death to the Imperial Japanese Army"?

Let's help you make sense of this:

- Israel is at war with Gaza after it was attacked by Gaza. This war will end as soon as Hamas surrenders and the hostages are returned. Could have ended a long time ago.

- Gaza is ruled by Hamas that just like Bob Vylan advocates for the murder of all Israelis and Jews. That is the genocidal party to this conflict, by their own declaration and actions.

- The correct analogy is the US going to war with Japan after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Even that analogy is weak because Pearl Harbour was a military target while Gaza attacked civilians including massacring random people who went to a music festival. Just like Glastonbury. What would the UK do if Glastonbury was attacked by ISIL, 10's of thousands of people murdered, and thousands taken hostage? I mean we've seen what it did for a lot less than that.

- Israel's defensive war looks exactly like this war would look like if any other western country had similar military action. It is generally targeting military targets and civilians unfortunately also get hurt. If you compare to similar recent campaigns and adjust for the significantly more dense population, tunnels, the use of civilian infrastructure, you will see that Israel is waging this war with less impact to civilians compared to e.g. the western allies war against ISIL or Al Qaeda. None of Israel's critics are able to give a realistic option here for Israel to achieve its legitimate goals of self defense. Hamas has been attacking Israeli cities with rockets and massacred Israeli civilians. Israel can not let it remain in control, and a force, in Gaza.

- No other country in the world would do less in terms of military action under similar circumstances. We've seen countries like the US, the UK, Australia, France, take significantly more violent measures in significantly less serious (to their self defense) circumstances.

- The argument that Gaza was somehow occupied before Oct 7th and Palestinians had no choice to improve their situation without violence is a lie. Their violence, against civilians, is an explicit, declared, contiunous, choice. Gaza was handed to the Palestinians in 2005. Even if you can somehow twist the blockade on Gaza to be something else there is still no other country in the world that would act any differently. Gaza has received billions of dollars in support since 2005 and Hamas has invested it in weapons and tunnels.

- The IDF is not a "genocidal military". It's just a military. It's fighting a difficult war to defeat a brutal enemy that is holding hostages, doesn't care about deaths of its own people, and refuses to surrender. No other western military would fight in a more "clean" or "fair" way under the same circumstances and non-western militaries would be a lot more brutal and violent (like Russia did to the Chechens or Turkey to the Kurds). The allegations of genocide are false. They are an antisemitic blood libel. Civilian casualties are unfortunately an outcome of this kind of war which Hamas started and is continuing to date.

- The media, including the BBC, is reporting Hamas PR as news and certain media (like Al-Jazeera) is basically engaged in a PR campaign on behalf of Hamas. According to Hamas any militant that dies is a civilian and civilians that die without relation to any military activities are also killed by the IDF, including Palestinians killed by Hamas. According to the media there are no combatants and no military infrastructure and no tunnels e.g. in Gaza. All targets are civilians and all infrastructure is civilian. The truth is the opposite.

- According to the media "there is no safe place in Gaza". The truth is the humanitarian zone, designated as a safe area, accounts for a tiny minority of casualties in this war, mostly related to Hamas commanders hiding there. Palestinians who have chosen to move there are significantly more safer than those who for whatever reason do not.

It's generally bad to call for the death of anyone. Doing it in a music festival given Hamas' massacre of music festival goers is doubly stupid/insensitive/evil. Sometimes you have to fight, and kill, but you should never wish for anyone to be dead.

At this point what you're doing is tantamount to writing long essays trying to convince people that the Earth is flat. It is very very obviously a genocide — probably the most well-documented one since the Shoah! — and everyone but the most hardline Israel supporters can see that.

There's a reason that support for Israel in the US has dropped to just 12% among Democrats. [1] Even among Republicans, it's down 18 percentage points! And this is despite heavy censorship of pro-Palestinian narratives (as evidenced by the article).

[1] https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/the-shift-just-12-of-dem-vote...

This argument seems so counterproductive to me. Israel is obviously committing war crimes, attempting ethnic cleansing and any number of other horrible violations of international law and common standards.

But I don't see how it is committing genocide. They are not trying to destroy the people, the genus. There are 2+ mill people in Gaza and with all those bombs they killed 100k or less? Basically that is just what urban warfare looks like.

This is like the Diddy trial, where you give the perp a way out by overprosecuting.

Here's another comment I left in response to this same person (YZF) [1] with 13 examples of Israeli MKs and other government officials declaring their intent to kill civilians. Many of these are explicit calls for genocide.

That was in December 2023, after two months, when the death toll was only around 17,000 [2]. It's now been 19 months of near constant siege; if you check Wikipedia, as of today the official count is around 58,000 people killed directly. That's likely to be a vast undercount of the total number of deaths: an estimated 64,620 had died from traumatic injury by June 2024 [3], and probably many thousands more from malnutrition and disease. There are also thousands of uncounted bodies buried under the rubble. Israel has (intentionally) destroyed almost every hospital in Gaza, damaged or destroyed at least 92% of residential buildings [4] and cut off all food and water at least twice (and repeatedly massacred civilians at aid sites).

Do you really think fewer than 100k people have died as a result of this?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38576316

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini...

[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[4] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162491

The point is that what you are describing is not genocide. "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that. Russia does do that to the Ukrainians. Putin thinks Ukraine is not a real nation and he thinks the Ukrainians are not a separate genus. That is why Ukrainian children are getting indoctrinated in the occupied territories and the Ukrainian language getting suppressed.

Does that mean that Ukrainian civilians are worse off than Palestinians? No, obviously not. Israel is guilty of many crimes and many of them are worse than some forms of genocide.

Words have meaning and you are offering the Israeli apologetics an easy way out arguing semantics and the easy way is that they are right.

> "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that.

Israel "does not do that" only if you ignore remarks by IDF members, MKs and the Prime Minister himself explicitly saying they are doing that.

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