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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to me that all this sweat and tears are spent deliberating over the use of a word in faraway courts while all of us can see with our eyes the horrors Palestinians are subjected to by the occupying IDF. "We didn't say there was a genocide! We acknowledged the plausibility of the possibility that potentially maybe an investigation might perhaps occur into the possibility of maybe Palestinians being able to experience a genocide by someone."

It reminds me of a conversation I had with an Israeli a few weeks back. He asked me, "if what Israel is doing is so bad, why does nobody stop it?"

A great question. I don't know. And the bodies of children continue to pile up.

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If you want to redefine genocide to mean "a very bad thing" then go ahead, but doing so would hollow out the term.

There's nothing stopping people from discussing the events in Gaza as a tragedy and a war crime, but activists are intent on attaching the word genocide to this. Referring to it as a genocide has become a litmus test to be considered pro-Palestinian.

To be fair, the UN working group that declared it genocide was completely precise in how they defined it and the criteria they used. Totally fair to disagree either with the existence of that working group, their definition of genocide, or with the facts they cite as evidence, but to pretend it’s just a bunch internet activists playing rhetorical tricks is clearly subterfuge.

are you referring to "UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory"? Their report came out 10 days ago. This has been referred to as a genocide far longer than that

People say Hamas is inherently genocidal. Some believe the state of Israel to be inherently genocidal. I’m not responding to those claims. The thread was discussing the recent UN report, and that was the context of my comment.

Nobody stops it because it's not worth it, for whatever you want to measure "it" by.

Israel-Palestine used to be really important, because it was a surrogate conflict for Western vs Arab control of the Middle East, and what that is really about is of course oil.

The Arab-Israeli wars of the 1950s/1960s were direct conflicts, but it became apparent that the West wouldn't let Israel lose because Israel represents the latent threat of Western invasion if the Arabs ever really turned off the oil spigot.

So the Palestinians became the thorn for the Middle East to keep Israel at bay, so you get strange bedfellows of Iran and Qatar (Sunni and Shiite) funding them, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But a funny thing happened over 75 years of relative stability of borders and global trade: the status quo established itself, oil price and supply was managed and stabilized, security agreements established and backed up (with the Iraq invasion of Kuwait). Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel in fact are effectively allies against Iran and Turkey.

And the US has its own supply of oil with Dakota shale oil. A FUCKTON of it. So strangely, the Arabian peninsula isn't afraid of the US. They are afraid of Iran and Turkey. And who has the best army to counteract Iran and Turkey?

Israel.

The Palestinians don't have a geopolitical use anymore. The Palestinians used to number around 400,000. Now? They number 4,000,000. That is ... not good. The Palestinians have no economy, and rely almost entirely on external aid. So the scope of a humanitarian burden on Arab sponsors has risen from 400,000 people to 4,000,000 people. AGAIN: the humanitarian burden has risen by a factor of 10, while their geopolitical value has DECREASED, almost evaporated.

And that is without the decreasing value of oil from EVs/alt energy and the long term specter of global warming.

That is NOT GOOD for the Palestinians.

The answer is simple - racism, same reason the Brits gave them the land in the first place when they knew it already had brown people on it that had been living there for almost a thousand years. How many deaths did it take for most Westerners and Western governments to start caring about Ukraine and start moving towards action? Barely a handful if any. How many deaths has Israel racked up since 1948 while the self-appointed human rights arbiters of the world wring their hands and say it's just not quite genocide yet?

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