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Comment by _alternator_ | Hacker News Reader

Honestly it's difficult for me to respond to this comment because the premise is so clearly flawed.

A semblance of civilian life does not mean genocide did not or is not taking place. Wholesale population displacement, destruction of a significant percentage of civilian structures, bombings, raids, land and sea blockades, statements from leaders that suggest genocidal intent... these point in the other direction.

Would it only be genocide only if no child in Gaza was smiling? If no one was getting married, no one singing, no one relaxing amid the horror? Inhumanity of this level of extreme only occurs literally when everyone is dead. I guess that's the line you have in mind?

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Wholesale population displacement is explicitly not (by itself) genocide under the convention. Genocide is an intent crime, and the intent has to be the eradication of the targeted ethnic, national, racial, or religious group. Kidnapping all the children in an occupied territory and dispersing them so they can't be returned to their families is genocidal. Mass displacement isn't.

The fixation on the term "genocide" has been a major own-goal for advocates of Palestinians. It was deliberately defined to be a difficult bar to clear. "Warm crimes" and "ethnic cleansing" are easy claims to make in the region, and ordinary people don't care about the distinction between "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide"; that term would have served just as well, without the escape hatch "genocide" provides.

So... "statements from leaders that suggest genocidal intent" ... meets the genocide bar, yes? I'll just quote wikipedia:

The Gaza genocide is the ongoing,[19][20] intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war. It encompasses mass killings, deliberate starvation, infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, and prevention of births. Other acts include blockading, destroying civilian infrastructure, destroying healthcare facilities, killing healthcare workers and aid-seekers, causing mass forced displacement, committing sexual violence, and destroying educational, religious, and cultural sites.[21] The genocide has been recognised by a United Nations special committee[22] and commission of inquiry,[21] the International Association of Genocide Scholars,[23][24] multiple human rights groups,[c] state governments, numerous genocide studies and international law scholars,[30][31] and other experts.[32]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

There are certainly people involved in the Israeli government that have expressed genocidal intent. The problem is that you can say that about basically every state in the world. It can't be the case that the moment a state commits an ethnically-targeted war crime it is per se committing genocide because you can find someone in the majority, the opposition, or the administrative state that has embraced genocidal logic. The logic has to animate the whole conflict.

You've rattled off a list of war crimes, many of which I agree with you about unreservedly, all of which are colorable. I don't think there's much doubt about the impact of Israel's post-October-7 policy on Gazans. But so long as you remained fixed on the term "genocide", you'll forever be arguing with opponents who, at least in the current trajectory of the conflict, have the better side of the legal argument.

I'm no genocide expert, but it does seem like legal scholars who _are_ genocide experts agree that the facts here seem to clearly meet the bar. The people who you credit with "hav[ing] the better side of the legal argument" do not seem, from my vantage, to be arguing in good faith. They are trying to bog us down in semantics when a truly horrifying crime is happening, and saying that we can't call a horse a horse is not helping.

I'll also say this: I greatly sympathize with Israel and Jews more generally here. The problem at the core remains global antisemitism; it's the reason Israel needed (and still needs!) to exist, and the reason Jews globally feel threatened. Antisemitism in the middle east is particularly pernicious, but it's not much better in Europe or the Americas. It doesn't just feel like a dangerous wolrd for Jews, it _is_ a dangerous world.

That doesn't change my opinion about the situation in Gaza---there's ample evidence that it's a genocide. But I hope this helps people see that we can, and should, hold these two truths at once. Jews are persecuted, and are in a precarious situation globally. In fear and in anguish, the state of Israel is performing unconscionable deeds in Gaza. A central cause is antisemitism; if we could somehow find a solution to that, you'd go a long way towards solving the whole conflict in the middle east. But good luck.

Really the only thing that moved me to comment here, besides message board vulnerability amplified by waiting for a Rust compile run to finish, was the implication upthread that mass displacement of populations was genocidal. The rest of it I don't think there's enough daylight between us to debate usefully.

Pretty disingenuous to pretend that's the only thing that was listed.

> The problem at the core remains global antisemitism; it's the reason Israel needed (and still needs!) to exist, and the reason Jews globally feel threatened

I don’t think a genocide helps with antisemitism at all. In fact, by engaging in such horrific acts, the Israeli government makes an effective argument against the existence of any ethnostate.

I am not sure the continued existence of Israel as a local military power serves the interests of the Jewish diaspora.

> A central cause is antisemitism; if we could somehow find a solution to that

I say that with a heavy heart, and I don’t offer solutions at this point in history. The current status quo is unsustainable in the long term.

> The fixation on the term "genocide" has been a major own-goal for advocates of Palestinians

While I, and many others think that Israel is committing genocide, this is not an "own-goal". The only people playing semantics here are Zionists who are staunchly pro-Israel.

I think you're going to find that "everybody who does not agree with me on the precise particulars of my conclusions is foursquare in league with my opponents" is not the winning strategy it might feel like here.

It was you who made the claim that identifying Israel's actions as a genocide (as agreed upon by many genocide experts and international organizations) was an "own-goal". That is to say that by your logic, if you feel that Israel is committing genocide, you should keep quiet about it because you may turn some mythical constituency into a pro-Israel position by simply stating that opinion.

I don't think the pro-Israel position is "mythical", but I can imagine that if you go out of your way to stay in spaces that affirm your own beliefs it probably does feel that way.

I didn't say that the pro-Israel position is mythical. I said that no one became pro-Israel because people are saying that Israel is committing genocide. They were pro-Israel to start and just use that as a rhetorical device to try to get people to stop saying Israel is committing genocide.

What do you mean by "Zionists"?

The definition of Zionism is: people who believe Israel has a right to exist.

So we're all Abolitionists? Pakistanists?

I don’t understand your reply. What does Pakistan have to do with anything? Abolitionists? Abolish what, Israel? Sure, but I’ve never heard anyone refer to themselves like that.

The point is that the term Zionist makes as much sense as Abolitionist. Abolitionists succeeded. Israel exists. Pakistan exists. If you support the extermination of Jews and the country of Israel, just say so. Pretending that "Zionist" means something is brain dead.

> and the intent has to be the eradication of the targeted ethnic, national, racial, or religious group

Your use of the word "eradication" suggests total annihilation, but genocide refers to the destruction of such a targeted group in whole or in part.

You might argue that this can be vague and would allow any ethnic cleansing to be described as a genocide; in fact this is a point of contention among genocide scholars.

Certainly we'd both agree that Israel as a whole is carrying out at least partial destruction of the Palestinian people residing in Palestine, and that many Israeli politicians are calling for total or near-total destruction, many IDF soldiers conduct themselves accordingly, and their military actions involve indiscriminate killing/maiming often enough that there is a strong case their eventual goal is total or near-total destruction.

Put another way, there is no compelling argument that Israel conducts itself, in its extensive operations in Gaza/West Bank, with any goal of Palestinians eventually living freely there.

"Wholesale population displacement, destruction of a significant percentage of civilian structures, bombings, raids, land and sea blockades,"

These are all things that happen during war. Explain why this war is different. All war is bad. I genuinely don't see how this is not a war but a genocide.

> "Wholesale population displacement..."

> These are all things that happen during war.

You do realize that Israeli government officials openly talk about permanent relocation (expel, "voluntary migration", emigration, etc) of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza all the time:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/smotrich-says-n...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/occupy-expel-settle-minister-m...

This woman was actually tasked with that job by Netanyahu:

https://www.haaretz.com/gaza/2026-04-29/ty-article/.premium/...

I have questions.

What do you think are the definitions of genocide and war? (why are they different words)

Do they overlap?

You cathegorize that as genocide when it is directed at a very specific group. Like jews in WWII, now it is Palestinians in their own country.

You can think of genocide as a special case of a war, one where the party being genocided has no army or weapons to defend itself.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran— all of them have both an armed force and weapons to fight with. Hamas in particular, instigated the hot conflict that started Oct. 7 2023, and prolonged it through hostage-taking and active participation in armed conflict.

All these Iran-backed forces are formally allied into an Axis of Resistance, and their main success so far has been to confuse people like you about who holds the moral and ethical high ground. The reason they sought to sow doubt and confusion is to isolate Israel so they can destroy the nation, the whole thing, as they continuously have campaigned to do for perhaps 70 years.

What do you mean no weapons to defend themselves? They have plenty of weapons...

No, Palestinians in Gaza hardly have food and shelter, let alone weapons. Maybe Hamas (which most Palestinians despise) had couple handguns they managed to smuggle in but that's useless against bombs, tanks and drones.

Gaza has been under Israeli blockade for more than 2 decades now. Of course there is a resistance to that. It never had a regular army in any meaningful sense.

Anyway, you're not really disproving my point. The original poster has already conceded that killing, even in war, is not humane. Genocide just happens to be a war where there are no effective combatants left on one of the sides, so what remains is killing of civilians.

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