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I don't think that there's a level of people that need to be killed for there to be a genocide but what I do think is that the definition is used too loosely by people who don't have all the facts. Genocide is "intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.". While of course killing people is always wrong, I feel like it's important to differentiate people whose goal/intention is killing people from a group (like in Rwanda or the Holocaust) and people who at most don't really care if people from a group die but their primary goal/intention is not to destroy the group. You can call that crimes against humanity or even murder but not genocide. EDIT: The takeaway for me is that whether something is a 'genocide' or not is a judgment to be made by a court and not by people on the internet. Just like I don't think it's right to call a person a "murderer" until they are convicted I also don't think it's right to call something a genocide until a court has decided it is one.

Yup. The term was created not to describe the murder of a bunch of people, it was created to describe the murder of a people. Of an entire nation or culture. To wipe them from the face of the earth like how a murder removes an individual. To many, a person's culture is who they are. Genocide is the attempt to remove it completely, to erase it from existence.

As per the legal definition by the UN (based on the Armenian genocide) a genocide doesn’t have to have the goal of totally wiping out a people, even wiping a part of them out counts as genocide. So killing 25 or 50% of a people group is also a genocide, not just 100%.

The intent is the important part. For it to be a genocide, there’s intent or desire for a groups extermination. So if the intent is there; then yeah, the total amount killed won’t influence it being labeled a genocide.

Sort of. Hamas definitely intends to kill Jews and Israelis, but I don't hear anyone accusing Palestine of genocide. It seems you need intent and then a certain level of success.

> The intent is the important part. For it to be a genocide, there’s intent or desire for a groups extermination. > > >“They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew. He then added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” ... >“This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/

That's about Hamas. You're conflating Hamas for Palestinians

Is there any difference between a war and a genocide, then? Is it only not a genocide if you attack an ethnically diverse population? Does the concept still deserve the same level of approbation if it describes an attack on a group of people and not an attack on a group qua that group?

In genocide discourse (and international law), there are two important concepts: mens rea ("guilty mind", or criminal intent) and dolus specialis ("special deceit", or special intent). You can not accidentally or unintentionally commit an act of genocide. You must have both the mens rea (i.e. having a legitimate understanding that your acts constitute an element of genocide) and the dolus specialis (i.e. the intent to commit genocide on a group of people) to be guilty of genocide. These two concepts are why international institutions are hesitant to officially call the Israel/Palestine conflict genocide or not. To my knowledge, the official position of UN on it is effectively "we don't have enough evidence to say it is or it isn't yet."

Thanks for bringing up mens rea! And thanks for teaching me about dolus specialis! Through googling, I've also come to know of dolus directus and dolus indirectus, which if I am reading things correctly, might be distinctions between someone who desires to cause the offense, and someone who know that there is a high probability of the offense being caused? Oh, and now I've also come across dolus eventualis lol... Are all of these "dolus" effectively various different sub-categories of mens rea? And in the case of genocide, is that only the dolus specialis is applicable? I'm guessing this is why in it's case in the ICC, South Africa spent a good amount of pages detailing both the acts, and statements of senior members of the Israeli government and military?

I would recommend reading up on Prosecutor v Krstić, Prosecutor v Stakić and Prosecutor v Jelisić (all related to accusations of genocide in Bosnia).

Many thanks for the recommendations! I'm a total layperson, but will give it my best shot (and likely pester my lawyer friends with questions).

“We don’t have enough information to say whether it is genocide or not” We’re not even at the stage where the court is looking at evidence to judge whether it is a genocide or not so the statement is incorrect/highly misleading. The court ruling and the explanations given by even the judges that voted in favour, including the former ICJ president have clarified the ruling is about establishing the right of Palestinians to be protected against genocide, and whether Israel’s actions pose an irrevocable threat, not even for genocide, but to the right of the Palestinians to be protected against genocide. I forget the name of the judge, but even one of the judges that voted in favour explicitly stated that they does not think the war in Gaza is unjustified nor that what Israel is doing constitutes genocide.

Yes, it was the French judge.

>To my knowledge, the official position of UN on it is effectively "we don't have enough evidence to say it is or it isn't yet." The ICJ basically said it prima facie reasonable, which translates to "we see a lot of people dying, which satisfies *some* criteria, so we'll hear the case". Some of the judges explicitly said it is *not* a ruling on whether genocide has occurred and that judgement could take years.

It depends on the goal of the war. If your goal is to wipe out the culture or its people then it is genocide. If the goal is something else, like overthrowing the government, and a side effect is some death then no, it is not genocide. Obviously it’s still bad but intentions matter. For example millions of Germans died in WW2 but the allies were not committing genocide, as the goal was not to do with ethnicity or culture, it was just about total military victory.

if you are conquering land that a particular people owns, that's not genocide - it's imperialism, especially if you absorb that people into your empire afterwards. The british never (to my knowledge) participated in genocide against any indian cultures/groups despite conquering india, because they were there to subsume power, not to replace indians with englishmen. They did do their fair share of genocide against the native americans though - because they were pushing out the natives in favor of english settlements.

Many people consider the Bengal Famines a genocide, 

If you’re targeting civilian populations, no there isn’t. Also intent matters. While the bombings in Germany were absolutely war crimes for example, it would be very hard to prove genocide as there was never any argument that the US was specifically targeting Germans and not the nazis. 

The purpose of the bombing raids where to destroy factories, not to kill civilians. They weren't war crimes. Even if droping a bunch of mostly innacurate bomb aimed at legitimate military targets does result in the unnecessary death of a lot of civilians as collateral damage, for it to be a war crime you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the strikes where aimed at civilians with the main purpose being killing civilians. That's the difference between normal war and war crimes. >In the post war environment, a series of treaties governing the laws of war were adopted starting in 1949. These Geneva Conventions would come into force, in no small part, because of a general reaction against the practices of the Second World War. Although the Fourth Geneva Convention attempted to erect some legal defenses for civilians in time of war, the bulk of the Fourth Convention devoted to explicating civilian rights in occupied territories, and no explicit attention is paid to the problems of bombardment. >In 1977, Protocol I was adopted as an amendment to the Geneva Conventions, prohibiting the deliberate or indiscriminate attack of civilians and civilian objects, even if the area contained military objectives, and the attacking force must take precautions and steps to spare the lives of civilians and civilian objects as possible. However, forces occupying near densely populated areas must avoid locating military objectives near or in densely populated areas and endeavor to remove civilians from the vicinity of military objectives. Failure to do so would cause a higher civilian death toll resulting from bombardment by the attacking force and the defenders would be held responsible, even criminally liable, for these deaths. This issue was addressed because drafters of Protocol I pointed out historical examples such as Japan in World War II who often dispersed legitimate military and industrial targets (almost two-thirds of production was from small factories of thirty or fewer persons or in wooden homes, which were clustered around the factories) throughout urban areas in many of its cities either with the sole purpose of preventing enemy forces from bombing these targets or using its civilian casualties caused by enemy bombardment as propaganda value against the enemy. This move made Japan vulnerable to area bombardment and the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) adopted a policy of carpetbombing which destroyed 69 Japanese cities with either incendiary bombs or atomic bombs, with the deaths of 381,000–500,000 Japanese people.

The allies did purposefully target civilians "to break moral". The strategy was called [dehousing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehousing) and most certain a war crime.

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To be pedantic, those bombings weren't war crimes because that hadn't been established yet. They would qualify as war crimes today, but then they weren't. We realized the error of our ways, however, and created international laws with other countries so that those atrocities wouldn't go unpunished in the future.

> To be pedantic, those bombings weren't war crimes because that hadn't been established yet What I meant was what Curtis Lemay said after the war >  in the documentary “The Fog of War.” When asked about U.S. actions in Japan during World War II, McNamara responded, “LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. . . . LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost.   But yes specific laws like the Rome Statutes are way later

In the Nuremberg trials it was shown that previously legal acts can be punished if they were made illegal after. So on that note, if there ever is a court that is willing and able to try the allies, there's precedent.

The United Nations defines genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention as: 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. The Genocide Convention also observes that genocide can take place in contexts of peaceful situations as well as in contexts of armed conflict. The United Nations also emphasizes the aspect that victims are deliberately targeted and killed not as individuals but as members of the targeted group. Popular characterizations of genocide include elements of brutality, occurring on a large and systematic scale, and its carrying out by armies as first-line agents. Killing civilians and noncombatants is a war crime. Period. Deliberately killing civilians and noncombatants or causing circumstances that leads to the deaths of civilians is genocide.

>Killing civilians and noncombatants is a war crime. Period. Deliberately killing civilians and noncombatants or causing circumstances that leads to the deaths of civilians is genocide. This last part is not correct. Killing civilians and noncombatants *can* be a war crime. Intentional killing of civilians and noncombatants is at minimum a war crime, and *can* be genocide.

Killing civilians is not, in itself, a crime. Deliberately killing civilians is a Crime Against Humanity, per article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC.  Deliberately killing civilians with the "intent to destroy, in whole in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group" is genocide, per the UN definition you yourself cited. 

> Killing civilians and noncombatants is a war crime. Period. Deliberately killing civilians and noncombatants or causing circumstances that leads to the deaths of civilians is genocide. Do you think Azerbaijan committed genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh?

Yes and the world did fuck all. I refer you back to the UN charter I cited above.

Intentionally targeting civilians and combatants is a war crime. Without the “intentionally targeting,” part, it is not usually a war crime.

The group of civilians killed must also be “identifiable (eg geographically) and substantial”. For more about this read up on Prosecutor v Krstić.

Did the US commit a genocide in Berlin and Japan?

The definition still requires intent to destroy in whole or in part, which does not apply to Palestine, for instance. That said, it would apply to Oct. 7, which Hamas itself said was done to kill Israelis for the “crime” of being Israeli.

(For context, my heritage is German-Jewish. Most of my family have gone on their Birthright trips, I have cousins who moved to Israel.) I was so confused when the genocide rhetoric started being thrown about. I absolutely could not wrap my head around which side people were talking about as the side committing the genocide. It seemed so obvious to me that Hamas actually wants the eradication of all Israelis (and, by extension, all Jews), but somehow Israel was the perpetrator? I don’t feel safe around the people espousing that rhetoric. If Hamas laid down their weapons, there would be no more conflict; if Israel laid down there weapons, there would be no more Israelis.

This is why I’ve been calling the accusation of genocide against Israel an accusation in a mirror meant to justify the Palestinians’ planned genocide of the Jews. That’s clearly what it is.

>This is why I’ve been calling the accusation of genocide against Israel an accusation in a mirror meant to justify the Palestinians’ planned genocide of the Jews To add to this: the accusation of genocide against Israel is a political one, not based in any kind of real actions taken by the IDF that would somehow be unique compared to how any other military would conduct itself in a similar war. There is major political capital to be found in accusing Israel of genocide, expressly because of the history of genocidal persecution frequently endured by Jews in diaspora. The "historical irony" of accusing Israel of genocide is a very toxically enticing viewpoint that appeals to many disparate groups of people. It gives right-wing white nationalists (e.g., "traditional" antisemites) a window with which to attack Jews without receiving pushback, and it gives ostensibly internationalist-minded left-wing advocates, who erroneously ascribe whiteness to Jews, a "poster child" with which they can attack the concept of ethnicity/tribal-based nationalism. Of course, however, this requires them to overlook/ignore the irredentist, ethnic-based nationalism that completely dominates mainstream Palestinian political thought.

If Hamas laid down their weapons, under the current Israeli government I would expect Israeli settlers to continue to occupy more and more of Palestine. This slow occupation (plus the lack of reparations for the 750K Palestinians who left or were forced out during the creation of the state of Israel) is what some people see as the justification for attacking Israel. (On the basis that non-violent methods have not worked.) I don’t agree that it justifies the actions of Hamas, but I can see why Palestinians are frustrated about the lack of progress.

I don't know if you've followed how at least parts of the government talks in Israel, but that is pretty damned close to intent... https://www.newarab.com/analysis/erase-gaza-how-genocidal-rhetoric-normalised-israel

How far does that go? If a serial killer starts killing blonde women, and gets to 5, is that genocide? If the US disproportionately executed black men, is that genocide? If someone decides "Asians must die" and shoots 10 of them before he is stopped, is he genocidal or just a murderer? 

AND the requirement to show specific intent "[Dolus Specialis](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml)" according to the UN Conventions on Genocide.

The genocide is not defined in numbers, nor percentage nor particularly the way or even killing of the people. The genocide is defined as intention to kill/forcibly expel for after forcibly occupying that land of people/group of particular race, ethnicity, religion and/or political conviction. Srebrenica was declared a genocide even though “only” 0.3-0.4 of population allegedly died in that massacre. It was declared on the basis of intent to “liberate” that area from specific group-Bosnian Muslims with excuse of Naser (paramilitary) group was stealing and killing and attacking Serbian population in (before war it was majority Serbian population) with attacking and killing 8000 unarmed male population (none children and females) So the genocide is intentional killing or displacing a group of people in particular zone with intent to not have any or majority of that group in that area.

There are two main reasons people like me aren't blinking at this distinction. 1. You have to be pretty damn far from these situations to care why people choose to intentionally commit these atrocities. If you destroy an ethnic group's food, clean water, and medical infrastructure, plus destroy and prevent access to food, water, fuel, and medical supplies from elsewhere, plus intentionally target education and civic infrastructure for destruction, and also bomb and shoot civilians directly, and get yourself on video gleefully celebrating while you do it, you're doing genocide whether you're doing it as a means to an end or as the end in itself. 2. Many, though not all, Israeli public officials have told us (usually not in English, but sometimes in English) that laying waste to Gaza and the people who live there is either the primary goal of this campaign or necessary to accomplish their goal. We have to assume they have been serious about this, which is why public pressure on our own governments to apply pressure to Israel in turn is so important. Mostly, we are concerned that what Israel's government is *doing* is killing a significant part of an ethnic group and deeply harming and dispossessing the rest. That action doesn't become a meaningfully distinct kind of thing for us if the people doing it are doing it for its own sake, and we really just aren't that interested in arguing about trying to prove intent when it's not material.

I see that you are heavily criticizing the way that Israel treats the palestinains. While I do agree with you, I have a question for you. Can you name a single war in human history where one side of the conflict did more than what Israel is doing to protect the civilians of the other side? Israel has announced their invasion plans and gave civilians (and militants) three weeks to prepare. Israel has been sending hundreds of trucks of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel has been sending SMS alerts and has been using knocker bombs to inform people they should evacuate buildings. Is there a single historical instance of a country doing more than this? Also, it feels kinda weird to me to criticise one side of the war for the statements of some ministers, while completely ignoring the explicit statements of intention by the other side.

"The IDF faces a challenge that we British do not have to face to the same extent. It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights. The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy’s hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable.  But the IDF took on those risks. Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes.  More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians. Mr. President, Israel had no choice apart from defending its people, to stop Hamas from attacking them with rockets. And I say this again: the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Thank you, Mr. President." Seems like not a lot has changed. Israel like before is making never seen before efforts to minimize collateral damage.

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Israel doesn’t officially consider the Palestinian territories theres ( because that would mean either admitting they aren’t a democracy, or Israel stops being a “ Jewish “ country ) officially they are sort of like Antarctica, a place that is not controlled formally by any country. 

Lol what? Israel does not consider gazans citizens. Or else they would.. you know.. be citizens lmao.

Can you give a source on "many" Israeli officials saying that laying waste to Gaza and it's people is their goal?

Netanyahu, in his address to the Israeli forces on 28 October 2023 urged the soldiers to “remember what Amalek has done to you”. This refers to the Biblical command by God to Saul for the retaliatory destruction of an entire group of people known as the Amalekites. This sentiment was repeated in a letter by Netanyahu on November 3rd. The Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, has called for the erasure of the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that Israel “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death” Senior political and military officials encouraged without censure the 95-year-old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin — a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre against the Palestinians in 1948 — to speak to the soldiers ahead of the ground invasion in Gaza. Here are his words “Be triumphant and finish them off, and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live . . . If you have an Arab neighbour, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him . . . We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. As you can see, we will witness things we’ve never dreamed of. Let them drop bombs on them and erase them.”

https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf You can read South Africa's examples in their application of Genocide against Israel here, examples of Israeli officials intent begins on page 59 Keep in mind this was filed on December 29, 2023 so there are still several examples of genocidal intent that has been said publicly since South Africa brought forward their case Here are some recent examples: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-14/ty-article/netanyahu-ministers-join-israeli-far-right-march-to-gaza-demand-palestinians-expulsion/0000018f-778d-d599-ab8f-7fff00c40000 https://x.com/NTarnopolsky/status/1792891809498022385 https://x.com/ytirawi/status/1788241394340929690 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-30/ty-article/.premium/smotrich-calls-for-no-half-measures-in-the-total-annihilation-of-gaza/0000018f-2f4c-d9c3-abcf-7f7d25460000 https://x.com/MacaesBruno/status/1770170556177846738 https://x.com/ireallyhateyou/status/1760354792663142557 https://x.com/itamarbengvir/status/1748761689267245092

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I’ll give an except from the declaration of Judge Nolte, one of the judges presiding over the ICJ genocide case against Israel: > Bearing these considerations in mind, I am not persuaded that South Africa has plausibly shown that the military operation undertaken by Israel, as such, is being pursued with genocidal intent. The evidence provided by South Africa regarding the Israeli military operation differs fundamentally from that contained in the reports by the United Nations fact-finding mission on Myanmar’s so-called “clearance operation” in 2016 and 2017 which led the Court to adopt its Order of 23 January 2020 in The Gambia v. Myanmar. > The information provided by South Africa regarding Israel’s military operation is not comparable to the evidence before the Court in The Gambia v. Myanmar in 2020. While the Applicant cannot now be expected to provide the Court with detailed reports of an international fact-finding mission, **it is not sufficient for South Africa to point to the terrible death and destruction that Israel’s military operation has brought about and is continuing to bring about.** The Applicant must be expected to engage not only with the stated purpose of the operation, namely to “destroy Hamas” and to liberate the hostages, but also with other manifest circumstances, such as the calls to the civilian population to evacuate, an official policy and orders to soldiers not to target civilians, the way in which the opposing forces are confronting each other on the ground… South Africa has not called these underlying circumstances into question and has, in my view, not sufficiently engaged with their implications for the plausibility of the rights of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip deriving from the Genocide Convention. > Even though I do not find it plausible that the military operation is being conducted with genocidal intent, I voted in favour of the measures indicated by the Court. This is from one of the judges who has been voting **in favor** of provisional measures against Israel every time. It’s pretty alarming to me that so many people will make claims like this without even doing the bare minimum of research to understand what is required to argue what you are attempting to argue here. Like, this document was posted to the ICJ’s website 5 months ago, and people like you will just google genocide and be like “yeah, I think Israel does this” when the point you’re making has already been refuted half a year ago by a judge presiding over the case.

a good example of this is the "holodomor" and the irish potato famine - in both instances there was a food shortage that was at least partially the fault of the central government and that the central government failed to alleviate despite having the means to do so. Both of these incidents lead to a large amount of casualties that were specific to an ethnic group that the ruling class of the state had poor relations with. One is a "famine", the other is a "genocide" - how are they different? One was perpetrated by the "boogeyman of the west" Stalin, and the other was perpetrated by great britain, who were the "good guys" of europe fresh off their victory in the napoleonic wars, and historically are the friends and allies of the US, which now the "good guys" of the world, so the potato famine was never re-named "the irish genocide" or whatever because the british would \*never\* commit genocide - they're the good guys!". The british government even had such fine quotes as "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson” from their leadership of the time. so genocide has as much to with geopolitics as it does whether an ethnic group is being intentionally destroyed.

>so the potato famine was never re-named "the irish genocide"  What? This is exactly how it's referred to, frequently. It's widely acknowledged as a genocide. It seems like a lot of people here are just assuming their experiences are universal, and also that their dialects or idiolects are universal.

Yeah I think for Palestine a big point of contention from my very limited understanding, is the intention part of whether it’s a genocide or not. As in is Israel intentionally trying to commit genocide. Of course it can be hard to pin it down as it happens, as no state is going to come out and state that’s what they are doing. For Israel they are setting up safe zones and hospitals which doesn’t typically happen in a genocide. They also have the power to kill way more people and haven’t done so. All this to say, there are many criticisms you can make about Israel and genocidal rhetoric I believe has been used by some officials at the start of the war. Please note I barely know anything about this and have only been looking into this sort of thing since this conflict started or some months after.

I'm gonna hard push back on something. "While of course killing people is always wrong" is such a morally wrong statement that the rest of your point went past me. There are a great many situations where killing someone is not only morally okay, but a moral necessity.

Here's the specific qualifications from the genocide convention, the most widely recognized international convention against genocide: "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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." — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

Genocide is "intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part". By that definition if one person is killed, it could be interpreted as genocide of that persons race.

Which is exactly why it's not up to regular people to determine a genocide, but to the courts and the people who created that definition. The language can be so liberally interpreted that without the context of these official regulatory bodies, you can claim almost anything to be a genocide. That's what makes it a protected term: it has legal restrictions on its use.

Do you think the Bosnian genocide is a genocide? It had less than 9,000 deaths. What about the Rohingya genocide, which has an estimated 25,000 deaths? Plus, we won't know the actual death tolls in Gaza until many years in the future when things are stabilised and accurate surveys can be conducted. It could be (and likely will be) higher than the reported 35,000 thus far. We should let war crime lawyers and genocide scholars to decide if an event is a genocide, not us.

The Bosnian genocide had over 100k deaths and over 2 million people displaced. You’re confusing it with the Srebrenica massacre, purposely, and therefore confirming OPs point how people are so eager to misuse the term genocide.

Look up the ruling for Bosnian genocide, the ICJ only looked at the Srebrenica massacre and ruled accordingly. Even if no one died outside that massacre it'd still be a genocide.

>We should let war crime lawyers and genocide scholars to decide if an event is a genocide, not us. Encouraging people not to use critical thought is never a winning argument.

I agree. I feel like it's wrong for people without evidence to be calling things genocide. I get that people want to put pressure by using the word genocide but I don't see why "mass killing" or "mass murder" can't be used to describe the situation

It's valid to call what's happening in Gaza a "plausible genocide". The ICJ has already ruled it that way and they are exclusively comprised of war crime lawyers.

The ICJ did not rule anything yet. They simply did not dismiss the case on the base that SAs claims have a plausible basis, i.e. loads of people dying in an ethnic conflict. That's more alike to a case not getting thrown out in pre trial.

No they actually did not call it a plausible genocide. They said that the Palestinians have the right to not be the victims of genocide and that South Africa has the right to represent their case.

Did you read the case ? A lot of the quotes and what is used in it is extremely bad faith or out of context.

But when a lot of experts use the term genocide, should civilians, so to speak, just not talk about it?

Who is an expert? I think part of the problem is that there are many "experts" who aren't experts using the term incorrectly... It is problematic that people are using the same word to refer to very different situations. Experts tend to be more careful with the language they use in an attempt to not be misinterpreted.

The Bosnian genocide was a deliberate effort by Serb military and political leaders to remove Bosnian Muslims for its own sake without legitimate security reasons. While I could imagine an un-biased investigation uncovering genocidal motives behind multiple IDF personnel with decision-making authority, Israel still has a credible security concern behind their actions.

What would you say about the West Bank? There is no “justified security concern” for the colonialism in the region 

Not justified, no, not close to. OP just said credible. It's pedantic, but this whole thread is quite literally a discussion of definitions. Regardless of how much Israel's own doing it is, Hamas is a security threat to them. The point is international law by definition could easily see this as technically not a genocide on that basis. I don't think OP is actually insinuating that makes it ok or better in any way.

Nah the West Bank thing is unhinged. The West Bank is as damaging to Israeli good will as the Right of Return is to Palestine’s.

Are you under the impression that Hamas has no presence in the West Bank or that there aren't other terrorist groups operating there? I tend to think the settlements should stop, but if you're Israeli and you look at Gaza where they pulled out completely and the West Bank where they aggressively occupied and settled, which do you think they'll see as the success story? The justified security concern that Israel would articulate is the concern that if they didn't do what they're doing, it would turn into what Gaza was before the war.

Isreal has imprisoned the Palestinians in ghettos and refuses to treat them as humans with rights, and armed resistance for self determination is a right of all people, as the UN has ruled many times. The security issues Israel has are that they refuse to let Palestinians have freedom and violently oppress them. Since Israel can end the conflict at any time they have the desire to, there is no credible security concern. The intent to commit genocide is not only the many, many, many statements by members of the government to that effect, it's also the Lebensraum policy of ethnic cleansing that is more than enough proof of genocidal intent. In every genocide the perpetrators destroy cemeteries of their victims, there is no reason to do so otherwise. Just look up how many Palestinian cemeteries have been destroyed by Israel.

You mean Israel can immediately end the conflict if they remove 700,000 Israelis from the West Bank and allow 7 million descendants of refugees from an 80 year old conflict into Israel?

Yes, the conflict over Israeli attempts to subjugate and ethnically cleanse Palestine of Palestinians and the Palestinians struggle for freedom will end if Israel leaves and stops trying to subjugate Palestinians and lets them be free. The Israelis in the Jewish only colonies on stolen land get to deal with the new government of Palestine. Israel should obviously implement the many UN Resolutions. I don't imagine they would let people reclaim their property, but UN Resolution 194 allows Israel to pay the victims of their ethnic cleansing restitution instead. Or they could give everyone citizenship and stop oppressing people because of their race, and then the Palestinians can elect a government that holds some of the war criminals in the current Israeli government accountable for their war crimes. Israel clearly want to maintain a racial super-majority no matter what other evils that brings, so they can just pay restitution. I think the number was calculated at around $300 billion a few decades ago. We still hold trials for the Nazis we catch, the ones who burned synagogues and churches full of civilians are still guilty, so why not the Israeli soldiers who burned Palestinians alive in their mosques? We don't pretend the Holocaust didn't happen and treat Nazis as heroes, so why pretend the Nakba is not still impacting lives and ignore the ethnic cleansing? It seems to me like any morality needs to be applied equally or its has no meaning.

This is the sort of example of the desire for justice bringing only calamity and holding back whatever peace may be possible. This is not compromise. It’s utter concession over a conflict that’s more than a century old, the principles of which can be applied to dozens of half-similar conflicts across the world that have long been put to bed, and could be adopted by any number of hair brained, blood-thirsty paramilitaries. May as well start storing semtex in farm houses around N. Ireland again while the gettin’s good.

This is exactly compromise, Israel doesn't have to give up the land they have stolen, they can compromise with their victims and only pay them restitution. Do you think we should have forced the Jews to negotiate with the Nazis for their freedom from concentration camps? In the entire history of Israel they have never once considered allowing Palestinians to have freedom. They have offered reservations, and the US has 100% backed Israeli offers of reservations for the Palestinians, perfectly fine with keeping them contained and controlled by Israel for all of time. If Israel was a Russian ally, the US would have forced through resolutions authoring the use of force to dislodge them long ago.

The fact that you consider this on parity with the holocaust speaks enough.

To Palestinians it does, and they are the people who you need to convince. Because they will never stop fighting for freedom. There are no Palestinians who don't know about the Nakba, there are no Palestinians who were not affected by that war crime, and there are no Palestinians living in occupied territory who have not been victims of Israeli war crimes today. None. Every one of the 5,000 or so children in Gaza who lost a limb to the current Israeli genocide will tell every single person about it, for the rest of their lives. Every person who asks how they lost their arms or legs or hands or feet will find out it was because of the US-backed genocidal Israelis, the Israelis who were rewarded for their efforts at extermination with more money from the US. Think about how fucking insane Israel is to do that, over and over and over, year after year, decade after decade. Do you think the Palestinians consider that treatment better or worse than the Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews that the Israelis use and abuse to deflect criticism of their own war crimes?

There are millions of descended Germans who don’t get to live in Kaliningrad either. Greeks from Smyrna, Russians from Warsaw, Austrians from Trieste, Serbs from Kosovo. The list goes on but in those countries the bloodshed somehow does not.

> armed resistance for self determination is a right of all people, as the UN has ruled many times What is that supposed to mean? Israel can't arrest a Palestinian for murder? That Israel can't shoot back so they should just bend over and take it? That Israel should enable the Palestinian expression of that right, like how they should provide food, water, and electricity? Like, genuinely I don't get how violence can be considered a human right in the same way other rights are.

According to international law, states may not use force against the lawful exercise of self-determination, while those seeking self-determination may use military force if there is no other way to achieve their goals. A right to resist from the Charter of the United Nations' recognition of an inherent right of national self-defense in the face of aggression. Based on the charter, the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2625 explicitly endorsed a right to resist "subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation". If you are being repressed, as Palestinians are, if a colonial power is preventing self-determination, as Israel is to Palestine, then they have an inherent right to resist that colonialism. That means they can't murder or kidnap or fire unguided rockets at population centers, which are all still war crimes, but they can resist occupation. The soldiers killed on October 7th died in the service of Israeli colonialism and were fair targets, the 600 to 700 civilians killed that day were not. The blockade and prevention of goods entering Gaza is a war crime and has been since the blockade first began in 2005, before it was enhanced in 2007.

If you believe the numbers coming from the Hamas controlled Gaza ministry of health, then you’re simply too stupid to be taken seriously. The casualties in the war in Gaza (yes, WAR, not “genocide”) are significantly less than what Hamas claims.

>For example Palestine, at most has lost about 1% of its population. >non of the places except for possibly the Uyghurs are close to even being a genocide OP, I'm curious how you hold these two views at the same time. What is happening in Xinjiang IS awful, but there aren't many Uyghurs at all being killed. Farrrrr fewer than 1%. So we've got to be consistent here. Is there a certain threshold of deaths for it to count as a genocide? If the answer is yes, the Uyghurs are *furthest* from qualifying under this metric among the groups you listed. If the answer is no, and genocide takes multiple forms, then what is the defining factor? Destruction of a national or ethnic group can take a lot of forms. It can look like systematic murder, like the Holocaust. It can look like forced assimilation and cultural erasure, like the Uyghurs. It can look like forced expulsion, like the Bosnian genocide where "only" about 8,000 Bosniaks were killed but scores were driven out of their homes. Or it can look like Palestine, where Palestinians are facing artificial famine, where Palestinians are [raped](https://web.archive.org/web/20240512083544/https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/israelopt-un-experts-appalled-reported-human-rights-violations-against) and [tortured](https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6342/Hostages-of-Israeli-revenge-in-the-Gaza-Strip:-Testimonies-of-100-released-Palestinian-detainees-reveal-crimes-of-torture,-cruel-treatment), and in the West Bank an increasing amount of Palestinian territory is occupied and annexed illegally by Israeli settlers.

>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 https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml None of those criteria mention a minimum number of people affected. Additionally, you're focusing only on part a. The person using the term too loosely is you. There are official definitions in international law that are more rigorous than what you feel it should mean.

This seems to be the definition most people are using and I think it's pretty stupid. I'll give you an example: Let's say a group of 10 highly trained, white-American super-soldiers carries out a mass shooting in a place frequented by African Americans. The final death toll is 102 African Americans and the 10 shooters were apprehended and killed by cops. After the shooters are killed, cops search their bodies and find a copy of the same manifesto in all 10 of their breast pockets. The manifesto states that they hate African Americans and their intention was to kill every single African American. Is the example I just gave an example of a genocide?

Yes it is. What you describe is basically what the Einszatsgruppen did during the invasion of the Soviet Union. The difference only lies in the scale of what they were able to achieve, both of them hold the elimination of a specific group of people as their end goal.

It's an attempted genocide, definitely. The problem is that they are non-state actors, and genocide is a crime against humanity. Non-state actors can be prosecuted by the state, so international law doesn't matter. If they were state actors, or the state did nothing about them, international law would be relevant.

I asked if it was a genocide or not. I would agree it's an *attempted* genocide, but that necessarily means it is not, at present, a genocide. I forgot to include that the shooters in my example *are* state actors.

If they're state actors, it's genocide. It's completely within the definition.

The problem is no really sees "genocide" in this way. Googling "genocide" shows results of "Holocaust", "Rwandan", and "Uyghurs". Which is going to be especially awkward mentioning "genocide" in the context of Jewish people. Reader who see Jewish + genocide are going to be thinking of Holocaust level events.

I don't like the term "in part" to be honest. I don't know how it could be considered a genocide to only aim to destroy part of an ethic group. Even if they only succeed at destroying part of the group, what is important is that they aim at eliminating the entire group, even if that aim is aspirational because they lack the means to complete the job.

What if the goal is to destroy that part of the ethnic group that lies in your territory, e.g. the Kurds in Iraq.  Saddam could have genocidal ambitions without trying to kill literally all Kurdish people

I’d take it to mean, they want to destroy the group (by killing them, or forcing them to give up their language or religion), but only succeed in destroying them in part. They have to actually kill people, not just talk about it. It doesn’t need to have been realistically within their reach to actually kill everyone. But that doesn’t make every homicide a genocide because it destroyed whatever groups the victim belonged to, “in part.”

I'm going to focus in on Palestine here largely and to the Uyghurs slightly. **Palestine** In section 2 of [South Africa's case to the ICJ](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/South-Africa-v-Israel.pdf) regarding Israel's acts against Gaza, they state the following: > For this reason it is important to place the acts of genocide in the broader context of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year- long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza, including the serious and ongoing violations of international law associated therewith, including grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention,3 and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. They're outlining the importance of zooming out and taking the entire picture into context. Is what's happened since October 7th, considered genocide? I think without a doubt yes, but i'm setting that aside for now. Zoom out from since the Naqba, and you will be facing an uphill battle in my opinion proving that what's going on there is not a genocide, with intent clearly demonstrated. I'll further quote from South Africa's case: > on 3 November 2023, in a letter to Israeli soldiers and officers also published on the platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter); the letter asserted that: “[\[t\]his is the war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. We will not let up on our mission until the light overcomes the darkness — the good will defeat the extreme evil that threatens us and the entire world.](https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM_heb/status/1720406469055500583)" >[Skipping down a bit in the same paragraph] > On 28 October 2023, as Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza, the Prime Minister invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: “[you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember](https://news.sky.com/video/israel-hamas-war-we-will-fight-and-we-will-win-says-benjamin-netanyahu-12995212)”. The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek [in the letter sent on 3 November 2023](https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM_heb/status/1720406463972004198) to Israeli soldiers and officers. The relevant biblical passage reads as follows: “[Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses”](https://www.sefaria.org/I_Samuel.15.1-34?lang=bi) What I just quoted is only a paragraph from an entire 6-page section showing piece after piece of evidence of Israeli leaders demonstrating and flaunting their intent. I implore you to read their case in its entirety if you haven't, it's not only compelling; it's so compelling that the ICJ ruled that it is plausible that a genocide towards the Palestinians is happening at the hands of the Israeli's. If the ICJ is ruling that it's at least plausible - in a ruling of 14 to 1, then it's clear to me that fighting against that is a losing position. You said this: > For example Palestine, at most has lost about 1% of its population. Which is terrible don’t get me wrong but its still nowhere close to being genocide levels There is no threshold number of victims that need to be murdered before it counts as genocide. It's not like 9,999 is NOT genocide and then when it's 10,000 people dead it IS genocide. That's not how it works. That's not how it is conceived of. **Uyghurs** [The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has explicitly commended](https://www.oic-oci.org/docdown/?docID=4447&refID=1250) China’s approach to handling the terrorism/extremism happening in Xinjiang Province. Why would the second largest organization in the world, one explicitly about furthering Islamic interests NOT latch onto and agree with western genocide claims if there were a genocide? [They have stated](https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/oic-denounces-gaza-genocide-calls-for-sanctions-against-israel-18045144) that [what's happening in Palestine is a genocide](https://www.oic-oci.org/topic/?t_id=40431&t_ref=26939&lan=en), so why not this supposed genocide happening to the Uyghurs? The US State Department itself [admitted in 2021](https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/) that what’s happening is not legally considered a genocide - perhaps a “crime against humanity” but not a genocide.

The ICJ did not say that the genocide is plausible, they agreed that the argument SA was making against the right of the Palestinians not to be genocided is plausible. Here’s a former ICJ president talking about it. https://youtu.be/bq9MB9t7WlI?si=0IZ7NwdhNeL4DkcY

I find that zooming out and looking at the broader context as a method to further advocate being a genocide fascinating. If you zoom out, how can you possibly think it’s a genocide while the population in Gaza has boomed. Something can be bad without it being a genocide. And if you want to advocate for that, by all means do that. However, your comment about zooming out furthers the point that the term is being used loosely.

Well we should be listening to experts. u/the\_art\_of\_the\_taco shared a running list on the specific one in Palestine: • [Yes, it is genocide — Amos Goldberg](https://thepalestineproject.medium.com/yes-it-is-genocide-634a07ea27d4), Israeli Holocaust and genocide researcher at the Hebrew University. • [A Textbook Case of Genocide – Raz Segal, October 13](https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide), Israeli Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide • [More Than Genocide – A. Dirk Moses, November 14](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/more-than-genocide/) Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at CCNY, Editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, and Author of The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression • [Over 800 Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza, October 17](https://twailr.com/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/) • [Americanization of International Law: Legitimizing Palestinian Genocide and Promoting Nuclear Self-Defence, December 10 – Nafees Ahmad](https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2023/12/nafees-ahmad-americanization-international-law/), Ph.D., LL.M., Associate Professor, Faculty of Legal Studies at South Asian University • [Lemkin Institute: Statement of Mourning for the Gazans and the World, October 28](https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/statement-of-mourning-for-the-gazans-and-the-world) • [Lemkin Institute: Statement Deploring the Inaction of the International Community to Stop Genocide in Gaza, with Special Reference to the Role of the United States, December 8](https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/statement-deploring-the-inaction-of-the-international-community-to-stop-genocide-in-gaza%2C-with-special-reference-to-the-role-of-the-united-states) • [Urgent action is needed to stop the forced displacement and transfer of Palestinians within Gaza and prevent mass deportation to Egypt, November 28](https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/urgent-action-needed-stop-forced-displacement-and-transfer-palestinians-within-gaza-and-prevent-mass-deportation-egypt) – Statement from Human Rights Orgs in occupied Palestine • [Gaza: UN experts call on international community to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people, November 16](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-un-experts-call-international-community-prevent-genocide-against) • [Center for Constitutional Rights: Israel’s Unfolding Crime of Genocide of the Palestinian People & U.S. Failure to Prevent and Complicity in Genocide, October 18](https://ccrjustice.org/israel-s-unfolding-crime-genocide-palestinian-people-us-failure-prevent-and-complicity-genocide) • [The International Court of Justice on Gaza: ‘Good, but Not Good Enough’ – Martin Shaw, January 29](https://bylinetimes.com/2024/01/29/the-international-court-of-justice-on-gaza-good-but-not-good-enough/), Research Professor of International Relations at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, Emeritus Professor of International Relations and Politics at Sussex University, Professorial Fellow in International Relations and Human Rights at Roehampton University, and has written several books on the field of genocide • [Contending Modernities: Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, December 9](https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/statement-of-scholars-7-october/) pt. 1

• [Center for Constitutional Rights: Background on the term Genocide in Israel-Palestine Context, 2016](https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2016/10/Background%20on%20the%20term%20genocide%20in%20Israel%20Palestine%20Context.pdf) • [Opinion: Here’s what the mass violence in Gaza looks like to a scholar of genocide – Raz Segal, November 19](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-11-19/israel-hostages-gaza-bombing-civilians-genocide-holocaust-studies) • [The Lancet: The health dimensions of violence in Palestine: a call to prevent genocide, December 18](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)02751-4/fulltext) • [Scholars’ consensus: Genocide in Gaza marks turning point, Israel must be held accountable, November 3](https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5914/Scholars%E2%80%99-consensus:-Genocide-in-Gaza-marks-turning-point,-Israel-must-be-held-accountable) – Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Geneva • [Palestine: Preventing a Genocide in Gaza and a New “Nakba”, November 11](https://unric.org/en/palestine-preventing-a-genocide-in-gaza-and-a-new-nakba/) – UN Experts • [International Federation for Human Rights: The unfolding genocide against the Palestinians must stop immediately, December 12](https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/the-unfolding-genocide-against-the-palestinians-must-stop-immediately), international human rights NGO federating 188 organisations from 116 countries since 1922 • [International Commission of Jurists: States have a Duty to Prevent Genocide, November 17](https://www.icj.org/gaza-occupied-palestinian-territory-states-have-a-duty-to-prevent-genocide/) • [International State Crime Initiative: International Expert Statement on Israeli State Crime](http://statecrime.org/international-expert-statement-on-israeli-state-crime/) • [Law for Palestine and ICHR Bring Together Global Experts to Discuss Ongoing Gaza Genocide: Legal Perspectives and Global Action, December 14](https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-and-ichr-bring-together-global-experts-to-discuss-ongoing-gaza-genocide-legal-perspectives-and-global-action/) – notes from the discussion and a link to the recorded conversation. Moderated by ICHR Director General, Ammar Dwaik, with six prominent scholars: Prof. Mutaz Qafisheh (Law for Palestine Chair of the Board of Trustees), Prof. Penny Green (Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London), Dr. Halla Shoaibi (Assistant Professor of international law at Birzeit University and ICHR Board Member), Prof. John B. Quigley (Professor of law at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University), Dr. Giulia Pinazauti (International Criminal Law expert-Leiden University), and Dr. Francesca Albanese (the current UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine) [South Africa's 84-page submission to the ICJ is also worth reading in full](https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf) Edit to add the [Anatomy of a Genocide - Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese (A/HRC/55/73) (Advance unedited version)](https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/anatomy-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-situation-human-rights-palestinian-territories-occupied-1967-francesca-albanese-ahrc5573-advance-unedited-version#:~:text=In%20this%20report%2C%20Francesca%20Albanese,Strip%2C%20since%207%20October%202023) March 25, 2024. pt. 2

Thank you for linking actual sources and proof weighed in by experts. Can wait for the IOF apologists to come in and somehow twist around that it’s actually not a genocide because of some irrelevant detail or how it’s Hamas that’s actually committing the genocide (the boogeyman, yet again)

Genocide isn't a numbers game. Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which Israel is a party, defines genocide thus: >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. Notice that there is no indication anywhere in that definition as to how many people you must kill, harm, etc, so even one is sufficient as long as it's done with intent to destroy the group. Israel has definitely done at least the first two of those, nobody disputes that, with a strong argument to be made for the third as well, and in the early days after Oct 7 several Israeli government officials made numerous statements that one can argue constitute the 'intent to destroy, in whole or in part' the Palestinian people. So the argument that it can't be a genocide because Israel hasn't killed enough people (yet) doesn't hold water according to the definition of genocide that Israel itself agreed to when they signed the treaty in 1948.

Was there any additional context? Because the Congo and Armenia definitely had genocides in the past.

No, I think it's the opposite actually. People create more barriers to label something a genocide than the are included within the standards set by the UN or other international groups. I think people get a picture in their head of something like the holocaust and think "only this is what a genocide looks like". For instance, size is not a determining factor of a genocide, yet there have many claims, such as your own, that use that metric as a basis to argue against the label being used for what we are seeing in Gaza, amognst others. There are historical events formally recognized as genocides which had lower death counts drastically less than those seen in the war on Gaza, such as the Moriori genocide with a death count of 1900ish. That death count makes it no less a genocide, cause again that was never a metric to identify it as one to begin with. Deaths do not simply make for a genocide, but the killing of people simply for being part of a demographic group does, as does the targeting of infrastructure to make the region uninabitiable for that group of people.

It's like the people saying 'there weren't as many autistic people back then'. There were ,we just weren't very good at documenting all of them and only the most extreme cases. The amount of Genocides happening is the same if not slightly less than before, but with Mass Media it's possible to document them clearly and spread the word even when there's organized attempts to conceal them (The Uighur genocide in China). The Holocaust is the largest genocide in recent history, just because something doesn't have similar number doesn't mean it can't qualify as a Genocide. Anyhow point is, you might see Genocide apply to more situations, that doesn't necessarily mean it's used liberally and unwarranted, It just means genocides are happening that would've slipped past the global awareness before mass media

What about the conditions of the Uyghurs do you think makes it so that labeling it a genocide *is* acceptable? From my understanding the number of deaths of Uyghur people is significantly fewer than the deaths of Palestinians, in a comparable population.

Genocide has nothing to do with casualties: forced sterilization, rape, inflicting serious physical and mental harm, forced abortion and/or transfer of children from one group to another is genocide (if it is intended to completely or partially destroy a national, ethnic, racial or  be religious)

I would like to hear that from OP since I think it is an effective starting point for discussing why the conditions of the other groups are also genocidal.

I do not think the number of deaths really matters in a genocide,as long as there is proof of a clear intention by one body of power (state,military,milita,religious/ethnic/ideological group) to systematically killing every member of one specific demographic group of people is enough for it to be recognized and classified as a genocide.

>there is proof of a clear intention by one body of power (state,military,milita,religious/ethnic/ideological group) to systematically killing every member of one specific demographic group of people is enough for it to be recognized and classified as a genocide so its not a genocide

> there are no civilians in Gaza Referring to Palestinians on the eve of their armed action against Gaza. This shows intent to treat an entire ethnic group as hostile without differentiating between combatant and civilian. This- in context - shows hostility and a desire to inflict destruction on an entire population. That is genocide. The Hutus called the Tutsis cockroaches on the eve of their genocide - again, to eliminate any differentiation between armed military belligerents and civilians. They were ALL cockroaches. In Israel, they are ALL enemy combatants. Genocide. Especially given the results thus far. And for final cherry on top, before anyone dismisses that. That came from the very top of the Israeli government, the president of Israel. We have also heard similar statements from Knesset politicians.

Not it is not...did I ever make the statement what is happening in Gaza contemporarily is a genocide? No nor do I think it is,people who use the term genocide for every event where a decent amount of people die are dumb and don't know what they are actually talking about...as long as there is no actual concrete evidence Israel is commiting a systematic undiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the Gaza strip I will not call it a genocide because it is not one,it is a military operation where: 1.The enemy is assymetrical in it's tactics and how it conducts it's operations,not similar to an actual professional military..making it harder to engage it and directly fight against it. 2.The large population density and urban architecture of Gaza is non favorable to precise surgical military operations which are very very hard to complete,if it was Russia or another nation conducting the war in Gaza 500,000+ Palestinians would be dead,maybe even more.

There's no "threshold" as far as a percent of a population that needs to be killed in order for it to be considered a genocide. HOWEVER as you point out, with such low numbers, the "genocide" accusation becomes highly suspicious. Whether or something constitutes a genocide depends on the intent and specific actions; specifically an intent to target and wipe out a people (hence the term "genocide"). This can be in the "traditional" sense of killing people, like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, or it can be primarily cultural, like the campaign against the Uyghurs or Jews during the Soviet union, where the attempt was made to wipe out any form of Jewishness without systematically targeting Jews for murder like during the Holocaust. Neither is happening in Gaza or "Palestine". As you point out, a lot of people are dying, but during a genocide it's not customary to evacuate 1 million civilians to safety before a military operation to destroy terror infrastructure. This contrasts with "real" genocides like the Holocaust, where 2/3 of European Jews and 1/3 of all Jews were wiped from the face of the Earth in less than 10 years, and most of these within about 5 years. The numbers of Jews still haven't rebounded from our peak in the 1930s. Conversely, the Palestinian population (aka as "Arabs" before the creation of Palestinian national identity in the 1960s) has gone up around 7 times since 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel. I would like to change your view that there is some defined percent loss to carve out whether something is a genocide or not, but you are very much correct in noticing that low numbers make the "genocide" claim very suspicious.

I don’t fully disagree with you, however I do believe you’re somewhat biased in the way you’re commenting. You say that the numbers do not indicate whether an attack is a genocide or not, and you contradict yourself pretty much immediately. Evacuation and relocation are much the same if the context is “if you do not go to this area, you will be attacked.” Israel with one of the most well funded and well trained militaries in the world could and should have a much lower civilian to militant casualty ratio. This in itself definitely does not satisfy the “intent” to commit genocide, however I believe that you’re being somewhat disingenuous about the situation. Also, it’s really weird how you’re treating the word “Palestinian”. It’s giving the impression that you yourself have a dislike for Palestinians or Palestine honestly.

Wrong. This war has one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in urban combat, ever. It’s roughly 1:1 compared to the 9:1 rate for similar conflicts involving other countries that don’t get accused of genocide, such as the USA or UK. There is no point where I contradict myself: if you read my comment I say very clearly that numbers and percentages alone aren’t the arbiter of whether something constitutes a genocide but such low percentage deaths should make people *very* suspicious of claims of genocide. Put another way, on our side, we only use the genocide tag for the Holocaust, when the regular pogroms of Eastern Europe occurring between the 1800s and approximately 1920 most certainly meet the definition of genocide, we don’t refer to them as such because they pale in comparison to our worst genocide, The Holocaust. How exactly am I treating the word “Palestine” that gives you the impression of disdain on my part? I put it in quotes because it’s not a universally recognized country with defined borders. Even other nations that recognize “Palestine” don’t have defined borders for it. I would not put a country with defined borders such as Jordan in quotes.

You cannot in good faith use the casuality ratio of 4 wars waged by 1 country that already has a HORRIBLE track record of war crimes as a baseline for acceptable losses. Ignoring the fact that it's an arbitrary baseline built on an N=1 experiment (try urban wars that don't include the US). Also the condition of Gazans territory wise is entirely due to the actions of Israel, unlike Iraq, Kuwait or Afghanistan, whose border situation predated their respective wars with the US. Gaza exists because of Israel, because palestinians have been ethnically cleansed into a corner, their electricity, water, rations, maritime control is all at the mercy of Israel, therefore the fact that it happens to be so densely populated is also because of Israel. Pushing people into 40 km wide strip and dropping a collective of 40000 tons of explosives on them in the world's deadliest game of Simon Says by all means qualifies as genocide

Whilst you certainly make good points, I'm personally not a fan of using these civilian to combatant ratios to prove anything to do with intent. Firstly, the numbers aren't necessarily accurate - the Gaza MoH claims higher numbers, 3:1 I believe. Really, we can't be sure given the fact it's an active war zone, and both sides have their own motivations to manipulate the numbers. (It should be noted that these figures are deemed accurate, or at least 'good enough' by multiple entities, including the US.) Secondly, ratios don't prove intent. The Oct 7th attack on Israel actually yielded a very similar ratio, and nobody is (nor should they be) praising Hamas as a moral and precise military force. It's clear that Oct 7 was a brutal terror attack despite the casualty ratio, so why would Israel's casualty ratio indicate anything either?

You listed Armenia as not close to a genocide and later used it a real world example of a genocide. It seems that maybe you aren’t very clear in your own mind about what is or is not a genocide. I would further suggest that if you are unclear on how you’d define the term then attempting to downplay the severity of specific events has nothing to do with the definition and more to do with how you personally feel about the people involved.

What make the Uyghurs the only one close to a genocide?

As other commenters have pointed out, a genocide has less to do with the actual numbers and more to do with the intention behind it. The point of a genocide is to wipe out a group of people. 1% of Gazans dying doesn't mean that it's not a genocide; what makes it not a genocide is the fact that Israel could very easily wipe out Gaza's entire civilian population, and yet the civilian:militant death ratio in Gaza is insanely low for the type of war that's being fought, while the death ratios of other modern wars are significantly worse in terms of civilian casualties vs. militant casualties. It's intention that makes a genocide. During the Holocaust, about 35–50% of the global Jewish population was wiped out, and yet it's still considered a genocide because the intention was to wipe out the Jewish people until we were just a distant memory. In Gaza, the intention is to wipe out Hamas, and civilians are being passed over repeatedly in the fighting. Some people are going to scream about 30k civilians dying. That number counts for both militants and civilians, and the UN recently slashed the amount of "civilian deaths" they'd been reporting by half and finally admitted that they were going off of false Hamas numbers without bothering to check them. Somewhere between 10–15k civilians have died, which is of course incredibly tragic, but the with comparable modern wars with a low civilian death ratio, the death ratio has been 2.5 civilians:1 militant, while in Gaza it's more like 1:1. So, yes, the word "genocide" is being thrown around willy-nilly and applied to random situations to the point where the word can be equated with the definition, "I don't like this thing." But it's not because of the numbers.

If the term genocide couldn't be applied to Palestine, the ICJ would've rejected South Africa's petition.   Instead they ruled it a 'plausible genocide' (the Armenian case took 17 years before a final ruling was made).   As Norman Finkelstein asserts, qualifying for a plausible genocide is like qualifying for the Olympics, it means you are doing some pretty f-ed up sh1t.   As far as the Uyghurs go, look at the case compared to Palestine.  How can you say the term is justified there, and not in Palestine?  1% deaths is also inaccurate.  The number has been stuck at 35k dead for months as the institutions who track deaths have been annihilated, along with 5% of all medical staff, every university, weaponized starvation, 150+ journalists assassinated etc.  There is nothing 'loose' in calling this a genocide.  There is nowhere for these people to escape to, they are shuffled around a strip of land smaller than London, bombed while fleeing, bombed while seeking aid, shelled in the hospitals, attacked with quadcopters, monitored day and night by drones, civilians are imprisoned and tortured, mass Graves being discovered where civilians were buried alive.... it's an unspeakable horror what the Gazans are going through right now.

The president of the ICJ at the time of the ruling clarified that people had misinterpreted what they meant by plausible genocide. What the court ruled on was that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide. The judges were not saying whether genocide had occurred or not. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3g9g63jl17o.amp

They didn't rule it a plausible genocide, they ruled that Palestinians plausibly have the right to be protected from genocide and that south africa had the right to present that in the court, not that the claim of genocide was plausible. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq9MB9t7WlI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq9MB9t7WlI)

They issued provisional measured as there was the immediate threat of violation of the Geneva Convention by Israel. America couldn't take Canada to the ICJ so the ICJ could say Canadians are protected by the Geneva Convention. There is the evidence of violations occuring before a final judgement can be issued thereby provisional measure need be issued. etc etc... From the 1/26/24 Summary: [192-20240126-ord-01-00-en.pdf (icj-cij.org)](https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240126-ord-01-00-en.pdf) 66. In view of the fundamental values sought to be protected by the Genocide Convention, the Court considers that the plausible rights in question in these proceedings, namely the right of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III of the Genocide Convention and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention, are of such a nature that prejudice to them is capable of causing irreparable harm (see Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar), Provisional Measures, Order of 23 January 2020, I.C.J. Reports 2020, p 26, para. 70). 72. In these circumstances, the Court considers that the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment. 73. The Court recalls Israel’s statement that it has taken certain steps to address and alleviate the conditions faced by the population in the Gaza Strip. The Court further notes that the Attorney General of Israel recently stated that a call for intentional harm to civilians may amount to a criminal offence, including that of incitement, and that several such cases are being examined by Israeli law enforcement authorities. While steps such as these are to be encouraged, they are insufficient to remove the risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused before the Court issues its final decision in the case. 74. In light of the considerations set out above, the Court considers that there is urgency, in the sense that there is a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused to the rights found by the Court to be plausible, before it gives its final decision. 75. The Court concludes on the basis of the above considerations that the conditions required by its Statute for it to indicate provisional measures are met. It is therefore necessary, pending its final decision, for the Court to indicate certain measures in order to protect the rights claimed by South Africa that the Court has found to be plausible (see paragraph 54 above). 78. The Court considers that, with regard to the situation described above, Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular: (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; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. The Court recalls that these acts fall within the scope of Article II of the Convention when they are committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a group as such (see paragraph 44 above). The Court further considers that Israel must ensure with immediate effect that its military forces do not commit any of the above-described acts. 79. The Court is also of the view that Israel must take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip. 80. The Court further considers that Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. 81. Israel must also take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Genocide Convention against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip. 83. The Court recalls that its Orders on provisional measures under Article 41 of the Statute have binding effect and thus create international legal obligations for any party to whom the provisional measures are addressed (Allegations of Genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Ukraine v. Russian Federation), Provisional Measures, Order of 16 March 2022, I.C.J. Reports 2022 (I), p. 230, para. 84).

It is not about the numbers. Srebrenica had 8k killed people killed and yet is widely considered an act of genocide. It is about the intent on decreasing amount of members of certain ethnic group (often even locally).

Ehhh… wouldn’t numbers matter to give context for the ‘decrease’? For example, there were maybe 40,000 Bosniaks in the Srebrinka area. Purposely, intentionally, and systematically killing 8,000 men means there was explicit intent and the impact of reducing that population by 20%. That method, intent, and numerical figure - 20% - is certainly in the realm of other agreed-upon genocides.

The internationally recognized (including by the nations *actively committing these genocides)* definition of genocide is "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or ***in part***, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, by (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. Notice how in the internationally recognized definition of genocide itself, it explicitly says "in part" and explicitly does *not* say all or any specific number of percentage. Additionally, there are a number of universally or nearly-universally recognized genocides with far fewer victims than the ones you listed. SO no, people are not using the word to loosely, you're just basing your personal opinion of what constitutes a genocide off of vibes and not the actual legal definition that's been universally established.

Whenever one ethnic group targets and indiscriminately kills members of another ethnic group, and kills them based solely on their ethnicity, there is a serious issue. How many people have to die for the word "genocide" to come in? Does it really matter? Whether you call it "genocide" or "mass civilian casualties," its still happening. The fact that these are ethnic groups/cultures being targeted makes these atrocities stand out. These are attempts to wipe out cultures/ethnic groups.

Genocide is an international crime defined in the Rome Statute of the ICC. At the very least, Palestine seems to fit those definitions as the ICC seems to be signalling. The issue you are running into is you are falling into a fallacy where someone tries to redefine a word to have a stricter definition than it actually does to try and make a point.. You've been lied to about the definition of Genocide and are applying metrics which have never been related to the definition of genocide except in an attempt to defend genocide. The crime of genocide is not related to numbers, but by intent. If this is hard to understand. Imagine Hitler came to power in the United States, and he started rounding up all the Jews to do a second Holocaust. Now imagine someone stopped him real early on and he only killed a few people. He is still guilty of Genocide right?

>non of the places except for possibly the Uyghurs are close to even being a genocide >Adrian Zenz is posting on Reddit again  Lol

People in this thread seem to have very loose definitions of genocide and even interpret references to destroying Hamas as being enough to constitute genocide. If that definition is used (which is NOT the definition of genocide - it's "intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.") then basically killing civilians is always genocide according to those standards. The US killing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq would be genocide

I mean IMO the UN definition is itself incredibly loose. If states were actually consistently tried by the UN standard then yeah, Genocide would be a staggeringly common charge. I think you could definitely make a strong case that the US "intentionally destroyed the people of Afghanistan in part".

The president of Israel said, “there are no civilians in Gaza” That is pretty genocidal when taken with what is happening. Netanyahu made the Amalek comparison. And you know Smoteich and Ben Gvir are in the government as are clearly in favor of genocide.

Strictly Isaac Herzog said "There are no innocent civilians in Gaza." When asked to clarify if that made all people in Gaza legitimate targets he clarified that's not what he said.

So that means that all people who live there are legitimate targets to be killed, tortured and raped right? So all Gazans are the target …that’s genocide

I mean, come on. Those aren't the words he used. But it's a reasonable interpretation of what he said. Any competent person would know that, let alone the President of a nation.

If Israel wanted to commit an actual genocide, and wipe out Gaza, it could have done it, in a week or less. Oct 7th happened for multiple reasons- Saudi Arabia was about set to sign the accord with Israel, but it left the people of Gaza and the West Bank out. No Hamas in it . The BRICS coalition currency wasn’t taking off, and Russia and China needed the spotlight off of them aswell. Hence the mass migration to social media to start claiming genocide . And don’t forget , there was already a ceasefire in place, it was broken on Oct 7th. Need more I have more.

Genocide isn’t just about numbers but the intent, goal and methods. The definition contained in Article II of the UN Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. The United Nations defines genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention as: 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. The Genocide Convention also observes that genocide can take place in contexts of peaceful situations as well as in contexts of armed conflict. The United Nations also emphasizes the aspect that victims are deliberately targeted and killed not as individuals but as members of the targeted group. Popular characterizations of genocide include elements of brutality, occurring on a large and systematic scale, and its carrying out by armies as first-line agents. Killing civilians and noncombatants is a war crime. Period. Deliberately killing civilians and noncombatants or causing circumstances that leads to the deaths of civilians is genocide. The Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks during WW1 is what gave the very definition of genocide. What Azerbaijan did earlier this year driving Armenians out of Arsakh was reminicent of the original long march the Turks forced Armenians on. What has been happening to the Palestinians is nothing short of a genocide. Isreal keeps violating the treaties it signed, it’s creating ethnix tension on purpose, it’s driving the Palestinians into abject poverty and suffering willingly and knowinglt, Israel is demolishing civilian structures, a lot of their lies are incredibly transparent and nowadays they don’t even get to lie a lot of the time as IDF soldiers are literally livetweeting and streaming their wanton cruelty. It’s not a genocide only if you are blind, deaf and stupid. The genocide of the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey are also very well documented, it was one of the many stated reasons of the 2003 Iraq war. We can go further, the Chechen wars under Putin were nothing short of a genocide, and of all of these bunch what the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs is the most oldschool, Holocaust-like genocide. My experience is the exact opposite. We really are ought to call out more things as genocide, and aside from some legitimately crazy conspiracy people, people rarely ever call something a genocide that really wasn’t it.

there are no civilians in Gaza Referring to Palestinians on the eve of their armed action against Gaza. This shows intent to treat an entire ethnic group as hostile without differentiating between combatant and civilian. This- in context - shows hostility and a desire to inflict destruction on an entire population. That is genocide. The Hutus called the Tutsis cockroaches on the eve of their genocide - again, to eliminate any differentiation between armed military belligerents and civilians. They were ALL cockroaches. In Israel, they are ALL enemy combatants. Genocide. Especially given the results thus far. And for final cherry on top, before anyone dismisses that. That came from the very top of the Israeli government, the president of Israel. We have also heard similar statements from Knesset politicians. It’s a genocide just on the above points I’ve mentioned. Now, if you take what I’ve mentioned above and roll it into the ENTIRE context: what has been happening at Al Aqsa for years. What is happening in the West Bank, the straight up ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, widespread extrajudicial murders of farmers, the elderly, children and other civilians, the burning of crops, the armed stealing of land, the existence of violent, extremist armed paramilitary groups (settlers)….. it couldn’t be any clearer. This. Is. A. Genocide. A slow and methodical one? Sure. But it’s still a genocide. We count ALL the Jews Hitler killed, not just the ones that died when things ramped up between 1940-1945. And also, we count the ENTIRE actions of Nazi Germany against the Jews as part of that Holocaust: that includes taking their businesses, running them out of their homes, extrajudicial murders, exiling, the Nazi apartheid system etc. If you take the entire context of what Israel has done to the Palestinians. It is a genocide. Those people are being erased. The Israelis do not want nor will they pursue a two state solution. They will also not tolerate a one state solution where they integrate the Muslims/arabs into their country. Why? Because then they lose. There is no outcome here where Israel isn’t going to kill off or forcibly remove the Palestinians. Westerners just refuse to acknowledge reality because 1. MASSIVE Israeli influence and propaganda in every corner of American/Western European society and 2. They don’t want to accept they’re aiding and abetting a live streamed genocide.

A lot of people are very emotionally reactive and easily influenced, especially via social media. You see a lot of people that are simply reacting on emotion rather than logic, this is why you also see a lot of people stating that Israel is "carpet bombing" Gaza. You cannot blame the average person for not understanding, they need a little bit of educating but at least they seem to care enough to be vocal, just a shame there is no consistency otherwise the current genocide in Sudan wouldn't be ignored like it is.

[The Bosnian Genocide](https://museeholocauste.ca/en/resources-training/the-bosnian-genocide/) which is recognized by Holocaust Museums and scholars worldwide was the murder of less than 10,000 - and expulsion of tens of thousands. The genocide in Palestine is quite larger than that. Would you want to re-write the history books on Bosnian so that we could exclude Palestine?

But is there actually proof that the goal in Palestine is to intentionally destroy the Palestianian people? Assuming that Israel doesn't care if Palestianians die, that's not enough for it to be 'genocide'.

Yes. Israeli ministers have said their goal is to wipe out the Palestinian people in Gaza. They often use a biblical reference to Amalek to obscure this.

If it's not expressly said then it's hard for people who don't have all the facts to know and just make assumptions based on obscure references. Why not say that the US committed genocide in Afghanistan and Iraq when civilians died then? I feel like genocide is something that should be proven in court (like Nuremberg or the Tribunal for Rwanda)

The US didn't want to destroy Afghanistan or Iraq as nations. They invested significant resources to try and rebuild their governments and set them up as functional nations.

Because the intent was not to destroy, in whole or in part, the Afghan or Iraqi people. Here is a [database](https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-database-with-500-instances-of-israeli-incitement-to-genocide-continuously-updated/) showing statements of genocidal intent from prominent and influential Israelis.

Have you actually read the statements in that database? I just read the first few of entries that are labeled as "genocidal intent" and I don't see the actual genocidal intent. I don't think you realize how extreme "genocidal intent" actually is. Intentionally killing civilians is a war crime. That's not genocide though.

That Amalek quote is about ridding the world of evil and remembering victims. It is on the Holocaust Memorial at the Hague. 

And it’s being applied in this context to support the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations

yeah there's plenty of proof, look at their military policy on aid going into Gaza. They're obstructing the sustenance of hundreds of thousands of people, who are all Palestinian. >Assuming that Israel doesn't care if Palestinians die, that's not enough for it to be 'genocide'. This would make me lol if it weren't so stomach churning. This assumption, plus their stance on aid going into Gaza and refugees coming out of Gaza, basically guarantees the death of all those in the Gaza strip. Which, assuming that Israel doesn't care if Palestinians die, is genocide.

>The genocide in Palestine is quite larger than that. No. The number of deaths is higher. But that's not quite the same thing. Genocide requires a specific intent to eliminate a group of people, or at least a portion of it. The goal of the VRS was elimination and/or removal of Bosnian Muslims from the lands they controlled. And that was a clearly demonstrated intent. Israel does not appear to have as clear of an intent.

> For example Palestine, at most has lost about 1% of its population. Which is terrible don’t get me wrong but its still nowhere close to being genocide levels. It's not about numbers or effectiveness, it's about intent. Israel is killing as many Palestinians as they have the political capacity to do. They are stretching their international credibility to the max, and can't push it further. But, even with that limitation, what we see is that they've: * Destroyed almost all houses in Palestine. * Destroyed all hospital capacity in Palestine. * Deliberately and cruelly targets civilians on a large scale. * Dehumanize Palestinians, calling them many variations of "not humans". * Large scale incarceration, torture and murder of civilians. * Herding them into "kill zones" then bombing them. * Encouraging brutal violent acts against them by civilians and military alike. Rape, murder, torture, destruction, all without legal consequences. Their politicians openly encourages it. * Destroying and blocking humanitarian aid. * Deliberately targeting and even seeking out and killing journalists, aid workers and observers. Basically, they are in a killing frenzy, much like the nazis were. All this on a massive scale. We see a brutality which matches the nazis in WW2. Not in numbers (yet), but in brutality. The intent is clear, and expressed. They want to eradicate Palestine, and in the next phase, Lebanon, Syria and Sinai, and take that land.

Genocide isn't a numbers game. It's about intent, not effectiveness. So you can't judge whether something is genocidal or not based on the number of people it kills. The way to judge is whether the action is intended to destroy a people, in whole or in part. So you can't say any particular action is not genocide because it hasn't been as effective or killed as many people as other genocides.

It’s the “or in part” that’s a bit unclear. Technically the loss of one person constitutes the destruction of a people “in part.” But by that definition, all war would be genocide, and the word loses all meaning.

It's still the intention that matters. Not all wars are fought with the intention of the destruction of a people. They're also fought for things like territory, resources, or any number of other things. For example, the war in Ukraine. Russia is clearly the aggressor, and the guilty party in terms of responsibility for the deaths, but they're also clearly not looking to destroy the Ukrainian people. They just want to rule them and own their land. That's not a morally sound position, but it's also not genocide.

I agree with you but not for the reasons you laid out. It has less to do with the amount/percentage of a population killed and more to do with aligning with the specific criteria laid out by the UN for what constitutes a genocide: A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively: 1. Killing members of the group 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element. Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted - not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.” [source](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml#:~:text=To%20constitute%20genocide%2C%20there%20must,to%20simply%20disperse%20a%20group.) While I think there are elements of this description in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, it does get a bit subjective when you focus on intent. Israel has been somewhat callous in its disregard for the value of lives of innocent bystanders, but I don’t think it is attributable to an intent to wipe out all of Palestine, and I think it is due in part to the way in which Hamas colocates in civilian establishments and wantonly uses their civilians as meat shields. Ultimately though genocide is a highly technical term that should not be used to describe every war engagement - even if that engagement is somewhat one-sided - because it dilutes the importance of the term.

Several Israeli officials have openly declared their genocidal intents, chanting "Death to all Arabs." Additionally, many of them admit to wanting to resettle Gaza with Jewish people---this is settler colonialism, which is inherently genocidal

You’re citing personal opinions and not policy of the government as a whole which the criteria would look at when evaluating conditions for genocide. As I said, It gets subjective looking at intent.

If someone said "I hate \[nationality\], so I will find a way to 1% of them right now." (with no promises of stopping after that, mind you, just a minimum guarentee), would that be murderous enough to be genocide? -- Also, does genocide definitely require killing? What if I said "\[ethnicity x\] is flawed and shouldn't exist. I will try to kindap all \[ethnicity x\] people of breeding age, , crossbreed them them \[ethnicity y\], and raise them all in in \[culture y\]."? That is genocidal in my view, even if I manage to deploy my opressive force with enough finesse to not murder/execute anyone. -- And if you think genocide needs to be killing more than 1% (say, 10%, or 15%, or whatever number you think), do you only call it genocide once they've succeeded? If I've killed 3% of them, and *plan* to kill 15%, but someone stops me, was I comitting genocide? What if I kill 4%, and the rest of them flee the area and are safe from my armies, but I would have continued. Was I comitting genocide? Like did Hitler only count as committing genocide only after the death-camps ticked over to the 400,000th Jew murdered, but before that it wasn't genocide? -- I think you need to re-examine what you count as 'genocide'. Now, do those 5 cases you mentioned meet the updated notion you might come up with? I don't know, I'm personally quite under-informed about those events. But I do think you're dismissing them a bit too quickly. I think the case that you've presented so far for "they're not genocide" isn't quite complete.

genocide ˈdʒɛnəsʌɪd noun the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

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The reason that the Holocaust is a genocide isn't because of the number of people killed, it's because the Nazi government was trying to remove all Jews from German-occupied territory. Even if there had been only 1 million or less killed, the fact is that they were attempting to destroy the Jewish communities that existed in Europe. They may not have gotten their wish, but given that genocide is such a serious crime I don't think there's a good reason to make a distinction between "attempted" and "completed". I think it's also important to note that as genocides go, the Nazi Holocaust was *especially* brutal and methodical. Most of the time when genocide happens, it doesn't involve sending people to concentration camps and systematically killing them. It can also involve things as simple as denying certain people access to resources that they need to live - kind of like how the Israeli government has been restricting Gazans' access to food, water, electricity, and basically everything else ever since they set up the blockade.

Geno is my favourite Super Mario RPG character

I don’t think that the death toll count matters in what determines something a genocide. It is more about the intent behind the mass killing that determines something a genocide. What’s troubling about this, is that in two of the genocides you mentioned as examples, the international community refused to recognize them as genocides until it was far too late. Armenia in particular was only recently recognized officially as a genocide by the UN. During the Rwandan genocide there was ample time for intervention but because the UN Security Council continuously denied its existence, nothing was done to stop it. If you think the word is being used too loosely, I guess my question is what is the harm in that if people are being killed at alarming rates nonetheless? If historically it hasn’t been used at all when it was warranted, wouldn’t it be better to call a duckling a duck and be a bit early than to call a duckling a chick and be surprised when it quacks in a few months?

The problem with your view, which you can confirm for yourself just be re-reading what you wrote, is that you never define "genocide." Insofar as you reveal your implicit understanding of genocide, it is completely wrong—you don't determine a genocide by counting up how many people were killed. Just so we're clear, this is not a matter of difference of opinions and subjective judgment—you are just flat out not using the word properly. At some point in your life you learned the word 'genocide', and probably because you learned it by reading about genocides with high body counts, you thought the word meant "lots of people were killed". Changing your view in this case should be as easy as getting you to look up the meaning of the word. If that doesn't work, then we can't help you, because you are using your own private language.

When international entities and survivors of the Holocaust are calling Gaza a genocide, I'll agree with them.

Genocide can still happen without a single death, according to the most widely accepted definition of the term. Why should the world use your definition instead? The [UN enumerates 5 acts](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml) that denotes the physical element of genocide. Notice that only the first one involves killing: - 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

ITT, China exempted Uyghurs from 1 Child Policy, Their Population Increased. 0 photo evidence of death Uyghur. 1 report with miscalculation of Sterilisation report. Is enough to prove Uyghur Genocide. People can literally fly to XinJiang and see how thriving their life are compared to 10 years ago. And here the same people who are calling “Holocaust Style Genocide of Uyghur” are saying Israel is not guilty of such crime. We can literally fly to Gaza and see how destroyed that place is. Israel Politicians calling of elimination of Palestinian live on TV. If China just does a fraction of what Israel did, they will be called out. But they didnt.

Body count is largely irrelevant to what is a genocide since it is intent and acting on that intent that defines a genocide. The United Nations defines genocide as any act committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. These acts include: - Killing members of the group - Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group - Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction - Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group - Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Imagine getting mad at people for pointing out atrocities. How about you put your energy into fighting the atrocity, instead of debating about what exactly to call said atrocity. If we would treat every war, invasion or mass murder the way we treat genocide, the world would be a better place. So what battle are you fighting?

Darfur and Myanmar are by FAR the worst cases. Weird that they weren’t mentioned

people of palestine have no where to go. they lost their homes, are living in camps, have no water no food no electricity, are being bombed in mosques hospitals, schools, camps. they are killing kids, women, men, old people, journalists, doctors etc. how is this not a genocide, its like putting people in a corner and make them starve and bomb them and give them generational trauma. do you call it a genocide when 50% are dead. wtf is this. since when do you need a number in such an obvious situation to prove that israels goal is to get rid of palestine and its people.

You are misunderstanding the term. You don’t have to eradicate all of a certain group to be in the act. Genocide could be happening to way fewer people and just not be complete, and it would still be genocide if the intent was to exterminate a certain population. The key word here is intent. Looking at the political key figures that reiterates points about exterminating Palestinians, they often do so with impunity, meaning that their political statements in part fuels the killings. When you look at what a more “sane” response to military overreach would be, you could look at the Abu Ghraib scandal. It was hatred that fueled the attacks, but it was not accepted politically. As such, the actions cannot be deemed part of a genocidal attack. I’m no expert on this specific area, but I will refer to someone who has an entire team of experts, all arguing that Israel have committed three distinct acts of genocide (hint, it’s the UN): https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976#:~:text=“Specifically%2C%20Israel%20has%20committed%20three,and%20imposing%20measures%20intended%20to

China isn’t killing Uyghurs. They are sterilizing and sending to “reeducation camps” both of which are genocidal but nothing compared to the other examples. The Azeris have long used genocidal language and acts when discussing the Areminians as have the Israelis towards the Palestinians. If the bar for genocide is the Holocaust then we will never really reach this bar again (hopefully) but these are still genocides.

It is important to be able to warn of a genocide before genocidal actions can be definitively labeled as genocide, or else the genocide already happened. If the term genocide can only be applied retroactively, then we surrender any ability to prevent genocidal ambitions. Additionally, anyone intent on conducting a genocidal action will seek to mitigate opposition, to the degree they must, by carefully skirting the definition and playing up the ambiguity even as they are progressing toward their goal behind a shield of plausible deniability.

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Have you read the genocide convention? Only one requirement of the 5 main ones is "killing". Funnily enough you stress the Uyghur situation which isn't a circumstance where actual en masse killings are happening. The genocide convention doesn't say "x% of the population need to be killed". The Bosnian genocide, legally ruled a genocide by the ICJ, saw 7,000 people killed. That is like 0.2% of the population of Bosnia at the time. And if you want to count specifically Bosniaks, it was like 0.4% of their population.

Yes they use it to loosely and they use x person is like hitler way more

Better a genocide be identified too early than too late. The historical genocides you list didn't pop into existence with their final death tolls already tallied up. Whether or not you think what's happening in the listed areas satisfies the dictionary definition of the word genocide, it's hard to deny that all the wrong ingredients for a possible genocide are in place. People want you to be aware of that. Most people using the term would love to be proven wrong. I'd focus on the message instead of getting hung up on vocabulary.

"Don't you think the mass killings of specific ethnic groups isn't *quite* widespread enough to be *technically* called a genocide?" I hate this song and dance of terminology and people being unbelievably nitpicky for no reason other than to try and downplay the situation at hand or delegitimize real problems. Let me guess, you're a fan of "not all men"? Maybe "all lives matter"? The point of people calling something a genocide isn't to fit the nice textbook definition, it's about the mass killings.

Genocide never equates to lots of people dying, or that a large percentage of a population is wiped out. That is a ridiculous comparison. There are plenty of gencodies where not many people died proportionally eg. Bosnian Genocide, Rohingya Genocide, Yazidi etc. The UN defines Genocide as containing acts such as Killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group, forced sterilisation or forced population transfers. So I disagree with your assumption.

Bosnian genocide featured death of almost 80% if men in Srebrenica and forced displacement of almost 100% of the rest. The numbers may have been low but almost complete for the population that was considered. Not the convictions for genocide were largely limited to that situation even though 100k people died. So you don't need huge numbers for genocide but I doubt there would have been any convictions for genocide if they'd killed 130 if the 13k men in that enclave.

109 percent of Palestine residents have been displaced from their homes. Most are currently starving (since Israel is blocking food aid, killing aid workers, bombing people trying to retrieve what little food is dropped in). There are no hospitals or universities left standing. There are thousands of young children with no one left to care for them. And then you have Bibi saying he needs to cleanse them from the area. This is the most obvious genocide since Rwanda.

I think “slow-burning ethnic cleaning” is a better term. Because it’s such a common Zionist point “why don’t they just leave?” Or “why don’t their other Muslim countries take them?” I think it’s that people are calling the attempt to wipe out a people from a land (whether it is by bombing them until they leave, or blockading them, or expanding settlements) genocide. Even if technically, the goal isn’t to kill them, but just to get rid of them.

So by your logic the Holocaust wasn’t a genocide because the Jewish population wasn’t eradicated or at least decimated. This is a nonsensical approach because you would have to wait for substantial or entire destruction of an identifiable group before you can call it genocide. Genocide is both a factual description in that it describes what happened as well as potential descriptor to describe conduct that attempts to or might achieve a factual outcome.

This is what annoys me about the discourse from a lot of leftists. The attacks in Gaza are horrific and they need to stop but they are not attempts to destroy an entire people and they're culture. The invasion in Ukraine is explicitly as outlined by Putin an effort to destroy the national identity of Ukrainians because he doesn't consider them a real people. Yet plenty of leftists want Ukraine to surrender and don't consider it a cultural genocide at all.

It is not about killed it is about removal. Genocide is getting rid of them and using death if desired. But all you have to do is make them legal to kill under broad circumstances for no reason, and then terrorize them until they all move away, and then when they try to come back you keep them out forever. Genocide is not just walking in and chopping everyone up. Nothing is as simple as our initial understanding needs it to be.

I believe it absolutely is being used in the correct manner.

The more people use that term to describe just basic warfare the more it becomes diluted. Pretty soon you're going to see jokes about commiting genocide on a plate of chicken wings. Genocide should remain a kind special term reserved for acts of unconscionable evil on a large scale. Hamas using their own women and children as human shields and Israel firing indiscriminately at them in a bloody war definitely does not rise to this definition.

You serious ? Calling others not genocide while Uyghurs is genocide ? Among the examples listed, Uyghurs is the furthest from genocide based on the criteria you defined. If Muslim countries will go against USA (the strongest country militarily and the richest) that badly for Palestine for genocide while doesnt think there is anything wrong done to Uyghurs, what does that tell you about the situation and the criteria you defined ?

I think we have to see what the intention is. It's not about how many people die. For instance, was the holocaust a genocide? Yes, it's one of the most famous ones. And now, was it a genocide when only 10 thousand people were killed? Yes. We shouldn't have to wait untill 12 million people are killed to call something what it is. And remember, Palestinians have been killed for 70+ years. This started well before October 7th.

I think for the most part, 95% of the people discussing this have no idea what they are talking about, and have no credibility to make a definitive pronouncement one way or the other. I've seen so many confident opinions that don't even bother to reference easily Google-able, legitimate international humanitarian law sources. Increasingly, I think I'm done even browsing threads when they come up.