During its current war against Hamas, Israel has deliberately forced two million Palestinians into refugee camps. Israel has deliberately leveled half of Gaza. Israel has deliberately denied food and medical aid to civilians. Israel has plainly carried out indiscriminate bombing with little care for who they kill.
You can make a pretty good case that these are war crimes. I would. Nonetheless, it's not genocide. It's not an attempt to exterminate the Palestinian population. It's war. As horrific as it is, the death toll in the Gaza war has been sadly ordinary.
Kevin appears to have omitted a line on his chart above which is genocide…
Yeah.
It's still genocide, by the UN definition. Which includes forced evacuation, displacement, and rejection from civil society or economics.
The chart is interesting in its own way but does not support the thesis offered. Many of the conflicts involved multiple parties and the two party wars were of a much of a different sort. I mean was the battle for the Warsaw ghetto not a genocidal war? I guess the point is that asymmetry matters. Nevertheless, I’m with Loomis from LGM in that the term genocide is misallocated and the charge ethnic cleansing (genocide’s first cousin) is more apropos. For those counting WW2 had an incredible 2.5% civilian death toll if we assume a world population of two billion and 50 million dead. The number in Russia and Europe is obviously much higher.
It might be ethnic cleansing if there was a more serious attempt to get the Palestinians to leave Gaza. I mean more than just a few comments about Congo or weird stuff from the nutbags of Netanyahu's unfortunate coalition.
The IDF is displacing Palestinians multiple times, and carrying out attacks in areas to which they told people to flee. They are destroying housing and civilian infrastructure. How many people will Gaza be able to house, and provide water, electricity and food to after the Israelis have finished despoiling it? Their objective is to render Gaza largely uninhabitable and thereby ‘encourage’ ‘voluntary’ emigration. It’s not what the fanatic ministers say, it’s what the IDF is doing.
You must be better informed about their "true objective" than I am; I can see multiple other alternative objectives based on their actions. Perhaps you will forgive me if I wait to see them it actually happen before stating that ethnic cleansing is going on.
I can see multiple other alternative objectives based on their actions.
This isn't the flex you think it is, and furthermore, no one's going to waste any time trying to 'prove' otherwise.
It sure looks like the Israelis are making a serious attempt to get Palestinians to leave Gaza. It's just happening in slow motion. Once they get to the point of house-to-house fighting in Rafah, the only two outcomes are a massive slaughter, or Egypt opening the gates and letting the Palestinians leave.
This was always the plan. And now that oil and natural gas just off the Gaza strip needs to be put to 'productive' use ...
Don’t forget China: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war-two-casualties-by-country
Isn’t Netanyahu’s coalition the actual government running Israel? So if the people running Israel say they want to exterminate Gaza, shouldn’t we believe them?
Few during WWII felt that, for example, fire bombing German cities was genocide: yet, almost certainly, the civilian death toll was overwhelming. Using the WWII logic, the current level of bombing of Gaza, could easily be morally justified.
I am not claiming the WWII logic is correct: rather, I am identifying our moving morale standards, around civilian death during war.
"I am not claiming the WWII logic is correct: rather, I am identifying our moving morale standards, around civilian death during war."
As in comparing Ukraine and Gaza?
James B. Shearer - I am not comparing two current conflicts.
Rather, my point, our tolerance for civilian loss has materially moved, when one compares WWII, or say the Korean war, to today.
Few in the west had morale complaints about civilian death associated with bombing Berlin, Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki: we bombed cities and not military bases. Approximately 100,000 people, almost all civilians, died in Hiroshima alone.
Our air campaign on Japan deliberately targeted civilian structures with incendiary bombs. Probably more people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than died in Hiroshima. I have heard those attacks described as war crimes by some but I’ve never heard of them described as genocide.
It's also a war crime to mix un-uniformed forces with civilian populations or use civilian facilities for military purposes. Hamas has two million hostages plus the handful of Israelis they took.
The US had a similar problem in the Korean War. A standard tactic used by the North Koreans was to rouse a town at gunpoint and drive them towards the US lines as a shield. Not all that many veterans talked about this. Americans did fire. Many who didn't were sitting ducks for the North Koreans who had no qualms about killing civilians.
Do you have a source showing Hamas has done such a thing? Otherwise, this is as non seqitur as it gets.
I have no problem calling Hamas' militant wing war ciminals, but I think you and others offer exagerations and fabrications like the above as a way to excuse Isreal's criminal actions. Crimes of the Isreali occupation are not a justfication for the Oct 7 atrocities committed by Hamas. Likewise, those atrocities are not a justification for the inhuman carnage we are witnessing in Gaza right now.
So, Israel is committing a war crime when it arms civilians, and when ununiformed settlers attack Palestinian villages?
It's not just that moral standards have changed. Legal standards have changed, too. The 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, and the 1977 Annex to it provided most of the laws that Israel is guilty of violating.
TheMelancholyDonkey - very good point.
The challenge, as I see it, are:
- lots of countries, since 1949 and 1977, have violated the aforementioned documents without consequence
- certainly Hamas, and Israel, are in violation
Therefore, given that the legal standards are inconsistently applied, my point about changing morale standard still has merit.
Hamas isn't a country. It even isn't a functioning government. It is a terrorist organization that has some limited control of a territory. They definitely commit war crimes but I think it is terribly disingenuous to call some sort of double standard if the world expects more from a supposedly law abiding nation than from a criminal organization.
Hamas was a functioning government until Israel invaded Gaza just as the Nazis were a functioning government until the invasion of Germany was well under way.
Hamas was a functioning MUNICIPAL government. It didn't have any say over the borders. It didn't control the air space or the territorial waters. It didn't even control most of education or health care which was done by UNRWA and other UN organs. It does not set the VAT rates, that is done by Israel which also collects the tax and does NOT transfer it to any Gazan authority.
So it had less force than my local county government which sets tax rates and water and infrastructure spending...
I think "bantustan" is the word you are looking for to describe the governments in Gaza and the West Bank.
‘Moving morale [sic] standards’ — first, I think you mean ‘moral’, second, that phrasing is curious. A lot of humanity would consider that not merely movement, but improvement.
I'm confused, what part of WWII was where the allies refused to allow Germans freedom to reintegrate into international relations?
This is a more complicated question than it might seem. The Allies controlled all policy in Germany until 1949. At that point, they allowed German civilians to form a government, but retained overall control until 1955. The European Coal and Steel Community came into existence in 1952, which was the first step of reintegrating West Germany into international relations. But East and West Germany did not join the UN until 1973.
That late? I did not know that. The difference between oddly and widely read, I suppose.
So Israel has been at it for three months. Maybe we ought to project what the kill totals would be if they keep killing the native population at this same rate for as long as the Germans did their Romany, handicapped, and yes, Jewish residents?
Or normalize to "average kills per year" or some other way of comparing apples to apples.
And queer; LGBT were also targeted.
Thanks! I didn't mean to leave these folks out.
That depends on whose definition of genocide you're relying on. If the Convention [] on Genocide, what Israel is doing is unlikely genocide. If you're relying on the Rome Statute, it's possible to interpret Israel's actions as genocidal.
On top of that, it depends on who has the power to refute and block ICC/ICJ.
Easy peasy, all we have to do is agree on a definition, which would surely be somewhere between "the occasional civilian building gets obliterated, whoops" and "gas chambers and ovens", to determine what the situation is here.
This is far beyond 'an occasional' to 'nearly all are damaged, most are destroyed'
You say tomatoes and I say tomahtoes.
kevin,
have you actually read the UN definition of genocide?
It's a lot broader than what you think it is.
I don’t see how this chart is relevant to the subject. As far as I can tell the number of deaths is not a criteria for determining I genocide has been commited.
Like most things, there are shades of gray, and people often blur the lines between ethnic cleansing and genocide, understandably because one can cause the other.
I think if it were being done by a country we weren't on good terms with, we (press, politicians) would probably be calling this ethnic cleansing. And while they might not quite be there yet, it's clear there are some in Israel's government that would like to cleanse Gaza and the WB of Palestinians. It doesn't mean they want them all killed (a la Germany, Rwanda, etc) but they want them gone and don't seem to be concerned whether it's migration or death.
They've made Gaza unlivable and deadly, and while that happens in war, there seems to be a movement in Israel to make this a permanent state of affairs.
I wouldn't call it genocide either, but I understand why people do and what they are getting at.
(I also understand that Israelis and their ancestors have faced ethnic cleansing themselves, and that wasn't right, either.)
Not caring whether it's migration or death is what makes it genocide. Just because they *may* not be committing genocide on purpose doesn't mean that they aren't.
Last I heard, deliberately starving people to death is considered to be genocide, full stop. No, it doesn's matter if the options are leave or die, it's still genocide.
The other conflicts were all multi-year, this one is hardly more than a few months old.
On an annualized rate, Gaza is at 4%, Khmer Rouge at 6%, Somalia is at 3%, East Timor is at 0.8%,
This is not considering the number of excess deaths due to starvation, or the long effect of having the infrastructure totally destroyed.
And you'd be surprised what you can live through.
It's not genocide if Israel does it.
Most of us have been hearing this for our entire lives. I guess it must be true then, there's a chart and everything.
Besides, I'm sure the Gaza concentration camp will be just fine for the returning Gazans after this "war" is over.
You seem to be comparing the preliminary deaths in the first 3 months of the assault on Gaza with a lot of wars that have already finished. Does anybody actually think that keeping 2 million people without access to food is going to leave the death toll in Gaza similar to what it is now? That Israel's destruction in Gaza has already surpassed the effects of the disaster in Iraq is sobering.
And, of course, the point of the hearings on genocide are to keep those death counts where they are rather than standing by as they grow. Drum doesn't say what numbers he is using, but presumably they are deaths from bombings as reported by the Gazan authorities. But it seems highly unlikely that that will be the largest source of deaths given the lack of drinkable water, and the very limited allowance of relief into the territories.
Many top Israeli figures do not hide the fact that the point of this is to make it so that there is only one people with a claim to the land, namely the Jewish inhabitants. It is possible that Israel simply wants to beat the Palestinians into submission so that they accept apartheid. But the charge of genocide hardly looks crazy at this point. And the time to step in is before the death percentage reaches that of East Timor, not after.
At some point, it will be understood to be cruel to let people live in a destroyed Gaza. Then all will agree the population should be evacuated.
And Israel should then be treated as a pariah state by everyone. Let them see if they can become entirely self-sufficient.
A recent Oxfan report shows that the daily deaths in Gaza greatly exceeds all other major conflicts in the 21st century> 250 a day in Gaza vs 96.5 in Syria, 51,6 in Sudan, 50.8 in Iraq, 43.9 in Ukrain, 23.8 in Afghainstan, and 15.6 in Yemen. (and that's not even accounting for all the dead bodies buried in the rubble that haven't been counted yet). So yeah, give Israel a bit more time. They're clearly going to surpass Yeman and Syria and very possibly Darfur and South Vietnam. And if there are major disease outbreaks as some fear, then all bets are off.
I’m just happy to see religious fanatics getting whacked. The Middle East offers the world nothing but fanaticism. Let it burn.
The wording is "whole or in part" I happen to think there's an argument either way.
Came across this bit in The Atlantic:
Someone's read their Hannah Arendt. Conversely, I see several posters here whom I doubt know her name, let alone read anything she's written. I also think there's a broad (mostly nonvoiced) consensus here as to which commentors fall into that category.
Semantic arguments must be the most pointless in politics. The IDF is systematically killing thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, and forcing millions into homelessness, incurring an occasional casualty of its own in the process. I don't care what name is given to it; it's a horrendous crime.
Good thing we have bloggers to tell us what is and isn't a genocide. That way we don't have to rely on experts on the topic, at least some of whom have already concluded that this is a genocide.
I read Kevin’s post, and I read every comment, and unless I missed something, there isn’t one single condemnation of Hamas. Shame on all of you.
Kevin is increasingly turning into a parody of an intellectual: the type that’s so smart that they paradoxically start saying things that normal people can easily identify as problematic. To paraphrase Orwell, only the intelligentsia could be so stupid.
For a much better take than the comically biased post provided by Kevin and backed up in every comment, here is a recent column from Andrew Sullivan:
“The atrocities of October 7, committed by a fundamentalist, totalitarian terror-sect, were designed to replicate the anti-Semitic madness of the Holocaust — in the one place where this was never supposed to happen again. Like the architects of 9/11, the terrorists’ psychologically astute goal was to trigger the deepest fears of its victims, to terrorize into trauma and over-reach …
“No, this is not genocide, as I have argued before. In fact, the charge of genocide seems to me inflammatory, even grotesque, deliberately equating Israel with the Nazis, in the tradition of the hate-filled international left. There is no evidence that Israel wants to exterminate the Arab race, in whole or in part, or even the Palestinian part of it. Hamas, in contrast, openly brags of its eliminationist anti-Semitism …
“Because Hamas is not a nation-state capable of mounting a comparable counter-attack, we are also witnessing an inherently lopsided fight, where civilian losses among the Gazans are stratospherically higher than Israeli casualties. It’s not a war like the Allies and the Nazis where two forces matched; it’s a war in which one party already controls the entire ground of the other, has vastly superior air and land power, and can pound its enemy with relative impunity.
“It therefore looks and feels like a relentless massacre. This is in part, of course, because Hamas deliberately uses civilians as fodder and human shields, and cynically maximizes civilian deaths for propaganda purposes. This too is different than other kinds of war, and it makes it close to impossible to defeat Hamas without massive civilian loss. Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for the carnage.”
You are a lunatic conservatice piece of shit troll uncapable of not lying, unless you think calling Hamas a terrorist organization isn't condmning them. Either that or you are just a moron that can't read.
WOW, what a childish response. I'm not sure what makes you think spouting bile like this is okay. It's not.
@Solar:
Your behavior is a discredit to the Left. All it accomplishes is the election of Trump.
Shorter Sullivan: It's not a war. It's a relentless massacre of civilians. But it's Hamas's fault because they don't have an army to fight back.
@Kenalovell:
Your “shorter” version is a strawman response.
Hamas does have an army to fight back. They even used that army to attack as part of their stated mission of genocide. It just doesn't wear uniforms and hides among the civilian population. Those are also war crimes. Arguing that Hamas is allowed to use civilian shields makes little sense. It's a vile tactic, but Hamas figures that it has better PR than Israel.
It's not like Israel just got up one day and said let's wipe out Gaza. It's that Gaza got up one day and said let's wipe out Israel. This death to the Jews thing goes back way past the founding of Israel as a modern state.
Isreal's supporters have only fairy tales like these to hide behind. History doesn't exist. Reality doesn't exist.
Hamas' actions on October 7 were an atrocity and a crime against humanity. No one here has shied away from that sentiment.
That stipulated, would you go to a post discussing whether or not Hamas militants used rape as a weapon and express your outrage that no one in that context was condemning Isreal for its treatment of Gaza? It's hard to even imagine, though your mirror image of that scenario is standard protocol all over the place. Even when outlets like CNN are interviewing Palestinian survivors who have lost all their loved ones and barely escaped with their own lives. "Do you condem what Hamas has done?"
This post and thread are about what flavour of war crime Isreal is committing right now. Trying to shift the topic to what Hamas did three months ago to provoke Isreal's reaction is a transparent attempt to excuse Isreal and shut down a conversation about very well founded accusations.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, disproportionate response: these are all crimes by law. Isreal is indisputably guilty of the last two, pretty obviously guilty of the second, and if you don't accept they are guilty of the first, who really cares.
There is no "yeah, but look what they did" clause to get out of violating international law.
You've wasted a couple of hundred too many words on this one. He'll never acknowledge the obvious, let alone formulate a coherent rebuttal.
You're undoubtedly correct, but sometimes I reply more for the lurkers...a long standing habit I developed during the climate blog wars of the 20-aughts.
You are a lunatic conservatice piece of shit troll uncapable of not lying, unless you think calling Hamas a terrorist organization isn't condmning them. Either that or you are just a moron that can't read.
I completely agree. And thanks for voicing the collective revulsion most of us feel about Mr. "If you can't make me say I'm wrong I win."
I read Kevin’s post, and I read every comment, and unless I missed something, there isn’t one single condemnation of Hamas. Shame on all of you.
Yawn. The incessant complaint that every single bit of commentary on this subject must include a ritual condemnation of Hamas is infantile.
There were two incidents of school shootings this year so far, Leo, and you didn’t condemn either one of them, you depraved hater of children.
Numbers, schrumbers. Recently I read of a doctor in Gaza who had to amputate the leg of a child which, had medicine been allowed into the strip, could have been saved. It had to be done without anesthetic because that also is stopped from entering. His exact words I don't remember but it was pretty close to this: "Her father was crying as he held her down, I was crying as I cut her leg and the girl was screaming."
So three things here. The girl was innocent but bombed anyway. Then she wasn't allowed to get the antibiotics to stop her wound from becoming gangrenous. Then she wasn't allowed to get anesthetics during the amputation of her leg. That's three actions the latter two of which had no military meaning and were purely cruel. And she's one of thousands. Let the ICJ decide whether there is genocide, or at this stage a plausible case to be made thereof. What I see is pure cruelty.
Why isn't Rwanda on the list?
Meh.
We have scores of statements of genocidal intent from Israeli government leaders and IDF soldiers. We have -- as Kevin mentioned, then ignored -- cutting off of food and medical aid (and water) to a densely crowded civilian population.
KD hangs his argument on the limited civilian death count, but (a) the butchery has only started, and (b) we have not yet started receiving information on deaths from lack of water, food, medicine, and sanitation, which are likely to be huge. I think we will end up looking at 5%+ of the population of Gaza being killed by this assault, and in the course of under a year.
And then the question can be asked, to what end? In WWII, we were fighting regimes that had slaughtered and enslaved millions, that had toppled legitimate governments, and that remained a serious threat to all around them. In Gaza, Israel is fighting a rag-tag militia with rifles and a few improvised or smuggled-in rockets, whose greatest "military feat" caused maybe 2,000 civilian casualties.
And in WWII, we were in a war that lasted six years and that consumed much of the economies of the countries involved. Israel has been in active combat not four months yet, and have they even re-allocated government spending (theirs, I mean; not America's) in order to address the "critical threat" -- ?
It's genocide. Full stop.
Remeber the howls of 'bias' when the Lancet study on all deaths in Iraq attributable to war? I don't know how many times I and others had to explain to the likes of Argle Bargle what a confidence interval was. Say, wasn't that the one where she blamed her mistakes on her lousy, no good, very bad calculator?
The Allies also had a strategy for how to convert their operational campaigns into a peaceful victory. Some of them, especially the British nighttime bombing campaign, turned out to be based upon very flawed assumption and were, if anything, counter productive. But they had a plan.
When they occupied Germany, they devoted immense resources to building a functional civil society. They helped to create institutions that would not just remove the Nazi elements from German society, but that allowed the Germans to govern themselves. They took it as a given that they would return sovereignty to the Germans in fairly short order. And they, at least the Americans and the British, did not annex any German territory.
Anyone pretending that there is any comparison between the Allied efforts, writ large, in World War II, and those of the Israelis in the present either has no idea what they are talking about or they're lying to you.
Yes.
I think what is damning for Israel -- in rational discussion, but maybe not in the ICJ -- is a consideration of what else they might have done. Probably increased vigilance around Gaza and strikes against rocket launch sites and facilities would have almost entirely eliminated the threat.
Instead they decide to kill some 30,000 people directly, with probably several times that many indirectly. That is literally Nazi-level evil.
Contrarily, what options did the Allies have? Any letup on their attack on Germany would have left the Third Reich in control of most of continental Europe; any letup on their attack on Japan would have left Japan in control of a lot of Asia and Oceana. With both regrouping and consolidating their power, to expand further.
The ‘human shields’ argument comes up frequently here and elsewhere in attempts to absolve Israel of any responsibility for civilian deaths. It absurdly denies agency to Israel: Israel chooses to drop 2000-lb. bombs in densely-populated areas, determines its rules of engagement for ground forces, decides to conduct air strikes in areas to which it directed civilians seeking safety.
Here is a contrasting case: the US had been fairly criticized for ‘collateral damage’ i.e. civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Subsequently, it learned of the presence of Ayman Al-Zawahiri in Kabul. He was bin Laden’s successor as head of al-Qaeda and a key figure in the attacks on US embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and those on 9/11. There was no higher-value terrorist sought by the US, nevertheless, an operation was carried out that killed him without harming anyone else in the same house, using non-explosive missiles (probably the ‘flying Ginsu’): https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3114362/us-drone-strike-kills-al-qaida-leader-in-kabul/
By contrast, the IDF killed some 70 Gazans in targeting ‘several’ [unnamed] Hamas ‘operatives’ (not commanders or leadership): https://www.timesofisrael.com/improper-munition-said-cause-of-high-death-toll-in-strike-on-gazas-maghazi/
Where there’s a will, ….
Arguing that Israelis have agency is anti-semitic.
I don't have time to read through the thread, but I'm sure it's been mentioned that genocide law (as opposed to popular conceptions) is not "exterminating the Palestinian population".
I was initially skeptical about genocide claims, very skeptical, until I read some reasoned discussions about it based upon the law, and my perception dramatically changed. I've not formed a final opinion on it, but to say these allegations are "without merit" is deceptive and telling (referring to Blinken, not Kevin, who is still going on popular conception rather than law).
While reasonable people can disagree whether or not what Israel has done so far constitutes a genocide, there's also the desire/responsibility to prevent a genocide BEFORE it happens. I mean, I can imagine some of these people during WW II: "Nope, not a genocide yet.. Nope still not there. Nope not yet. Okay, now Germany's crossed the genocide line, now we have to do something".
Genocide has an interesting definition. Remember that Israel was repeatedly accused of practicing genocide in Gaza while the population there grew from 500K to 2M. That kind of definition makes it hard to avoid charges of genocide.
Opinion seems to be that Israel had two moral choices. It could have just shrugged off the October attacks as it has many others or it could have carefully counted N dead, M raped, K injured, J kidnapped and executed a precise retaliatory raid that killed N, raped M, injured K and kidnapped J civilians in Gaza. I expect that Israel might have gotten away with the former but would have been condemned for the latter.
I've never seen anyone suggest either of those choices, and doubt you have either.
When has Israel 'shrugged off' terrorist attacks by Palestinians without retaliating?
The most frustrating application of the term Genocide is how one sided it is in application. Hamas' motives are always described as genocide when it comes to its favored removal of the Jews from the river to the sea, but when Likud claims "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty" it is not similarly described (see Kevin's discussion). Each wants ethnic cleansing of the other.
I further don't believe it is fair to simply call Palestinians "Arabs" and lump them all together. Both Jews and Palestinians have ancestry dating back to the ancient hebrews. Jews inter-married with Europeans and Palestinians inter-married with Arabs. I think the denominator used to call it genocide should be either large or small for both. Not large for one and tiny for the other.
There can be no two state solution in the manner of the bantustans of Gaza and the West Bank, with settlements and the control over the resource starved city state of Gaza. And, no one state solution will work based on demographics.
Those who doubt that Israel is in the process of committing genocide in Gaza might consider this article on the IDF actions to degrade the environment to the point that it becomes unlivable. It seems very doubtful that mass evacuation of much if not all of the population will be avoidable.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/for-israel-the-cruelty-is-the-point/ar-AA1mZsqm?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=70b3fef7ba164ba9998b65ae632e67ba&ei=25
Using the death toll today seriously underestimates the death toll. You can't expect that starving people is not going to lead to decreased life expectancy even if people don't immediately die from lack of food.
Genocide doesn't require you to be successful. It just requires an intent to destroy a group. Members of the Israeli cabinet, including Netanyahu, have publicly expressed that Gaza, not Hamas, is the target of the war and that clearing it out so settlers can move in is a goal. Smotrich has said that in just so many words, and Netanyahu's analogy to the Biblical war against the Amalekites is hard to interpret any other way.