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Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse, and Assad’s reconquests of major Syrian cities, which are also way way worse.
So, a question I keep asking when people make this claim, and which no one has answered thus far(or even engaged with)- why is Israel’s genocide killing fewer civilians than Russia and Syria are doing on accident in campaigns with the goal of controlling the civilian population to subjugate as normal citizens of their respective regimes? While the IDF is probably more competent than the Russian army and definitely dramatically more competent than either the SAA or NDF, this shouldn’t matter that much if it’s an attempt at genocide-by-collateral damage, because after all Israel could easily get away with making Gaza look like Mariupol and then say sorry, we definitely not really regret the collateral damage, can’t make a shakshuka without breaking some eggs.
This is not true. The civilian casualities in Gaza are significantly higher than that in Ukraine, the invasion of which by Russia people have been rushing to call genocide, including many people here. For simplicity I will just takes about deaths specifically and not casualities.
As already posted below the OHCHR estimates 9,701 civilian deaths in Ukraine between 24 Feb 2022 and 24 September 2023.
Reliable estimates for Gaza are hard to find but OHCHR estimates the deaths to be over 11,000 between 7 October 2023 and 16 November 2023 (some of whom would not strictly speaking be Gazans as there are also casualities outside of Gaza). So Gaza has roughly the same number of deaths in a month than Ukraine had in a year and a half. More recent numbers from early January suggest this number could be over 22,000 for Gaza. This would put the percentage of Gazans killed somewhere around 1% of the total population.
Now, Gaza is more densely populated and urbanised where the fighting is taking place, but this is also offset by the fact that Ukraine has a much larger population than Gaza and the operations are larger scale.
Regardless, no matter how you cut it, the civilian casualties in Gaza are extremely high and people would not be hesitating to call it genocide if it were any other country.
Did the US genocide Iraq?
For that matter, did the US genocide Japan?
Something like a million Japanese civilians died in the latter years of WW2 in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. And this was long after Midway: the US was clearly the dominant power by that point and not under existential threat, if it ever was.
And I think unequivocally the answer is “no.” One might think the fire bombing or the nukes were bad, but not all bad things in a particular category is the “worst” thing in that category (I don’t think that’s the point you are making to be clear).
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The USA has committed its own atrocities in the past. When it comes to the war against Japan, the Japanese had their own murderous empire.
What is the point to bring them now but to excuse new warcrimes? At some point bringing WW2 constantly to justify new wars being started, or actual warcrimes such as Dresden kind of undermines the moral legitimacy of WW2 itself and should make us question whether the people doing this were also acting with self serving motives then too. Especially since the Nazis and Japanese were condemned for being warmongers and imperialists.
Is WW2 a permanent card to excuse starting wars and committing attrocities rather than a historical episode that should make us oppose such bad behavior?
There is also a genocide that happened against German civilians after the end of WW2. So by this logic, you could justify the most depraved behavior.
At some point this milking of WW2 to excuse warcrimes is behavior that is similiar to the nazis using the communist atrocities (including against ethnic Germans) as a means of legitimizing their future attrocities.
Rather than deflecting responsibility towards the past USA, we should focus on the now and judge morally Israel's actions. What we will see is an extreme racist supremacist goverment that dehumanizes a population and wants to conquer its land.
The same population that they ethnically cleansed in the past, in violation of the expectation of initial promises by zionists when they were promoting their project that they would respect the Arab inhabitants of the place. And in addition to this, of course they also promote culturally genocidal propaganda denying the Palestinians their nationhood. Unsurprisingly this is related to also to the project to violently ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, as well as as it is always the case with such rhetoric. The people who don't exist, can more easily be made to not exist.
History isn’t about creating get out of jail free cards. But it is a useful barometer for “what is normal” and what is “abnormal.”
By historical standards what is happening in Gaza is not abnormal nor is it a genocide.
By historical standards all sorts of mass murderous attrocities are not abnormal, including genocides. As is rhetoric of people calling such conduct as not abnormal to justify and excuse it. It is definitely a disgusting atrocity of ethnic cleansing through mass murder, complete obliteration of the homes of the Palestinians, inducing policies to starve them.
Considering the starvation it is mass murder in the process of becoming genocide if one takes a higher standard for genocide. Or already qualifies as a genocide if one considers the mass murder that already has happened as qualifying.
Also, obviously all this attempt to understate terms and it would be too late if the numbers of dead keep on pilling, in line with what Israeli politicians want. Not to mention all the people who have lost limbs.
The reality is that the treatment of Jews in WW2 is brought precisely to justify the murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by people who certainly prove in that regard that we should be careful with our sympathies for bad actors would use them to justify vile warcrimes. It would be more sensible to not be manipulated to obsessing about Jews from 80 years ago and be diverted by that from confronting those committing or supporting the warcrimes of today.
You have a problem with war in that case. That is, you can’t attack Gaza effectively without the collateral consequences.
I go back to “don’t start nothing won’t be nothing.”
Obviously the Palestinians haven't started this conflict in October 7th and there was plenty of something before this. So the way you frame it is completely inaccurate. Of course, I am not someone who is as biased for Palestinians as those I criticize are for Jews, but I do have to defend them when they are under destruction. Frankly Jews and Palestinians living separately (and freely) in their own homeland and keeping out of each others affairs would be the sane ethical way to go.
This would require Jews to stop doing plenty of "somethings" against the Palestinians and respect the group rights of other groups.
While much of war is going to be ugly, there are different levels to this. There is a difference between fanatic supremacist warmongers trying to destroy other ethnic groups and take over their homeland and other ways to conduct yourself. It is excusing warcrimes to say that war is this always. The rhetoric of Israeli politicians and their actions shows that this is about ethnic cleansing through violence and death, starvation, destroying peoples homes.
In the case of Israel, I have no doubt that without the attention of people putting pressure, that Israel's leaders in line with their rhetoric and those who support the already war criminal conduct would have pushed things far further. On the other side, those who have been apologists for this conduct have stained their hands. Israel would have done even less with a less favorable environment in the USA especially.
Here the world is watching and they are reacting entirely differently than your propagandistic Jewish supremacist framing which is why lot of the world wisely has become much more negative against Israel. https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opinion/
And we see a change to negativity towards Israel even in countries like the UK with a significant Jewish lobby that have also have been harmed by Muslim extremism as well which would give them less reason to sympathize with the Palestinians.
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The Gaza Strip has a population of 2.1-2.4m (the lower is from the CIA, the higher is from Wikipedia), so no, 20,000 civilian casualties are absolutely not 3-4% of the total population. It’s possible you looked up the population of only Gaza City, one of several in the strip.
Corrected, thanks.
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I'm somewhat disappointed by the long span of time in which people in this discussion here just claimed that either number was higher without comparing actual numbers.
Those people work with a very loose definition of genocide.
Blame the U.N. Since 1948, it has defined genocide as
It also criminalizes “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” and “complicity in genocide.” Some of the speeches by Israeli politicians clearly fall afoul of the former, while, if what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, the United States’ actions would arguably fall afoul of the latter.
So October 7th was also a genocide?
According to the U.N.’s definition, yes. As were 9/11, various other terrorist attacks, the aftermath of the Armenia/Azerbaijan war, etc. Now, you could argue that this definition is so expansive as to be useless (and I’d agree if you did), but it’s the one that the international community has been using for the past 75 years.
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Personally, I'm not particularly interested in the question of whether Israel's actions meet the 'definition' of genocide, formal or otherwise. I get why it is important (least of all for the ICC and other international law proceedings) but at some level it just becomes a semantic question. I do think those who claim Russia is committing genocide against Ukraine but refuse to make or support the claim that that Israel is committing genocide against Palestine have a huge double standard.
My perspective is that, at best, Israel has displayed a overwhelming level of disregard and negligence to the Palestinian people that amounts to criminality, both recently and historically. At worst, I have to take at face value the multiple statements, both recently and historically, of senior Israeli officials that they want to utterly destroy Gaza and/or the Palestinian people. I both these things to be horribily immoral and should be rebuked. Whether they meet the formal definition of genocide I don't particularly care to argue.
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Can you?
Russian actions and intentions are considered genocidal.
How many civilians dead in Gaza (and West Bank, and Syria, and…)? 10k, 20k? I don't want to cite Hamas-affiliated sources. But no, it doesn't sound a lot a lot worse.
Russians are currently in mourning about the (admittedly cute) cat Twix who got tossed out of the train near Kirov (really tragic), they don't give much of a fuck about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed by the Russian army. Had we higher verbal IQ, everyone else would also have cared more about Twix. Jews care about Jews, and they're smarter and more influential than we are, though not remotely as smart as they seem to imagine.
It is what it is.
Genocide is now like fascist— a slur that doesn’t really mean anything outside of “I don’t like X.” By any reasonable standard, Russia is not committing genocide. Ditto Israel.
Now that doesn’t mean complaints about civilian causalities are necessarily wrong. But seems to me the real complaint is about war per se.
Or about the existence of Israel full stop. If you're anti-Zionist, any stick to beat Israel with is fine.
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By Ukrainians and in a very limited sense by some observers around stuff like the Ukrainian kids taken to Russian orphanages or adopted or whatever (I don’t know whether that’s actually true). Russian actions are only genocidal around the expanded late-20th century definition of genocide that includes the Uyghurs and other cultural reeducation efforts (or ambitions toward such efforts). By this logic of course Napoleon repeatedly genocided his own people to make France and so on. Public schooling is essentially genocide by these standards.
Actually it was the second-most read article on BBC News (UK) yesterday, so maybe you do. That said, they then followed up with this.
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For the record, I don't believe Russian bombing ought to be considered genocidal at the current rate. Its insinuations towards "destroying Ukrainism", however...
Who makes those insinuations?
Nuts on telegram channels? Russian equivalents of Ann Coulter, she of "We must invade theur countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" fame?
At least one major Russian mass media outlet. I googled Ann Coulter and she is labeled as "a conservative columnist". I must remind you that there is no such division in official mass media as there is between Democrat newspapers and Republican ones in USA. You get pro-government TV and mass media, and nuts on telegram of various sorts.
Apparently, in late 2013, in an auspicious coincidence with Ukrainian Maidan troubles, RIA Novosti was directly reorganized by Putin's edict, and since then there has been a trend of anti-Ukrainian messaging.
edit: does Dmitry Medvedev, ex-chairwarmer for Putin of 2008-2012, count as a nut on telegram or as an Ann Coulter? He does post on telegram, and he does sound like a nut, and his posts are similar to what you quoted. I could dig some up if you're interested. You know, when Putin doesn't outright say "we really should paint Ukraine our color on the map and call Ukrainian 'an outdated Russian dialect'", but everyone around him says so, it gets one thinking.
You aren't familiar with Ann Coulter? She was a conservative political pundit known for telling it like it is or saying the quiet part out loud, depending on your politics. Sort of respected in the nineties but a joke to most people after the culture shift of the noughts (although not conservatives generally of course). I think No_one's point was that she was a political pundit, not an official member of the government (telegram nut and Coulter being of a kind, as opposed to alternatives). So Medvedev is definitely closer to authoritative than either the telegram nut or Coulter, but still not someone representing Russia's official position. As for that news piece, denazification of the Ukraine might be a fig leaf, but it's a pretty good one.
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