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Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

middleeasteye.net

661–670 of 1001 posts

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#661
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only the blue representatives would resolve this tension by pulling support for a now internationally-recognised genocide! :( I suppose that option is just too radical to put on the table.

You've thought through the full foreign policy implications for pulling aid from Israel overnight? I'm not sure why "less bad" on your pet issue isn't enough, especially when you're up against Trump, who has made posts suggesting resorts and golden statues of himself in Gaza.

I doubt any foreign policy aid would get pulled from Israel. Israel doesn't need to be taking actions perceived as genocidal. If the US wasn't offering full and unconditional support they'd just have to go about their foreign policy aims in a more palatable way.

Isreal's approach to foreign policy doesn't do them any favours, I've lost count of the number of negotiators they've taken out this year. The US would be helping them by forcing them to conform a bit more to global norms, if they upset less people and try some more cooperative strategies we might see progress on peace in the region. The fact that the Democrats failed to find a frame like that to prevent what appears, superficially, to be a genocide really goes to the heart of what GoatInGrey was pointing at.

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we expect any desirable outcome in this hypothetical though? So the US flips, Israel is pressured into withdrawing, Hamas regains control of the strip and resumes rocket attacks, Israel is forced to respond eventually. It doesn't seem like a path toward a real solution.

It's the same liberal psychology behind UNSC Resolution 1701 in 2006 where Hezbollah pinkie promised to disarm. And now look at all the dead bodies that this liberal solution caused 18 years later. Of course the same types propose the same solutions again with no sense of shame as to how much death it causes. The actual durable solution is something like how Sri Lanka defeated the Tamil Tigers, or how Russia defeated…

> 18 year causality stretch without a single critical remark about israels constant desintegration of palestinian civic life.

Good job. The feat of not blaming the obvious aggressor is something very few accomplish.

Israel has control over water, electricty, gas, road, "law enforcement", etc. and used it for decades to push palestinians out of their homes. The last violent events are a result of long oppression and netanjahu establishing a theocracy. Only focusing on extremes and make conclusions on such a basis is something dumb people do, dont you agree? Israel is clearly to blame, when you know a little more nuanced history and consider its long time dominant position in that conflict.

> international community has given such a morale boost to Hamas

By ignoring israels obvious long running now openly genocidal master plan, you are doing the same.

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#663
post #525

Seeing PG slowly turn on this issue, from nothing into recognition and now into advocacy has been wild. Presumably because he has kids, and like many parents you understand with your eyes first, and then your heart. PG wields some amount of power in SV, but YC and others are still inextricably tied to what's happening. Thiel was just in Israel with elad gil, rabois, alex karp, joe lonsdale. It's just too much to list…

For those of us not in the loop, what is PG, SV, and YC (I guess that the latter is ycombinator)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) (YC Co-founder)

Silicon Valley

YCombinator yes

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#664

I for one will be holding my representatives responsible who continue to vote for the US to enable a genocide. The videos coming out of Gaza have turned me and many others into single issue voters.

[flagged]

>> Would you categorize all wars and all acts of self defense as genocide?

No, only those that fall within the definition contained in Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#665
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And let's find a war where clauses I, II, and III do not apply When these clauses apply against civilian populations, they are war crimes or crimes against Humanity, or both.

Can you name a war in which members of a group weren't killed, or serious bodily or mental harm wasn't caused to a members of a group?

That is a straw man. The criterion is deliberate targeting of civilian populations. The US is known for having occasionally bombed a wedding party, but in Gaza, 80% of the victims were civilians. That’s a war crime and closer to WWII extermination campaigns than any modern military conflict involving western militaries. We are not talking about collateral damage from a drone strike, that’s systematic levelling of entire cities. You have to go back to things like Dresden and the Tokyo firebombings to find western equivalents.

Hospitals and journalists were deliberately bombed. That’s a war crime and the closest example of a western military doing it is Russia in Ukraine.

Emergency shelters and food distribution centres were deliberately targeted. That’s a war crime and again, there is no western equivalent.

Then there’s the pogroms on the West Bank.

When your argument is that a country’s behaviour is not as bad as ethnically cleansing in some African countries or WWII, your argument is really desperate.

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#666
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flipping the U.S. really is the key to ending this conflict. The U.S. reliably uses its security council veto to nix any meaningful UN response and the U.S. remains, by far, the biggest supplier of arms to the IDF. If the US were to stop veto'ing everything and cut off the IDF's supply of, at least, some types of weapons, the new ground assault would likely end quickly. Unfortunately, that isn't likely to happen. Net…

Why would we expect any desirable outcome in this hypothetical though? So the US flips, Israel is pressured into withdrawing, Hamas regains control of the strip and resumes rocket attacks, Israel is forced to respond eventually. It doesn't seem like a path toward a real solution.

The Iron Dome prevents most of the rocket attacks. Gaza has no protection against what has become indiscriminate Israeli bombing.

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#667

I for one will be holding my representatives responsible who continue to vote for the US to enable a genocide. The videos coming out of Gaza have turned me and many others into single issue voters.

[flagged]

So what? The fact that Hamas or its supporters produce fake anti-Israel propaganda doesn't mean that Israel isn't committing genocide. To suggest so is to engage in the fallacy of composition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition):

(1) "Hamas produces a lot of fake anti-Israel propaganda" -> (2) "All anti-Israel evidence is fake" -> (3)"Israel is not committing genocide".

You can't reach conclusion (2) from (1).

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#669
post #525

Seeing PG slowly turn on this issue, from nothing into recognition and now into advocacy has been wild. Presumably because he has kids, and like many parents you understand with your eyes first, and then your heart. PG wields some amount of power in SV, but YC and others are still inextricably tied to what's happening. Thiel was just in Israel with elad gil, rabois, alex karp, joe lonsdale. It's just too much to list…

I used to shame PG for his elitist views. Now I celebrate his moral courage.

One man cannot fix everything.

Dear PG (I'm sure you don't read HN, but this is yet another echo),

As I said on X, your own platform (YCombinator) is still full of hateful bigots who would censor/downvote even the mildest form of speaking against the genocide. Proof: this comment being downvoted. Downvoting as a mechanism is akin to censorship. It's being abused.

Re: Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

#670
post #653

[flagged]

>That would be the first genocide that involves terrorism, hostages and human shields at the same time.

No it wouldn't be, you're just spewing lazy Zionist propaganda.

"Jewish-Zionist Terrorism and the establishment of Israel" - https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

"Release of civilian hostages held in Gaza and arbitrarily detained [de facto hostages] Palestinians must be immediate and not hinge on ceasefire negotiations" - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/release-of-ci...

"Why Does Israel Have So Many Palestinians in Detention [de facto hostages] and Available to Swap?" https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/29/why-does-israel-have-so-...

"Israeli use of human shields in Gaza was systematic, soldiers and former detainees tell the AP" - https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-arm...

"The Israeli army’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been documented on a large scale" - https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6390/The-Israeli-army%...

"The Israeli military has used Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, soldier and former detainees say - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/24/middleeast/palestinians-h...

"A Brief History of Israel's Use of Human Shields

This is a brief history of how the Zionist community in Palestine, and then the state of Israel, used its own civilians as shields in its conquest of the land. Zionist leaders realized early on that Zionism was a civilian and a military enterprise. In 1919, the first Zionist militia, HaShomer (which evolved into the Haganah, which evolved into the Israeli army) declared “the need to begin widespread settlement close to the existing boundary lines for the purpose of defending the country.” The idea was to establish new Zionist colonies in the border areas. The idea was to put civilians in harm’s way. But the problem ran much deeper. Zionist fighters soon realized they would need to embed themselves in civilian communities to establish a self-sustaining recruitment base and fund militia operations. The latter was achieved through combining agricultural and military training in civilian settlements. The financial support for military training was attained through the agricultural output of the settlement. By 1936, Jewish Agency Executive Committee Chairman, David Ben-Gurion, came to agree with HaShomer’s idea to establish settlements in border areas. HaShomer “once had a good idea,” he said, “creating … settlements along the country's borders. It appears necessary to establish settlements on every mountaintop in Palestine with crucial strategic importance.” The point became all the more obvious during the 1948 War. In April 1948, Ben Gurion told his government: “We must establish a string of settlements of a new type, different from the regular ones, that are not based on the sacred writ of the military academy but rather, constitute mixed battalions of settlers and warriors, farmers and fighters.” For Ben-Gurion, this was the only path to victory. In the aftermath of the War, Ben Gurion outlined the roadmap for how Israel should continue to settle the country: “Our conquest in the Negev and the Galilee will not be sustainable unless we quickly populate these portions of the country…[with]...the establishment of a long line of settlements on the frontier.” And so, in the 1950s, Israel built civilian centers in border areas to serve as a first line of military defense. 26 new settlements were established along the Lebanese border, the Jordan river and the Gilboa foothills; 13 on the eastern border, 8 in the Jerusalem corridor and 25 on the southern front. In total, some 108 such militant civilian settlements were built in Israel after 1948, including towns like Nahal Oz, short for Nahlayim Mul Aza, “Nahal soldiers across from Gaza,” which tragically ended up serving the purpose for which it was built. The point was to put Israeli civilians on the front lines as human shields.

Agricultural work conducted under guard in Moshav Nitzanei Oz (“buds of strength”) in 1954. Founded in 1951 as a Nahal settlement, the moshav was located on the Jordanian border and the outskirts of Tulkarem source (p.72) Initially, the status of the citizens in the border towns was “identical to reserve soldiers,” according to Israeli historian Yoav Gelber. These “civil” communities were even organized in companies and platoons and integrated into the Israeli military’s command and control hierarchy. The Israeli military trained and equipped these civilians in classic civilian stuff like anti-tank and light arms instruction. After the 1967 War, Israel took a similar approach in the newly conquered territories. In July 1970, Israel confiscated land in Hebron by military order, ostensibly for “security purposes.” The first buildings on it would be falsely presented as a military facility, according to Israeli cabinet meeting notes. Shortly thereafter, Israel built 250 civilian housing units in Kiryat Arba within the perimeter of the area specified for the military unit’s use. Similarly, in 1971, Israel declared Palestinian village of Aqraba a military training zone. By 1975, the Jewish settlement of Gitit was established on its ruins. The idea in the 1970s was to enmesh Israel’s civilian and military presence in Palestine. Then Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres called for creating a strip of civilian settlements slicing across the West Bank “for defensive purposes” and another strip near Jerusalem to break the occupied territory into fragments. He added, “there’s a line of army bases in Samaria…I’d put a small civilian settlement next to each one.” By 1980, the World Zionist Organization had developed a “Master Plan” for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The plan called for settling the land between and among the Arab population to make it “hard for Palestinians to create territorial contiguity and political unity.” Civilian settlement in the service of military conquest! “From my perspective,” Avigdor Lierman said in 2017, “it's clear that the settlements in Judea and Samaria and those here in the area of Jericho and the Dead Sea are the State of Israel’s true defensive wall.” Israel’s military headquarters are located in the Tel Aviv city center, a few hundred meters from a large high school. All the major bus lines pass right by. Tel Aviv’s main hospital -- the Ichilov Hospital -- is just to the north and is connected to the base by emergency tunnels. The Israeli army radio station is located in a residential apartment building & its antennas are on the roof of that residential building. Then there’s Israel’s militant settlers, who often carry out pogroms and acts of violence against Palestinians together with the Israeli military. What’s more, the Israeli military has established settler militias, known as “territorial defense units,” which are civilian groups armed and trained by the army. All of this makes Israel’s claim that “Hamas uses human shields” deeply cynical. In its campaign of mass murder in Gaza, +972 reported Israel prefers to strike Hamas fighters in their homes, together with their families, so long as no more than 20 civilians are killed per strike (for higher level commanders, 300 civilians massacred is considered acceptable).

Imagine if Hamas adopted this military doctrine. What percentage of Israeli households would be legitimate targets? How many Israeli households have an active-duty soldier or a reservist, or live within 100 feet of a household with a soldier or a reservist, and thus would equally be a target given Israel’s use of dumb bombs? [Note: Half the bombs Israel drops on Gaza are dumb bombs that often land 100 feet away from their target]. I’d venture to guess the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israeli civilians would be targets. Of course, targeting civilians is always a war crime, even if they are being used as human shields. That’s true no matter who is doing the targeting. Zionist leaders have embraced the use of Zionist, Jewish and Israeli human shields for more than a century. It’s time for this practice to end." - Zachary Foster, jewish historian, founder of palestinenexus.com, [https://palestine.beehiiv.com/p/brief-history-israels-use-is...]

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