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

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

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a difference of opinion on a very complicated geopolitical situation that is the culmination of a century of regional conflict is not being a "hateful bigot" or abuse.

Genocide is not complicated.

Genocide is both extreme and labour-intensive. No one wakes up in the morning and decides to become an extremist; it takes an awful lot to turn someone into an extremist. That 'awful lot' has to happen to many people for a genocide to actually happen.

The genocide itself is simple enough; the thousands of years of conflict leading to the genocide are not. Anyone who believes they can unpick all that history to come to a neat conclusion about who are the 'goodies' and who are the 'baddies' is a fool.

My only interest in this conflict is in keeping it as far away from myself, my kith and my kin as possible.

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

#702
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do you truly think that this news story is showing “some interesting new phenomenon”? I am not one to talk as an Israeli Jew who clearly disagrees with the entire bullshit premise of the article… but either way, the story is only saying things that people have been (incorrectly) claiming for months

> saying things that people have been (incorrectly) claiming

In your opinion, is there a neutral organization in the world that could define whether the legal definition of genocide is being met or not?

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

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this is meaningful because for the first time a legitimate international body is calling this a genocide. Previously, it’s been activists and claims that this might be genocide. I haven’t read the report yet. But I will, and I intend to leave my mind open as to whether this raises the profile of this war in my mind relative to domestic issues.

Go read this UNHCR report. All the evidence is just circular references to other bodies who reference each other. The most damning thing they could pin on Israel was that "Israel admits 83% of the casualties are civilians". That idea was because Israel could name 17% of the casualties in Hamas registers as members of the organization. But assuming that every other casualty is a civilian is quite a stretch. For one th…

> Go read this UNHCR report. All the evidence is just circular references to other bodies who reference each other...

You think Navi Pillay, who was the President on the Rwanda Tribunal (for genocide), is less competent than you & would sign off on mere "circular references"?

> For one thing, Israel doesn't know the name of every militant it kills

Does it at least know who it is raping?

  The commission has previously found Israel to be guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including extermination, torture, rape, sexual violence and other inhumane acts, inhuman treatment, forcible transfer, persecution based on gender and starvation as a method of warfare.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-867600

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

#704
post #226

Comments on this post are disabled for new accounts, but in the era of anti-BDS regulation and other measures aimed specifically at curtailing practical freedom of speech surrounding this conflict, can we really comment freely on this without anonymity? The vast majority (38/50) of US states have passed some form of anti-BDS legislation. We can also expect corporate retaliation against employees who speak about this…

[deleted]

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

#705
post #226

Comments on this post are disabled for new accounts, but in the era of anti-BDS regulation and other measures aimed specifically at curtailing practical freedom of speech surrounding this conflict, can we really comment freely on this without anonymity? The vast majority (38/50) of US states have passed some form of anti-BDS legislation. We can also expect corporate retaliation against employees who speak about this…

> The vast majority (38/50) of US states have passed some form of anti-BDS legislation.

“Some form of” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, to the point of being dishonest propaganda. E.g., California is counted as one of those states based on AB 2844 of 2016. Which, to be fair, started out [0] as an actual anti-BDS bill (targeting state contracting only, but still an anti-BDS bill.) But the form that actually passed and became law does nothing that actually impacts BDS; it requires that state contractors with contracts of over $100,000 certify under penalty of perjury that (1) they are in compliance with California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act and Fair Employment and Housing Act, and that (2) any policy they have against a “sovereign nation or peoples recognized by the government of the United States of America”, explicitly including but not limited to Israel, is not applied in a way which discriminates in violation of either the Unruh Civil Rights Act or the Fair Employment and Housing Act.

It is not, in any meaningful sense, an anti-BDS law.

[0] Well, “started out” isn’t really true, either, since it was introduced as a technical change the an environmental health law replacing "Department of Health Services” with “Department of Public Health” in one section of law, reflecting a reorganization that had occurred subsequent to the law passing, went through a “gut and amend” switch to become a bill that would add new sampling requirements for drinking water, then went through another “gut and amend” to become an anti-BDS bill focussed on public contracting. But then it went through a number of more regular amendments which stripped out all the anti-BDS parts—both the operative anti-BDS language and the proposed legislative findings and declarations of purpose at the opening, replacing both the operative provisionsn and the findings and declaration portions with anti-discrimination rather than anti-BDS provisions.

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

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a difference of opinion on a very complicated geopolitical situation that is the culmination of a century of regional conflict is not being a "hateful bigot" or abuse.

Genocide is not complicated.

[flagged]

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

#707
post #697

Every time I've looked into the arguments for this being a genocide, I saw, at best, a description of urban warfare. Maybe I am wrong. If anyone is still reading this thread, could you write what you believe will happen after Israel won the war?

I more or less agree with you (if it were a _genocide_, you'd expect Israel to be equally targeting Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel proper), but the report does have some specific examples of things that seem to go beyond "just" urban warfare. For example, Israel denied shipments of baby milk powder, which can serve no legitimate military purpose (except trying to prosecute the war via starvation of babies, which is illegal). When combined with the public statements from Israeli government officials that denigrate the Palestinians in Gaza as animals, I think there's definitely _some_ crimes against humanity being committed by Israel.

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

#708
post #653

[flagged]

Every major genocide I can think of has been precipitated by the actions of the victim group against the oppressor group. Indeed, in many cases, it's explicit that the perpetrators were looking for just such a pretence. The most serious genocide we're all aware of began, indeed, with a terrorist incident ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht ) -- a jewish boy assassinated a german diplomat. This comment also…

The terrorist attack of 2023 had such magnitude that Israel was allowed to do 50 times worse with no immediate punishment, but this pretence is getting old and they're in too deep: I think that the people who think that it's possible for both parties to live in peace are kidding themselves. There is no good solution to this conflict because enemies cannot suddenly become friends. There are only bad "solutions".

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

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a difference of opinion on a very complicated geopolitical situation that is the culmination of a century of regional conflict is not being a "hateful bigot" or abuse.

Genocide is not complicated.

[flagged]

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

#710
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone else not familiar with "anti-BDS": "Anti-BDS laws are legislation that retaliate against those that engage in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. With regard to the Arab–Israeli conflict, many supporters of the State of Israel have often advocated or implemented anti-BDS laws, which effectively seek to retaliate against people and organizations engaged in boycotts of Israel-affiliated entities." From Wikipe…

From a historical, economic, social perspective... Why does Israel hold so much power over the world?

> Why does Israel hold so much power over the world?

Because it holds so much power over the government of the United States, and thereby benefits from the power the United States has over the world.

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