Genocide and ethnic cleansing are lumped together, but I don’t think they’re identical or equally wrong. After a certain number of failed attempts (number and intensity unspecified!) to live alongside each other, I do not think it is per se wrong for Israel to attempt to expand its borders to cover the Palestinians lands and expel the inhabitants and press their ostensible allies to resettle them.
Pressing a people to move is not as bad as genocide, and I think that, though extremely undesirable, it can sometimes be the least bad option.
Gaza is so small that clearing a full demilitarized/buffer zone is essentially an attempt to empty it. It’s different for the Koreas, which are large enough to maintain a space between. Having no place for civilians to flee away from the front makes this war much much worse.
We’d be better off if women and children could go to refugee camps in the Sinai, even if that weakened Palestinian negotiating positions.
I think Bartov's response to this argument, in his original piece, has quite a bit of force. If nobody will accept those refugees, then it's a moot point -- and right now nobody will. When President Trump floated his "plan," for example, he didn't say "and all the Palestinians are welcome to come to the United States to stay as long as they like." The Palestinian situation is distinct from, say, the expulsion of the Armenians from Ngorno-Karabakh, both because the Palestinians are currently stateless and because they have no other state that they can confidently assume will accept them with open arms.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian consequences of ethnic cleansing can be pretty horrific. Greece/Turkey, India/Pakistan, the Balkan Wars -- there are plenty of examples without even getting to the absolute bloodbath of World War II. And the geopolitical consequences can be terrible too. Russia's turn to authoritarian revanchism has been pretty awful. I strongly suspect that turn would have been sharper and swifter if, say, Ukraine had tried to aggressively expel Russian speakers in 1991. And suppose Turkey had responded to persistent PKK terrorism by rounding up the Kurds and expelling them en masse over the border to Syria, Iraq and Iran? Would that have made those countries *more* stable? An influx of Palestinian refugees destabilized both Lebanon and Jordan in the past. I think we should assume that an influx into the Sinai under current conditions would radically destabilize the Egyptian government. Is that what we -- whoever "we" might be -- want?
Also re transfers they transfers occured post 48 had many of the refugees moved to areas Israel conquered or occupied post 67 and onwards, i.e. West Bank southern Lebanon. Further Israel is expanding unprovoked into Syria, is still occupying territory in Lebanon and of course Palestine. What is the guarantee that Israel will be satiated? For those in Gaza or West Bank further transfers may end up like the Nakba transferring them to within army range of Israel who due to there expansionism and impunity may follow and repeat the process in the next decades. For example many of the Israel right still talk about regaining Sinai, so your proposal of transfer to there seems to indicate that the process you are arguing for here will repeat soon enough.
Yes, though it's clear America does not have a simple "push a button and get Israel/Hamas/Egypt to help in exactly the way we want" option on any front. There's a lot of public pressure for unilateral ceasefire, and I'd like us to be exploring at least as hard whether there are any tractable ways to shelter refugees as well.
And I think we _should_ be preemtively offering safe passage/shelter to at least some refugees with American connections and who undergo vetting in a third party country. That *is* within our power. And it's hard to imagine pitching other countries on accepting refugees if we won't.
I certainly agree with your last point! But I'm sure you realize that it's hard to imagine this administration -- or, honestly, any American administration -- offering to take in hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinian refugees, regardless of the vetting scheme we might require. Moreover, given the way this administration is trying to throw people out of the country for social media posts about the destruction of Gaza, I think it's safe to say that nobody actually living in Gaza would pass the vetting scheme that, in this hypothetical, they would impose.
Why does the buffer zone need to be inside Gaza? The demilitarized zone in Korea is only 4 kilometers thick. It would be easy to clear out that amount of land around Gaza, outside the Strip. It's just fields. Except in the northernmost bit, where you may want to carve a little indentation into the Strip because of Sderot and such.
This is what I've always said Israel should do. It's what Israel would do if Israel were sane.
Even from a purely economic perspective (considering the value of the farmland sacrificed and the cost of the obstacles you'd have to set up), it would be enormously less expensive for Israel to do this than what Israel is doing now, even if you attribute zero value to human life.
If the problem is that Israel would lose national honor by giving up land, then don't call it a demilitarized zone, call it an Israeli military area.
It doesn't even need to be that thick! I only said 4 km because you mentioned Korea but it would be overkill to make it as thick as the one in Korea.
Hamas is not South/North Korea. Hamas will always be a pathetic and powerless third world mob incapable of getting past any serious defense. The only reason October 7 happened is that there was no serious defense.
For more than 100 years military engineers have perfected the art of slowing down troops. The most successful technologies are called land mines, wire obstacles (as in barbed/razor/concertina wire), and anti-vehicle ditches. If you set up an overwhelming amount of these, a force as pathetic as Hamas would never be able to carry out a successful raid. Such a solution would be much less expensive than what Israel is doing now.
As for Hamas rockets, tunnels, gliders, and anything else Hamas would ever be able to throw at Israel, ways to stop those also exist and would be much less expensive than what Israel is doing now.
And that is the first reason I oppose Israel's war. It makes no sense as cost-effective self-defense, therefore it must be motivated by expansionism and hatred.
Presumably, were the situation reversed, you would be endorsing as the least-bad option of the expulsion of all Israels, or at least women and children, yes?
The great difference is that one day, most likely, the refugees from Kiev and in general Ukraine will be allowed to return home, whether at that point it's called Ukraine or Russia.
Whereas if Palestinians leave, they'll never be allowed to return home. The land they own will be stolen by settlers. That is the major difference between evacuation and ethnic cleansing.
On October 11th 2023 an article was published stating that "any significant response from Israel would result in genocide".
So about the time the first response started the propaganda machine of "it's a genocide" had already started.
The fact is the genocide accusation gives Jew haters a great umbrella to hide under after they do their wicked deeds.
We must face the reality that Israel must destroy Hamas, Hezbollah, PIJ et. al. for Israel's long term viability and the survival of the Jewish people.
The fact so many people think this war is "genocide" is beyond absurd. It is the product of propaganda and a general lack of understanding of many factors. In reality, the IDF would prefer not to conduct "urban warfare" but that is not a reality given the proximity, location, and strategy with Hamas. That said, the Allies achieved victory by bringing Germany and Japan to its knees. As we all know, the US dropped not 1, but 2 atomic bombs on Japan, decimating two cities and its inhabitants.
I don't know how this entire conflict ends given how ingrained anti-semitism is within the Islamic world. However, demonstrating to the Palestinian people that their "River to the Sea" (pipe) dream is only going to make their future more and more bleak. They need to be shown (by force if necessary) that the land for a future state will only get smaller, not bigger if they don't end their real genocidal pursuit of eradicating Jews from the middle east"
If people around the globe really cared about the Palestinians, this is the narrative they would push (i.e., settle for what you have now or start thinking about immigrating to other Arab states). This is the only practical real long term solution.
In the mean time a cease fire will NOT help the hostages.
The alternative, which seems ethically plausible to me even if impractical, is to posit that there are some things you may not legitimately do even in self defense, personal or national. If Israel's security really and truly cannot be preserved except by such means as they are now using, can we really say so confidently that their security is on net worth preserving, from the point of view of a cosmopolitan human being rather than that of a tribalist?
I don't think it's really an abstract question, because actual cosmopolitan human beings live in particular places, not in an abstract space behind a veil of ignorance. What you're really asking, I think, is "if I were a liberal-minded Israeli, would I flee my country rather than be party to what that country is doing?" It's worth noting in that regard that, while some Israelis can very readily pull up stakes and move elsewhere, most cannot even if they wanted to.
If I were an Israeli who was legally required to do mandatory IDF service, I would certainly flee the country rather than carry out that service. And yes, you're right, that isn't an option for everyone, and one of the humanitarian things other developed nations could and should do is to make it more of an option (which we also should long since have done e.g. with Russians who want to flee to avoid fighting in Ukraine).
First, although I know it's not really relevant to the main question you’re asking, I can’t help but start by saying that I think “genocide” is the wrong word for what’s been happening in Gaza (at least thus far). I explain in full here (https://gordonstrause.substack.com/p/the-genocide-accusation), but the two sentence summary is that while Bartov is almost certainly right that Israeli actions in Gaza meet the U.N. definition of “genocide”, almost every war between states of different ethnic groups arguably meets that definition as well. The power of the word “genocide” is that what it really means to people is the Holocaust, and Gaza (at least so far) is fundamentally different in both scale and in kind.
With that out of the way, I like your framing of the question because it directly responds (or perhaps inverts) a question I’ve been asking to critics of Israel in Gaza (of which, I’m probably one, but a conflicted one). And that question is why they don’t consider it genocide for the Allies to have maintained their demand for unconditional surrender from the Axis power in 1945 at a cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese women and children but do consider it genocide for Israel to continue fighting until Hamas surrenders. So I appreciate you flipping that question and asking whether it would have been legitimate for the U.S. to have continued to drop atomic bombs on Japan if the Japanese had continued to refuse to surrender.
My answer to the question is yes. It would have been genocide and horrible (maybe not after 1-2 more bombs, but certainly soon after that). Perhaps more justified and less horrible than the genocides of the Holocaust and Rwanda (which were committed against people who presented no threat and who were never even given the chance to surrender) but a horrible genocide nonetheless. In that sense, I agree with Ross Douthat’s formulation that “One can have a righteous cause, one’s foe can be wicked and brutal and primarily responsible for the conflict’s toll, and still — under any coherent theory of just war — there is an obligation to refrain from certain tactics if they create too much collateral damage, to mitigate certain predictable forms of civilian suffering and to have a strategy that makes the war’s outcome worth the cost.”
That said a few additional comments:
- I still believe that Israel’s actions still fall well short of genocide (or even more than isolated war crimes). They’re getting closer to the line, and will cross it if they don’t successfully fix the aid problem and prevent starvation, but they’re not there yet.
- I agree with the other poster that ethnic cleansing, while terrible, is different than genocide, and as I responded to Andrew Sullivan in a back and forth on Substack notes (https://www.persuasion.community/p/israel-palestine-and-the-consequences/comment/125604963), if I came to believe that Hamas will always rule Gaza and that the people there would always be a threat to Israel, I would reluctantly support a policy of expulsion.
I will at least partially take the other side of one of your dilemmas. Truman, whether you want to call him genocidal or not, was absolutely a mass murdering war criminal who should have been in the dock at Nuremberg alongside the Nazis.
If you believe Truman was a "mass murdering war criminal who should have been in the dock at Nuremberg alongside the Nazis" then I think it's reasonable to believe that Netanyahu belongs in the dock at The Hague. I would respect the consistency even though I strongly disagree (especially with the Truman take).
Well, Radovan Karadzic went into the dock at the Hague and I think Netanyahu (and a fortiori his egregious coalition partners like Ben-Gvir) is at least as bad as Karadzic, so yes.
First, I’m really glad you’re framing this in terms of a war, because I get frustrated when people speak as though Hamas already surrendered, and Israel is running the world’s worst summer camp all by themselves.
Going back to the Japan analogy. What if Japan had refused to return the POWs, and US intelligence showed they were eager to try another Pearl Harbor as soon as they could regroup?
My point is that currently a true end to the war is not on the table for Israel. And it appears that Hamas is even less interested in negotiating now that the world is condemning Israel for the famine crisis.
There was indeed a cease-fire, but it was pretty much designed from the beginning to be breached, because neither side was even close to accepting the other's conditions for making it anything but temporary. I wrote about that at the time: https://gideons.substack.com/p/finally-a-cease-fire
I like how you frame this: self-defence doesn’t grant immunity, but “genocide” isn’t a catch-all either. The key is intent. What would you count as credible evidence of genocidal intent here—leader statements, target patterns, blocking aid? And do Hamas’s tactics (rockets from civilian areas, tunnels, hostages) factor into that assessment?
If critics demand Israel do less, what’s the realistic alternative that both stops rockets and frees hostages without rewarding the 7 Oct strategy?
One historical precedent worth considering here is the 1804 massacre of the French white population of Haiti by Dessalines. I was reminded of this by the Liberal Currents article attempting to make excuses for Dessalines' actions:
seems pretty hand-wavey, especially in its neglect of the women and children who were killed. I strongly suspect that Liberal Currents would not publish a piece making a similar apologia for the IDF's massacres (either today in Gaza or historically at e.g. Deir Yassin) and that that reflects their biased sense of who counts as oppressed. But in any case, if ever there was a "genocide in self-defense", surely that was it.
I can completely understand not giving anyone involved in the conflict the benefit of the doubt, and I can't imagine that any third party would have any impetus to impose a solution. Why on earth would they?
To be fair Israel doesn't produce the heavy bombs it has used to level Gaza and much of the ammunition it uses to bomb. Caps on aid and trade pursuant to push Israel to make peace with neighbours could bear fruit. Pushing Israel to resume negotiations and cease expansionism with Syria concerning its occupation would be a good way to show serious of this not being a forever war.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing are lumped together, but I don’t think they’re identical or equally wrong. After a certain number of failed attempts (number and intensity unspecified!) to live alongside each other, I do not think it is per se wrong for Israel to attempt to expand its borders to cover the Palestinians lands and expel the inhabitants and press their ostensible allies to resettle them.
Pressing a people to move is not as bad as genocide, and I think that, though extremely undesirable, it can sometimes be the least bad option.
Gaza is so small that clearing a full demilitarized/buffer zone is essentially an attempt to empty it. It’s different for the Koreas, which are large enough to maintain a space between. Having no place for civilians to flee away from the front makes this war much much worse.
We’d be better off if women and children could go to refugee camps in the Sinai, even if that weakened Palestinian negotiating positions.
I think Bartov's response to this argument, in his original piece, has quite a bit of force. If nobody will accept those refugees, then it's a moot point -- and right now nobody will. When President Trump floated his "plan," for example, he didn't say "and all the Palestinians are welcome to come to the United States to stay as long as they like." The Palestinian situation is distinct from, say, the expulsion of the Armenians from Ngorno-Karabakh, both because the Palestinians are currently stateless and because they have no other state that they can confidently assume will accept them with open arms.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian consequences of ethnic cleansing can be pretty horrific. Greece/Turkey, India/Pakistan, the Balkan Wars -- there are plenty of examples without even getting to the absolute bloodbath of World War II. And the geopolitical consequences can be terrible too. Russia's turn to authoritarian revanchism has been pretty awful. I strongly suspect that turn would have been sharper and swifter if, say, Ukraine had tried to aggressively expel Russian speakers in 1991. And suppose Turkey had responded to persistent PKK terrorism by rounding up the Kurds and expelling them en masse over the border to Syria, Iraq and Iran? Would that have made those countries *more* stable? An influx of Palestinian refugees destabilized both Lebanon and Jordan in the past. I think we should assume that an influx into the Sinai under current conditions would radically destabilize the Egyptian government. Is that what we -- whoever "we" might be -- want?
Also re transfers they transfers occured post 48 had many of the refugees moved to areas Israel conquered or occupied post 67 and onwards, i.e. West Bank southern Lebanon. Further Israel is expanding unprovoked into Syria, is still occupying territory in Lebanon and of course Palestine. What is the guarantee that Israel will be satiated? For those in Gaza or West Bank further transfers may end up like the Nakba transferring them to within army range of Israel who due to there expansionism and impunity may follow and repeat the process in the next decades. For example many of the Israel right still talk about regaining Sinai, so your proposal of transfer to there seems to indicate that the process you are arguing for here will repeat soon enough.
Yes, though it's clear America does not have a simple "push a button and get Israel/Hamas/Egypt to help in exactly the way we want" option on any front. There's a lot of public pressure for unilateral ceasefire, and I'd like us to be exploring at least as hard whether there are any tractable ways to shelter refugees as well.
And I think we _should_ be preemtively offering safe passage/shelter to at least some refugees with American connections and who undergo vetting in a third party country. That *is* within our power. And it's hard to imagine pitching other countries on accepting refugees if we won't.
I certainly agree with your last point! But I'm sure you realize that it's hard to imagine this administration -- or, honestly, any American administration -- offering to take in hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinian refugees, regardless of the vetting scheme we might require. Moreover, given the way this administration is trying to throw people out of the country for social media posts about the destruction of Gaza, I think it's safe to say that nobody actually living in Gaza would pass the vetting scheme that, in this hypothetical, they would impose.
Yes, but I figure if I'm *not* asking the admin to push for an unconditional ceasefire, I should at least call my shot.
Why does the buffer zone need to be inside Gaza? The demilitarized zone in Korea is only 4 kilometers thick. It would be easy to clear out that amount of land around Gaza, outside the Strip. It's just fields. Except in the northernmost bit, where you may want to carve a little indentation into the Strip because of Sderot and such.
https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/06cd353c3befe29bab4a132faeeffc90?impolicy=wcms_crop_resize&cropH=2000&cropW=2000&xPos=0&yPos=0&width=862&height=862
This is what I've always said Israel should do. It's what Israel would do if Israel were sane.
Even from a purely economic perspective (considering the value of the farmland sacrificed and the cost of the obstacles you'd have to set up), it would be enormously less expensive for Israel to do this than what Israel is doing now, even if you attribute zero value to human life.
If the problem is that Israel would lose national honor by giving up land, then don't call it a demilitarized zone, call it an Israeli military area.
It doesn't even need to be that thick! I only said 4 km because you mentioned Korea but it would be overkill to make it as thick as the one in Korea.
Hamas is not South/North Korea. Hamas will always be a pathetic and powerless third world mob incapable of getting past any serious defense. The only reason October 7 happened is that there was no serious defense.
For more than 100 years military engineers have perfected the art of slowing down troops. The most successful technologies are called land mines, wire obstacles (as in barbed/razor/concertina wire), and anti-vehicle ditches. If you set up an overwhelming amount of these, a force as pathetic as Hamas would never be able to carry out a successful raid. Such a solution would be much less expensive than what Israel is doing now.
As for Hamas rockets, tunnels, gliders, and anything else Hamas would ever be able to throw at Israel, ways to stop those also exist and would be much less expensive than what Israel is doing now.
And that is the first reason I oppose Israel's war. It makes no sense as cost-effective self-defense, therefore it must be motivated by expansionism and hatred.
Presumably, were the situation reversed, you would be endorsing as the least-bad option of the expulsion of all Israels, or at least women and children, yes?
I think it was pretty reasonable for the women and children of Kiev to flee, yes.
The great difference is that one day, most likely, the refugees from Kiev and in general Ukraine will be allowed to return home, whether at that point it's called Ukraine or Russia.
Whereas if Palestinians leave, they'll never be allowed to return home. The land they own will be stolen by settlers. That is the major difference between evacuation and ethnic cleansing.
On October 11th 2023 an article was published stating that "any significant response from Israel would result in genocide".
So about the time the first response started the propaganda machine of "it's a genocide" had already started.
The fact is the genocide accusation gives Jew haters a great umbrella to hide under after they do their wicked deeds.
We must face the reality that Israel must destroy Hamas, Hezbollah, PIJ et. al. for Israel's long term viability and the survival of the Jewish people.
The fact so many people think this war is "genocide" is beyond absurd. It is the product of propaganda and a general lack of understanding of many factors. In reality, the IDF would prefer not to conduct "urban warfare" but that is not a reality given the proximity, location, and strategy with Hamas. That said, the Allies achieved victory by bringing Germany and Japan to its knees. As we all know, the US dropped not 1, but 2 atomic bombs on Japan, decimating two cities and its inhabitants.
I don't know how this entire conflict ends given how ingrained anti-semitism is within the Islamic world. However, demonstrating to the Palestinian people that their "River to the Sea" (pipe) dream is only going to make their future more and more bleak. They need to be shown (by force if necessary) that the land for a future state will only get smaller, not bigger if they don't end their real genocidal pursuit of eradicating Jews from the middle east"
If people around the globe really cared about the Palestinians, this is the narrative they would push (i.e., settle for what you have now or start thinking about immigrating to other Arab states). This is the only practical real long term solution.
In the mean time a cease fire will NOT help the hostages.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20916/gaza-ceasefire-hostages
The alternative, which seems ethically plausible to me even if impractical, is to posit that there are some things you may not legitimately do even in self defense, personal or national. If Israel's security really and truly cannot be preserved except by such means as they are now using, can we really say so confidently that their security is on net worth preserving, from the point of view of a cosmopolitan human being rather than that of a tribalist?
I don't think it's really an abstract question, because actual cosmopolitan human beings live in particular places, not in an abstract space behind a veil of ignorance. What you're really asking, I think, is "if I were a liberal-minded Israeli, would I flee my country rather than be party to what that country is doing?" It's worth noting in that regard that, while some Israelis can very readily pull up stakes and move elsewhere, most cannot even if they wanted to.
If I were an Israeli who was legally required to do mandatory IDF service, I would certainly flee the country rather than carry out that service. And yes, you're right, that isn't an option for everyone, and one of the humanitarian things other developed nations could and should do is to make it more of an option (which we also should long since have done e.g. with Russians who want to flee to avoid fighting in Ukraine).
First, although I know it's not really relevant to the main question you’re asking, I can’t help but start by saying that I think “genocide” is the wrong word for what’s been happening in Gaza (at least thus far). I explain in full here (https://gordonstrause.substack.com/p/the-genocide-accusation), but the two sentence summary is that while Bartov is almost certainly right that Israeli actions in Gaza meet the U.N. definition of “genocide”, almost every war between states of different ethnic groups arguably meets that definition as well. The power of the word “genocide” is that what it really means to people is the Holocaust, and Gaza (at least so far) is fundamentally different in both scale and in kind.
With that out of the way, I like your framing of the question because it directly responds (or perhaps inverts) a question I’ve been asking to critics of Israel in Gaza (of which, I’m probably one, but a conflicted one). And that question is why they don’t consider it genocide for the Allies to have maintained their demand for unconditional surrender from the Axis power in 1945 at a cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese women and children but do consider it genocide for Israel to continue fighting until Hamas surrenders. So I appreciate you flipping that question and asking whether it would have been legitimate for the U.S. to have continued to drop atomic bombs on Japan if the Japanese had continued to refuse to surrender.
My answer to the question is yes. It would have been genocide and horrible (maybe not after 1-2 more bombs, but certainly soon after that). Perhaps more justified and less horrible than the genocides of the Holocaust and Rwanda (which were committed against people who presented no threat and who were never even given the chance to surrender) but a horrible genocide nonetheless. In that sense, I agree with Ross Douthat’s formulation that “One can have a righteous cause, one’s foe can be wicked and brutal and primarily responsible for the conflict’s toll, and still — under any coherent theory of just war — there is an obligation to refrain from certain tactics if they create too much collateral damage, to mitigate certain predictable forms of civilian suffering and to have a strategy that makes the war’s outcome worth the cost.”
That said a few additional comments:
- I still believe that Israel’s actions still fall well short of genocide (or even more than isolated war crimes). They’re getting closer to the line, and will cross it if they don’t successfully fix the aid problem and prevent starvation, but they’re not there yet.
- I’m not yet convinced that Israel’s military can’t achieve further legitimate goals in terms of degrading Hamas and its capabilities. Haviv Rettig Gur is who I most trust on that question, and he still has hope: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-28-the-gaza-paradox/id1794590850?i=1000717253857
- I agree with the other poster that ethnic cleansing, while terrible, is different than genocide, and as I responded to Andrew Sullivan in a back and forth on Substack notes (https://www.persuasion.community/p/israel-palestine-and-the-consequences/comment/125604963), if I came to believe that Hamas will always rule Gaza and that the people there would always be a threat to Israel, I would reluctantly support a policy of expulsion.
- But I don’t believe that’s true. I believe that over the Netanyahu years, Israel’s government has been as much of an obstacle to peace as Hamas and that a constructive peace is possible (https://gordonstrause.substack.com/p/israel-and-the-palestinians). Even made the (optimist’s) case for optimism in Damon’s comments: https://damonlinker.substack.com/p/still-stuck-in-gaza/comment/140804978
I will at least partially take the other side of one of your dilemmas. Truman, whether you want to call him genocidal or not, was absolutely a mass murdering war criminal who should have been in the dock at Nuremberg alongside the Nazis.
If you believe Truman was a "mass murdering war criminal who should have been in the dock at Nuremberg alongside the Nazis" then I think it's reasonable to believe that Netanyahu belongs in the dock at The Hague. I would respect the consistency even though I strongly disagree (especially with the Truman take).
Well, Radovan Karadzic went into the dock at the Hague and I think Netanyahu (and a fortiori his egregious coalition partners like Ben-Gvir) is at least as bad as Karadzic, so yes.
First, I’m really glad you’re framing this in terms of a war, because I get frustrated when people speak as though Hamas already surrendered, and Israel is running the world’s worst summer camp all by themselves.
Going back to the Japan analogy. What if Japan had refused to return the POWs, and US intelligence showed they were eager to try another Pearl Harbor as soon as they could regroup?
My point is that currently a true end to the war is not on the table for Israel. And it appears that Hamas is even less interested in negotiating now that the world is condemning Israel for the famine crisis.
I thought that there was a ceasefire that included steps for the release of hostages, one that Israel breached.
There was indeed a cease-fire, but it was pretty much designed from the beginning to be breached, because neither side was even close to accepting the other's conditions for making it anything but temporary. I wrote about that at the time: https://gideons.substack.com/p/finally-a-cease-fire
I like how you frame this: self-defence doesn’t grant immunity, but “genocide” isn’t a catch-all either. The key is intent. What would you count as credible evidence of genocidal intent here—leader statements, target patterns, blocking aid? And do Hamas’s tactics (rockets from civilian areas, tunnels, hostages) factor into that assessment?
If critics demand Israel do less, what’s the realistic alternative that both stops rockets and frees hostages without rewarding the 7 Oct strategy?
Perhaps a better WW2 example is below:
Stalin had a quote "Hitlers come and go, but Germany and the German people remain."
"The Order #55 of the National Commissar for the Defense" (23 February 1942)
https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1942/420223a.html
Stalin said this when the enemy had reached the gate of Moscow during World War II.
Further in that speech and others Stalin even despite shoaing hostility was clear in seperating party from people.
Remember also this is in contrast to Hitler's belief in extermination of a wide variety of peoples.
One historical precedent worth considering here is the 1804 massacre of the French white population of Haiti by Dessalines. I was reminded of this by the Liberal Currents article attempting to make excuses for Dessalines' actions:
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/desallines-a-maligned-hero-gets-his-due/
which if the Wikipedia article on the massacre is accurate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haitian_massacre
seems pretty hand-wavey, especially in its neglect of the women and children who were killed. I strongly suspect that Liberal Currents would not publish a piece making a similar apologia for the IDF's massacres (either today in Gaza or historically at e.g. Deir Yassin) and that that reflects their biased sense of who counts as oppressed. But in any case, if ever there was a "genocide in self-defense", surely that was it.
Betteridge law of headlines anyone?
Touché
Appreciate your thoughtful and insightful post. Unfortunately rare in this arena.
Is Betteridge's law true?
I can completely understand not giving anyone involved in the conflict the benefit of the doubt, and I can't imagine that any third party would have any impetus to impose a solution. Why on earth would they?
To be fair Israel doesn't produce the heavy bombs it has used to level Gaza and much of the ammunition it uses to bomb. Caps on aid and trade pursuant to push Israel to make peace with neighbours could bear fruit. Pushing Israel to resume negotiations and cease expansionism with Syria concerning its occupation would be a good way to show serious of this not being a forever war.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/i-almost-negotiated-israel-syria-peace-heres-how-it-happened/
A good view on ITAR implications connected to the Israeli air force are here:
https://someforeignfield.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-israeli-military-independence-9cf