Is the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict a genocide?

Answer 1

Other Community Views:

Despite the two thousand rockets which Gazans have fired against Israeli civilians this month alone (July 2014), their war crimes are not yet on a scale to be considered actual genocide (though it may be attempted genocide).

(And Israel's defensive response, though causing collateral deaths, is not directed deliberately at civilians.)

Answer 2

No. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are managing to survive.

Concerning Palestinian deaths:

In the Battle of Mogadishu (1993), between 1500 and 3000 Somalis died, including hundreds of civilians. How many Americans were killed? Eighteen. Did anyone accuse America of genocide for doing what it saw as necessary?During WW2, sixty-seven Japanese cities were carpet-bombed with incendiaries. 300,000 dead.

War reportage should not treat the casualty count as a moral scale in which (like golf) the higher the number, the lower is your rank. The fact that Japan suffered more than ten times the number of people killed than America did, does not change the war's moral barometer. America was fighting a just and necessary war against a heinous enemy.

In 2006, thousands of Hezbollah rockets rained down on us; the Iron Dome defense hadn't yet been perfected. Are you sad that now we, thank God, have an effective defense?

Now why don't you turn the question around and ask why is it that the terrorists in Gaza don't lay down their weapons, which place their own people in danger? They shot over 2500 rockets at us in one month alone (July 2014).

You should be aware that almost all of the Palestinian deaths occurred as collateral damage while Israel was trying to defend its populace against terrorist and rocket attacks, and terrorist tunnelers and the like. Israel targets military objectives, warning nearby civilians in advance through phone calls and leaflets, while Israel's terrorist enemies target civilianobjectives almost exclusively. As one witness said: "Israel uses its weapons to protect its women and children, while the cowardly Hamas uses women and children to protect its weapons" by forcibly putting people as a human shield near weapons caches and rocket launchers. Thus Israel faces an impossible situation in which the terrorists are just waiting for their own civilians to be unintentionally killed so that they can seize the opportunity to internationally bash Israel in the gullible U.N., the anti-Israel biased E.U., and the media. They shed false tears, which could have been prevented by laying down their Iran-supplied weapons and sitting down to negotiate. When Israeli civilians are killed, these same terrorists hand out candies and sing in the streets.

The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law, the rule of distinction. Article 48 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 states that "In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties in conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants, and between civilian objects and military objectives; and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives."

Since the rockets Hamas aims at Israeli towns are launched into civilian enclaves, each of the 12,000 or so rockets that have come into Israel from Gaza since 2005 represents a war crime. Where is the outcry against Hamas? People are being duped by their insidious Propaganda.

And incidentally, where is your outcry concerning Muslims killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Syria? Or the fact that the last remaining Christians now have fled Mosul after Islamic State militants issued a medieval-style ultimatum threatening them with death if they stayed.

Certain facts you may not know:
1) Hamas's founding charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel.
2) Israel supplies Gaza with water, electricity, medicines and provisions. What does Hamas do? It even fires at the power station that supplies Gaza with electricity.
3) Hamas oppresses its own Palestinian population, treats women as inferior objects, and persecutes Christians while building an army of fighters dedicated to suicide and "holy" war.
4) Israel treats wounded Palestinians. All the time. A reporter writes: This week I saw a Palestinian girl from Gaza being evacuated in an IDF tank to a hospital in Israel. She and her mother were interviewed, from inside an Israeli hospital. They spoke of the fair treatment, the care they received, and described the soldiers who had saved them as "brave and fair." Their faces were covered, for fear of being harmed when they return to their homes in Gaza.
5) Hamas fired on the field hospital which Israel established in Shejaia, a facility which only treats wounded Palestinians. Hamas did this in retaliation for the IDF's attack on Wafa Hospital in the same neighborhood. The difference is that Wafa Hospital was used as a Hamas launching-pad for missiles aimed at us. We have publicized these launches on film; and we also have shown footage of them concealing stockpiles of missiles in U.N. schools. Whom did the U.N. speak out against? Israel, of course.
6) In recent years they have not built so much as a single bomb shelter in Gaza; shelters that could save the lives of many civilians. Instead, they built dozens of underground tunnels from which to attack Israel and try to destroy it.
7) During the first 10 days of the 2014 war, the IDF lost 10 soldiers. Some of them, like the three paratroopers, are dead because the Israeli Air Force refused to attack a specific target for fear of hurting civilians. Instead, the paratroopers entered a booby-trapped house and were blown up.
8) A significant number of the Palestinian casualties were caused by the Hamas itself, which summarily kills protesters who question their policies.
9) Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005. Israel gave peace a chance. Instead of peace, we were fired upon, massively, again and again. Hamas has refused to join any cease-fire Israel agreed to. Hamas seeks to wreak death, to terrorize, to continue to brainwash those whose brains are not already drenched with uncompromising hatred.

All of the above applies to Hizbollah and other terrorist organizations, in addition to Hamas.

See also:

What impact does the conflict have on the Israelis?

How is Israel different than the rest of the Middle East?

Answer 3

NO. It does not in any way meet the definition of genocide. This statement is used for the hyperbole that comes naturally from the words "Holocaust" and "genocide" and lumping them together with "Jews". This is not to say that Israel may not liable for a different crime against the Palestinians, just not this one.

In order for a Holocaust or a genocide to occur, you must have two major elements. Having one or the other does not create a genocide. Having the first alone creates an ethnic conflict and having the second alone is massive civil strife or endemic killings.

1. The first one is that there must be a significant amount of unnatural deaths of a certain ethnic group or groups which are causally linked to a different ethnic group or governmental power.
2. The second is that these unnatural deaths must be carried out in a systematic way as to insure the elimination or vast reduction in size of the "undesirable" ethnicity.

As for the first issue, it is not clear that the amount of Palestinian unnatural deaths is significant nor that these deaths represent the targeting of individuals for murder on account of their "Palestinian-ness". Furthermore, it is unclear (although somewhat less so) as to whether or not the Israeli government represents a different ethnic group from the Palestinians.

• To the argument of "inordinate numbers", the amount of Palestinians who have died as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict have not been much higher (in proportion) than what we would expect from similar ethnic conflicts. We see the same sort of uneven casualties in Burmese vs. non-Burmans in Burma and this is not considered a genocide and we also see this in the Lebanese Civil War and this is also not considered a genocide. In neither situation is the death of numerous civilians desirable, but genocide is a very serious crime and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, like those conflicts does not reach that level of crime.
• To the argument of "targeting Palestinian-ness", this is directly refuted by the fact that 19% of Israelis actively identify as Palestinian Arabs and have voted for Palestinian Arabs to represent them in the Israeli Parliament. From time to time, these Arabs have actually advocated for the end or illegitimacy of the Israeli State and have not been tortured, beaten, or attacked for these seditious views. Unlike Iran, which has a mandatory Jewish representative in the Majlis who cannot dissent from policies he does not agree with, the Palestinian citizens of Israel can and openly do dissent from Israeli policies that they do not agree with and are not subject to violence, repression, or even the threats of violence or repression. This would seem to indicate that merely being Palestinian is insufficient to be on the other end of an Israeli gun.
• To the argument of Israel being "non-Palestinian", this is a more controversial argument, but Israel does have in its armed forced numerous Arab contingents, made up of Druze Israelis and Bedouin Israelis. As a result, Israel's armed forces do not necessarily consist of a monolithic Jewish ethnic group. However, this argument is both awkward to make and would excise the Armenian genocide from being a genocide since Kurds assisted the Turks in performing that genocide, so this argument of the Israeli government being sufficiently different from Palestinian interest should be conceded.

Even though 2 out of the 3 "moving parts" of the first part of the genocide definition can be strongly argued against, for the sake of argument, I will concede that there have been a significant amount of unnatural Palestinian deaths at Israeli hands to discuss the second half of the definition.

As for the second issue, it is almost impossible to seriously claim that the Palestinians who are being killed are being killed in systematic or engineered way. Furthermore, there is no evidence to claim that the intent of this is to vastly minimize or eliminate the Palestinian population.

• To the argument of Israel systematically killing Palestinians, there is scant evidence of this. Palestinians are not being rounded up, collected, and then disposed of. In the Armenian genocide, Turkish soldiers arrested and murdered Armenian intellectuals and then proceeded to march the Armenian population off of their lands until they dehydrated or starved. In this way, we have a planned and systematic attempt to remove the Armenians. The Jews and other minorities persecuted in the Holocaust were rounded up and forced into areas of closed containment, like ghettos or concentration camps. The concentration camps were actual constructed facilities designed for the sole purpose of mass murder and in which mass murder undoubtedly occurred. The Palestinians, whether they fled by force or by choice, were not pursued by Israeli soldiers until they would die of dehydration or starvation nor has any facility been built in Israel or the Occupied Territories to facilitate the murder of Palestinians. Individual incidents, like Deir Yassin, are not representative of the general Israeli military policy and the best proof of this was how quickly the Irgun was disbanded after the events of Deir Yassin, indicating disapproval with this tactic.
• To the argument of Israel attempting to minimize the Palestinian population, Palestinian Demographics show a very different story. The Palestinian population has increased annually without pause in every major Palestinian area (including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). If Israel were seriously intending to remove the Palestinian population, they must be extraordinarily ineffective. Since most people would agree that the Israeli military is far more powerful in the Occupied Territories than any Palestinian militant group, this means that if there is an intent at the higher echelons of command, it is not followed, or, more likely, there is no such intent.

Now, this is not to say that Israel is completely in the right, but it is not guilty of genocide by a long shot.