Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Clear enough, right?
Under this definition Israel's occupation and war of extermination is absolutely genocide, unquestionably. The goal is to kill, mutilate, and displace the Palestinian people. The goal is the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza, by any means necessary. Israel's war on Gaza is genocide.
However, under this definition are the completely justified goals of Hamas also genocide? They intend to destroy the settler-colonial monstrosity that is Zionism and eradicate the nation state of Israel; Palestine from the river to the sea. That, technically, means they are committed with intent to destroy the national group of Israelis by displacement, death, or simply making them into Palestinians after destroying Israel's government.
That doesn't seem right to me. I am absolutely in solidarity with Hamas and Palestine in their struggle against the Zionist entity. An occupied people destroying their occupier's government and settler identity can't be considered genocide, because it creates this legal and ethical equivalency with the settlers.
And yet, technically, that seems to be the case. Am I wrong?
And, by pointing out this technicality, am I just a dog for Zionism?
well yeah, genocide is genocide, even if you think your flavor is justified. However, I don't think abolishing Israel and replacing it with Palestine would qualify as genocide in and of itself. Hypothetically, if in that Palestinian state Jews were allowed to live unharmed, and to procreate, there'd be nothing genocidal about that.
It's getting there that is the problem. There's no peaceful way to implement a free Palestine and Hamas knows this.
Creating a Palestinian state necessarily requires killing or causing serious bodily/mental harm to settlers on a very large scale. The civilian death toll would be necessarily immense - and even the concept of "civilian" is complicated because the majority of Israel's civilian population are IDF reservists and veterans, and civilian settlers have been deputized to murder Palestinians with the protection of active IDF.
Do I just accept "yeah, I support settler genocide" and deal with the baggage that necessarily has?
A reservist or a veteran is still a civilian if they are unarmed. If you are advocating for the killing of civilians, or POWs for that matter, you are advocating for war crimes. Simple as that.
I mean you could advocate for a peaceful solution, thats still an option, as absurd as that might seem to you. My take is that both the Israel government and Hamas need to step off the extremism, start viewing the others not by their ethnicity or religion, but as humans. Start talking to each other, discard the idea of retaliation, and make compromises. This is anything but easy, idealistic even, but ultimately it is the only sustainable way for us to progress as a species.
many settlers are allowed to be and encouraged to be armed, with the zionist state even going as far as to purchase and distribute thousands of rifles to them. they then use these rifles to further encroach on palestinian villages and shoot them.