Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.

It's a ridiculous argument. The Nazis went through a LOT of effort and resources to gather Jews from all the corners of Europe, and even more effort into exterminating them as fast as they could, within the logistical and economic constraints of fighting a 3 front war.

There's no comparison at all to the ease with which Israel could just drop a couple of bombs on Gaza, had it decided to do so.

The fact that I just spent five minutes thinking about it proves that it's not ridiculous at all. The scale is different (so far), but I’m not convinced there’s a qualitative difference.

Most people spend more than five minutes a day thinking about things that are ridiculous.

Do you? I don't think I do. Unproductive, sure, but not ridiculous.

You literally just did.

So I guess your point is that other people think about things that you consider ridiculous. I don't dispute that.

It's because you're deeply ignorant about the subject. Anyone can think ridiculous thoughts in complete ignorance.

Try reading a history book about the holocaust, or even just WW2, and you'll see just how ridiculous you sound.

The only thing stopping Israel from doing that is international outrage. Israel is entirely dependent on its benefactor states like the US and, while it pushes the limits to the extreme, must at least contend with world opinion.

That's like me saying you're a murderer, but you just haven't killed anyone yet because you're afraid of going to jail. Maybe it's true, but it's a bit of a silly argument, isn't it? In western society, we judge people based on their actions.

Israel has murdered tens of thousands of people. Your argument doesn't hold.

That’s not what murder means. They were attacked by a government and went to war.

They've murdered tens of thousands of civilians. Israelis literally killed an entire NICU of infants.

You seem to be ignoring the retaliation that would be enacted at a drop of a couple of those bombs.

Huh? If the Nazis could have killed all the Jews faster, they would have. They sought to eliminate Jews all throughout Europe. I’ve never heard this argument, but it’s unintelligent and I am not making it.

The existence of camps where jews and other "undesirables" were kept for long periods of time disproves this entirely. The Nazi's were not trying to speed run the process. They were systematically eliminating people. That's why it's a genocide and not a series of massacres. I would suggest sticking with the definition of genocide instead of coming up with your own convenient version.

You're just showing your ignorance. The Nazis killed the majority of their victims as soon as they arrived in the camp. They kept 20%-30%, mostly men who could work, to be used as slaves for their military industry, and they eliminated everyone else. They developed gassing especially in order to speed up the killing and make it more economical.

It was a genocide because they tried to eliminate a specific ethnic group, for no other reason than its ethnicity.

You should go learn more about the subject, if it interests you so much.

It doesn’t interest them. People who think what Israel is doing is anything like what the Nazis did have had their brain washed clean by anti-Semitic propaganda. It’s smooth as a volleyball in there, facts don’t matter.

How is long term ethnic cleansing different from genocide?

Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to remove a people from the area. It can be accomplished by methods other than killing.

Genocide is an attempt to kill them all.

The Venn diagram has a lot of overlap for sure but they are not the same.

“Your honor and members of the jury: my client could have easily committed way worse crimes!”

> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.

You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.

Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.

Why does israel use expensive precise munitions wherever possible rather than their stockpiles of much more deadly "dumb" ones?

maybe because they are trying to act ethically toward a murderous neighbor that is conducting asymmetric warfare and those are the best tools to accomplish that.

or, maybe because they came to the conclusion that the repercussions on the world stage of even more horrific media coming out of Gaza is too steep of a price to pay.

i don't know which, but i do know it is naive to conclude that because they COULD end the war in a day and did not, they are driven by morality and ethical concerns rather than pragmatic ones.

I didn’t say they were driven by morality, though I’m sure they are more so than Hamas. I just think what they’re doing is ethnic cleansing (which is not a compliment) rather than genocide. I’m actually pretty sure that most of the people who call it by “genocide” don’t know the difference between the two.

because it would be admitting to the world that it has said weapons.

Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.

The argument conveniently always goes such that Israel is the baddie.

Curious how that goes, especially since Israels ulterior motives are always implied, they're not taken by their word.

And Islamists, who share their motives openly with anyone willing to listen are ignored.

Genocide was literally in Hamas’s charter and yet somehow they’re the good guys because modern leftists can’t think past “colonialism bad”.

I never said they were the good guys. Fuck Hamas.

But let's not equate an inexperienced group of starved and impoverished guerilla fighters with a first-world, nuclear-armed genocidal ethnostate.

by dumb munitions I mean older bombs vs JDAM and alike.

Anyone who seriously speaks words 'nuclear weapon' and 'gaza' together is basically admitting he has 0 clue about the situation and is uninformed larper for either side.

Expensive for whom? US taxpayers?

They have remotely guided bulldozers and enough non-nuclear weapons to do the job several times over conventionally too though.

Yes, there is a long term effort by the State of Israel to remove Palestinian life from Palestinian land.

The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.

> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.

Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.

See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).

Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.

So by your logic if you slowly exterminate a people its not genocide?

You cannot exterminate a people too slowly because they can (and do) move. Ethnic cleansing can happen over centuries (see the last 500 years of our hemisphere for examples). Israel has let tens of thousands of them out of the country. Nazis did not let injured Jews go to hospitals in other countries.

Which, again, is not dismissing war crimes, or denying that any have occurred. Just pointing out, this is not genocide but ethnic cleansing. Israel has a vocal right wing faction that advocates for ethnic cleansing, and a vocal left wing that is against it.

That definition of genocide is so narrow that it would also exclude the Armenian genocide, since many were allowed to flee.

I can't find any evidence that they were allowed to flee. They organize "mass deportations" that were really just dumping them into the desert without food or water to die. Some did flee, just as some Jews fled Germany and occupied countries during WW2. If you've got a source for that I'd love to see it, neither Google nor ChatGPT seem to agree.

Please first tell me what kind of evidence you would consider sufficient, otherwise you’ll just dismiss whatever I present.

I don’t know why I’d dismiss it, I’m not a shill for the Ottoman Empire and am interested in history. Any documentation from a historical record? Contemporary news articles?

I couldn't easily find evidence that Armenians were explicitly allowed to escape, however it’s widely acknowledged that many were spared, especially those in Constantinople. Even the genocide deniers use this to argue against genocidal intent: "... certain groups of Armenians were spared, which proponents argue proves there was no systematic effort to exterminate the Armenian people." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide_denial)

>If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.

And the retaliation from the rest of the world in those circumstances would be swift and measured in hours, and there would be a smoking pile of rubble in that particular part of the world that would be uninhabitable for centuries.

So instead, Israel is cooking the frog.

This is one of the worst pro-Israel arguments; I can't believe people still make it. Israel isn't going to drop a nuke on the "holy land", where they want to start building Jewish settlements, a few dozen miles from Tel Aviv. No matter how much they hate Palestinians, people don't want to live in an irradiated wasteland.

By nuclear-armed I’m pointing out that they’re a well-funded, first class military, not that they’re going to nuke the place. They’re arguably the second strongest military in the world.

They could have achieved genocide very quickly with conventional weapons and boots on the ground too.