Thanks Ivan for the long and considered response. I appreciate the time and effort although you may not be surprised to learn that I do not agree with a lot of it! Thanks jimbob for contributing too.
Grudging thanks to Tristan for pithily summing up my main point in impressively few words making what follows seem very wordy. Cheers!
Below is a bit of a brain dump as I am away from my library of books and am not a great believer in the objectivity of Wikipedia. It is also way longer than it needs to be - I’m trying to answer your points as fully as possible but have been writing notes in small chunks in my breaks and therefore it isn’t as organised as it could be. However, this is a forum post not an academic essay, so I hope you can forgive me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to post anything at all which would disrespect your contributions.
The problem with diluting the accusation from genocide to an allegation of general carelessness with lives is that it significantly changes the goalposts to a subjective measure with no legal basis. It just becomes a matter of opinion. Those claiming genocide without justification are making the gravest legal allegation available to concentrate attention on Gaza to the detriment of other (in my opinion) greater tragedies around the world which are barely getting a look-in. I wonder why the world’s only Jewish state gathers far more condemnation than other countries where there are conflicts and famines killing people in far larger numbers (in the case of Sudan, at least an order of magnitude more).
In law, (well, in the jurisdictions I understand anyway - English Law and some international tribunals), precedent only applies if you can establish that situations are substantially the same in fact and law. Similar rules apply to the use of historical parallels in serious scholarship (although a little more latitude is usually allowed as long as one is not trying to draw conclusions unsupported by the facts). I struggle to see any meaningful parallels between Gaza and the Armenian Deportation or the Holodomor in terms of the parties involved, or the historical circumstances that led to these awful events. I could have tried to counter your argument by asking the rhetorical question of whether the British were careless with the lives of the quarter to half a million German civilians who died during WW II aerial bombardments in the pursuit of the military aim of defeating the Nazis, but that would be similarly irrelevant. The unique situation in Gaza can and should be judged by experts (military and legal) using due process, not by trying to fit the events on top of an unrelated historical event and then building an argument backwards on that. We’d just end up bickering over the historical examples and not the facts on the ground in the here and now and it wouldn’t advance either of our arguments by 1mm.
Having spent a fair bit of time looking, I still have to find a serious military expert who believes that there is a genocide or that the general actions of Israel are against international law. (It would be a rare war where there weren’t individual cases of actions that should be investigated and, if required, prosecuted. However, if these have occurred (which I suspect they have like in every other war I have looked at) you cannot generalise unless there is evidence of a pattern ordered from the top-down). I would recommend articles by John Spencer (a leading expert in urban warfare at West Point) such as
this one, or Andrew Fox (British ex-soldier, urban warfare expert, and Sandhurst lecturer) who
co-wrote this analysis . Further experts to look at are General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or General Sir John McColl (former Deputy Commander of NATO Forces). I suspect they know more than any of us about the realities of urban warfare and their opinion is consequently more valuable as to whether Israel’s actions are likely to be found legal or not.
You state:
“The Israeli government is being rather careless about Palestinian lives in a way it would not if it was Israeli citizens whose lives might be at risk from their actions.” Can you name me a war where an army did not place a higher priority on defending their own citizens and way of life than protecting those of the opposing power? I am struggling to think of a single one. It is also rather taken as read in the Geneva Conventions that this is the normal state of affairs in a war.
You also talk about proportionality and your opinion. However, there is a legal definition of proportionality and it is not what you appear to think it is (from my understanding of what you have written). Rather than take this on myself to explain (since you do not know who I am or what my qualifications or experience are to be able to opine meaningfully on this), can I direct you to
this interesting read where international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff talks about this concept in detail.. It may be tempting to discount it as it is someone defending Israel’s approach to proportionality and just to accuse her of bias, but I urge you to read what she says about the legal principles and then check against the law as it is written. Neither of our opinions matter - the law does and it is the legal definition that rules.
You state:
“It doesn't help that many prominent and influential people, such as president Herzog, say that all Palestinians are Hamas (and this probably specifically means Gazan and West Bank Palestinians, not Israeli citizen Palestinians.)” It would really help me address this point if you can point me at the full exact quotes so that I can see them in the complete context. This is because I have seen many examples of quotes obviously being either changed or taken out of context, so I don’t want to guess which ones you are referring to and subsequently waste both of our time. At the moment I would have to rely on your paraphrasing of what you can remember someone being reported to have said, and that doesn’t really give me much to go on.
You talk about
“The shootings around the food distribution sites was exceedingly suspicious.” Can you be more specific? I can recall some cases where allegations were made that were subsequently discovered to be incorrect, but the corrections were not reported clearly or at all. So if you can point me at the detailed allegations you are relying on, I would like to read them. I might agree that it is suspicious, I might be able to find evidence to suggest that it was reported inaccurately. I simply cannot comment meaningfully on this vague assertion.
Jimbob says: “And the damage to infrastructure looks pretty deliberate”. Can you specify please? Infrastructure can be damaged in multiple ways during a war. It could have been deemed a legitimate military target, it could have been hit by accident (remember the unfortunate bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia by the US in 1999?), but it could also indicate some kind of war crime. Without specifying what you are referring to and providing reliable evidence that this is outside the normal run of things in a war though, I have no chance of addressing this point. Vague assertions weaken rather than strengthen your point in my mind.
My concern has been the pattern that is most clearly seen in the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital on 17 October 2023. Immediately afterwards, Hamas announced that it was an IDF strike, 500 people had been killed, and the hospital flattened. The BBC and other newscasters took this at face value and broadcast it around the world with no apparent fact-checking. Jon Donnison of the BBC amplified this claim on the BBC News Channel. The daft idea that anybody could establish a casualty figure and make confident attributions of blame within minutes of such a tragedy was not even questioned by the BBC, and Jeremy Bowen went on to take this line too. It turned out to be completely false. The explosion was caught on video and is now generally acknowledged to have been a misfired PIJ missile aimed at Israel from a civilian area in Gaza which fell short and landed in the car park. The hospital was very much not flattened and the casualty figures appear to have been much lower and not in any way attributable to Israel. Jeremy Bowen was later challenged on this and came up with the following beauty of a quote:
“That was my conclusion from looking at the pictures and I was wrong on that, but I don't feel particularly bad about that. It was just the conclusion I drew.” This attitude sums up all that is wrong about news reporting at the moment. Rather than verify information and report facts, then analyse later when there is enough information, they present a simple narrative of a complex situation, and if the facts don’t fit, it’s not really that important. When I last checked, Jeremy Corbyn’s accusatory Tweet on this incident was still up, but even he must know that it is untrue by now. This reporting led to an immediate spike in antisemitic attacks around the world (correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but this is highly likely in my opinion) - including a firebombing of a synagogue in Berlin, yet the BBC remains insouciant about it all. As this tactic has worked so well in the propaganda war so far, it seems to be continuing, so please be careful to be detailed in your allegations and to check to see if there is already evidence that rebuts them. Since it takes time to properly refute untrue allegations with facts, the old saying that “A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes” has real punch here.
I have seen “No Other Land”. It is a very well made film that has a clear narrative and intent behind it. It does not however have any evidential value as the directors have full editorial control and only show what they want to. It is interesting that you point out the nationalities of the directors as it makes two clear points that you might not have meant to make.
Firstly, I don’t judge content on the ethnicity or nationality of the content producer. I judge it on the quality of the evidence and the level of objectivity (or otherwise) demonstrated in the information gathering process. One of the main problems with the film is the omission of some fairly crucial facts. The claim that Masafer Yatta is a village with long standing roots is not backed up by evidence. It appears that some caves in that area were used as seasonal shelters but there is no evidence of actual permanent inhabitants in the records of the Ottoman Empire, British Mandate, or Jordanian occupation (1948-1967) (all of whom record the area as uninhabited). In 1980, it became a live-fire training area, but the shepherds were still granted access during training breaks and specific grazing times. Illegal structures started appearing around 1981 (and were immediately demolished). After the Oslo Accords (1995) the area was designated by both Israel and (crucially) fully agreed by the PA as Area C - meaning that permission had to be granted to build there. Structures however continued to be built there illegally and were demolished. And so we get to where the film starts, but the history in the film is incomplete and therefore gives a false impression. This is not to say that I do not believe that there is some genuinely appalling behaviour shown, but without the vital context, the film is a powerful piece of narrative that omits half of the truth and amplifies the bad behaviour of one side only. Good for outrage and Oscars, bad for people who believe in facts and the law.
Secondly, the film could only be made because Israel is a relatively free society with relatively free speech. Robust criticism of the government (and mass demonstrations against it) are regular occurrences. You will find all manner of opinions proudly and loudly expressed, from mad left-wingers who want to tear down the whole state and spend their lives condemning other Israelis, to rabid right-wingers who are racist and violent towards any non-Jews (or anybody who is nice to a non-Jew), as well as all opinions nice and nasty in between. Whatever your bias on the conflict, you can easily find an Israeli voice to provide a quote to back you up. Quote farming is therefore rather meaningless, balancing facts on the ground is what matters.
This is rather different from any of the surrounding areas by the way. Voicing dissent against Hamas in Gaza is often a death sentence. You won’t find many voices advocating for peace with Israel because Hamas silences them. The brutal repression that Hamas dole out on any Palestinian they don’t like is barely reported in the UK press. People who have never visited the region seem to naively think that because they can find many Israeli voices condemning their own government whilst there are so many fewer dissenters on the Palestinian side it must be because Israel is in the wrong! The obvious fact that Israel allows raucous dissent and neither the PA nor Hamas do goes straight to the blindspot caused by their biases.
Let me conclude this rather long and bloated post by apologising for not having time to edit it, and by posing a question. Rather than criticising Israel’s reaction to the horrific 7 October 2023 attacks, what would you do when faced with an enemy on your doorstep who launches completely indiscriminate attacks on you from positions embedded within their own civilian population and clearly stating in their founding charter (which you can easily find online) that you must all be killed. How would you protect your citizens from this?