Or let me put this differently: If you want to discuss whether war crimes have been committed in the last month in Gaza, we can have that conversation (although precise determination of whether war crimes have occurred in a specific incident is best left to specialist lawyers who have expertise in this field).
However, if you are using the term “genocide,” you should consider the following four questions:
- Why has Israel not previously attempted to wipe out or ethnically cleanse the population of Gaza in all the decades it could do so? (There were 400,000 people in Gaza at the end of the 6-Day War vs. 2.3 million people living there now. To put it mildly, that is not the population growth that one normally associates with genocide or ethnic cleansing.)
- Why have you not used the term to describe other recent instances of urban warfare that have resulted in significant civilian casualties, such as Grozny, Fallujah, Mosul, Aleppo, Raqqa, Mariupol, or Bucha? (Bonus question: Can you name any example of urban warfare in history, ancient or modern, that has not led to mass civilian casualties?)
- Why have you not been posting about any of the following genocides that are currently occurring in the world?, i.e., the ongoing genocides in Darfur of the Masalit people, in Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenian Christians, of the Uyghurs in China and of the Rohingya in Myanmar?
- Why did you not use the term “genocide” to describe the extermination of Jews carried out by Hamas on October 7?
If you don’t have good answers to all of these questions, then I need to ask you, what is different about this conflict that is making you use the word “genocide” here?
A Stranger in a Strange Land 