hypnorotic posted:

Why would they kick out all the West Bank arabs when they could place them in ghettos and make them work in sweatshop factories? Or as janitors and other menial labor? I don't know if Israel could actually function as a first world nation without the arab underclass.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

Denying people access to food and clean water does not merely make their lives worse, it either forces them to leave or kills them.

Main Paineframe posted:

The Israeli blockade has been loosened since Protective Edge, particularly in regards to construction materials and infrastructure equipment. By all accounts, the main factor delaying Gaza reconstruction is international donors failing to live up to their promises, rather than Israeli obstructionism - materials are being allowed through but there isn't enough money or aid to buy all that's needed. As for food, Egypt's extreme crackdown on the Gaza border under Al-Sisi is really putting the dietary crunch on Gaza right now.

Crowsbeak posted:

A pogrom of the Scale you're suggesting would require a very large campaign of bloodletting by Israel, and would pprobably lead to Israel becoming a bigger pariah then North Korea.

Paul MaudDib posted:

Actually no - recognizing minorities as different is stage 1. Stage 2 is a group having traits or symbols that can distinguish them as an Other- for example the star of David for Jews. Basically - having a way to identify a minority is a prerequisite for effectively going after them.

As the theory notes, symbolization is a universal human act and it's only problematic when it begins to be used as a targeting symbol for hate.

So I'd put stuff like hijabs into that category. Maybe beards too.

Main Paineframe posted:

By all accounts, the main factor delaying Gaza reconstruction is international donors failing to live up to their promises, rather than Israeli obstructionism - materials are being allowed through but there isn't enough money or aid to buy all that's needed.

emanresu tnuocca posted:

So this thread went back to "I don't need to show a genocide exists, I'm allowed to use whichever words I want cause this is how I liberate palestine".

Reminds of Shamir's "For Eretz Israel Lying is Permissible", I think in Islam this is called Taqiyya.

And that you liars dare accuse Absurd and me for 'defending G E N O C I D E' (god how much of an shrill idiot do you have to be to repeat that schtick) well you are in fact just relegating yourselves to the level of propagandists, But it's cool, cause your lies are that which will liberate palestine, so way to go, o brave martyr.

Edit: literally went from "a wide consensus exists" to "How dare you question the words I chose to use! They have the correct emotional impact!"

30.5 Days posted:

I've been very careful to avoid using any word that might compare the situation in Israel to any other situation past, present, and future, or to use words like "cleansing" and "genocide".

emanresu tnuocca posted:

Sorry I should have made it clear that I am referring to two or so specific posters, in my zionist rage I might have been somewhat remiss of pointing that out.

Hong XiuQuan posted:

If it's only two, you should probably name them so they can defend themselves if they want to.

CharlestheHammer posted:

Plus it seems to be a step by step guide, so yeah if you are going to genocide someone you have to identify them and be aware they exist. I don't see the problem he is having or how this is diluting.

Cat Mattress posted:

Why the gently caress would you spend your foreign aid budget on building stuff that's just going to serve as target practice for Tzahal? Planet Earth, unfortunately, has no shortage of populations needing foreign aid, but there's no such thing as infinite budget (especially in these debt-obsessed times of austerity and sequestration) and it's more constructive to spend your money on developing infrastructure that will not be bombed to smithereens before the construction workers have even left the building.

Whining about international donors not donating is just obfuscation; the real cause is still Israeli policies. The thing Gaza needs is a no-fly-zone to protect it against Israeli depredation; without this military protection building anything is a waste of resources, nothing more.

Also lol at "Israel loosened the blockade now that Sisi is enforcing it".

Main Paineframe posted:

According to that spectrum, practically every country in the world is in at least stage 3 of genocide, and the US is in stage 4 or 5 of genocide. Boom, there goes practically all the bite from the original sinister statement that Israel is in stage 6 of ~genocide~.

emanresu tnuocca posted:

There's also the 'inescapable irony' of posters who not two pages ago accused us of playing 'genocide apologism' by practicing 'liberal-essentialism' via insisting that Israel is not engaged in genocide by demonstrating that it 'doesn't tick a few boxes in the checklist' now presenting a checklist themselves and attempting to demonstrate that Israel is indeed engaged in genocide because it ticks a few boxes in the checklist... but not those others countries of course, no, they don't tick off enough boxes.

Laughable.

Main Paineframe posted:

According to that spectrum, practically every country in the world is in at least stage 3 of genocide, and the US is in stage 4 or 5 of genocide. Boom, there goes practically all the bite from the original sinister statement that Israel is in stage 6 of ~genocide~.

quote:

While I agree in principle, after Protective Edge ended and the UN worked out a deal between Israel and the PA to coordinate the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip, a big international aid conference was held where billions of dollars were pledged toward reconstruction, and that was considered to be the funding for the reconstruction plan. In reality, only a few hundred million of that money has been delivered on, and not only the reconstruction but even the humanitarian aid has ground to a halt due to being funded by nothing more than broken promises. I agree that it's a poor investment, but charity cases usually are. And it's not like "eh, why bother housing the homeless, their home might get destroyed again so let's just leave them on the streets" is exactly the pinnacle of moral development.

The two moves were unrelated - Israel's loosening of restrictions came about as part of a deal with the PA, while Sisi tightened them because he came to power and hates Hamas. I'm not sure why you're scoffing at it, either - since Israel does not control Gaza's full border, Egyptian cooperation in the blockade has been an overwhelming factor in determining its actual effects. Sisi's crackdowns have been devastating for Gaza.

Woozy posted:

Restating an argument isn't refutation, it actually doesn't even rise to level of engagement. The point that you've failed to grasp once again is that the semantic content of a word is determined by more than just whatever you say it is. If you want to answer the question "is Israel engaged in genocide" you should at least understand in principle how those questions are typically settled. Like you're hugely full of poo poo and way out of your depth and I can already tell how this is going to go by the fact that you haven't actually bothered to quote or argue with the post that you've spent the last two pages being so butthurt over.

We're both competent speakers here (well...) so you're going to have to do better than "Israel and its allies aren't willing to use the word to describe their own behavior" if you want to argue that genocide has some fixed immutable meaning that explicitly excludes Israel. You being wrong about super basic poo poo like how words work doesn't invalidate the perspective of numerous people--including those who are actual victims of what is uncontroversially genocide--who don't see any problem with calling a spade and spade.

CommieGIR posted:

I'm still waiting for him to accuse people of being antisemitic again.

emanresu tnuocca posted:

I appreciate your cheerleading but I do recall you not being able to challenge any of my points yesterday.

Nosfereefer posted:

Maybe we can just call it a series of genocidal acts?

CommieGIR posted:

And multiple people disagree with yours, so maybe you should withhold some of that smug 'I'm right, your wrong' demeanor. It's not as if you've flown in and the majority agree with you, multiple people have issues with your claims as well.

CharlestheHammer posted:

Nah don't give into his dumb handwringing, call a spade a spade and let him try and refute it. If the topic so far is anything to go by, it will at least be funny watching him try.

emanresu tnuocca posted:

Article 2 of the UN genocide convention of 1948 posted:

Genocide is defined as 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; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Kajeesus posted:

You know, in these last several pages of argument, I don't think I saw anyone post the actual, UN-defined, definition of genocide:


There is absolutely no way for Israel's West Bank policies to fit this description. What's going on there clearly constitutes ethnic cleansing, but words have meaning. Do you believe Israel will pursue Palestinians who flee to Jordan to bring about their destruction?

You could argue that Gaza fits under "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," I suppose, but there has to be deliberate genocidal intent, rather than merely neglect and a complete disregard for human life. If you think there's global consensus that the former is the case, I'd really like to see it backed up.

quote:

The term 'ethnic cleansing' has frequently been employed to refer to the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are the subject of this case ... General Assembly resolution 47/121 referred in its Preamble to 'the abhorrent policy of 'ethnic cleansing', which is a form of genocide', as being carried on in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ... It [i.e. ethnic cleansing] can only be a form of genocide within the meaning of the [Genocide] Convention, if it corresponds to or falls within one of the categories of acts prohibited by Article II of the Convention. Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area "ethnically homogeneous", nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide: the intent that characterizes genocide is "to destroy, in whole or in part" a particular group, and deportation or displacement of the members of a group, even if effected by force, is not necessarily equivalent to destruction of that group, nor is such destruction an automatic consequence of the displacement. This is not to say that acts described as 'ethnic cleansing' may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region. As the ICTY has observed, while 'there are obvious similarities between a genocidal policy and the policy commonly known as 'ethnic cleansing' ' (Krstić, IT-98-33-T, Trial Chamber Judgment, August 2, 2001, para. 562), yet '[a] clear distinction must be drawn between physical destruction and mere dissolution of a group. The expulsion of a group or part of a group does not in itself suffice for genocide.

— ECHR quoting the ICJ.[14]

emanresu tnuocca posted:

No, not really, only those who think that the actual definition of the word is not important because "checklists", are you now in that camp as well?

So far the prominent arguments supporting this 'uncontroversially accepted' notion of Israeli genocide are:
1. It doesn't fit the definition nor enjoys any sort of consensus but definitions are made by first world oppressors and the allies of zionists. -This is what you believe I gather?
2. Genocide isn't about killing ethnic\religious\cultural groups, it's a set of events which if exist in unison might constitute more and more severe genocide. -This notion was in my opinion thoroughly disputed by Main Paineframe.
3. Definitions aren't important, using words to evoke action is. - Which as I noted, is not even an argument about the definition of genocide, it's an argument about how it's ok to lie for a good cause.
4. At the current rate stretched to an arbitrarily period of time Israel is likely to completely exterminate every single palestinian in Gaza, therefore this is genocide. - Sure if that happens that would be genocide, only there's no guarantee any of this is true, despite the sorry state Gaza has been in since the war people have not been dying in droves and the population is still growing.
5. At the current rate stretched to a century from today Israeli policy is sure to kill of every palestinian in the west bank. -This is pure conjecture, I do not presume to have such predictive abilities nor do I believe in historical determinism.

Are there more "refutations"? Did I miss some? Is this enough handwringing?

Now sure I may have done disservice to some of these arguments through my indelicate strawmanning, but this is generally the gist of things. In anyway, if you're just gonna hide behind the skirts of other posters and cheerlead while having no more contributions short of your semi nonsensical posts from yesterday well, just let me know.


This one demonstrates positions 1 & 3.

FreshlyShaven posted:

First, you're significantly overstating how much the illegal blockade has been loosened. So far, 1 house has been built since Protective Edge. One. Out of hundreds of thousands destroyed and despite the fact that winter is fast approaching. That's not a result of a lack of financial aid(though that's certainly an outrage in and of itself); it's the result of the blockade. Israel may have jiggered with the details of the blockade a bit, but the fact is that the blockade is still designed to cause civilian suffering and to prevent the Gaza Strip infrastructure from being meaningfully rebuilt(which again goes to how at this pace Gaza is set to be uninhabitable by 2020 and Israel has done nothing to prevent that; in other words, that's what Israel's desired outcome seems to be.)

Secondly, you can't treat the blockade as being 2 separate, unrelated phenomena. Yes, Egypt controls the Rafah crossing but Egypt is a military dictatorship and Egypt's military has been deeply intertwined with, voire subservient to the Israeli state since the 70s. Israel is Egypt's major supporter and patron and they dictate that Gaza be under blockade(even when Morsi was president, the blockade more or less stayed despite massive popular opposition due to pressure from Israel via the military) though of course Sisi has his own reasons for participating(crushing the MB). The fact that an Arab dictatorship is complicit in an Israeli policy doesn't subtract from Israel's culpability; it only adds disgrace to the Egyptian government's account.

quote:

The men of Shejaiya still come daily to sit vigil in the desolate ruins of their neighborhood, drinking tea and playing chess. But these days, there are also clusters of construction workers on Shejaiya’s dirt paths, finally pouring a few cement foundations and hammering together wood planks.

Fouad Harara, 56, arrives at his house on Montar Street before 6 a.m. to check the previous day’s work against his thick wad of engineering blueprints. He returns at midday with chicken and rice for the 10 men who have, over the past four weeks, completed the cinder-block ground floor where Mr. Harara plans to revive his electrical-services business and erected pylons for the second of seven sketched stories.

“Exactly the way it was,” Mr. Harara said of what would replace the home he built in 1993, one of hundreds flattened by Israeli attacks on Shejaiya, the Gaza City neighborhood that abuts the border fence, during the war last summer. “I was comfortable in this place,” he added. “We lost everything, but it’s still in my memory.”

A year after the halt to hostilities between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Aug. 26, 2014, not a single one of the nearly 18,000 homes destroyed or severely damaged in Gaza is habitable. About 12 percent of their owners have been approved to rebuild through the complex Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism created by the United Nations, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but just under 4 percent — 719 families as of Saturday — have actually purchased cement or other materials.

Those involved in the process, and advocacy groups, attribute the slow pace to Palestinian political infighting, Israel’s involvement in approving projects and participants, and a lack of funds. International donors have sent about $340 million of the $2.5 billion they pledged for Gaza’s reconstruction last fall, and much of that was spent on removing rubble, on temporary housing for 100,000 displaced residents or on minor repairs.

Israeli, Palestinian and United Nations officials acknowledge that cement has flooded Gaza’s black market, with some undoubtedly ending up in the militants’ underground tunnel network — the very thing the monitoring system was set up to prevent.

“We know and believe that some of it goes to the wrong places,” said Maj. Adam Avidan, Israel’s point person on the mechanism. At one point, 18 of 30 beneficiaries bought their full allotment of cement and “went the same day and sold it on the black market,” he said. “They didn’t build their houses.”

About 37,000 tons of cement sits unused in Gaza warehouses, nearing or past its expiration date for load-bearing projects.

Mofeed M. Al Hassaina, the Gaza-based minister of housing and public works, was in Shejaiya on July 23, when Mr. Harara was among the first four owners to start rebuilding, surrounded by clicking cameras. But Mr. Hassaina said he was afraid to return to the neighborhood, and had turned down an invitation to a school opening there after three days of demonstrations by residents outside his office.

“I cannot go there, because they are angry,” he said. “Maybe they’re cursing us and they’re shouting at me because they’re frustrated about their life.”

Palestinian civil-society groups pushed forward a petition this month calling for an end to the reconstruction mechanism, saying that Israel’s access to a database of destroyed homes and its role in reviewing applications only entrenched its control over Gaza, a position echoed in a reportpublished this week by Gisha, an Israeli group that promotes freedom of movement for Palestinians.

But Mr. Hassaina, other Palestinian leaders and United Nations representatives all said that Israel had done its part in reasonable time and had allowed cement into Gaza. Empty coffers, they said, are the primary problem.

“Now we have 2,000 names that have been approved by Israel, Israel sends the material, but where is the money?” Mr. Hassaina asked. Qatar has provided $6 million of a pledged $50 million to rebuild 1,000 homes, he said, and “Kuwait promised $75 million, but we don’t have anything yet.”

The International Crisis Group, in a report scheduled to be released this week, says international donors have not paid up because of the worsening rift between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, and the lack of a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel, which it says makes another round of violence likely.

Others complain that reconstruction is being pursued piecemeal, without an overall development plan including infrastructure for neighborhoods like Shejaiya or any structural economic change to address unemployment in Gaza, which is over 40 percent. The reconstruction mechanism imagines going beyond rebuilding the homes destroyed last year to address Gaza’s prewar shortage of 85,000 housing units.

“Restoring the situation to June 2014 isn’t O.K. — far from it, that would be condemning Gaza to more misery,” said Robert Piper, the United Nations’ deputy special coordinator for the peace process. “The potential disaster is that we not move fast enough on the software — planning and coordination, for example — rather than the hardware.”

Mr. Piper and Bashir Rayyes, the Palestinian Authority’s coordinator for Gaza reconstruction, said the focus on destroyed homes was too narrow. About 78,000 Gaza families received money to repair homes with minor or moderate damage (though many of them resold some cement for up to triple the mechanism’s prescribed 520 shekels, about $135, per ton).

Mr. Hassaina, the public works minister, said 455,000 tons of rubble had been cleared; 1.5 million tons remain. According to the mechanism’s website, 115 larger projects, like schools, hospitals and roads, are in progress, 15 have been completed, and 237 are in the approval pipeline. Mr. Rayyes said 95 percent of Gaza’s electric grid and water supply had been restored.

“Things are not great, but things are moving, and guys, guess what, we need more money,” Mr. Rayyes said. “Everybody is looking at the empty half of the cup, and honestly, that is not helping.”

The people of Shejaiya cannot live on a repaved road or in a restored power plant. They await a text message like the one Hussein Sukkar, owner of building No. G-10-80-1040, received last week ordering him to bring “original copies of land ownership” to the ministry of public works. He had been approved to rebuild.

A typical new home is allocated $50,000. Owners can withdraw money in installments from the Bank of Palestine, then buy materials from the mechanism’s 100 approved vendors, whose facilities are under 24-hour surveillance, and hire one of its 260 contractors (10 vendors and 55 contractors have been suspended for unspecified violations). Inspectors from the United Nations or the housing ministry are supposed to visit each site to ensure that the work is complete before releasing the next batch of money and material.

Mr. Sukkar’s is one of two homes on Karama Street where work is underway; at least 15 more were destroyed. On Nazaz Street, where almost all of the homes remain in ruins, six men sat on plastic chairs under a tree one recent afternoon.

“The real war is now,” Kayed al Zaza, 45, said, complaining that the rebuilding process was unfair and based on money and personal connections. “It’s worse than Zionists’ wars, as it is launched against us by our own divided politicians.”

Abdel Hadi al Ejla, 56, lamented, “Tell me what kind of homeland this is, which lacks homes for its inhabitants.”

A relative, Nemer al Ejla, has been working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the home of another family member — a bittersweet task because his own application is still pending. “I reconstruct this place, but I have no home, and I live in a small tent with my 13 children,” he said bitterly. “I want to explode.”

The Harara family, too, is split: Four of their 19 buildings, which housed 250 people and surrounded a patch used for picnics before the war, are under construction.

Mr. Harara has a photograph of his former and future home affixed to the tent he put up after the fighting stopped last August, where has spent virtually every day since. It shows a flourishing nut tree, which he said was felled by Israeli bombs.

A few yards away, green branches sprout from the ground, some part of the tree apparently having revived itself.

“We are the same — our homes and ourselves,” said Mr. Harara’s brother Abed, 53. “We will not die. Our roots are like this tree.”

Main Paineframe posted:

While I agree in principle, after Protective Edge ended and the UN worked out a deal between Israel and the PA to coordinate the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip, a big international aid conference was held where billions of dollars were pledged toward reconstruction, and that was considered to be the funding for the reconstruction plan. In reality, only a few hundred million of that money has been delivered on, and not only the reconstruction but even the humanitarian aid has ground to a halt due to being funded by nothing more than broken promises. I agree that it's a poor investment, but charity cases usually are. And it's not like "eh, why bother housing the homeless, their home might get destroyed again so let's just leave them on the streets" is exactly the pinnacle of moral development.

Kajeesus posted:

Do you believe Israel will pursue Palestinians who flee to Jordan to bring about their destruction?

uninterrupted posted:

Oh go gently caress yourself. Israel has proven time and time again that it will destroy any infrastructure that allows Palestinians to live at anything above sub-substinance level. That is entirely on the Israeli people.

Also using the ridiculous guidelines most Zionist posters are using in this thread the Holocaust wasn't genocide because the Nazis fed the people in concentration camps.

Main Paineframe posted:

When's the last time Israel bombed infrastructure in the West Bank?

Main Paineframe posted:

When's the last time Israel bombed infrastructure in the West Bank?

emanresu tnuocca posted:

Repeating a lie doesn't make it a truth, putting it in italics doesn't either, you are seriously invoking 'numerous people' as some infallible appeal to authority. I already told you it would be nice if you could start naming scholars who support this view before you qualify it as uncontroversial. heck, can you even demonstrate a consensus concerning israeli genocide among Palestinian scholars? I'm gonna bet you won't be able to do any of that, so you basically can keep repeating this same line but it doesn't change the fact that you're presenting your dumb minority opinion as something which it isn't. if that wasn't clear: you're a liar, if people choose to buy your bullshit that's fine, they are likely idiots, but you are still just a simple liar.

People who have an interest in the topic beyond just mining it for smugness posted:

We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.

quote:

You've already abandoned any attempt to support your definition for genocide short of it just kinda feeling right and that you believe it signifies that sort of 'immediate call to action' you wish to conversationally convey when you are talking about how Israel bad and that attempts to actually use the common definition for the word are used by dirty hasbarists and their allies to discourage an immediate international action, that's a nice laughable position to have but it barely merits a discussion as you've already made it plainly clear that the meanings of words are to be used as a political weapon whenever the situation is severe enough to call for it.

Now, obviously, your position is completely idiotic but perhaps it should also be noted that humanity actually has a lovely track record when it comes to intervening to prevent genocides, so even if you do get everyone in the world to concede that Israel is engaged in very slow burn G-E-N-O-C-I-D-E, this won't necessarily mean that the world will take any significant action, so your crusade against words meaning things is ultimately likely quite futile.