alt Hacker NewsI understand we won’t come to an agreement here, but I wanted to respond to two of your points:
1. Re: the term genocide, do you know why Palestinians have been insisting on this specific word to be used? Because genocidal intent was clearly communicated from virtually day 1, and was backed by actions to prove this intent. Cabinet members were calling Palestinians “human animals” and “amalek” for God’s sake - and that’s not even close to the worst of it! Palestinians didn’t just wake up one day and say “well, it’s arbitrarily a genocide, and we want everyone to call it that”. And South Africa rightfully pursued a case at the ICJ. Firstly, because they recognized the shared suffering from their experience with apartheid, but most importantly, because they saw that there was a mountain of incontrovertible legal evidence to support their case.
1. Re: Ukraine, you simply cannot make that argument in good faith. Russia’s goals in Ukraine are in direct opposition to Israel’s goals in Gaza and the West Bank.
Russia ultimately wants to annex Ukraine to expand its influence and reinstate its past glory with the USSR. This requires that it absorb Ukrainians into Russia proper. Russia uses the shared culture and language as a justification in its propaganda, but I think there is a kernel of truth there when it comes to Russia’s motivations, particularly in eastern Ukraine. Given all this, genocide is a non-starter for Russia - how can you claim annexation when you are also working to genocide the local population?
On the other hand, Israel wants to cleanse the land of its people - in fact, the absolute last thing it wants to do is absorb Palestinians into Israel proper. From day 1, its intentions were crystal clear: Palestinians as a racial/ethnic group cannot remain in Gaza. They used all tools at their disposal in pursuit of this goal, including mass starvation, collective punishment, mass bombardment, forced relocation, and so on. Taken together with the statements made by top gov officials, this constitutes genocide.
This is all setting aside that Ukraine is a fully sovereign nation with an equipped and supported conventional military fighting a conventional war against a nation state aggressor.
Let me say first of all: super chill response and I really appreciate that.
On point (1), I've got reason to question the claims of genocidal intent that get bandied about in these kinds of conversations. Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece for The Atlantic debunking one of the most frequently cited "amalek" claims. It's easy to find people on either side of the conflict espousing genocidal views, but harder to map specific actions to realistically genocidal intent (especially when the views are ascribed to people with no decisionmaking authority over how the campaign is being waged).
I hate having to be so hedgy but I'll do it anyways: none of that is to say that the Gaza campaign was waged ethically or with meaningful concern for civilian life, and I fervently hope many of its architects end up imprisoned for their roles in it. But that's a cards-on-the-table statement, not a clinical assessment.
On point (2) about Ukraine: Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity; Russia has deliberately --- in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza --- targeted civilian populations (Bucha is an obvious example), and, most damningly, Russia embarked on a campaign of family separation and coerced adoption with the specific intent of disrupting Ukraining ethnicity.
You point out that Israel wants to "cleanse" the land (call it Greater Israel, from the Jordan river and including the Gaza strip) of Palestinians. I'm not as sure about that, but I can stipulate to it. That by itself does not constitute genocide!† (Ethnic cleansing? A crime against humanity? Very possibly!) Genocide as a concept does not encompass any link between blood and soil.
It really pisses Palestinian advocates off to hear this, and I get why, but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population. Similarly, if we're doing comparative statecraft, Assadist Syria successfully cleansed itself of its concentrated Palestinian population, over just the last 10-15 years. See how often you see Palestinian advocates make claims about Yarmouk camp, though. You start to understand why advocates for Israel (I am not one of those) are jaded about this whole thing.
† You get a similar thing about "apartheid", a term I'm more comfortable using with Israel, from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid, to the point where the term makes more sense applied to other larger, more salient ethnic divides elsewhere in the world. But like, preemptively: I'm with you, it's effectively an apartheid system in the West Bank.