In my experience at least it actually describes almost every Zionist Jew I know - the belief that the world wants to call it a genocide so they can invade it and destroy it.
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There's of course ALSO "there are far larger conflicts where the word is not thrown around, it's thrown here bc it's easier to cover Gaza & the world considers anything involving Jews of special evil" but all of that sort of orbits around "do not arm the world against fellow Jews" as a real pressure
aug 3, 2025, 7:49 pm • 0 0 • view
That literally never crossed my mind. (I guess I am post- or non-Zionist at this point, so perhaps I don't fit the category.) I am hoping Israel can be saved from self-destruction, which I see as a more likely risk.)
aug 3, 2025, 8:30 pm • 3 0 • view
But the question of what the impact of acknowledging a genocide would be is separate from the factual question of whether what is happening meets the legal standard of genocide.
aug 3, 2025, 7:49 pm • 5 0 • view
I don't think it can be so neatly separated, because "genocide" is itself a category constructed to be extremely broad, while simultaneously carrying with it an implicit moral call to immediate and harsh action.
aug 3, 2025, 7:50 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm trying to separate the factual question of whether genocide is occurring from the normative question of what one does with that fact, if one concludes it is occurring. Are you suggesting there is no purely factual question, because applying the term "genocide" is always a normative decision?
aug 3, 2025, 7:55 pm • 2 0 • view
I think applying the term genocide is very frequently a normative question in IHL, yes. It's almost by design a crime defined by what one thinks of as the intention behind it - not purely nature, metrics or scale.
aug 3, 2025, 7:56 pm • 0 0 • view
A genocide can encompass an entire continent or a single metropolitan area. It can be primarily cultural or physical. It can encompass anything from government neglect in the face of famine to active killing squads. It can encompass basically any relative % of victims - "in whole or in part."
aug 3, 2025, 7:57 pm • 0 0 • view
(And this gets even more ambiguous when we consider for example the fact that again, Gaza is basically a single metropolitan area of modest size, and yet the same terms & scale are applied as are applied to ethnic cleansing of much larger areas & much more concentrated paces of massacre!)
aug 3, 2025, 7:59 pm • 0 0 • view
(Ultimately, when people demand people acknowledge "this is a genocide!" they are almost always saying " I'm seeing it all over my TL! DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!" and there is a not-insignificant number of people who think that "something" should involve bullets and bombs in Tel Aviv.)
aug 3, 2025, 8:04 pm • 1 0 • view
There are very few crimes in international humanitarian law MORE nebulous than genocide, by design. It doesn't even have legal gradiations! It's really mostly an additional condemnation of intent as far as I can tell.
aug 3, 2025, 8:05 pm • 0 0 • view
I think that's a fair characterization - these terms create understandings as much as describing them - but then that has serious ramifications for the entire understanding of post-Holocaust genocide prevention, if speaking the term is what creates the moral obligation.
aug 3, 2025, 7:59 pm • 1 0 • view
It does! It's a very uncomfortable topic! When it comes to "preventing genocide" aggressively we have a pretty bad record.
aug 3, 2025, 8:00 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm curious in what directional sense you mean
aug 3, 2025, 8:22 pm • 0 0 • view
I mean we just aren't very good at preventing genocide or especially motivated to do so. We are perhaps good at preventing genocides that specifically look like the Shoah, but that's kinda it?
aug 3, 2025, 8:23 pm • 0 0 • view
I mean if you're arguing that historically speaking we've moved too late, too selectively, not at all, etc, i agree
aug 3, 2025, 8:24 pm • 6 0 • view
All I was trying to say is that I know Jews who think it is genocide and say so, and those who don't think it is, but I don't know anyone who earnestly thinks it is but is afraid to say so for political reasons.
aug 3, 2025, 8:00 pm • 10 0 • view
But if you are saying that they would come to different conclusions about the ostensibly descriptive question, if the political context of the term were different, perhaps that is true; we can't really know for sure.
aug 3, 2025, 8:01 pm • 3 0 • view
And presumably people who genuinely do not believe it meets the legal standard of genocide wouldn't suddenly start to believe it does, even if the demands for what to do with that claim were entirely different.
aug 3, 2025, 7:50 pm • 4 0 • view
You presume that “genuine belief” is a thing here – often in these situations, it’s more about believing _in_ belief – believing that it’s virtuous to believe X, rather than believing X as a matter of fact.
aug 3, 2025, 11:42 pm • 0 0 • view