During World War I, the Ottoman Empire collectively blamed the millions of Armenians in their territory for attacks by Armenian resistance fighters. Around 1M non-combatants were killed by the Ottoman military — in many cases, by forced marches through the Syrian desert without food and water.
Denouncing this genocide doesn’t make you an Armenian resistance fighter or an advocate for their views. It just means you’re against genocide.
In 1994, in the wake of the Rwandan civil war, the president of Rwanda was killed. Military and government officials suspected the Tutsi-aligned Rwandan Patriotic Front and blamed the Tutsi and Twa people collectively. They organized the mass killing of Tutsi people; between 500,000 and 1M people were killed in the following three months.
Abhoring this murder doesn’t make you a partisan of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. It just means you’re a human, opposed to the systematic slaughter of humans.
On October 7 2023, Hamas’s military wing attacked and killed about 550 Israeli soldiers and as many Israeli civilians. They kidnapped, tortured and raped hundreds more. In response, Israel has denied food, water and medical supplies to the 2.3M people of Gaza, driven them from their homes to a tiny sliver of land near the Egyptian border, destroyed half of all residential buildings, killed 30,000 people and seriously injured 60,000 more. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has called this action a plausible genocide.
Wanting this genocide to end with an immediate ceasefire doesn’t mean you support Hamas or want Israel to be destroyed. It means you’re opposed to mass killing and expulsion of people from their homeland.
Is it exactly the same as these other examples? Absolutely not. Genocide never is. But you can be on the side of humanity against the destruction of the people of Gaza and it doesn’t make you an advocate for the views or actions of Hamas.
Evan Prodromou's Blog 
@evanprodromou welcome to the fallacious world of false dichotomies. Thanks for providing these examples.
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Absolutely. I honestly don’t know when this kind of asymmetrical warfare becomes a genocide, but I think it’s about the point when collective punishment is introduced.
@enmodo @evanprodromou A much better comparison is the Sri Lankan Civil War. Where the Tamil minorities oppression by the Sinhalese spiraled into civil war. And where the Tamil Tigers increasing inability to hold to agreements and use of terrorist attacks against civilians resulted in their eventual destruction. Inability to hold to agreements and attacks on civilians fits Hamas to a tee.
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Yes, actually, it does.
Ceasefire cannot mean surrender. So long as Hamas remains in place, ending the retaliatory war guarantees further massacres. We know because Hamas has promised to repeat its performance if allowed.
If you want the war to end, you want Hamas to end it, not Israel.
#israel #hamas #politics
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You can’t say, “We just need to commit a little more genocide to achieve other goals.” That’s not how genocide law works. There is no higher priority than stopping genocide — it is a “jus cogens” or peremptory norm. It’s not acceptable to commit genocide in order to eliminate Hamas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peremptory_norm
@evanprodromou People who have failed to recognize the antisemtic and genocidal intentions of hamas and the "pro palestinian" movement they are so eagerly sharing their stages and lending their voices to have lost all of their little remaining credibility to me.I dont believe a word they say and i cant take them serious.There have been zero(!) attempts to distance oneself from antisemites.Their "humanitarian" NGOs have been funneling money to Hamas for years.No sign of self-reflection whatsoever
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@evanprodromou Except the ICJ did not call it "plausible genocide" as can be easily checked in the wikipedia artucle you link to. Some accusations appear plausible and thus the court will investigate the claims. This is a very low bar to pass.
Also, Israel does let in food and water (albeit not enough), contrary to some statements of high ranking officials at the beginning of the war. How else are the ca. 2 millions inhabitants of the Gaza Strip supposed to survive the 4 months of fighting?
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@evanprodromou Also, Israel did not drive inhabitants out of their homes to a tiny strip along the Egyptian border, but informed them in advance that it was going to conduct a military operation there and designated an area where they could evacuate to in order not to get killed during the fighting. This is the exact opposite of genocide.
BTW, this was useful to Hamas giving its fighters an early warning to evacuate and move their equipment, which is why Hamas is still fighting.
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The horrible numbers of dead and mutilated civilians as well as destruction of residential areas are easily explained by the strategy and tactics employed by Hamas making residential areas a military infrastructure and using civilians as living shields.
This suffering by the Gaza Strip population is really horrible, but how comes Israel gets all the blame no matter what it does, and Hamas is barely mentioned at all in this discussion?
The choice to bomb those civilian targets was up to Israeli politicians and the IDF. Killing dozens of civilians in order to take out a single fighter is a choice — one that show the intense disregard for Palestinian lives. Many targets are bombed without any expectation that they are military targets; see https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/israel-targets-infrastructure-in-gaza-to-ramp-up-civilian-pressure-on-hamas-report-claims for a description of this campaign.
It would be great for Hamas to be tried for its crimes in an international court. As a UN member, and the directly aggrieved party, Israel has the ability to make these cases. I think there’s a great case for Israel to make in a court about Hamas — perhaps at the ICC. It would be a much better process than killing tens of thousands of civilians.
People have not been allowed to return to their homes in the north. They are evacuated southward, and then disallowed to return.
The ICJ said this in their decision: “The Court concludes on the basis of the above considerations that the conditions required
by its Statute for it to indicate provisional measures are met. It is therefore necessary, pending its
final decision, for the Court to indicate certain measures in order to protect the rights claimed by
South Africa that the Court has found to be plausible.”
The order is available for download here: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240126-ord-01-00-en.pdf
You are correct — there are supplies coming in, but they’re not enough for everyone. The latest from IPC:
https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue-94/en/
@evanprodromou this is incredibly ignorant and reeks of STEM-lord depth of knowledge to history, geopolitics, and international relations.
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I’m definitely interested in updates! The Armenian and Rwandan genocides are kind of hard to summarize in 2-3 sentences, I agree.
@evanprodromou The current tragedy is simpler. Hamas chose a moment to attack Israel in the certain knowledge it would be defeated and that Israel would exact terrible revenge. Why? To get that which has been denied the Palestinians these last 75 years. Support from the global community. It worked. Israel is now a pariah and will fall. Palestine will be restored and live free like Lebanon and Syria. Was accepting massive casualties among its own people worth that? Hamas clearly thought so.
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Well said
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Bombing those hospitals is a choice. Nobody is making Israel bomb a hospital to take out a bunker.