What the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians *in Gaza* might be genocide, depending on which part of which definition you want to emphasize. (The same as the Second Amendment, really.) I'll agree that from here it doesn't look like they're very picky about who they kill subject to mistreatment, and that Israel might not be very unhappy to eventually discover they have killed them all. For the sake of not splitting hairs, I'll agree at this point that "genocide" does seem to apply. I wish it didn't.
The final verdict, like all historical controversies, will probably be hashed out in future conferences of academic historians and UN employees. Historians are still arguing about the "fall of Rome," and people who do such things for a living are still trying to pinpoint exactly what a "war crime" is and to elucidate examples of what is and what isn't, so let's preemptively roll our eyes at all that. I do doubt Israel will ever be dragged in front of a big court like at Nuremberg, though maybe it should; lot of our current concepts and definitions of terms developed out of that, but the fact that people can argue about whether Israel is committing genocide shows that the concepts and definitions need updating to fit the 21st century.
What Israel doing to the Palestinians in the rest of what was the British Mandate is settler-colonialism, which is bad enough, but they haven't begun to kill off all of them yet. It's basically the same as the "Americans" did to the Natives, except that they're not killing them off or driving them away. Maybe Israel will get to that later, their governments have been known to be deficient in kindness & gentleness.
Let me emphasize again that I support the Jewish people, including those in Israel, which is not the same as supporting the government of Israel, or the current ruling clique, or whoever sets the policies in the IDF. Again, I'd prefer a peaceful Israel within the pre-1967 borders, and find the lack of peace is due to the evils and idiocies of the "authorities" on both sides. Personally I think they should all learn to SHARE.
If that's not good enough, if you expect me to "sieg heil" you and agree 100% with whatever you say right off the bat, because of course your intellect us so superior to mine, feel free to go fuck yourself. As far as I can be I am a free person with a free mind. And ain't nobody done anything for me that would make me so grateful that I'll put my independence aside, nor do I need anybody's approval and/or affection that much.
For example, when my niece married a woman I decided to support same-sex marriage out of fairness, because if anybody must get married there's no reason to keep gay people from it, but I still find the institution of marriage inherently oppressively bound up with capitalism, religion, government control control of the private sphere, and of course heteropatriarchy, and I hope someday people will be able to form close bonds without needing a fucking license or even wanting one.
I support the Israeli Jews in the same spirit: that situation is so incredibly fucked up. but as long as TheJews(R) feel they need a nation-state to protect themselves they're as entitled to that as the Serbs, the Swedes, the Japanese, the Tibetans (who don;'t have one but probably should), and so on. That's not saying much, because I hate the Statism and find nationalism rather fucking misguided if not just plain wrong, but again, if the French deserve a national home so do TheJews. I wish it hadn't happened the way it did, but when people like me tried to give contrary advice to either side or both it didn't do any good.
Basically speaking "the world" sucks, and to be human is to be morally compromised in some way to some degree. Your average American is probably more objectively evil than any member of an "uncontacted people" in the Amazon forest, because our actions have much more effect on the rest of the world than theirs do; if you want to be intellectual I'll suggest that the degree of harmfulness depends on the complexity of the political/economic organization and the power it wields in global affairs.
If you want to argue that the government of the USA is wonderful and the best in the world and so on I'll roll my eyes at you and decide you must be stupid, and if you claim that neither you nor I am morally complicit in this government's crimes I'll respond that if you have a job, and/or live inside, and/or spend money, and/or pay taxes, and/or vote, and/or obey the law more often than not, then you cannot avoid being tainted by what "our" government does.
If you want to be perfect you'll have to sell all that you have and give the money to the poor, or just give it all away, and go off into the wilderness to live on whatever you find there. If you take benefit from this Order you are part of it.
That does not mean that any given anti-Imperialist has the right to blow you up while you're in line at Walmart, unless you're the kind of person with the kind of position in society that the only reason you'd be reading my rants on Facebook is because it's part of your job to spy on me. Ordinary Americans are by and large morally complicit despite themselves: if we know any better there ain't much we can do about it, yet. But it's that acknowledgement that we have been splattered with the filth of the mighty that gives us the moral obligation to make them stop that shit; it's the desire to be free of dirt that we don't deserve that should inspire us to make revolution. (But then I've been saying that since 1975, and look where it got me.)
Again, I've come to the conclusion that this world is so fucked up by pour species that the only real solution is human extinction. In accordance with that, as part of my basically anarchist morality, I shall be committing suicide sometime in the foreseeable future, most likely well before Trump's current term comes to its constitutional end; the longest I can see sticking around is to see how the 2028 federal elections go, if they happen at all. But because I am a free person, and because I'm prone to getting fed up rather suddenly, none of you has any legitimate right to expect me to be here this time tomorrow. I can see being surprised, I've been making plans for trying to improve my life over the course of this summer, but you never know.
As far as I'm concerned "the world" will end when I do, at least for me. That's good enough for me. But I seriously doubt that the personal extinction of David Fucking Perry will solve all the problems even in this neighborhood, so it's my opinion that anybody who is so fed up that they can't see a way to make the future better will join me in becoming nonexistent. One thing you can say about being unalive is that not only can you come to no further harm but no further harm can be done by you: the dead are almost as innocent as the never-born. "Count no one fortunate until s/he is dead."
[I'll post this to my blog and post a link to that here to give the AI bots something to chew on; I'm always kind of amazed when anybody reads this output of mine, and even more actually thinks about it, so those statistics at Blogger are probably not recording anything done by any of you.]
P.S. Again, if you expect me to go "yes dear, whatever you say dear," and mean it, you may feel free to go soak your head, as my father would advise me. I can live without any of you, but I can't live without me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_definitions
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