Okay, but how can it not be considered ethnic cleasning?
I think one big blindspot in the modern, rules based order is that far too often, we end up debating definitions rather than focusing on the actual suffering… some argue that that is the point of our rules-based system. I think it’s more of a flaw, but still…
They are following the terminology used in the Geneva Conventions to leave no doubt that it is a war crime. They are not denying that it is ethnic cleansing; they are not using that phrase because it is not the applicable legal term.
Quick Deep Dive:
The advance warning is terrifying, no?
A million people will be bombed tomorrow, and it will be live on TV, with commentary.
I fucking hate this planet.
I think you’re missing my larger point… the word games aren’t helping the situation. Just call shit what it is, and while there is a “legal” definition of terms like ethnic cleansing, how often has legalese been used to ignore taking action thinking of Rwanda, for example or even Yugoslavia. People dickered around about what was happening in Sarajevo, while people were being endlessly picked off by snipers for YEARS… I’m not a huge fan of Bill Clinton, but he was absolutely right to bring the hammer down on Serbia when they tried to invade Kosovo. At some point, you absolutely need to be proactive on stuff like this and try to head it off at the pass. This seems to be one of those cases, though the US, EU, and Canada will not intervene, but will wag their fingers at Israel as they disproportionately punish the collective for the acts of a few… They will feed their own children through a fucking meat grinder to keep the dream of greater Israel, with King Bibi on a throne of skulls alive…
Yeah, but a few of them did a bad, so they should all be punished… /s 
That’s what they’re doing. They’re calling a war crime a war crime.
I think this reinforces my larger point, that language and legal terminology is used to cover up acts of brutality. Getting hung up in the legal terms doesn’t really help (hence my example of Rwanda and Sarajevo).
It’s fucking depressing just how little we’re willing to just do the right thing, but instead are hung up on defining things before we can act. Seems to me a byproduct of our modern society in general, which is sort of obsessed with putting everything into neat little categories in order to “understand” them… Foucault was dead on about how that sort of thing shapes the world and is a byproduct of power and building hegemony…
but hell, even HE fell into that trap, playing the games of the French academy, which prides itself on its obscurity and opaqueness.
THERE IS NO OUTSIDE, JUST THE SYSTEM.
They are leaving.
Civilians are fleeing northern Gaza by car, on the back of trucks and on foot after an Israeli warning that civilians should move south
Get ready to see some brute force tunnel destruction. Bunker busters, etc.
Why is this not seen???
We welcome back Noah Kulwin to discuss the explosive yet basically unseen Al-Jazeera documentary The Lobby detailing illegal lobbying efforts by the Israeli government and just why you literally have not seen this film
The Lobby UK:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzGH…nbENCKuz7fqU12xNBce
The Lobby USA:
Israel’s president Isaac Herzog accused Palestinians in Gaza of being collectively responsible for the attack. “It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true,” he said on Friday. “They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”
IANA(warcrimes)L but isn’t collective guilt and punishment classified as a war crime? It certainly should be!
“They all deserve it.”
I did read that correctly, yes?
By this morning many of us have received another nightmarish push notification from the New York Times as Israel demands the evacuation of 1.1 million Palestinians from Northern Gaza. This is a cruel and impossible demand and the beginning of the worst type of calamity many feared would come from this war. There seems little possibility that international pressure will cause the Israeli Defense Forces to abandon or modify this request after the United States offered its unconditional support for Israel. One can only hope that this is a temporary measure and not the de facto implementation of the Israeli far right’s longstanding demands for “population transfers,”—essentially another round of ethnic cleansing. But even if the goal is purely military, it seems likely there will be little left to return to in Northern Gaza at the end of this war.
My interpretation remains that Hamas fully intended to provoke the most terrible possible response from Israel: their hope seems to be that Israel will commit such a massive atrocity in response that it will lose international legitimacy. All the sympathy that Jews as a people and the support Israel as a project receive as a result of the Holocaust will be erased or at least badly damaged. Every antisemite in the world will be able to say, “See, they are just as bad, stop listening to them complain, maybe they have it coming.” This would be the beginning of the end for Israel. After all, despite its military prowess, if remains a small nation, dependent on the support of bigger powers for arms and ammunition. If that goes, it is a trap, a prison, just another forsaken stretch of sand not unlike Gaza.
As a young man, I thought I was an anarchist. As you grow older, you drop such beliefs as stupid and naïve, but recently I’ve felt this naivety and stupidity is fundamentally correct: states are evil, abstractions like “nation” are not really worth dying or killing over, and that the world would be a better place if the soldiers on both sides just shot their own generals and leaders. I want to say, “To hell with the whole lot of them.”
Strategy and tactics are not what’s really at issue here. At core of the worldviews in question is a belief in sheer murderousness. What both Hamas and the far right in Israel want this is to become is a war of annihilation and extermination. This is the fundamental vision of their nationalism of despair: races and peoples pitted against each other in interminable conflicts that can only be concluded with “final solutions.” Of course, a similar vision of permanent racial war underpinned Nazism and the Holocaust**. I categorically refuse to be recruited to this conception of the world. And I will not be manipulated by emotional appeals and propaganda—by one side or the other—to participate in it.**
Join the club, it’s got me and Carne Ross in it.
They left out in the video that many haredi refuse to serve in Israel’s armed forces. Which is something because of the policies they tend to push which certainly threw fuel onto the recent conflicts
(^article from late June of this year)
