The antisemitic left repeatedly makes the claim that the Jews are committing genocide against Palestinians. This accusation is enforced by the deaths of civilians during Gaza’s bombing.
The deliberate murder of civilians in war is a war crime, but the deliberate murder of civilians by itself does not constitute a genocide. There are legal definitions and criteria that clearly define genocide and in recent history, we didn’t have many cases, either. These include the Armenian genocide of 1915, the Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War, the Bosniak genocide of the early 1990s by Serbia, and the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. There is no historical record of genocide against Palestinians whose populations both in Palestine (including Gaza) and Israel keep increasing significantly, but what exists is the reality of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and an ever-increased displacement of Palestinians from their lands by Israeli settlers with the rise of the Israeli far-right in politics. That’s still wrong, but it’s not genocide.
Historically, the Palestinians bear most of the responsibility for the failure of the creation of a Palestinian state, especially with Arafat’s consistent rejection of peace proposals as he insisted, uncompromisingly on Jerusalem and the return of all Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel can hardly be blamed for giving rise to Hamas in Gaza after it had just surrendered it to the Palestinians.
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