As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel.
We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.”
This is not the most popular opinion on Lemmy these days, but it’s still an immense stretch to want to call the war in Gaza a genocide.
If Israel wanted to kill off the Gazans, they would just have to start carpet bombing certain areas. At this rate, it would take them 50 years to do it, which would be immensely stupid.
What Israel has done is turn up the dial with regards to acceptable collateral damage - just like the US did themselves to break costly sieges like Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa.
No-one who is appaled at the civilian casualties has actually ever come up with a valid alternative method to eradicate IS or in this case Hamas or Hezbollah without causing any or even less civilian casualties. The US government knows and accepts this, so in public they’ll play the pacifist while in reality they’re accepting the ‘necessary’ violence.
Not sure where you’re pulling this out of.
They literally are carpet bombing civillians, for a while now, as well as brutally blocking any humanitarian aid (such as food). They are literally using starvation to exterminate the Gaza strip, Nazi efficiency.
That and more, and Bibbi himself said with biblical flair: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” Not out of context. The context was the “war” with Gaza.
Even with a minimal amount of history taught at school you can piece together a very very very Nazi way of thinking. Everything is Hamas, Even the children, the hospitals, all infrastructure conducive to life and order. “Keep killing all leaders, contain, and eradicate with any means (such as starvation)”
Just by numbers, the Hamas attack that “started this” was 1.5k (Hamas) vs 1k (Israel) dead, which Israel knew about and was informed many times by intelligence agencies, and happened by a breach of a wall that is lined with 24/7 monitoring, they just chose not to be prepared, in a strong “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Churchillian way. This attack “caused” Israel to start carpet bombing, and murdering indiscriminately (even shooting children included) and killing 50k Palestinians (not taking into account the wounded, suffering, and deathly malnutritioned).
But hell, you don’t need to listen to the logic of some random guy on the internet, why not just read this, ICC formally declaring the factual reality: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-kc-applications-arrest-warrants-situation-state
I think it is high time that we acknowledged the elephant in the room.
“God’s chosen people” = “ubermensch”
“God’s promised land” = “lebensraum”
Do you have any source on the carpet bombing you claim they’ve been doing for a while?
If Israel wanted to do a genocide, they could just roll out the carpet bombs and spread them over the refugee tent cities. They’d easily kill 50-100k every few hours. That way, it wouldn’t take 50 years.
But in reality, we see 50-100 deaths per day. That just doesn’t jive
Reality doesn’t care about what “jives” for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_bombing_of_the_Gaza_Strip
The most perspective-enlightening comparison is probably “By late April 2024 it was estimated that Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II.[4][5]”.
If that doesn’t fit your carpet bombing definition, I give up.
The normal definition of carpet bombing is dropping a ‘carpet’ of bombs over an area all at once. That’s where the name comes from, anyway.
If you’re just saying they dropped a lot of bombs, why would you want to call that ‘carpet bombing’ ?
“they dropped a whole bunch of bombs, yes, but nowhere did it say they dropped them all simultaneously. if the word ‘carpet’ doesnt fit, you must acquit israel of genocide”
-nonailsleft, exact quote rn
Why would you need to lie about them carpet bombing civilians as proof for genocide if you’re convinced that’s the case without it?
do you actually think the potential misapplication of the word carpet is the thing that makes it a genocide or not? let me help you with that
the proof is in the genocidal language and intent, the mass starvation, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and infrastructure, the manipulation of journalism, the unhesitating violation of human rights and international law. its a genocide because of the systematic erasure of a people, a culture. ‘carpet’ is very obviously used in a figurative sense to describe “a lot, like in world war two” above, not the technical sense your strictly literal pedantic argument would require to have any pretense of validity. “lie about carpet bombing”
Carpet bombing in WW2 wasn’t called that because they dropped a large number of single bombs over a country over a large period, it was called that because it’s a technique where you try to cover an area with a dense carpet of bombs all at once
There is 50-100 deaths a day that are recorded. Thanks to Israels deliberate destruction of the health system, fire fighters, journalists and other civilian infrastructure there is many more unrecorded deaths. And this is just people “missing”. On top there is all the indirect deaths that already occured or are inevitable from the total annihilation of infrastructure. The conservative estimates range from 200.000-300.000 people killed in Gaza. That is 10-15% of the total population.
I agree that there would be unrecorded deaths, but I don’t think Hamas has any reason to underestimate their number by a factor of five (5). There’s still a lot of structure and quite a large (international) presence of aid and medical workers, and journalists. One can use numbers from food distribution or the polio vaccinations that would easily corroborate 10% ‘missing’ population.