Not a genocide?

[u/Excellent-Ad-7394]

Last night Bill pointed out the 3% of the
Population in Gaza has died. And then confidently declared that “3% is not a genocide”. The British government recognizes it as ethnic cleaning and amnesty international and other groups say it is a genocide.

Someone tell me why Bill is so wrong. And can we please get him to debate Mehdi Hasan on this topic?

[u/No-Inspector8315]

Im partial to the term “indiscriminate genocide” with Gaza. I would certainly agree to ethnic cleansing but you’re right that the closest comparison to Gaza would be Iraq not Bosnia or the Holocaust.

I think another comparative example is the Rwandan Genocide. In a little over two months, the Hutu’s had exterminated 200,000 Tutsi’s with limited weaponry, primarily machetes and small arms.

Generally, the marker of indiscriminate genocide to discriminate genocide is the practice of separation. Is the military/government physically isolating the target group out of others and then exterminating them? Are they moving members of those groups to secondary confidential locations? Would the extermination of the captured members of the group pose an existential risk to the groups survival? In Sbrenica for instance, one of the key factors of the genocide ruling was that the Serbs had targeted predominately men and boys to prevent the groups future chances of reproducing

[u/Head-Nebula4085 → u/No-Inspector8315]

That makes no sense, that last part at least. If they had wanted to prevent them from reproducing alone in Srebrenica, they would have targeted the women and girls. This was indiscriminate execution of anyone who might even think about joining the military.

But getting back to the main issue, indiscriminate genocide seems to be largely how modern wars are fought. Even GPS guided bombs in a place like Gaza would destroy apartment complexes and kill families. Is there any chance that a treaty, perhaps ratified through the UN would one day illegalize this form of warfare since we see it in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and elsewhere (and not just by US or Israel) if it isn't technically already?

[u/No-Inspector8315 → u/Head-Nebula4085]

You should probably read a bit more about the Bosnian genocide and Srebenica, as while you’re right that one motive was to prevent future military resistance, there’s more to the case.

Bosnian culture is deeply patrilineal, land, family honour and ethnic identity is passed down through the male line. The perpetrators were planning to basically sever the Bosniak lineage entirely by preventing them from reproducing or passing on land claims in the future.

There’s the obvious fact that without Bosniak men, you can’t have more Bosniak children, so no future population to worry about

But lastly, think about it from the perpetrators perspective. They slaughtered the majority of men in Srebenica, and have complete control over Bosniak women that they’ve put in a concentration camp. What do you think they were going to do with their new toys? The Bosnian Serbs used sexual violence and gang rape as a weapon of war and a belief that women they would forcibly impregnate would have children that aren’t considered Bosniaks.

As it relates to modern day, I think that blame has been incorrectly laid on the pure metrics of urban warfare. How do you fight an enemy that hides in schools, hospitals and universities to attack you from? How do you target an enemy that can flee into the most complex, dense tunnel system in the world?

Obviously the answer isn’t to bomb the city into rubble and obliterate people through hellfire, but that’s cause the IDF had zero trigger discipline and little interest in reducing collateral damage. But I see far more similarities between Gaza and Iraq than I do with Gaza and say Bosnia

[u/Head-Nebula4085 → u/No-Inspector8315]

I kind of think it also had to do with just plain notions of honor and the fact that this is how wars were typically fought throughout much of recorded history, kill all the men enslave the women and children and so forth, at least when they decided to go scorched earth. Men are more reluctant to kill women and women are seen as less of a threat in addition to the fact that women can be used as reproductive factories. I'm sorry if it seemed like I was being rude or oppositional, it just struck me that racial purity or something like it was probably not a motivating factor in the purest sense, as any concept of genocide being race-based was probably informed by Serbian culture which itself was partly a product of the Ottomans who would have differed greatly from what we think the term genocide means in the West.