EPThttps://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/29/labour-party-conference-vote-israel-genocide-gaza
Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine - Page 484
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12276 Posts
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/29/labour-party-conference-vote-israel-genocide-gaza | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4427 Posts
On September 30 2025 15:14 Nebuchad wrote: Labour members have voted to accept the UN finding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, which is probably more important for UK politics than for Gaza politics but it's one more step. And, you know, eat shit Starmer, all that good stuff. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/29/labour-party-conference-vote-israel-genocide-gaza Well, more good news. Keep it coming! I know some moderates who deny that genocide is happening (some of them also doubt that Hamas committed genocide on October 7, so I question their ability to accurately determine what is or isn't genocide. But unlike others they're willing to listen and learn more). By and large though the trend is very clear: even those who don't think it's genocide are beginning to move away from arguing that the Gaza war is just a war like any other. More people accept that mass murder has happened, but terms such as "genocide" are not being used. Those same moderates also doubt Russia committed genocide in Ukraine. Perhaps I should ask them whether or not they think China is committing genocide (or at least ethnic cleansing) against the Uyghur. As more people say something, more people believe it. Words become belief, like a mantra would. So it's important that we keep calling it what it is and never back down. One question I've been asking myself is whether the term "extermination" is equally precise as "genocide". I wonder if people would adopt that term more willingly. But I personally doubt it. If someone denies that it's a genocide, they'll most likely also deny that it's an extermination. So I think I'd rather stick to the most precise term. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12276 Posts
On September 30 2025 15:43 Magic Powers wrote: Well, more good news. Keep it coming! I know some moderates who deny that genocide is happening (some of them also doubt that Hamas committed genocide on October 7, so I question their ability to accurately determine what is or isn't genocide. But unlike others they're willing to listen and learn more). By and large though the trend is very clear: even those who don't think it's genocide are beginning to move away from arguing that the Gaza war is just a war like any other. More people accept that mass murder has happened, but terms such as "genocide" are not being used. Those same moderates also doubt Russia committed genocide in Ukraine. Perhaps I should ask them whether or not they think China is committing genocide (or at least ethnic cleansing) against the Uyghur. As more people say something, more people believe it. Words become belief, like a mantra would. So it's important that we keep calling it what it is and never back down. One question I've been asking myself is whether the term "extermination" is equally precise as "genocide". I wonder if people would adopt that term more willingly. But I personally doubt it. If someone denies that it's a genocide, they'll most likely also deny that it's an extermination. So I think I'd rather stick to the most precise term. In my experience the moderates that you're talking about have no problem seeing it clearly when it's Russia or China doing it, it's only when our governments say that it's justified that suddenly things become "complex" (in ways that they can never fully demonstrate) and politics lose their inherent clarity. One thing that is important about terms other than genocide that describe adjacent things, like ethnic cleansing, is that we're kind of misusing them if we're using them to "not use" genocide. The reason why a term like ethnic cleansing exists isn't because the term "genocide" must keep its purity and it's wrong to apply it to situations where it doesn't belong, it's the opposite: they were talking about what happened in Bosnia in that case, and some defenders of those mass murders were pointing out that not every metric was met in order to call it genocide. In response to that (bad) argument, people at the time said okay, let's use a distinct term then, "ethnic cleansing", and then we can treat that situation exactly the same as we would treat a genocide. Those terms are meant to extend the scope of what we can call genocidal practices, not to delineate it. | ||
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Legan
Finland466 Posts
The proposal starts with some vague mentions of Gaza being terror-free and things being done in the best interest of Gazans. The latter does not have much backing in the other parts of the proposal. The text notably lacks dates and doesn't define "qualified Palestinians," who are supposed to be involved in the process. Hard to see how qualified Palestinians will not just look like puppets or collaborators to Gazans. There are no actual mentions of how Gazans are to be heard about on issues. The Palestinian Authority is mentioned as a future option, but it seems to demand that they agree to previous demands regarding reform, which seems unusual to include in this deal as a condition when the PA is not a party in this deal. It seems like an easy way to dismiss PA from involvement, and this text does not define the demanded reforms. The name "Board of Peace" seems to have a blatant aim at the Nobel Prize. The weirdest part is obviously the economic section that talks about "thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East". I wonder what cities they mean and how the local working class view them? At least the proposal gives amnesty to Hamas members who give up arms and allows others to leave Gaza. In theory, Hamas members can now give up arms without signing their own death sentence. However. I'm sceptical that this actually means much. The hostage release clock being started by only Israel agreeing to the proposal seems odd too, as Israel could do so, and Hamas would have less time to organise the release if their agreement takes some time. Israel would then easily blame Hamas for breaking the agreement. Regarding any aid, the text refers to the previous ceasefire agreement as a minimum. It also talks about full aid being sent after the agreement, which implies that aid is not being fully sent currently. I wonder if the last two points about Palestinian statehood and co-existence will be okay with Netanyahu's allies. They are also very vague, using "the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood", which leaves a lot of room for denial. | ||
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KT_Elwood
Germany1032 Posts
That's why he is nominally the boss of the board. | ||
KwarK
United States43049 Posts
On September 30 2025 15:43 Magic Powers wrote: Well, more good news. Keep it coming! I know some moderates who deny that genocide is happening (some of them also doubt that Hamas committed genocide on October 7, so I question their ability to accurately determine what is or isn't genocide. But unlike others they're willing to listen and learn more). Post to clarify the grounds for disagreement on terminology, not to disagree on what is actually happening. My personal understanding is that a genocide is when you kill all the people. For example when the Nazis eradicated the Jewish ghettos they had close to 100% kill rates. Most European Jewish communities that were subject to the Nazis were wholly eradicated. Same with the great many Native American tribes that simply ceased to exist. It’s the total destruction of a people. That’s what I think of when I think genocide. So for me the Hamas attacks on Israel aren’t genocide because they never had a chance of killing all the Israelis. Hamas are very genocidal, they’d love to kill all the Israelis, but you don’t get a badge for trying. They never had the means, it’s not genocide. It’s just a horrific war crime, a massacre of civilians simply because they could. Extremely bad, but a different flavour of extremely bad. Israel’s situation is different because they very much do have the weapons to kill all the Gazans. But not only are they not using those weapons, they are also going to considerable effort to prop up the Gazan population with regard to food and medical supplies distribution. To get ahead of the obvious intentional misreadings of what I’m saying, that does not mean that they’re doing enough or that they’re not complicit in it being a problem in the first place. Just that the death toll from hunger and starvation would be an awful lot higher if Israel didn’t participate in supply efforts. That makes it hard to imagine a coherent and consistent Israeli policy of killing all the Gazans because the actions they’re taking are contrary to that. If I were the Israeli minister for genocide then I would be extremely angry with the counterproductive efforts of other parts of the government that kept distributing aid, even if the aid was insufficient to save everyone. It’d be like if the Wehrmacht followed the Einsatzgruppen around and gave medical assistance to survivors. Then there is the question of other Palestinians such as Israeli Arabs or Jordanians who Israel seem to coexist with pretty well. That makes it more complicated than a racial or ethnic eradication policy, they don’t seem to want to kill all the Palestinians (as in the descendants of the population that lived in British Palestine). So, on genocide I give Hamas a rating of genocidal because they’d love to do it but they’ve done zero genocides. I wouldn’t even say that they’re trying to do a genocide, it’s so far outside of the possible that it is purely aspirational. Israel also gets a rating of partially genocidal because a lot of Israeli politicians seem to advocate for genocide in Gaza, though generally implicitly, but they’ve not done a genocide yet. Most Gazans have survived the war and will survive the war. I am reasonably certain that after another ten years of whatever we call this there will still be millions of Gazans alive in Gaza and that makes it difficult to describe it as an eradication. Or to put it another way, how would you falsify an accusation of genocide? What criteria would need to subsequently be met to say that it was wrong? The first declarations that Gaza amounted to a genocide were decades ago and the population of Gazans continued to grow, were the people calling it a genocide back then wrong? Then there’s the question of colonization and displacement. Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are unjustifiable occupations and displacements. They take the land by force, settle it, and then use force to defend that settlement. It’s no different than any other war of conquest. Abhorrent, indefensible. Then there’s the question of war crimes by Israel and it’s not a question. The evidence is undeniable. Abhorrent, indefensible. Then there’s the question of ethnic cleansing. I think it’s probably fair to say that most Israelis, and that likely includes Arab Israelis, would prefer the Gazans gone. Let’s imagine for a second that we have an unemployed alcoholic neighbour who beats his wife and his dozen kids and his abused kids routinely vandalize our property and attack our family. Also, for balance, somehow it’s our fault that they’re unemployed and an alcoholic in this metaphor. There’s a pretty huge gulf between thinking “I wish they weren’t my neighbour” and “I’d like to murder the whole family including the kids”. Where I’m going with this is that Israel wants the Gazans gone, but it doesn’t seem to want to achieve it by killing them all. Ethnic cleansing and genocide generally go hand in hand, people are normally reluctant to be displaced en masse without force and once you start forcibly removing people they generally don’t get looked after very well. The “relocations” performed by the USSR were cleansing and genocides, for example, because rounding all the people of an ethnic group in a given area up is cleansing and depositing them in Siberian work camps with no supplies is genocide. The survival rates were appalling. Essentially ethnic cleansing is usually the same thing as genocide which I think was Nebuchad’s point, “making a people not here” and killing them are very rarely not the same thing. With Gaza Israel might have a wish for ethnic cleansing but it doesn’t have the stomach for eradication, and that’s what cleansing would likely require. Relocation isn’t on offer and without relocation that just leaves eradication. They are ethnically cleansing the West Bank though, as an implicit result of their policy of displace, settle, defend. The West Bank is different because it is large enough that you can internally displace people without killing them all. Gaza isn’t really, it’s just a warzone. So, lots of really terrible stuff going on. And I think, by and large, we all basically agree on what terrible stuff is going on. The argument about words is semantics, it doesn’t actually matter if the people involved are imagining the same scenario. It doesn’t somehow become better if you use different words for it. War crimes are still war crimes, massacres are still massacres. I think the maximalist assertions of genocide aren’t helping anyone because they immediately run into the question of eradication which they cannot answer. If anything I think it’s counterproductive because it results in Israel winning a fight despite being essentially guilty. It’s like if a DA overcharges a murderer, a jury might reasonably acquit a charge of murder 1 if murder 2 was the more appropriate charge, muddying the issue. I think there’s a cognitive bias where we all agree that if eradication were happening then immediate and forceful intervention would be required and so the inverse becomes implicitly accepted, if eradication is not taking place then intervention is not required. It’s a logically unsound conclusion, but one that people will make if it is set up for them. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12276 Posts
On September 30 2025 23:57 KwarK wrote: There’s a pretty huge gulf between thinking “I wish they weren’t my neighbour” and “I’d like to murder the whole family including the kids”. Where I’m going with this is that Israel wants the Gazans gone, but it doesn’t seem to want to achieve it by killing them all. Ethnic cleansing and genocide generally go hand in hand, people are normally reluctant to be displaced en masse without force and once you start forcibly removing people they generally don’t get looked after very well. The “relocations” performed by the USSR were cleansing and genocides, for example, because rounding all the people of an ethnic group in a given area up is cleansing and depositing them in Siberian work camps with no supplies is genocide. The survival rates were appalling. Essentially ethnic cleansing is usually the same thing as genocide which I think was Nebuchad’s point, “making a people not here” and killing them are very rarely not the same thing. This isn't something that we'll be able to study fully because people won't be open about this, but I really think there's very little difference between the two, displacement and murder, in the mind of someone who wants an identity of people gone. I think if you presented to nazi supporters the possibility of removing Jewish people by making them live somewhere else on the other side of the world, the percentage of them who would go "NO I REFUSE WE NEED TO KILL THEM" would be very, very small. At the end of the day every rightwinger is an idealist, what they want is only the thing that they envision in their head, it's about the result not about the process. Of course as you point out the process to achieve any of that is always the same, and it's dehumanization and removal of human rights, followed by ethnic cleansing/genocide, but honestly I doubt that registers. It's possible that I have already talked about this, but I'm always reminded of a conversation I had a few years ago with a girl who was telling me about how the world would be better without gay people being visible in the street, in gay prides, existing without a care. I pointed out that in that world gay people would still exist, they'd just be in their homes, hidden, but they'd still be there. But she answered that from her point of view, what I was saying and not existing were the same thing. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10776 Posts
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12276 Posts
On October 01 2025 00:39 Velr wrote: For the person being affected the diffrence between being displaces or murdered seems pretty big. Not really, no. Forced displacement of populations by groups who want them gone tend to come with large body counts. The impulse is the same. | ||
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KwarK
United States43049 Posts
every Party member says, "sure, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination - it'll be done." And then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a firstrate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this - and except for cases of human weakness - to have stayed decent, that has made us hard. I've always found that quote fascinating because he is so very close to getting it. He's essentially saying that people talk a good game but then they struggle to personally take accountability in killing their neighbours, even if they're Jews. That if exceptions were allowed, if there was some kind of vouch system for the good Jews, then they'd basically not kill any Jews at all because all the German Jews could likely find at least one good pure blooded aryan who could speak for their patriotism, work ethic, values etc. That the SS are to be praised because they have the moral courage to kill anyone, even their neighbours, even the "firstrate Jew". Even though they know it is murder.I also want to speak to you here, in complete frankness, of a really grave chapter. Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said quite openly, but all the same we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934,* to do our duty as we were ordered, and to stand comrades who had erred against the wall and shoot them He places Jews in the same box as the SA, people we don't want to kill, people we must not hesitate to kill.The contradictions and what it tells us about the mental state of the architects of the Holocaust. How they reconciled their instinctive revulsion of the acts they performed with the performance of them. How they justified it to themselves. What they thought about what they were doing. Himmler describes a clear ethical code, how they might do the monstrous and not become monsters. I gave a strict order, which has been carried out by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl, that this wealth will of course be turned over to the Reich in its entirety. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have erred will be punished in accordance with the order given by me at the start, threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single Mark of this money is a dead man. A number of SS men - they are not very - many committed this offense, and they shall die. There will be no mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, as a watch, by one Mark or a cigarette or anything else. In his ideology he doesn't want sadists or thieves, he doesn't want SS members who "want" to kill the Jews for pleasure or property. Their presence, their participation, would invalidate the ethical framework of the whole genocide. He says that SS members who steal so much as a cigarette from their victims must be executed, it is a capital offence. He believes that the ethical code required of mass murderers is somehow higher than that of the general population, and that it necessarily has to be in order to not be corrupted by their work.Fascinating speech. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12276 Posts
I don't know if you can assess how much of it is factual and how much is words? Like, I assume it wasn't uncommon for SS members to kill Jewish people for pleasure or take their property, that seems fairly standard. Does he not realize that, is he turning a blind eye to it? Did he personally enrich himself in these despite what he's saying? Another fundamental instinct of fascism is the pleasure to have different rules for yourself and for the people who are below you, so I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't follow the code he was promoting. | ||
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Jockmcplop
United Kingdom9702 Posts
Armed militia and gangs supported by Israel are seizing control of parts of Gaza, exacerbating its humanitarian crisis and potentially threatening any efforts to bring order if Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza takes hold. The Israeli military and security services have for several months been arming and training groups in Gaza as local auxiliary forces and as an alternative to Hamas, but the strategy appears to have gathered momentum in recent weeks. The so-called Popular Forces under a commander called Yasser abu Shabab have been operating in the south of the territory for several months, coordinating closely with Israeli forces around controversial aid distributions sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaque US- and Israel-backed private organisation. Now up to a dozen new militias have emerged across much of Gaza, in addition to the Popular Forces. The citizens of Gaza really stand no chance do they? When Israel is signing a peace treaty with one hand and paying groups to make any resolution impossible with the other. Peace, my arse. All Israel wants is more dead Palestinians. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23365 Posts
On October 01 2025 01:31 Jockmcplop wrote: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/30/israel-backed-militia-groups-potentially-threaten-new-peace-plan-for-gaza The citizens of Gaza really stand no chance do they? + Show Spoiler + When Israel is signing a peace treaty with one hand and paying groups to make any resolution impossible with the other. Peace, my arse. All Israel wants is more dead Palestinians. I might agree were it not for their unflappable resilience. The US was days away from roving gangs pillaging the elderly for their toilet paper after like a week of it being hard to find. I can't imagine the chaos that would unfold in any US city/state living under a fraction of the deprivation (let alone the violence) they are in Gaza. | ||
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KwarK
United States43049 Posts
On October 01 2025 01:26 Nebuchad wrote: It is interesting yeah. Or it is interesting to me, I may be weird. Depending on how much of this is sincere, I think we see the same main instincts. I'm a good person, my hand was forced by the evil Jews, it's unfortunately the only path to achieve the goal. I don't know if you can assess how much of it is factual and how much is words? Like, I assume it wasn't uncommon for SS members to kill Jewish people for pleasure or take their property, that seems fairly standard. Does he not realize that, is he turning a blind eye to it? Did he personally enrich himself in these despite what he's saying? Another fundamental instinct of fascism is the pleasure to have different rules for yourself and for the people who are below you, so I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't follow the code he was promoting. You're right, there were loads of sadists and thieves. I think the idea of the noble murderer who is governed by a rigid code is pure fantasy, but that's part of what makes it interesting. Their fantasy tells a story about how they saw themselves. | ||
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Legan
Finland466 Posts
On October 01 2025 01:31 Jockmcplop wrote: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/30/israel-backed-militia-groups-potentially-threaten-new-peace-plan-for-gaza The citizens of Gaza really stand no chance do they? When Israel is signing a peace treaty with one hand and paying groups to make any resolution impossible with the other. Peace, my arse. All Israel wants is more dead Palestinians. These gangs have two possible fates. They either become Israel's tool to divide and control Palestinians, or they turn on Israel, which will give reason for the IDF to stay. Any more formal positions they get will be tied to Israel support, which undermines them as representatives of Gazans. | ||
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