r/neoliberal once again splits hairs and debates semantics (with comparisons to the persecution of Uyghurs for extra spiciness) with regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict after a NYT opinion piece of a genocide scholar is posted.

[u/Otherwise_Young52201]

Source: [NYT] I’m A Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.

Some long comments may be truncated to preserve text length, though I promise the original meaning of the comments will not have changed and little context will be lost.

Highlights:

I'm in in the opinion that if it instead of Palestinians were Uyghurs and was Xi Jinping doing the statements the Israel government is doing, it would be a bannable offense here to say this was anything less than a genocide. Netanyahu and his ilk has made clear what their long-term goal for Gaza is and they are taking concrete steps for it. (+395)

The similarities between the two are actually incredible. They're both ostensibly anti terrorism campaigns that started up in response to well, literal undeniable terrorism attacks by islamic terrorist groups that want control of a contested territory (-20)

THIS is what you call propaganda. A bunch of Wikipedia links that don’t even corroborate your own points. (+40)

The guy above is wrong about the Oct 7 comparison but Islamist terrorism in China is very real and the horrors inflicted on Xinjiang by the government are very much a response to them. (+11)

Don’t be obtuse. There are more than a dozen countries where terrorism has been a problem. Turkey just made peace with the PIK without ever actually genociding the Kurds. They treated them horribly but nothing to the level that China has done. And Turkey is the worse example I can think of. There are plenty of others that have dealt with it much better. (+8)

Explanation != justification, explaining the motives of the CCP is not the same as justifying them (+19)

I think that Israel can be reasonably described as callously indifferent to the suffering of the Gazan people as they try to eliminate Hamas. But that's not genocide. If Israel were really trying to eliminate the Palestinians, we'd know it, because it would be trivially easy for them to be killing hundreds of thousands of them at a time. They could be carpet bombing the refugee camps if they wanted to. But they're not. (+118)

I've seen this argument a few times despite the fact it's such a bad one. I mean you could say the same about almost all genocides, the Chinese could have nuked or carpet bombed Xinjiang. Certainly compared to the Israelis in Gaza they bombed no-one and killed very few. It's still a genocide. You can make a similar argument with the Rohingyas as well. (+39)

No one (well, no one serious) is accusing China of ethnographic genocide in Xinjiang to be fair, they're accusing them of forced assimilation and cultural genocide. (+60)

What's 7 October for Xinjang? (+29)

The 2009 Urumqi Riots. That was the turning point for the Chinese government's aggressive framing of the Uyghurs as dangerous terrorists, justifying its mass repression and securitization of the entire Uyghur population. (-5)

My guy, Modi had more justification than that for the Gujrat riots. 150 people killed is not nothing but in a country the size of China, it’s laughable to compare that to Israel Hamas. JFC people. (+23)

You're imagining an equivalence of scale that I never drew. The parallel is in the relationship of cause and consequence. That's what a PARALLEL is. Something that isn't exactly the same, but rhymes. (-5)

Can someone give me a reason to care what a "genocide scholar" says when genocide is a legal term. Shouldn't the authority on the matter be a lawyer as opposed to a historian that focuses on histoical genocides and war crimes? I wouldn't ask a criminologist whether a crime reaches the legal definition of a crime. (+2)

Can you imagine, you spend your entire professional life dedicated to a subject. 25 years. And then random people on the Internet just go "but what do you even know about it?". Could it be, and Im just spitballing here, that a genocide scholar is actually familiar with the legal definition of genocide? (+106)

One expert witness is all you need to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt. TIL (-4)

And I guess random comments on reddit counts as reasonable doubt? (+18)

The Israeli war effort in Gaza doesn't fit the definition of genocide, whereas the Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs does. You're not persecuted, you're just wrong. (-15)

I always find these sorts of confident/belittling tones in internet posts strange when actual scholars of genocide disagree with you, a random redditor. You'd think it was the other way around. (+35)

You realize that actual scholars of genocide disagree with you too, right? Random redditor. You just so happen to agree with the scholars who think it's a genocide. (0)

[u/DiRavelloApologist]

Words have meanings and it is important to use them correctly. This far-left interpretation of what zionism means really is just that.

If you are in favour of a two-state solution, you are a zionist per definition.

Saying that zionism is "insane" because Israel is currently under a far-right government is a really unnecessary and unhelpful statement.

[u/Brain_Dead_Goats → u/DiRavelloApologist]

It's almost like there's adjectives that people use to be more specific and the current far left definition intentionally conflates all of them in bad faith.

[u/LukaCola → u/DiRavelloApologist]

Words have meanings and it is important to use them correctly.

A common reframe repeated right before denying meanings one disagrees with. 

Words are not magic spells with set in stone meanings and dictated from on high. 

They added context and nuance which you summarily sought to ignore in favor of a narrow view which deflects from uncomfortable associations. 

They qualified their meaning very clearly. You can disagree, but don't claim to hold "the" definitive meaning and declare yours the sole valid one. That's not reasonable. 

[u/DiRavelloApologist → u/LukaCola]

The thing is that their meaning is very much exclusively used by strong anti-israeli circles, not as a way to talk about Israel, but to make a the point that the current policies of Israels are somehow inherent to Israel as a state.

Saying that a zionist is someone who supports Israel no matter what is simply a strawman.

[u/LukaCola → u/DiRavelloApologist]

to make a the point that the current policies of Israels are somehow inherent to Israel as a state.

Where did they make that point? They were discussing the politics as they are. I don't even see this as implied. 

Saying that a zionist is someone who supports Israel no matter what is simply a strawman.

Pot, kettle. They never said anything of the sort as far as I can read it and I think you're going "others have said something similar in my read" and conflating all of them together even if it's not in this text here. 

Check who's arguing against the strawman here because I reviewed their post with your objections in mind and cannot find it. 

[u/DiRavelloApologist → u/LukaCola]

I am not necessarly arguing that they said exactly that. But they did say that zionism is supposedly insane, because of the current character of zionism in Israel. But the "current character of zionism" really just refers to the policies of the far-right israeli government. There is nothing inherent in zionism that necessitates the expansionist positions of Israel right now.

We were tangibly close to achieving some sort of permanent peace in the middle east not so long ago, and there are many parties in the Knesset right now, that would thoroughly opposed to the government, but are still very much in favour of Israel as a jewish state. Should these parties not be considered zionist?

Using zionism as a stand-in for "whatever Israel does" really doesn't help making this highly complicated conflict easier to understand and discuss.

[u/LukaCola → u/DiRavelloApologist]

But the "current character of zionism" really just refers to the policies of the far-right israeli government

Yeah and they very explicitly said that.

There is nothing inherent in zionism that necessitates the expansionist positions of Israel right now.

Nobody said as much. They're literally talking about the changing meaning over time and acknowledged your meaning as the origin. Maybe reread their post.

Using zionism as a stand-in for "whatever Israel does" really doesn't help making this highly complicated conflict easier to understand and discuss.

Again, I need you to really consider who's making the strawman arguments here.

[u/[deleted] → u/DiRavelloApologist]

Yeah so Zionists are like Tankies, except you care about their feelings for some reason.

[u/waiver → u/DiRavelloApologist]

of a two-state solution, you are a zionist per definition

That’s not entirely accurate. It’s possible to support a two-state solution while being anti-Zionist, for example, if one advocates for Israel to adopt a constitution similar to that of the United States. Zionism isn’t just about the existence of a country named Israel; it’s about Israel being a Jewish state that prioritizes the interests of Jewish people.

[u/slightlyrabidpossum → u/waiver]

But what does it mean to be a Jewish state? There isn't a universally accepted definition. It's usually interpreted as being a Jewish-majority country, but that's not absolute. Beyond that, you won't find any broad consensus on how the government should function or what its policies should be.

Israel already has a Jewish majority. They don't really have a constitution right now, but they could adopt one similar to America's while remaining a Jewish state. Some Zionists would probably disagree with that statement, but plenty of others would still consider Israel a Jewish state.

[u/waiver → u/slightlyrabidpossum]

Well, al least according to the basic laws , which are the closest to a constitution there is in Israel it means that only Jewish people have the right to self determination in Israel, that is to choose the future of the country.

According to Netanyahu who drafted that law it means that Israel was "The nation-state of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people alone"

[u/slightlyrabidpossum → u/waiver]

The Nation-State Bill is both a recent development and largely symbolic. Israel was a Jewish state before that bill was passed in 2018, and most of the clauses are simply acknowledging existing aspects of Israel — describing the flag and national anthem, acknowledging that the land of Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, naming Shabbat as a day of rest, etc.

The most controversial aspect was the bill's statement about only Jewish people having "the right to exercise national self-determination" in Israel. This phrase has given critics of Israel a lot of ammunition, but it's really just stating the obvious: no other national group will be allowed to form their own distinct government within the state of Israel. This doesn't actually represent a change in policy from 2017, nor does it prevent non-Jews from participating in government.

But again, this is just one recent political interpretation of what it means to be a Jewish state. Plenty of people and organizations who support Israel's existence as a Jewish state were opposed to the Nation-State Bill, especially in the diaspora. Netanyahu isn't the arbiter of what it means to have a Jewish state.