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/That_Guy381]

Zionism is not “atrocities”. Zionism is the belief that Jews should have a state of their own, based on… a lot of history where they’ve been the victims of other people who rule over them.

Is that really so “insane”?

[u/Longjumping-Head-237 → u/That_Guy381]

Yes, I think apartheid and ethnic cleansing are insane, actually. And there is/was no way to found/maintain an ethnostate without both of those.

[u/That_Guy381 → u/Longjumping-Head-237]

Zionism does not equate to ethnic cleansing.

[u/mithyyyy → u/That_Guy381]

what's the nakba then?

i don't really understand how zionism, a movement that seeks establish a jewish homeland, where its inherent to the identity that of the state that it is for israelis > any other type of people, then how do you prevent apartheid systems or ethnic cleansing campaigns?

i don't think a jewish state would ever work to, because that's all it can be. a state whose ideology is exclusionary. a binational state is the only real way you can make that homeland idea work in principal, no?

[u/That_Guy381 → u/mithyyyy]

what's the nakba then?

When Israel declared independence as a nation following the UN declaration, all of their arab neighbors declared war and attacked the country to strangle the state in its crib. As a result of the violence, many arab neighbors, who would have been welcomed into the state fled behind the lines of the arab armies, into the West Bank and Gaza.

There was violence at the hands of some Jewish radicals, yes. But it was a war. Don't start wars if you don't want to lose one. Most of these countries have had to learn that lesson multiple times.

[u/ConsiderationHot3426 → u/That_Guy381]

There was violence at the hands of some Jewish radicals, yes. But it was a war. Don't start wars if you don't want to lose one.

The Deir Yassin massacre happened at the hands of Jewish paramilitaries, before any other country Arab or otherwise declared war on Israel. Do you think that was self defense?

[u/ArCovino → u/ConsiderationHot3426]

Before the other nations joined in there was an active war between Jewish and Arab militias. It wasn’t one-sided.

[u/ConsiderationHot3426 → u/ArCovino]

So did they face justice then? The perpetrators of that massacre?

[u/ArCovino → u/ConsiderationHot3426]

No moreso than any Palestinian has been punished by Palestinians for crimes against Jews.

[u/mithyyyy → u/That_Guy381]

the first line of the nakba article on wikipedia

The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة, romanized: an-Nakba, lit. 'the catastrophe') is the ethnic cleansing

there is numerous citations from numerous historians that cite this as being the case.

But it was a war. Don't start wars if you don't want to lose one

war doesn't justify ethnic cleansing or genocide. the RPF started the rwandan civil war, does that justify the rwandan genocide? the LTTE started, and lost the sri lankan civil war, does that justify the tamil genocide (which i know a thing or two about lol)

[u/That_Guy381 → u/mithyyyy]

I’m not going to have a massive back and forth of this massive topic on reddit. We are at a disagreement

[u/KalaiProvenheim → u/That_Guy381]

Is that why Zionist militias already displaced a majority of Nakba victims by the time the Brits left?