I'm no genocide expert, but it does seem like legal scholars who _are_ genocide experts agree that the facts here seem to clearly meet the bar. The people who you credit with "hav[ing] the better side of the legal argument" do not seem, from my vantage, to be arguing in good faith. They are trying to bog us down in semantics when a truly horrifying crime is happening, and saying that we can't call a horse a horse is not helping.

I'll also say this: I greatly sympathize with Israel and Jews more generally here. The problem at the core remains global antisemitism; it's the reason Israel needed (and still needs!) to exist, and the reason Jews globally feel threatened. Antisemitism in the middle east is particularly pernicious, but it's not much better in Europe or the Americas. It doesn't just feel like a dangerous wolrd for Jews, it _is_ a dangerous world.

That doesn't change my opinion about the situation in Gaza---there's ample evidence that it's a genocide. But I hope this helps people see that we can, and should, hold these two truths at once. Jews are persecuted, and are in a precarious situation globally. In fear and in anguish, the state of Israel is performing unconscionable deeds in Gaza. The root cause is antisemitism; if we could somehow find a solution to that, you'd solve the whole conflict in the middle east. But good luck.

Really the only thing that moved me to comment here, besides message board vulnerability amplified by waiting for a Rust compile run to finish, was the implication upthread that mass displacement of populations was genocidal. The rest of it I don't think there's enough daylight between us to debate usefully.