Couldn't agree more with you, Maarten. My apologies for the long rant, but that false accusation of genocide is so idiotic that I need to get this off my chest in a therapeutic way, otherwise I’ll go mad.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The key words are “intent to destroy … as such.” The motive for the large scale killing of members of a particular population group must be the fact that they belong to that particular population group. Or, in plain English: there's no military logic behind the killings, the motive for the killing is pure ethnic hatred.
In Sudan, the RSF are killing 150,000 Masalit/Fur/Zaghawa because they belong to those ethnic groups. Rwanda 1994: 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu militias because they were Tutsis. Srebrenica 1995: an entire village of Bosnian Muslim men was exterminated because they were Bosnian Muslim men. The Holocaust: 6 million Jews were sent to the gas chambers because they were Jews. None of these massacres had any military logic and that's why they qualify as genocides.
Now back to Gaza: 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in a military operation aimed at eliminating Hamas. Of the 70,000 Palestinians killed, approximately 20,000 were Hamas jihadists. Moreover, they deliberately embedded themselves among the other 50,000 Palestinians in order to drive up the number of civilian casualties as much as possible. Consequently, there is a military logic behind the number of casualties, and therefore it isn't a genocide.
People are perfectly entitled to believe that there are too many civilian casualties, or that Israel's use of military force is disproportionate, etc. But objectively, the war in Gaza does not qualify as a genocide.
Beste Maarten, tijdens het afscheid van Filip kon je helaas niet blijven om na de borrel wat te eten. Ik noemde je 'in het echt best aardig'. Dat is een running gag in onze vriendenkring sinds jaar en dag als het gaat om meningen die niet mainstream zijn. Dat was dus een compliment.
Ik wens je het allerbeste vrij en los van de academische wereld en ik hoop je nog eens tegen te komen. Tot die tijd volg ik je postjes. Keep up!
Thanks for writing this but I think you have the same ideological capture about settlers. Statistically they are insanely more likely to be attacked than to attack. I think the word settler in and of itself is pejorative bc it applies to legal occupants which are the majority and doesn’t apply when the same happens on the Palestinian side with unauthorized building. I am not excusing incidents of Israeli violence I am contextualizing. If you want to push a comfort narrative the both sides on any aspect of the conflict you should do your homework before doing so bc you want the same on the broader conflict. I don’t speak about Netanyahu corruption charges bc I’m ignorant. I don’t live in Israel. As for the Supreme Court protests bizarrely published in the west like we follow this in any other western country other than our own- if you read deeply about that I don’t think you’ll find the protestors remotely sympathetic meaning the way the system is structured now is entirely un democratic. That’s what they don’t want changed. That doesn’t mean the reforms proposed don’t have their own downsides that aspect I can’t speak to I don’t follow the politics closely enough but I read two in depth articles about how the system functions and it’s pretty alien and as I said profoundly undemocratic. Israel doesn’t have the benefit of a real constitution w separation of powers so the power of that branch because bizarrely lopsided. The Supreme Court in any country is not there to stick it to the opposing party in power. It has a mandate to ensure their “basic laws” are followed and I think it has power regarding reviewing what the military does given its outsized role.
Regarding Wikipedia and the information war, this is a very insightful podcast on that subject. The platform - or at least certain topics on it - has been hijacked:
If you think the "Gaza genocide" will eventually be recognized as "Highbrow misinformation", you don't truly understand Wikipedia's level of influence with respect to controlling the standard narrative about controversial issues. Over the past twelve years, I've observed many cases in which Wikipedia was updated to present a view that, at the time, was held only by a minority of people on the left. In every one of these cases, within two or three years the media and academia had completely changed its coverage of the issue to match how it was presented at Wikipedia. Mind you, these were all cases in which the viewpoint began as having far less support than the "Gaza genocide" narrative currently does, and in every case the change to Wikipedia came first, with the media and academia later following suit.
The process by which this happens has been documented most extensively with respect to coverage of the Gamergate controversy: https://tdadlerwp.medium.com/the-wikipedia-post-appendix-f-copying-3fbc93f5e099 In that case it's demonstrable that the media and academia not only changed its coverage to match Wikipedia, but in many cases actually copied or closely paraphrased Wikipedia's text.
A slightly more humorous example is "glucojasinogen." https://ocham.blogspot.com/2012/03/medical-condition-known-as.html This fictitious medical condition was added to Wikipedia in 2007 and removed as a hoax in 2012, but by the time of its removal, it had already become well-established in medical journals. Consequently in the thirteen years since this hoax was removed from Wikipedia, medical journals have continued to describe it as a real condition. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Glucojasinogen&hl=en&as_ylo=2012 The most recent paper to describe it as a real condition, published in the journal Current Bioactive Compounds, is from this year.
Wikipedia shapes judicial rulings: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4327890 (This last process will be of major importance when there inevitably are court cases where the outcome hinges on whether or not Israel is committing a genocide.)
In the present, the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide_denial describes denial of the Gaza genocide as a form of genocide denial in the same vein as Holocaust denial. Realistically, we can expect post like yours to be regarded as a form of genocide denial by 2028 or so. I wish it didn't work this way, but in areas like these Wikipedia always lies upstream of academia and the media, rather than downstream from it. In twelve years of watching, I haven't observed a single case where it doesn't.
Pinker is an Epstein associate who pro deo came to his aid after the extend of his crimes was fully understood. You ramble on about peoples willfull ignorance yet you remain so blind about your own.
The calumny that Israel was committing “genocide” against Palestinians can be traced as far back as 1948, was revived with a vengeance by a hostile Soviet Union in the 1970s, was reintroduced by a UN report in 1976 (big surprise there), and has remained a trusty tool in the Palestinian propaganda workshop ever since. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza has ballooned from around 1.37 million in 1948 to 5.3–5.5 million today, representing a fourfold increase. Either this is by far the most inept, slow-rolling attempt at “genocide” imaginable, or Palestinians are so enamored of the claim of “genocide” that, having become world-class victim recidivists, they keep coming back for more. Or, what seems most likely, this charge of “genocide” is a total crock. Consider: if Israel and the IDF were intent on committing genocide against the Palestinians, why did they put their soldiers at risk by engaging in house-to-house urban warfare—and that only after providing advance notice to the civilian population to evacuate? And, if they had a genocidal intent toward Palestinians, why did they limit their military offensive to Gaza, which Hamas had, with the aid of UN, NGO, EU, and USAID funding, turned into a garrison state expressly dedicated to the eradication of Israel and its Jewish citizens? Could it be that on October 7, 2023, Hamas had “made good” on its threat to slaughter every Israeli it set its eyes on? Why no large-scale Israeli military incursion into the West Bank, if genocide of Palestinians was what Israel was after? No, the plain fact is that Israel has the capacity to commit a genocide of the Palestinians, but has shown no intent to do so, while the Palestinians have shown every intent to commit a genocide of Israelis, but lack the capacity to do so. Thank goodness for that.
Couldn't agree more with you, Maarten. My apologies for the long rant, but that false accusation of genocide is so idiotic that I need to get this off my chest in a therapeutic way, otherwise I’ll go mad.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The key words are “intent to destroy … as such.” The motive for the large scale killing of members of a particular population group must be the fact that they belong to that particular population group. Or, in plain English: there's no military logic behind the killings, the motive for the killing is pure ethnic hatred.
In Sudan, the RSF are killing 150,000 Masalit/Fur/Zaghawa because they belong to those ethnic groups. Rwanda 1994: 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu militias because they were Tutsis. Srebrenica 1995: an entire village of Bosnian Muslim men was exterminated because they were Bosnian Muslim men. The Holocaust: 6 million Jews were sent to the gas chambers because they were Jews. None of these massacres had any military logic and that's why they qualify as genocides.
Now back to Gaza: 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in a military operation aimed at eliminating Hamas. Of the 70,000 Palestinians killed, approximately 20,000 were Hamas jihadists. Moreover, they deliberately embedded themselves among the other 50,000 Palestinians in order to drive up the number of civilian casualties as much as possible. Consequently, there is a military logic behind the number of casualties, and therefore it isn't a genocide.
People are perfectly entitled to believe that there are too many civilian casualties, or that Israel's use of military force is disproportionate, etc. But objectively, the war in Gaza does not qualify as a genocide.
End of rant.
You can add Oxfam Novib to the list.
Bravo.
Thank you, Maarten. All the best for 2026!
Beste Maarten, tijdens het afscheid van Filip kon je helaas niet blijven om na de borrel wat te eten. Ik noemde je 'in het echt best aardig'. Dat is een running gag in onze vriendenkring sinds jaar en dag als het gaat om meningen die niet mainstream zijn. Dat was dus een compliment.
Ik wens je het allerbeste vrij en los van de academische wereld en ik hoop je nog eens tegen te komen. Tot die tijd volg ik je postjes. Keep up!
Bravo
Thanks for writing this but I think you have the same ideological capture about settlers. Statistically they are insanely more likely to be attacked than to attack. I think the word settler in and of itself is pejorative bc it applies to legal occupants which are the majority and doesn’t apply when the same happens on the Palestinian side with unauthorized building. I am not excusing incidents of Israeli violence I am contextualizing. If you want to push a comfort narrative the both sides on any aspect of the conflict you should do your homework before doing so bc you want the same on the broader conflict. I don’t speak about Netanyahu corruption charges bc I’m ignorant. I don’t live in Israel. As for the Supreme Court protests bizarrely published in the west like we follow this in any other western country other than our own- if you read deeply about that I don’t think you’ll find the protestors remotely sympathetic meaning the way the system is structured now is entirely un democratic. That’s what they don’t want changed. That doesn’t mean the reforms proposed don’t have their own downsides that aspect I can’t speak to I don’t follow the politics closely enough but I read two in depth articles about how the system functions and it’s pretty alien and as I said profoundly undemocratic. Israel doesn’t have the benefit of a real constitution w separation of powers so the power of that branch because bizarrely lopsided. The Supreme Court in any country is not there to stick it to the opposing party in power. It has a mandate to ensure their “basic laws” are followed and I think it has power regarding reviewing what the military does given its outsized role.
Regarding Wikipedia and the information war, this is a very insightful podcast on that subject. The platform - or at least certain topics on it - has been hijacked:
https://podcasts.apple.com/pt/podcast/ask-haviv-anything/id1794590850?l=en-GB&i=1000739258307
If you think the "Gaza genocide" will eventually be recognized as "Highbrow misinformation", you don't truly understand Wikipedia's level of influence with respect to controlling the standard narrative about controversial issues. Over the past twelve years, I've observed many cases in which Wikipedia was updated to present a view that, at the time, was held only by a minority of people on the left. In every one of these cases, within two or three years the media and academia had completely changed its coverage of the issue to match how it was presented at Wikipedia. Mind you, these were all cases in which the viewpoint began as having far less support than the "Gaza genocide" narrative currently does, and in every case the change to Wikipedia came first, with the media and academia later following suit.
The process by which this happens has been documented most extensively with respect to coverage of the Gamergate controversy: https://tdadlerwp.medium.com/the-wikipedia-post-appendix-f-copying-3fbc93f5e099 In that case it's demonstrable that the media and academia not only changed its coverage to match Wikipedia, but in many cases actually copied or closely paraphrased Wikipedia's text.
A slightly more humorous example is "glucojasinogen." https://ocham.blogspot.com/2012/03/medical-condition-known-as.html This fictitious medical condition was added to Wikipedia in 2007 and removed as a hoax in 2012, but by the time of its removal, it had already become well-established in medical journals. Consequently in the thirteen years since this hoax was removed from Wikipedia, medical journals have continued to describe it as a real condition. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Glucojasinogen&hl=en&as_ylo=2012 The most recent paper to describe it as a real condition, published in the journal Current Bioactive Compounds, is from this year.
A few empirical studies about this principle:
Science is shaped by Wikipedia: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505
Wikipedia shapes cities' economic outcomes: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12421
Wikipedia shapes judicial rulings: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4327890 (This last process will be of major importance when there inevitably are court cases where the outcome hinges on whether or not Israel is committing a genocide.)
In the present, the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide_denial describes denial of the Gaza genocide as a form of genocide denial in the same vein as Holocaust denial. Realistically, we can expect post like yours to be regarded as a form of genocide denial by 2028 or so. I wish it didn't work this way, but in areas like these Wikipedia always lies upstream of academia and the media, rather than downstream from it. In twelve years of watching, I haven't observed a single case where it doesn't.
Pinker is an Epstein associate who pro deo came to his aid after the extend of his crimes was fully understood. You ramble on about peoples willfull ignorance yet you remain so blind about your own.
The calumny that Israel was committing “genocide” against Palestinians can be traced as far back as 1948, was revived with a vengeance by a hostile Soviet Union in the 1970s, was reintroduced by a UN report in 1976 (big surprise there), and has remained a trusty tool in the Palestinian propaganda workshop ever since. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza has ballooned from around 1.37 million in 1948 to 5.3–5.5 million today, representing a fourfold increase. Either this is by far the most inept, slow-rolling attempt at “genocide” imaginable, or Palestinians are so enamored of the claim of “genocide” that, having become world-class victim recidivists, they keep coming back for more. Or, what seems most likely, this charge of “genocide” is a total crock. Consider: if Israel and the IDF were intent on committing genocide against the Palestinians, why did they put their soldiers at risk by engaging in house-to-house urban warfare—and that only after providing advance notice to the civilian population to evacuate? And, if they had a genocidal intent toward Palestinians, why did they limit their military offensive to Gaza, which Hamas had, with the aid of UN, NGO, EU, and USAID funding, turned into a garrison state expressly dedicated to the eradication of Israel and its Jewish citizens? Could it be that on October 7, 2023, Hamas had “made good” on its threat to slaughter every Israeli it set its eyes on? Why no large-scale Israeli military incursion into the West Bank, if genocide of Palestinians was what Israel was after? No, the plain fact is that Israel has the capacity to commit a genocide of the Palestinians, but has shown no intent to do so, while the Palestinians have shown every intent to commit a genocide of Israelis, but lack the capacity to do so. Thank goodness for that.