The war in Europe took 43 million lives. Dresden was firebombed in Feb of ‘45, only months before the end of the War.

In the Oct 7th attacks, Hamas murdered 700 Israelis and took 250 hostages. For that, Gaza looks like Dresden.

Dresden established modern international wartime law. The Hague determined that, in fact, war crimes can not be claimed based upon proportionality.

I'll add what's probably rhetorical at this point: there are now putatively more residents of Gaza than on October 8, 2023. There also continue to be roughly two million Arabs living in Israel. That doesn't sound like genocide to me, but it's not my call. It's the call of the ICJ (in this case), and their determination is the subject of this OP.

My grandfather is from Poland. 90% of the Jews in Poland were killed. Over 2.5 million people. That is what a genocide looks like. Something can be really bad without it being genocide. It could be an atrocity, barbaric, or heinous. Genocide is just a very charged word, particularly I would think for Jews. It gets in the way of having a useful discussion. The same goes for calling Jews or Israelis Nazis. That is just offensive.

Whatever we call it. There are a lot of dead people in Gaza. A lot of them are children. Nobody can be happy about that. Nobody can be happy about the latest offensive when we were told weeks ago that they were close to a ceasefire agreement.

I believe that you have the best of intentions, but your second paragraph is chock full of loaded language. Recognizing that there are always exceptions to outright declarations, I'll nonetheless use a very broad brush and state that no one is denying that there are a lot of dead people in Gaza and that a lot of them are children. With the same brush, I'll aver that no one is "happy about that". Generally, the people who use that language in defense of something are people who are accusing other people of harboring those heinous perspectives. In my experience, they are also those who freely claim that Israel is committing genocide.

That's why I brought up this clip. Israel is not committing genocide. Those who make that claim are doing so in bad faith or out of ignorance and unless that's stopped (especially among the stenographic media members, like the interviewer in this example) the fervor will intensify, endangering more people, and greater atrocities will be claimed, with the desire for greater retribution.

I don't think there's another word that's necessary. I'm just hoping that as the manufactured vitriol subsides, this assertion is the first to go away - as it's the most incendiary claim underlying all of the other horrid rhetoric.

I get that the words I chose are still loaded, just less loaded. Do you think I'm accusing you of being "happy about" the death of children? That was definitely not my intent. I think we agree on the main point that calling this a genocide is not appropriate.

As much as calling Israelis Nazis, colonists, white racists, etc. The offensiveness and dehumanisation is the point.

If a person dies, the unnecessary death should be the issue, not the word to describe it…..killed, wasted, off’d, iced, taken out, rubbed out, etc.

We should spend more effort trying to stop it than describe it.

Here, in this OP, the word is the literal subject. And if it's the wrong word, as it is, it shouldn't be used.

Okay?

I try to find the humor in everything, so I hope you take no offense, but this site offers a language and linguistics forum.

Peace!

Bibi uses it all the time , you American Jewish Democrats havent noticed ??

A little history :

In Israel, calls for genocide have migrated from the margins to the mainstream

Published: April 2, 2025

Thirty years ago in Israel, advocating for genocide could land you in prison.

In April 1994, an Israeli rabbi named Ido Alba published an article that read, in part, “In war, as long as the war has not been decided, it is a commandment to kill every non-Jew from the nation one is fighting against, even women and children. Even when they do not directly endanger the one killing them, there is concern that they may assist the enemy in the continuation of the war.”

An Israeli court convicted Alba for incitement to racism and encouraging violence and sentenced him to four years in prison.

Now the legal system is ignoring similar rhetoric.

In December 2023, following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which resulted in the killing of approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers and migrant workers, Rabbi Moshe Ratt, who’s seen as a public intellectual among Israeli West Bank settlers, composed a long post on Facebook.

In it, he noted that in the past, some people may have struggled with the morality of destroying an entire people, including women and children. Now they don’t. Obliquely referring to the Palestinians, he added, “Some nations have descended into such depths of evil and corruption that the only solution is to eradicate them completely, leaving no trace.”

More recently, on Feb. 24, 2025, Nissim Vaturi, one of the deputy speakers in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, called for killing all Palestinian adults in Gaza.

Ratt’s and Vaturi’s words went unpunished. In fact, genocidal rhetoric like theirs – in which the entire destruction of a people is proposed – has become more common in Israel.

Continued @ https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-have-migrated-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream-250010

Listen to what this government is saying they are not shy about it , the only good Arab is a dead Arab .....bottom line .

If the implication is that a reference to Amalek is a call for genocide, that absolutely it should not be used. You are an Israeli. You are in a better position to judge how Israelis interpret this.

Deuteronomy 25:19
When the LORD your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!

Exodus 17:14
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.”

Its how some Israelis interpret it .

1 Samuel 15:3
Saul, Israel’s first king, is told by YHWH via the prophet Samuel, “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe [kill and dedicate to YHWH—MZB] all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”

These passages describe a complete ethnic cleansing (“kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings”) in retaliation for Amalek’s unprovoked attack on Israel when they “were famished and weary” (Deut 25:18). Such genocide, including even the youngest of children, is morally abhorrent; when we teach such texts, we must say so. This is a dangerous biblical text since it is being used, even now, to justify the wholesale murder of any person perceived to be an Amalekite.

Source : https://jewishstudies.duke.edu/news/destroying-amalek

I'm a secular Jew/atheist

I think I'd heard that verse before in discussions, but wasn't finding it with Google yesterday. Thanks.

Forced displacement of people, mass starvation, complete destruction of cities, and the intent to remove and wipe out a whole people is there too.

The following quote from the article is what Joan Donoghue, the person in the video and now retired from the ICJ, said.