I would say that when you are being treated poorly in a way where laws exist protecting your right to demand better and realistically should be able to expect better, then using those laws is using them as intended. Sure it is to your advantage, however, the way you say it implies it is an unfair advantage, rather than simply trying to remove an unfairly applied disadvantage/detriment.
Are you suggesting they should not try to use laws to protect themselves from genocide/displacement?
This is not about genocide/displacement, this is about two attacks that have been assessed as targeting civilians or some such.
Yes, I'd say a side that starts a conflict with an egregious assault on civilians should be limited in its right to use international law to stop a similarly or less illegal counterattack. In other words, if you attack someone with a knife you shouldn't be able to press charges for punches flying back.
Or, at the very lease, not until the organizers and perpetrators of the initial atrocity are surrendered to that same court they are appealing to.
You really think this protest exists in a vacuum, totally detached and isolated from the context of the broader Israeli led genocide against Palestinians? Ok.
Using it to describe Israels effort to provide infrastructure, jobs, healthcare etc in the preceding decades is just insultingly wrong.
No contradiction there.
It's perfectly possible for the State of Israel to be nakedly and unapologetically engaging in a long-term campaign of ethnic cleansing (in the West Bank) and somewhat more convertly/discreetly so (in Gaza), while also, occasionally providing some measure of benefits to the affected population in certain narrow contexts.
In fact, this is exactly how colonial occupations work.
Or as Captain Willard put it (starting around 5:15):
"It was a way we had over here of living with ourselves. We'd cut them in half with a machine gun, and then give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie."
> Israel has had the means of destroying all of Gaza and bulldozing the debris into the sea for decades.
This is a really weak argument. Just because you have the means of a greater damage, that doesn’t absolve you of the damage you did cause. If I punch you in the face, I won’t be found not-guilty just because there was a fire extinguisher near by and in theory I could have caused a much greater harm.
This argument is doubly bad because Israel has destroyed all of Gaza. Almost everybody who lives there has been displaced. Most of everyone’s house is damaged or destroyed, almost everybody know somebody that has died, or is seriously wounded. The entire health care system has collapsed, the entire public order has collapsed, and people are constantly hungry. This is a textbook example of the destruction of a place.
> Even in this campaign they've been objectively trying to reduce civilian casualties despite it's detrimental effect on their military objective.
They have not. There are evidence of a pattern of conduct of civilians being targeted and killed on a regular basis by the IDF. This includes x-rays of photos of children’s skulls that have been shot in the head by an Israeli sniper, the share number of civilians killed and the statistical unlikelyhood that all these civilians were killed merely by accident, the previously mentioned destruction of the healthcare system and public order, etc. All of this combined is more than enough evidence that Israel is intending to bring about the destruction of Gaza in order to make civilian life impossible.
Using the word Genocide in the context is very appropriate and is being done by most experts on the matter, human rights organizations, international organizations, governments, etc.
> Even in this campaign they've been objectively trying to reduce civilian casualties despite it's detrimental effect on their military objective.
Puh-lease..! The ones wanting the genocide (yeah I say this deliberately) to end don't see it that way. At best you're delusional if you think they Israeli army benevolently cares, at worst you know this is a lie and you cynically don't care.
Like you cynically just sum up overall casualty numbers as "just 1 year's worth of population growth". The official number is 40000. AFAIK that's the number of directly killed by American/European bombs dropped by the IDF, bullets or by a building collapsing on them because a bomb dropped nearby. The unofficial number (killed by lack of food, housing, sanitation) is a lot higher, e.g. 186000 up to July (1). That's 186000 seeds of future terrorists avowing revenge (hey if you, as someone of the pro-genocide camp, are "lucky", maybe entire communities get wiped out that no one is left to fester anger about their community members' unjust death. And somewhere in there is probably the genocide-doers' unsaid justification about killing babies (14 pages of the list of names and ages of victims of this war have the number "0" for their age, but hey "just 1 year's worth of population growth!") - the freshly born Palestinians "deserve" to be killed, because otherwise they are going to grow up hating the nation that killed 186000 members of their community anyway and bombed their country into the middle ages, why not kill them now?).
One can quibble about the technical definition of genocide, or the degree of intent on the part of the perpetrators.
But I don't see how one can say that 40,000+ largely civilian deaths (including around 15k women, minors and elderly) -- likely to eventually grow to easily 3x that amount (even if the war were to stop today) due to the long-term health impacts of the overall situation, according to people who study these things -- isn't "making a dent" in the population.
Unless one implicitly considers that population to be, well, kind of not really human to begin with.
Just imagine someone saying: "The Oct 7th attack was kind of messy I guess, but really, you can't say it was genocidal -- after all, it didn't even make a dent in Jewish population."
As a commander in chief of the IDF, what would have you done differently?
Publically resign, denouncing my government's decades of bungling, hardheadedness and general heartlessness in the face of the situation that it has, in the scheme of things, largely created for itself. Ideally, also transferring as many incriminating documents, images/videos and datasets as possible to the ICC/ICJ and/or respected journalists as would be appropriate and helpful to the broader cause of building a just and lasting peace in the region.
Are you suggesting they should not try to use laws to protect themselves from genocide/displacement?