Last week a UN human rights commission found that Israel is carrying out a genocide. I think you're right that the winds have changed and now companies will shift their positions.
The word genocide has a legal definition, it’s not up for discussion or debate. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide according to genocide scholars.
If you're referring to the "International Association of Genocide Scholars" (IAGS), all it takes to join that organization is $30 and self identifying as a genocide scholar. Furthermore the resolution was passed with a total of 129 voting members, and about 107 voting in favor, out of over 500 total members.
Here's a letter from 514 verified scholars and legal experts calling on IAGS to retract their resolution, along with their rebuttal of the substance of the resolution:
> If you're referring to the "International Association of Genocide Scholars" (IAGS), all it takes to join that organization is $30 and self identifying as a genocide scholar.
They have certainly had some interesting members[0].
Legal definitions are often up for discussion and debate. That’s a large part of what lawyers do, in fact.
Anyway I have no comment on the specific claim being made here, I just really dislike it when discussion is stifled by saying “I’m right and no one can ever disagree”.
Rape? Like age of consent being different across regions and time? No nuance? Like how half the planet laughs when a boy gets molested by his attractive teacher and the other half calls it rape?
Exactly. I think people socialized into certain conversational norms in politicized online spaces, ridiculously overestimate plausibility of the rhetorical gambit of going "gee, who's to say?" when attempted out in the wild.
I think one strength of the liberal academic tradition is that whether it's philosophy, whether it's law, you get introduced to the "whose to say" archetype early on and get inoculated against it. It's not just that the concepts are well enough established that they're resilient against such skepticism, but even in cases of uncertainty, routine amounts of conceptual uncertainty are not a deal-breaker to investigating and understanding urgent moral issues.
A real argument in the negative would be along the lines of "here's how food truck inspection policies are tied to well-established norms that better explain the outcome of famine than intent to destroy". A not real argument is spontaneous, mid-debate discovery of the transience of linguistic meaning, discovered just in time to skirt the question of genocide.
The trouble with this form of skepticism is it can only ever be hypothesized, never actually consistently embodied by real people. Long before navigating to hacker News, you would look at your computer and be paralyzed by fundamental puzzles like "what is electricity", "what is information", "is there really an external world" and so on. It wouldn't have been discovered mid conversation about genocide.
People absolutely do disagree and debate what is and is not rape, though. Legal definitions exist, but have loads of subjectivity. E.g. some argue that threatening to break up with a partner over lack of sex is coercion and thus rape.
The definition of genocide is absolutely up for debate. And even legal definition (presumably you mean UN definition) is highly subjective, too. Less than 1% of Palestinians have been killed since Oct 7. Germany saw 10% of its population killed in WW2. France lost 4% in WW1. Why the former is a genocide but not the latter two is a pretty big hole in the logic behind the allegations of genocide.
What court? Presumably you're taking about the ICJ? It only stated that allegations of genocide is "plausible". The grandparent comment is about a human rights commission, not a court.
Also, the ICJ only has jurisdiction when states consent to its authority. And the UN security council can veto any decision. It's essentially a show court.
And again, people endlessly debate what is and isn't rape and murder. Judges and juries make the decision at the end of the day, and people still debate whether their decision was correct. If anything, drawing parallels to murder and rape only serve to highlight how subjective it is.
I think you actually, without intending to, raise the reason why this is an exceptionally powerful point. Given the diversity of academic opinion on so many fundamental subjects, consensus on any topic is extraordinary.
I actually don't agree with you that "legal definitions" are as hotly debated or that the existence of debate in general negates consensus on specific topics. And I do think one important point with genocide scholarship is regarding muddying the waters with tom-ay-to/to-mah-to approach to definitions. Treating definitions as inherently transient is an important instrument in normalizing cultural acceptance of genocides when they're unfolding in real time, which is why that tactic is targeted by so much scholarly criticism.
Also - many many institutions have declared that what’s happening is a genocide, and unfortunately that hasn’t changed anything. (Perhaps naive of me to believe that it would change anything)
But here we have UN and other twisting it to fit a situation that clearly weren't meant to be covered by it.
Because if the war in Gaza can be called a genocide so can almost every single other major war!
Also it is absolutely ridiculous to call a war that is started by one side, and one that only that side can end, a genocide against the same side that started it!
This is indeed a big obstacle to credibly calling the Israel-Palestine conflict a genocide. Germany lost ~10% of it's population in WW2. France lost 4% in WW1. Less than 1% of the Palestinian has been killed since Oct 7.
Heck, the US Revolutionary war saw the British perpetrated genocide against the Colonists if the military actions following Oct 7 count as a genocide.
In this case you're believing the emperor. Remember the "terrorist check in list" that was just a calendar? Israeli propagandandists don't even have the respect to make up plausible lies anymore.
I think the debate (/question) is whether it is Israel’s goal to eliminate the entirety of the Palestinian people. That does not seem to be the case, which is where the “not genocide” argument comes from.
Now I understand that the UN has specific criteria, etc. But the most famous genocide was the systematic execution of millions in gas chambers. This is not akin to that, is what people are arguing.
Anyone who watches Israeli news/media in Hebrew knows that Palestinians are not considered human in the Israeli society. Israel dehumanizes and genocides the Palestinians with the intention of wiping them off the face of the earth.
It is perhaps important, also, for genocide scholarship to survey the ways proponents rotate through various forms of apologetics. Not that I would wish it to be the case but the last few years are rich in case studies for how people debate and communicate about genocide, and it's attempts to muddy definitional waters that make it so important to have strong scholarship and scholarly consensus.
A long way of agreeing with your point, I suppose.
It definitely depends on the proximity to the genocide itself. Plenty of Americans easily call what happened with the Uyghurs in China a genocide. And if they know about, the genocide in Sudan a genocide as well. But when it comes to Israel it's a real reluctance. Will definitely be interesting to see how this time is viewed through history. It's close enough to western culture that it will likely stick around and just be something that happened in a poor country that gets forgotten.
