My view is that genocide is not just the eradication of a culture — for instance, one of the widely accepted definitions of genocide includes the forced removal of people from an area, which isn’t necessarily the eradication of a culture. You raise an interesting question though, about why genocide is bad. Honestly, I can’t answer that question because much of my view here is based in the deep sense of moral wrongness I feel when I think about the blanket eradication of a people.

I suspect that the “blanket” part of things is what I most object to. There’s always going to be people who fall through the gaps, the question is who we’d rather fall through the gaps: would we rather have war criminals escape justice, or murder people who don’t deserve it. We get to decide which side of caution to err on, but the problem is that it’s not a 1:1 ratio.

To use an example from a completely different domain, in my country, there is a lot of harmful rhetoric around people who receive social security benefits, especially disability benefits. Even though benefit fraud is extremely rare, this rhetoric (and the policies that result from it) lead to extreme levels of bureaucracy to ensure that a handful of “benefit scroungers” who are not entitled don’t receive money, at the cost of huge numbers of vulnerable people who are entitled falling through the gaps. People have died because of this, and the number of people harmed is far higher than the reduction in benefit fraud (given that levels of that were already so low).

I get that when we’re talking about such egregiously awful acts that are happening today, it’s a completely different situation, but the blanket killing of people in the way you describe feels to me like an overly retributive approach that will not lead to lasting peace.

I understand what you are saying by highlighting past times where justice was not done, and I see how those past failures have continued to cause strife right through to the present day. I don’t know what would have been a more appropriate approach, but I agree that more needed to be done.

That being said, I can’t ever feel okay with the extreme approach you describe. I realise that this may well be a naive view, because I know that a big part of why I feel this way is because I need to believe that people can be redeemed. I’m not saying that everyone can be redeemed — “true justice” may well involve the execution of people who are responsible for these atrocities. However, for the large number of Zionists who merely hold reprehensible views because it has been taught to them from a young age, I need to believe that people like this can change — I cannot bear thinking about what that would mean if such change weren’t possible. Whether we call it genocide or not, I don’t want to live in a world where mass murder is okay.

To cap off this comment, I want to say that I really appreciate your comment. We disagree profoundly, and I suspect that neither of us will have changed our mind by the end of this. However, part of why I wrote this comment at all is because I felt like your comment was made in good faith and was earnestly engaging with my points. Even if we don’t see eye to eye on this topic, I appreciate that we’ve been able to have this discussion