Hey would you be able to update your post on Israel committing genocide with any new information, if you have any? Also, how do you decide ‘intent’ for genocide, especially because people say contradictory things and act contradictory to stated intent? What would it be called if there was an extermination of people but there was no way to prove intent?
Sorry if you’ve answered this all before, I’ve been thinking a lot on genocide accusations (mostly because people are calling me a genocide enabler for saying that I don’t know if it’s genocide because I have seen so many scholars arguing and disagreeing) and the bit about ‘intent’ is the portion I am really stuck on.
Love your posts and hope you are well, I especially enjoy how well researched they are!
Hey would you be able to update your post on Israel committing genocide with any new information, if you have any?
Absolutely. While we're at it, I'll tell you what's really going on when they call you an enabler.
Nothing has changed the legal picture since I wrote this post in June 2025.
The ignorant and the dishonest will surely respond to this by citing the September 2025 report from the UNHRC Independent International Commission of Inquiry, announcing its opinion that Israel is committing genocide.
There are at least two reasons this is irrelevant.
First, the Commission of Inquiry is a 3-person body spun up by a Human Rights Council resolution.
It is not a court. It hears no defense, binds no one, and has no authority whatsoever to make a legal determination of genocide.
The (a priori) conclusion of the COI carries the exact level of legal power as a 67% majority on a three-hour Zoom call at the Park Slope Food Coop.
The board at the Park Slope Coop can make it slightly less convenient for the people of Park Slope to get their Bamba fix, but that isn't a judicial finding - it's just the sort of narrow-minded, groupthink horseshit that happens in every monoculture.
Second, the report was produced by the COI's three members - Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti.
The COI came at this with an agenda.
Kothari, in a 2022 interview, said social media was "controlled largely by the Jewish lobby" and openly asked why Israel "is even a member of the UN," which US diplomats called antisemitic.
Sidoti, speaking to the Human Rights Council, said accusations of antisemitism get "thrown around like rice at a wedding" and brushed off the IHRA definition.
Pillay, who chaired the @#&*ing thing, refused to condemn either, called the antisemitism concerns a "diversion" and "lies," and had publicly pushed "sanction apartheid Israel" campaigns well before she was ever appointed.
The commission they ran is the Council's first ever open-ended inquiry. It has no end date, but it does have a mandate broad enough to pre-load its own conclusions while sitting inside a body where Israel is the only country on earth with a permanent standing agenda item against it.
The US, the EU, and more than two dozen other countries have condemned that structural lopsidedness for years.
Again, the body that will rule on this is the International Court of Justice, in South Africa v. Israel.
An ICJ accusation requires unassailable judicial proof.
The standard the ICJ set is that if intent is to be inferred from a pattern of conduct, genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available from the totality of the evidence. Not a plausible reading. Not even the most likely one, but the only one. If the conduct can be reasonably explained by anything else, the standard is not met.
Has the ICJ has ruled on the merits of that case?
Israel filed its response in March 2026 and South Africa's reply isn't due until late 2027 - so we can't realistically expect a merits judgment before 2028.
So without he ICJ, what's the running running total number of tribunals that have found Israel guilty of genocide?
Not a single one is even weighing the merits right now.
...how do you decide ‘intent’ for genocide, especially because people say contradictory things and act contradictory to stated intent?
Genocidal intent has a technical name, dolus specialis: the specific intent to destroy a protected group "as such" (the definition lives in Article II of the Genocide Convention)
When that intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct, the standard the ICJ set is that genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from the totality of the evidence. Not a plausible reading. Not even the most likely one - the only one. If the conduct can be reasonably explained by a different objective, the standard is not met.
If a statement can be read as "destroy Hamas" instead of "destroy Palestinians," it cannot prove genocidal intent, because a competing reasonable inference exists, and the existence of that competing inference is fatal to the charge.
The bar was set this way on purpose, after the Holocaust, by people who understood that the crime of crimes had to be genuinely hard to prove or the word would rot into a slur you throw at any war you dislike...like people are doing right now when they casually spit this word at Israel, using it as an emotional condemnation instead of a legal term.
The court can't decide dolus specialis from statements. It'll ask whether the conduct admits any explanation other than intent to destroy the group as such. In a war against an enemy that fights from inside the civilian population, that's nearly impossible.
There is no Israeli state policy of destroying the Palestinian people. Anyone who disagrees should please show us the evidence to support their allegation. We've been waiting for years to see it.
What would it be called if there was an extermination of people but there was no way to prove intent?
If you are ever looking for the terms to discuss terrible wartime events that don't clear the genocide bar, that vocabulary already exists. It can be genocide, a war crime, or tragic, lawful, awful wartime death.
Telling these three apart requires depending entirely on the facts - which is why they try to shut you up instead of trying to convince you with evidence.
You used the word "extermination."
In both the Rome Statute and in ordinary English, this word implies a campaign aimed at wiping a people out.
It is ridiculous to suggest that has happened in Gaza.
What's happened in Gaza is a war.
Civilians die in wars, sometimes in appalling numbers, and that by itself is not a crime. Measured against modern urban warfare (Fallujah, Mosul, Dresden, the comparisons I ran in the original post), the reported casualty figures from a fight against an enemy that operates out of hospitals and tunnels do not look like the signature of an extermination. They look like the signature of a hard war against an enemy that embeds itself within these places for the explicit purpose of causing innocent deaths.
So, is what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide?
Not by the definition, which requires a specific intent that no policy reflects and that no pattern of conduct compels as the only reasonable reading.
Not by any ruling, because the one court that can rule hasn't done so. The accusation is unproven, and the burden sits with the people making the accusation.
The burden is on the accuser always.
The party alleging genocide has to prove genocide to the only-reasonable-inference standard. Until they do, the correct default is the one you're taking: it has not been established.
You're not sitting on the fence, you're sticking with the presumption that protects everyone, including every group that has ever actually faced genocide and needed the word to still mean something when they reached for it.
Like I wrote the first time: once these words get emptied of meaning, they lose the power to stop the very thing they were built to name. The people demanding you call this genocide without proof are not guarding that power. They're pissing it away and handing the bill to the future.
Let's talk about the people calling you a "genocide enabler" for saying "I don't know."
When someone calls you an "enabler" for saying you don't know whether it clears the bar of the definition, they have it backwards.
You're not the one departing from the standard. They are.
They are treating an unproven, unadjudicated, burden-not-met accusation as settled fact, and then branding anyone who notices this dishonesty a collaborator. That's moral bludgeoning.
Once you learn to see this move, Anon, you can't unsee it.
Calling you an "enabler" is emotional blackmail meant to turn your uncertainty into your guilt.
Their trick is to convert an epistemic position (I have not been shown proof) into a moral verdict (you are complicit in mass death), because almost nobody can stand being told they are complicit in mass death.
They want you to either affirm or go quiet not because the evidence moved you but because the social cost of honesty got set too high.
A decent person emotionally recoils from enabling genocide, and this tactic feeds on that decency, using your good faith and desire to belong as the prybar to extract a level of compliance your reasoning faculties would never offer.
The question should be: "Is this true?"
Instead, they're asking: "Are you a good person, Anon?"
...and if you hesitate, they decide the answer is "no."
They can't win the "is it true" fight, so they start a second fight about your decency that you cannot afford to lose.
By making "I'm not sure" expensive to say out loud...they get people to stop saying it.
The tactic itself tells you a lot about their position.
An argument that can actually prove genocide has no need to criminalize doubt about genocide.
A person calling you an enabler is not trying to win you over, because winning you over was never the point.
They are instead drawing a boundary and sorting who's inside the tribe from who isn't - and they do it loudly because performing the policing of the line in public is how they advertise their own purity.
They don't ask "is it true," because they don't have the epistemological faculties to grapple with that question. It also doesn't matter to them because the genocide claim isn't functioning as a factual proposition - they're using it like a shibboleth.
When you ask "is it true," it isn't heresy because they checked and found you wrong, but because that's not why they asked you for the password.
You can hold both of these ideas at once with no contradiction:
The suffering in Gaza is real
The legal charge of genocide has not been met.
As I said last time, "Not Genocide" does not mean "No Wrongdoing."
Refusing to collapse those two isn't genocide denial, Anon - it's reasoning with intellectual honesty.
Keep asking questions, keep asking for evidence, and don't let people who can't be bothered to gather facts impugn and make you doubt your character.
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