Israel oblivion

Mordor?

Hello hightor, I hope you’re not seriously denying that Copilot was "deliberately" (not that the software deliberated, but someone did) not naming Israel. (I already knew what "Levant" means, thank you.) The point is that Bing deliberately used a now-obscure geographical term to avoiding naming the Jewish state, so as not to offend Muslims. If there had been some general preference for broad geographical terms, rather than national names, Bing could have been satisfied with referring to the Arabian Peninsula, instead of specifying Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar.

Then, according to your interpretation, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Jordan have also been consigned to "oblivion" as well as the West Bank and Gaza.

Palestine wasn't mentioned.

Israel may be many things, but it is not a victim, it's a perpetrator of genocide.

This isn't the only place where I've seen Israel not mentioned when sometimes the smallest things mention countries in the Middle East. No, I don't have an example at my fingertips. But I know I've seen it. And yes, other countries can sometimes be omitted as well.

“Israel … is not a victim”
Many Israelis have been killed by their neighbors. if Israel as a whole is not a victim, that is because they have been able to defend themselves. If it were up to the surrounding Muslims, Israel would be annihilated and all its citizens killed.
“Israel…a perpetrator of genocide”
1. certainly the genocide you imagine has not occurred since there are many Palestinians
2. we can see that the genocide you imagine has not even been attempted, since if Israel had been trying to commit genocide against the Palestinians, all the Palestinians would be dead by now (Israel has a formidable military at its disposal)
3. it is worth noting that the charge of genocide here is only conceivable because a section of what used to be called the Arab nation was conceptually marked off as “the Palestinian nation” in 1967 – obviously as a propaganda move to make it look as if Israel was targeting a defenseless minority -- instead of the truth: Since its creation in 1948 the larger Arabs nations surrounding Israel have been repeatedly trying to destroy it.

Tell that to the ICC.

Israel is a genocidal apartheid state that has persecuted the indigenous Palestian people from the beginning.

FREE PALESTINE.

By that logic the Holocaust wasn't genocide "since there are many Jewish people."

I'm actually am in some agreement with you on this. I believe there are both semantic and political components to the issue. How do we define "genocide" and why do we use the term? Let's take this definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica:



The prime example of this is the Nazi extermination of European Jews, resulting in the first use of the term. Other examples can be pointed to, both before and after, which can easily be found in an online search. I'll state right now that I have supported the rights of the Palestinian people since the '67 war. I also support the concept of the Jewish homeland; I think the establishment of Israel was, tragically, botched and the Mideast and the rest of the world have been paying the price ever since.

The Hamas attack which sparked the Gaza war reflected the genocidal aspirations of that political group, but as they did not have the power to commit an actual genocide they used the tactic of "terrorism". As in the terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001, I believe Israel had the right, even the duty, to respond. And as in 2001 – and the later Iraq War – the US and Israel responded with illegal tactics – mass indiscriminate killing and collective punishment. In its attempt to destroy terrorists, the US killed hundreds of thousand of Muslims. Israel's utter destruction of Gaza led directly to the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans. In both cases, the majority of victims were not "terrorists"; they were innocent victims who were "in the way". In my opinion, both cases exemplify disproportionate responses, prompted by understandable outrage, intensified by the desire for vengeance, justified by murky appeals to international law and nationalist sentiment.

As the horrors of the US "War on Terror" and the Israeli-Hamas war unfolded before our eyes, international opposition grew. In a world which has grown used to mass killing and the wholesale destruction of civil infrastructure with increasingly powerful weapons of war, appeals to "stop the bloodshed" simply didn't measure up to the scale of the conflict. A stronger argument was needed, something that would convey more horror and express a greater level of outrage. Opponents of Israel were quick to label the conflict "genocide" because, 1. "mass killing" is now a rather commonplace occurrence, and 2. it is especially pointed when used against the Jews for historical reasons. Thus you had people referring to a Gazan "holocaust" precisely because it is especially hurtful when applied to the people who suffered Nazi persecution.

But is the Gazan war an example of "genocide"? I say no because it is indiscriminate, not systematic. The Nazis hunted down Jews (who were already a persecuted minority). They removed people from their homes. They investigated ancestry. They rounded up populations in other countries, deported them, and housed them in camps. In Gaza, the Israelis simply wiped out entire blocks of apartments, believing that there were likely some Hamas members located somewhere in the premises. Access to food and water were cut off for all residents; anti-Hamas Palestinians, Arab Christians, and international medical teams were all affected. Israeli agents did not go to Jordan and kidnap Palestinian residents. Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank were harassed and detained – some murdered by vigilante settlers – but not gathered up, imprisoned, and executed on a mass scale. Muslims in the US – and undocumented immigrants – face similar harassment and discrimination, but I wouldn't term it "genocide". Of course, anyone is free to concoct a definition for the term to fit particular circumstances. Which is why I prefer to condemn all forms of mass killing as equally atrocious. And why I don't think leaving out the name of a country in a list amounts to "obliteration".

You make several remarks worthy of response. Here I would like to address just one:
“I also support the concept of the Jewish homeland; I think the establishment of Israel was, tragically, botched and the Mideast and the rest of the world have been paying the price ever since.”
How do you think the thing should have been handled? For me, the key question is the tactical but important one of whether the Jews were a majority in Palestine at the start in 1948. (I find it hard to gather a consistent account of this.) If not, the initial situation looks like an oligarchy.

That's because it's very easy to distinguish between Israelis and Palestinians, unlike Nazi Germany where Jewish people were indistinguishable from the general population.

Genocide is genocide regardless of the methods used to carry out the genocide.

Have you noticed the OP uses the same arguments to dismiss the extermination of the Palestinians that Holocaust deniers/mitigators use to deny the extent of the Holocaust?

What I truly don't understand is that nobody has made a serious effort to make Irael stop. By any means necessary.

I'm the first to admit that I haven't spent years researching this topic. A few things come to mind:

• 1. Historically, Jews lived in harmony with Muslim populations in many countries. Muslims respected Jews as "people of the book" and there were thriving Jewish communities in Arab countries, Persia, and India.

• 2. I've read accounts of early Zionist settlers who bought land from the Palestinians and lived in peace with the Palestinian farmers and the Bedouins. And I know that there are many Jews who consider themselves Zionists and support a two state solution or some other way of resolving the conflict.

• 3. I think it was the influx of large numbers of refugees which fueled the ever-growing resentment of native Palestinians; that the swelling population of newcomers exacerbated rising tension.

(Historians and better-informed people may dispute parts of or all of these claims; I am not a scholar.)

If the Allies hadn't been in such a hurry to render assistance to the beleaguered survivors of the Holocaust (and assuage their guilt in the process) it's possible that accommodations might have been reached before the establishment of the state of Israel. Funds might have been raised to pay resident Palestinians for their land and a contiguous Palestinian territory could have been established, either as an independent state or as part of a Palestinian-Israeli federation. But I'm sure there would be all sorts of objections to this and I'd be summarily informed that it was impossible. Even if that's the case, the solution that was imposed wasn't any good either.

Is that really the case? Minus any cultural trappings, I've always thought the native Jewish population could pass for Palestinians and vice versa. The Semitic peoples from that area share a lot of DNA.

Same with indiscriminate mass murder. And it's equally bad.

As they live in different areas, it's very easy to distinguish.

The native, Sephardic and Mizrahi, Jewish people are very different from the emigre Ashkenazi Jews, whose families lived in Germany, France, and Eastern Europe.

When the Nazis issued posters showing grotesque stereotypes of Jewish people, imploring people to inform to their neighbours they had very little success because nobody looked like that.

Jewish people look like everyone else, European Jews look European, African Jews look African etc.

And the majority of Israelis are of European descent.