I find it very difficult to retain my respect for people who airily refer to "the genocide" in Gaza, as if it's been proven (or is simply obvious) that a genocide has been taking place there. At the very least, it's far from obvious. If anything, it's obvious that what we've been seeing is a brutal urban war carried out on terms dictated by Hamas, in which Hamas has adopted a strategy of maximizing the number of deaths and injuries of its own civilian population for propaganda purposes. This is a well-known tactic that has often been successful in the past in gaining international support and succeeding politically against militarily stronger enemies. I think it's fine to criticize Israel for adopting a strategy of entering into a full-scale war when it might have had other options, although it's also fine to question whether any of those other options, whatever they were, were genuinely viable. It's also fine to make allegations that Israel has committed war crimes during the process of this war - it has undoubtedly committed breaches of international humanitarian war, and some of those breaches might well rise to the level of war crimes. This happens on both sides in almost any war, so it wouldn't be surprising (but of course, that doesn't make it excusable). But not only is not simply obvious that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza; it's obvious that it wasn't - at least if we stick with the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention as interpreted by international criminal courts and tribunals to date. Israel has clearly had strategic and military aims - defeating and destroying Hamas, getting the hostages back, etc. - rather than a specific intent of exterminating an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group as such. It was always possible for its enemies to get Israel to stop simply by laying down their arms and surrendering. It's also increasingly obvious that a lot of people, perhaps including some jurists in the international courts, want to expand the concept of genocide so as to include Israel's actions in Gaza. Perhaps they'll succeed, but you have to wonder why they have that ambition. If war crimes are going on, and a lot of people are dying, why not just say that rather than insisting on expanding the meaning of the word "genocide", which refers to something beyond even this and has a reasonably precise meaning? Arguments about whether the current concept of genocide should be expanded can become pretty esoteric. We'll doubtless see those arguments play out in the courts over the following years. But at least some people who are sophisticated enough to realize that this is what is going on are being dishonest. They seem to want to expand the concept of genocide precisely for the purpose of demonizing Israel and making it look like Nazi Germany - and thus trying to do their bit to bring about Israel's defeat and destruction. For these people, it's not good enough to criticize (and debate) Israel's decision to embark on a full-scale war that would inevitably kill a lot of civilians, partly because of the very nature of urban warfare and partly because of the way Hamas embeds itself in population centers and within, around, and underneath civilian infrastructure. It's also not good enough, from their perspective, to accuse Israel of war crimes (which is itself a very serious and emotionally powerful accusation). They want to be able to portray Israel, falsely, as a force of evil comparable to worst the regimes in history, and to tar it - falsely - with a label that suggests the most extreme depths of horror and depravity. Obviously, a lot of people don't understand any of this at all and are just parroting what they hear (in which case, they have freedom of speech to say these things, but they're not worth listening to on this topic). But there are others who should know better, in that they do know something about international criminal law, and who are deliberately engaging in what they know is a program of hate propaganda against the state of Israel, with an inevitable risk that the hatred they're whipping up will go beyond Israel and its people and extend to the Jewish people.