Welcome to ‘You Asked For It’ the weekly mailbag column for Banter Members!
A reader writes in response to my piece on whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza:
Legal precision matters, but precision cannot become incense over a mass grave. We can debate intent, ICJ standards, Hamas’s crimes, human shields, and UN reports until the seminar chairs collapse. Fine. But children shot, starved, buried, displaced, and terrorized are not waiting for our vocabulary to become perfect before their suffering counts. The word genocide may be litigated. The moral catastrophe is already screaming.
It’s hard to disagree with the reader’s point here. But there are some things worth considering when it comes to litigating the word genocide — particularly when used to describe the actions of a country born in the wake of the largest documented genocide in history.
One of the reasons so many pro-Israel advocates refuse to accept that Israel has, or even may have committed genocide is because of the S…