I keep seeing the war in Gaza as being classified a genocide.
genocide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Now, when I look at the Iraq war, the goal was to destroy Ba’athist Iraq. By the same definition, wouldn’t that war have been a genocide as well? As an outsider, I observed awful humanitarian suffering during the Iraq war and don’t necessarily see the difference with the new situation in Gaza or see it as uniquely evil.
These are valid points, but I still think what sets apart the current situation from Iraq is 1) the scale and 2) the intent.
With regards to #1, bear in mind that those figures for Iraq are calculated over a period of fourteen years as opposed to just six months in Gaza. For the latter, the daily death rate is four times higher. Similarly, the fact that most of Northern Gaza is now an uninhabitable pile of rubble dwarfs even the destruction that occurred in Iraq. With regards to the genocidal language, the comment from Rumsfeld is a far cry from Isaac Herzog saying “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” for October 7th or Yoav Gallant saying “We are fighting human animals.”
As for #2, the vast majority of Palestinians are have been displaced southwards and are now basically trapped in Rafah with nowhere to go. The equivalent in Irag would have been for US to build a wall around Baghdad and prevented any women and children from leaving while they carried out their bombing campaigns. Also, the steps that Israel have taken to block humanitarian aid from getting to desperate and starving people sets the behavior apart from the US in Iraq. There’s also the sense of “collective punishment” in Gaza that wasn’t present in Iraq.
Again, I am still somewhat in two minds about use of the word, but I think there are still distinct differences that makes the current situation what the ICJ terms a “plausible genocide”.