By the way--just to be clear, I was not invoking the Holocaust or antisemitism to suggest that Jewish people are incapable of victimizing or oppressing other people. I was invoking it to ask how we're defining "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" since these are terms that can be thrown around. I was NOT asking this to diminish the terror and oppression endured by Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli government, but to emphasize the fact that 6 million Jews (and 2 million Roma and gay people and others) were killed in the Holocaust, which is incontrovertibly genocide. About 65,000 Palestinians have been killed since 1948, and 25,000 Jews, but they have also been intermittently at war.
Israel has an upper hand because it is backed by colonial powers, which would put it squarely in a position of dominance that it abuses, evidenced in many of the examples you cited. But if Palestinian citizens of Israel have full rights and representation (of which they represent over 20%), then it doesn't seem entirely accurate to describe it as genocide or maybe even ethnic cleansing. Sure, I have no doubt that many bigots in Israel and its government would be glad for Palestinian people to disappear. And the reverse is also true and codified in the Palestinian people's governing bodies. On the one hand, can you blame them? They are experiencing mass incarceration and infinite abuses that, yes, make it very difficult to simply live. And yet, there were 700,000 Palestinians in Israel in 1948 and there are over 4 million today, and the life expectancy is 74 years (7 years less than that of an Israeli person, which is very notable). Quantity isn't the only barometer of wellbeing, obviously, which is why I was asking quantitatively and qualitatively how you were thinking about those terms and what they meant to you. Maybe my phrasing could've been clearer. As intended by writing this article, all I'm hoping for is to have slightly more critical and ideally compassionate (ultimately, I think, constructive) discussions about hard topics.
