I also don't think this is a genocide. It's "merely" the most televised (the word that would have been used in the past) war in history, one that overshadows far worse conflicts like the Sudanese Civil War in our public consciousness. The war in Gaza is the first war most people who are claiming that this is a genocide are closely following (if watching Russian, Chinese, Iranian and Palestinian propaganda on social media can be called closely following), thus the outrage. Most people have been isolated from the horrors of war, most, including on the Lemmyverse, have no idea how to process what's going on, most have no idea about international law concerning warfare, shouting ignorantly that every single conventional act of war is automatically a war crime, provided it's Israel who is doing it - and almost all people are completely blind to the wider geopolitical behind the scenes game that is at play here.
Just to name one aspect that I've rarely seen discussed, isn't it odd that South Africa of all countries filed the frivolous lawsuit against Israel at the ICJ while at nearly the exact same time hosting Hamas and war criminals who have been far more credibly accused of committing genocide? This can only be partially explained by at best dubious historic analogies and past connections with the PLO.
Note that I'm not denying that individual Israeli soldiers are committing war crimes. Of course that's happening and they should be punished for it. Settler crimes are a huge issue as well and the Israeli state needs to come down hard on these people - but what these individuals with at most tacit approval from parts of the government are doing is at worst attempted displacement. I'm not denying the abhorrent conditions civilians in the Gaza strip are suffering from due to the war, but as the successful evacuation corridor created for Palestinian civilians and defended by the IDF against Hamas attacks has shown, there is a clear and obvious divide between this almost comically evil fictional IDF that people have invented and the actual actions of it as an organization, between it and Hamas.
What I am extremely doubtful of is that there is a deliberate and systematic campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people. It just doesn't add up. I've studied several real genocides and the patterns that unite all of them are completely different from this war. There is no legal disenfranchisement of Palestinians living in Israel - in fact, the opposite has happened in recent years. There is no drop in birth rates, like we are seeing in Xinjiang among the Uyghurs, with the Palestinian population growing at a far greater rate than Israel's and consistently so. There is no systematic dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli media and education - at worst some far-right individuals are saying deplorable things which do not represent the consensus within Israeli society. An army committing genocide does also not spend an inordinate amount of resources on warning systems for civilians they are allegedly trying to exterminate. Why would they send flyers and text messages, call, hack TV stations, provide websites with info on which areas are less dangerous and even invent the costly and to the Israeli military detrimental warning method of roof-knocking if they were trying to kill as many Palestinians? It doesn't make any sense.
One aspect that surprised me about this conflict is just how easily well-meaning people can be programmed to repeat a small handful of propaganda talking points, a frightening spectacle to witness during the ramp-up of a major war in Asia and a series of defeats for Ukraine. It's one thing to witness similar patterns among far- and alt-right people who have no principles - but more left-leaning people usually do (I should know), which makes us particularly impervious to changing opinions that we believe are based on the moral high ground.
The effect of a combined disinformation campaign by Russia, Iran and China are practically overwhelming the West, at least in part with the help of the shockingly effective Trojan Horse that is TikTok. You wouldn't believe how frequently I've come across the exact same "75 years of Israeli occupation" and other false and misleading sound bites. This one in particular has become such a meme that nobody is even updating it to the current year - and nobody who is blindly spouting it has even heard of Egyptian and Syrian occupation of Palestine (one of my least favorite interactions involved educating and Egyptian about this, which went back and forth a few times, until he doubled down on his denial of Egyptian occupation and declared that the entirety of Wikipedia was Western propaganda"), but I digress. It's the same with the genocide allegations, which few people I've come across are even trying to suppor