Unless there have been zero births since this article was published, even if you take the 50,000 death estimate from Hamas at face value, the population has increased since the start of the war. Of course, there is reason to suspect the Hamas figures, since they have been systematically manipulated, don't distinguish combatant deaths, don't separate out deaths from natural causes, and don't call out deaths caused by misfired Palestinian rockets.
The central camps have been almost totally untouched since the hostages are being kept there: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-804993 (article is a few months old but this is still true). And even outside of these camps, 16+ hospitals remain operational in Gaza despite serving as terror HQ.
A) It's hard to argue that the war in Gaza was indiscriminate when the IDF achieved the highest combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio in the history of urban combat, despite Hamas hiding in tunnels underneath population centers.
B) When soldiers flood across your border from a neighboring polity by the thousands, it would be an abdication of sovereignty not to defend against that immediate threat, regardless of the enemy's funding sources.
Zionism to me means that the Jews are entitled to self-determination, and that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of that promise.
Anti-Zionism is the negation of that idea; namely that Jews are not entitled to self-determination and therefore should live at the whims of the countries where they are a minority for their security.
Merely objecting to an Israeli policy or even a Jewish value is not intrinsically antisemitic. But if you criticize only Israel about some issue, and grant a free pass to everyone else on that same issue, that's when things become problematic.
Well I obviously don't believe they are committing genocide.
If Israel wanted to commit genocide, why are there more Gazans alive today than this time two years ago? Israel could turn Gaza into a parking lot overnight; why didn't they?
If the Palestinians are risking their lives to protest against Hamas in Gaza, why can't the alleged pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate in support of this viewpoint?
Yes, they are called Neturei Karta, and there are maybe 100 of them out there.
But it doesn't matter who is espousing the idea: just because a Jew says something doesn't make it _not_ antisemitic. I have yet to hear an argument that convinces me that it is not bigoted to selectively deny the Jewish people a right to a state from which to defend themselves.
1. OK, great: this is a legitimate argument against the existence of Israel. So we can then expect Israel to be the focus of 0.5% of anti-nationalist protests, since it is one of ~200 countries.
2. What is the "correct" number of fatalities when fighting a defensive war against an enemy committed to annihilating your country? And besides, even Hamas now admits that 72% of combat-aged fatalities they have recorded were men.
3. I never said carte blanche; I just find it curious that people find so much time in their day to protest against Israel, but when Alawites are massacred in Syria, civilians slaughtered in Sudan, or hundreds of thousands of children starve in Yemen, nobody says "boo". Surely you value the lives of innocent Muslims everywhere the same?
> If anything negative you can say about Israel is equated to antisemitism then Israel gets a free pass.
I am not arguing this. Everyone is free to criticize Israel; when it becomes antisemitic is when you hold Jews to a different standard than you hold everyone else.
> but Israel's response was out of proportion
Why do you say this? What would a proportionate response have looked like to an attempt to conquer your country by firing 5,000 rockets while 6,000 people invaded and murdered everyone they could find? Bear in mind, that immediately afterwards, Hamas leaders promised to repeat October 7th again and again until Israel was annihilated.
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnwspencer2018_israel-has-d...
Note the falsification of Hamas casualty figures:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-quietly-drops-thousands-dea...
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hama...