People who care about Palestinian lives have been pushing the (accurate, applicable) word “genocide” or the (accurate, applicable) phrase “ethnic cleansing.” At the outset of the invasion, it would have been too soon to call it, but now it’s absolutely not. Anybody who has seen or paid attention knows exactly what’s going on. Only ideology and ethics and affinity are shaping sides, now. And the decades of apartheid don’t help Israel’s case. It’s just willful mass murder at this point.
The fact is, though, in Palestine, as in Ukraine with Russia, legalistic language, finger pointing, recrimination, and shaming don’t mean squat. Nobody is going to enforce it. The US sees Israelis as like them, therefore Israelis will be supported and they’ll figure out what to call it later. Israel wants the Palestinians gone, either removed or dead, and they want the land. They will try and take it, and it looks like the Palestinians are on their own. The US will co-sign that.
That’s the kind of world we live in, now. That’s our reality. The strong take. There’s no objective truth when facts serve power. The weak die, as the world that made them weak looks on, in apathy or in prejudiced judgment. Courts and laws serve only power, and even if they didn’t they don’t save lives or stop tragedies, they only make examples of people in the hope that this will change human behavior (it doesn’t, it never has, if it did we wouldn’t be talking about this).
Practical agency is all that matters. You have it and you live, you prosper. If not, you get victimized. That’s the world the politicians and business people and priests and demagogues made for us. Enjoy it while you can, because if, by chance, you find yourself on the wrong side of the narrative, or the wrong side of luck, or on the wrong side of the perception of influence and power, no one will help you. Nothing will save you. Your life will be disposable. Happens every day. Always has.