Ah, yes, yes, quite right. Everything Israel has done over the past 76 years is just an endless sequence of unconnected anecdotes that never quite accumulates into a pattern of behaviour or a coordinated act of deliberate violence. All just isolated mistakes or individual atrocities that don't represent the IDF or the Israeli government, right? That's how it works.

Except, of course, when we're talking about October 7th.

There, strangely enough, you and I can agree that this attack was a horrific crime against humanity. This one day, composed entirely of individual anecdotes of barbarity, came together to actually mean something. To justify the nine-month slaughter of well over 30x more innocent people. To contextualise the genocidal language of senior Israeli government officials and the unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure. The mass graves found outside hospitals and the starvation of children. Even to justify the killings of hundreds of people in the West Bank who aren't anything to do with Hamas.

Hamas claims that the rapes committed on October 7th were the actions of "dipshits" on their side and not sanctioned by them. In fact, they also claim that they didn't intend to kill civilians at the Nova Festival but those killings happened as a result of confusion caused by unexpectedly finding the festival there.

Do you accept that? Does Hamas get the same pass you're so generously and open-mindedly willing to extend to the IDF? Or, even if Hamas' leadership is telling the truth about these "dipshits," do you hold them responsible for the actions and mentality of their fighters?

And I have not obfuscated the meaning of the word “genocide.” You simply don't know what the word means and refuse to accept the definition coined by Lemkin. Again, the article I wrote cites, word for word, the internationally recognised definition of the word "genocide." While we obviously disagree, I've always found you to be arguing in more-or-less good-faith. But this is just flat out lying.

Lastly, I've never claimed that everybody in the Israeli government is a far-fright extremist. I'm sure there is disagreement within the government as there is in every government. In fact, I'm not even interested in the term "far-right" at this point. The point is, there's a clear thread of violent colonial extremism running through the government of Israel since its inception. Funnily enough, many former leaders were much more honest about this than you are. For example, here's Ariel Sharon's senior advisor, Dov Weissglass, explaining the motivation for Israel's "withdrawal" from Gaza:

"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.

Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened.

You know, the term 'peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem.

And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."

And then, of course, there's the fact that the withdrawal, in addition to what I believe was a sincere attempt to relieve the increasingly intolerable conditions for Palestinians in Gaza, was mainly about maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel.

But, of course, you already knew all this, right? You know what you're talking about more than me after all...