On the basis of this officially-accepted definition of genocide there is no doubt that the horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people qualify as genocide. So there is no reason why socialists should hold back from using the term genocide to describe what is happening to the Palestinians. Left-wing Jews such as Ilan Pappé and prominent supporters of the Palestinians such as John Pilger have been increasingly outspoken on the issue. All around the world Palestinians and their supporters raised the slogan “stop the genocide in Gaza”. To oppose them doing this on the basis of a quibble over the precise meaning of a word that is bandied about all the time to refer to other atrocities would simply serve to down play the atrocities the Palestinian people face.
It needs to be emphasised that there is no reason that genocides have to fit the pattern of the Holocaust, Rwanda or the Irish famine, where a tremendous slaughter took place in a concentrated time frame. In contrast the Armenian genocide extended over decades. In North America and Australia the genocide lasted hundreds of years. At times there were massacres, but in Australia they were usually in the tens, not in the tens of thousands. At times the US and Australian authorities retreated from genocidal policies and reached agreements with the Indigenous peoples, but over the long haul it was genocide. It flowed from the logic of a colonial settler state.
Continue reading at http://redflag.org.au/article/what-happening-palestine-genocide