Cases of genocide brought before the ICJ aren’t based on Merriam-Webster, or the Cambridge Dictionary…
They use ratified international agreements, such as the CPPCG
After you said ‘plain text definition’. Now you’ve moved the goal post to a treaty.
The United states holocaust museum has a pretty good ‘plain text’ definition of genocide, which perfectly captures what the Israelis are trying to do to the Palestinians as genocide.
The article also has some useful ‘plain text’ descriptions of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, mass atrocities, mass killing and war crimes.
https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/learn-about-genocide-and-other-mass-atrocities/definitions
The astute reader will notice that the Israelis are actually guilty of all of these mass atrocities as part of their attempts to genocide the Palestinians.
Genocide is defined as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The acts are:
- Killing members of the group.
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Except for perhaps the last point, there’s no person that could argue that Israel has not perpetrated these acts against the Palestinians.
All that leaves then is the intent aspect of genocide.
The Israelis are very open about their desire to destroy Palestine. Law4palestine has a collection for quotes from current and former legislators which capture their genocidal intent:
If you don’t feel like reading through that, here’s an excellent summary of other evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent from Jewish Currents:
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
*Edit: added the link to the legislators list. Left the decision makers list as it just serves to hammer the point home
