Hello, Jazzflower.
I think genocide is bad.
Under the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, articles 2&3 (1948):
Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: ( a ) Killing members of the group; ( c ) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
If a group of people takes over another people's land where very many people have been living for centuries, claims the land, kicks off the people, and massacres a dozen villages, I oppose that as a violation of human rights.
In the course of a few centuries white Europeans claimed the Indians' land, conquered them, expelled them from many villages and massacred some. I would say killing people in those villages was genocide. It would have been better if they had just lived together in peace.
In the situation in the Holy Land, one group also came in, claimed the land, expelled hundreds of villages, and committed a number of massacres of villages. The group did claim the whole land, and planned to have a State for just its own group, which would cause a problem since most of the people living there were not of that group. The group conquered more than the territory it was given by the UN. The government had an official strategy called "Plan D" that said to destroy villages that resisted and called the conquest "cleaning up." 75% of the native people living there were "transferred" or expelled from their homes. Then the massacres of villages happened, which I call "instances of genocide" because the killers wanted to kill part of the Palestinian population - the ones in the villages that resisted.
I did look at the articles you pointed to. Their idea is that since the conquerors have killed far fewer people than Genghis Khan and other famous genocidists and did not try to kill the whole Palestinian people, then it is not genocide. However, neither fact means that it wasn't genocide, which can just be killing a part of a people.
I want to be sympathetic to both groups, so I can say that
most of the ethnic cleansing was not genocide. But would you say that when villages are destroyed and massacred during the ethnic cleansing of 75% of a native population those are
instances of genocide of Palestinians? I am having a hard time with this. Perhaps murdering thousands of decent people while kicking them out of their homeland is not enough to be considered killing "a part of the people."
In researching this I looked at this article describing some of the massacres:
A Nakba Diary: The Palestinian Catastrophe - York PSC
For me the stories of the destruction are sad and hard,
Jazzflower.