Yes, Israel is committing genocide

The word ”genocide” dates to 1944 when a Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, coined the word, combining the Greek word for race or tribe and the Latin suffix “cide,” which means “killing.”  In 1948 the UN adopted a convention to punish the crime of genocide.  

It is important to remember that genocide as defined does not only mean the killing of a particular groups, although that certainly qualifies.  It also means causing serious bodily or mental harm to a group, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction, imposing sterilization on members of the group, or transferring children from the group to members of another group.

Now Israel is proposing to herd the Palestinians in Gaza to one small section (already a scene of large scale destruction) in the south.  It is also clear that Israeli settlers are doing their best by physical violence and intimidation to drive Palestinian residents out of the West Bank with the connivance of Netanyahu’s government.  Both of those actions clearly fall within the definition of genocide.  

And I probably need to remind everyone–criticizing the actions of Netanyahu’s government does not mean you are anti-Semitic.