Rights advocates in the United States are urging President Joe Biden to end his administration’s “complicity” in Israeli rights abuses after key members of Israel’s government backed the idea of pushing Palestinians out of Gaza.
Far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich said this week that Israel should “encourage emigration” from the coastal enclave, home to an estimated 2.3 million Palestinians.
“If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after [the war ends] will be totally different,” Smotrich said on Sunday, calling for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians.
A day later, Ben-Gvir, who oversees national security, made a similar appeal, saying it was “a correct, just, moral and humane solution”, Israeli media outlets reported.
That’s not whataboutism. Whataboutism is changing the subject to derail the conversation. This is simply addressing a different point of view in the same discussion.
No. Mentioning the opinions of uninvolved people IS changing the subject of whether or not genocide is bad and should be stopped.
A comparable if much lower stakes example would be if we were discussing whether or not it’s ok to say that Wings were better than The Beatles and then some rando chimes in to inform us that 10% of techno fans think that the world doesn’t need guitars.
Fun had, let’s return to the actual: 10% of the respondents of a poll saying ANYTHING doesn’t make genocide more or less acceptable and bringing it up in spite of that is a whataboutism, a distraction and a very crass way to try to derail the conversation.