Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20190408212907/@comment-1327106-20190503015401

Ethnic cleansing is forcefully getting rid of an unwanted ethnic group or groups, with the intention that the removal is permanent. It's mostly a case of semantics. If there is any difference, I'd say it's a sense of scale. You could describe an incident of ethnic cleansing as happening in a town or a country, but you would only use genocide in terms of what's happening in a country. What happens in a single town isn't a big enough event to be genocide.

As far as AoT goes, Zeke isn't personally going around killing each and every Eldian, but for all functional purposes it's the same as genocide. The Eldian population has no choice in the matter and won't be around anymore.