I visited Israel for a sports seminar some ~10 years ago and met many nice people. I felt sympathetic to their reality of living in an ever-hostile environment from all sides, and struggle to keep their place in the world safe. I admired their resilience and strength.
When this Gaza conflict started, I saw how the Israeli protested against their government and demanded peace, so I thought there is a semblance of an excuse for glimpses of abhorrence being reported - "it's a small number of people in power, not the Israeli nation doing it, and also there are always 2 sides to the story".
Since then, there have been unfathomable horrors and crimes against humanity done from the Israel side, with extreme intensity and one-sidedness, and it's now been going for so long. I can find no excuse of any kind anymore, for what has been and is being done in Gaza. I don't think any normal person could. The weight of these things, in my mind at least, is such that if the Israeli people really wanted anything different, it was their human duty and utmost responsibility to stop this by now, in whatever way needed. They didn't... It's sad that people who have suffered so much as well, let themselves become the villains to this depth and extent.
It's a state founded on ethnic cleansing. People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves.
In late 1947, their militias begun a campaign of massacring and expelling Palestinians from mostly defenseless villages. These refuges pouring into neighboring Arab countries is what prompted the 1948 war. When the war ended, they murdered any civilians trying to return to their homes.
Gaza was originally a refugee camp created for receiving these expelled people.
The ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since. The current Gaza war is not when the crimes against humanity started. Israel has been commiting crimes against humanity throughout its entire existence.
> People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves
Including a sizeable Jewish minority.
The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region. But it’s a continuation of outsiders (in particular Westerners, though the Iranians also bought this settler-colonialist nonsense which led to their recent miscalculations) with no connection to the land drawing up broad moral claims for how the Middle East should be divided up.
There was a Jewish community in Palestine (mostly centered around Jerusalem) but they did not come up with the Zionist project. Actually, many were opposed and some of their descendants still do so to this day.
> The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region
The (European) architects of the Zionist project literally called it colonialism.
"You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial." -Theodor Herzl
Ze'ev Jabotinsky literally compared the Zionist project to other colonial projects when arguing the people living there would fight back against their colonizers and the need for numbers and strength to counter them.
Given how every group claims it is a holy place, I'd expect each group would want it held in a state of peace, prosperity, and reverence for the benefits of creation. Instead they all seem bent on holding their holy lands in states of violence, discord, and waste.
You're not wrong that there is deep external interference but wouldn't holy peoples rise above any of that to do better from every side?
Some people seem to have the idea that most of the people are European Jews, when in reality, it was more Arab jews, in large part due to the Nazis. The standardized language even reflects this, closet to the local pronounciation of hebrew than the "accents" in Europe. Or even Jiddish
There's plenty of videos of orthodox Jewish people getting brutalized in public by Israeli government thugs. There are many Jewish voices that oppose the genocide. Please don't conflate Judaism with a violent project of political extremism, even though the latter uses the former cynically as a "human shield".
> Please don't conflate Judaism with a violent project of political extremism
I’m not. I’m arguing that one can oppose what’s happening in Gaza without careening into counterproductiveness and calling for the destruction of Israel.
A state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere. In fact, it appears to be the opposite, based on historical fact. There are also Jewish communities that live peacefully with dignity in Iran.
> A state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere. In fact, it appears to be the opposite, based on historical fact.
Whatever else you think, this is some massive misunderstanding of history.
Historically, the lack of a state for Jews was one of the main reasons Jews experienced the Holocaust, which originated the term Genocide. Half of the Jewish population, making up (iirc) 90% of the population of Europe, died, because they had nowhere else to go.
And of the ones that survived, they still had nowhere else to go, no one wanted to take them in. The only place they could go, and what was agreed to worldwide, was to go to then-Palestine. Then, the hundreds of thousands of Jews "living peacefully" in Arab countries were ethnically cleansed from their countries, which they'd lived in for generations, and also largely had nowhere to go except Palestine.
> People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves.
Isn't that just history repeating itself? Even in the old testament, they had to clear the current inhabitants of their promised land after wander the desert for 40 years.
Archeology suggests biblical Israel was actually a federation of tribes, some of which were enemies in early parts of the Bible. For example, the philistines which became one of the 12 tribes and also are the origin of the term Palestinian.
The Muslims have systematically eradicated Jews from their entire homeland, the greater middle east, over the last five hundred years, and all the Jews have left is that strip of sand by the sea.
Israel is the last stand against a Holocaust that has been going on a lot longer than eighty years.
> In any case, Israel doesn't even have the right to exist
It does: UN resolution, 1967.
That you do not recognize an entire state to exist is an admission to preparing a genocide. The fact that 4 countries around Israel are preparing genocide justifies Israel’s measures are reasonable to maintain peace.
What is reasonable?
Well it’s not like Gaza didn’t start the shooting with 7000 rockets pre-October festival (I was myself surprised that Israel didn’t respond pre-October). Those rockets were indiscriminate against population centers, each of them were a war crime. So it’s reasonable to reduce the neighbor’s ability to wage war to dust.
Are the Gazans exempt from responsibility of their state’s actions?
To answer, we need to check whether the Hamas was imposed to the Gazans or whether they voted for it and, in a broader sense, whether the Gazans wish the genocide of Israel. It turns out the 2006 elections were almost the last ones in Gaza, and that’s when the Hamas was elected (and the opponents were not better). So the Gazans are aligned with the actions performed by the collective group of their nation, it’s not a small group of extremists, it represents the will of the nation, and therefore the facilities and support network of the Hamas are part of the war logistics, and deserves to be reduced to dust.
Did Israel act with restraint?
Israel has the nuclear bomb and has enough power to genocide if they want. The fact that they perform spot actions instead of sweeping actions is proof that Israel tries to discriminate the military, its support network with genocide intent against Israel (=pretty much everyone) and tries to spare the innocents, is proof that Israel is not committing a genocide.
Would that be the same UN that Israel (and the US, to a large degree) refuses to recognize the authority of? Can't have your cake and eat it too, friend.
> What is reasonable?
Not instituting so many decrees ("militaty orders") that even the military authority responsible for 'ruling' the area can't produce an accurate or complete list of all of said decrees. Decrees which, I might add, forbid planting flowers, raising a flag, operating a farm tractor, going to school, or making a bank account withdrawal without the permission of the Israeli military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Order
Let that sink in: if you're a Palestianian you can't go to the bank and take out your own money without permission of the Israeli military.
Another military order allows the Israeli military to seize your business if you don't open during regular business hours.
Those decrees also allow Jews to "buy" (seize) land from Palestinians who refuse to sell to them, merely by asserting "power of attorney"
Not having snipers executing children. Not conducting missile and gun attacks on ambulances and independent worldwide-recognized medical aid organizations, and then attacking rescuers who show up to render aid. Not slaughtering an entire hospital's worth of patients and burying them in mass graves. Not slaughtering people lined up to get food aid. Not purposefully starving millions of people.
Not using a black-box AI to decide who is a "terrorist" and then blowing up their entire house, thus killing not only the supposed terrorist, but the entire family, or possibly the neighbor - because a "smart" bomb would be too expensive.
Really? Is this why the world does not recognize the north part of Cyprus despite Turkish Cypriots not butchering any Greeks south of the border since 1974, when they unilaterally declared
independence?
Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us. And please don't include previously warring peoples whose leaders agreed on a population exchange and imposed that mandatory trauma on their own people.
Palestine, Cyprus, and India had the unenviable luck of being long-term victims of a last gasp British empire's farewell divide-and-conquer gambit.
(and excuse me for ignoring the deflection trolling)
> Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us
It was quite common and very accepted method in the 1940s, hell, expelling 15 million germans, some living there for hundreds of years, was proposed by Churchill.
The reason you never heard about the rest of these is because the people were resettled, not kept in a state of permanent inheritable refugee state financed by the UN with financial incentives to be kept that way.
>Please name some of other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing"
(proceeds to list examples of countries which were already founded before the ethnic cleansing events they mention or events I already alluded to)
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to list Libyans expelling italians as a comparable example, when Libya was a colony of Italy. Ditto Germans, a people of belonging to the aggressor country. Bulgaria declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. And you have to explain why you included the pakistan link, as I already mentioned it in my post.
Look, it's not expelling some imperial troops. but peaceful citizens, who sometimes had lived there for centuries.
The idea that people of different ethnicities live, unmixed, divided by neat borders of nation-states is pretty recent. This was the case neither in Europe, nor in Middle East for a very long time before the advent of state-based nationalism in the 19th century. It was quite normal for people of different ethnicities, languages, and even faiths to live intermixed in certain regions, especially areas of intense trade, which the entire Mediterranean coast used to be. Borders were more about economic and political control than ethnic identity.
(The ethnic unity purportedly achieved by nation-states formed in 19th and early 20th centuries is also often more by fiat: look at the variety of German or Italian languages prior to unification of Germany or Italy, for instance, to say nothing about India.)
>Look, it's not expelling some imperial troops. but peaceful citizens, who sometimes had lived there for centuries.
I'm confused are you talking about the italians in Libya, the Germans, or the Palestinians. It's hard to tell without referencing what you're responding to, or if there is a misunderstanding about the point I'm trying to make.
Palestinians can be arguably labeled as the aggressor country if that's how you want to spin the narrative. As Jews were peacefully buying lands when the massacres and ethnic cleansing started at 1929.
Most germans were living in their respected newly founded Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia for hundreds of years if not more when expelled.
Italians, even if they were colonialists, were expelled from their homes, by people who previously have been colonialists themselves, some when arriving with the arab conquests.
Bulgaria expelled the turks in the 1950s, and the partition of india, forming pakistan and india, were two newly formed countries around the time of israel and palestine, included ethnic cleansing from both sides
Do you think that these examples of ethnic cleansing post ww2 are irrelevant when no new country was formed?
The difference is that e.g. Māori or native Americans and whatnot are full citizens with full rights.
The "founded on ethnic cleansing" is not the most important bit from the previous post. It's the "ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since" that's the most important bit.
No, the difference is that the native population of western countries very much disappeared, because this was an actual genocide their percent of population is now negligible.
While the Palestinian population in Israel proper is around 25% with full rights, while those under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have rights in their respective political entity.
Again there are other examples of countries where the population lost all rights and were expelled like germans in czechoslovakia and poland or greeks from turkey
> the native population of western countries very much disappeared
That's simply not true. It's very obviously not true. Are you denying that Māoris and Native Americans exist today? I cannot phantom why you would say such obvious nonsense.
I no longer believe you are engaging in good faith. Good day.
> Facts is that most of the palestinians fled in the earlier phases of the war, and the very little instances of forced evacuation of the population where within the borders of Israel/Palestine, not out of the country.
People don't leave their homes voluntarily. They leave because of violence or fear of violence. The fact is there were Palestinians living all over the map at the "before" stage. Settlers came to form an ethno-state. The orders given to the Zionist militia commanders were literally "cleanse" this or that village. In the "after" stage, all these people are gone from most of the map and the ones trying to return to their homes are shot dead.
That is ethnic cleansing period. The goal was to create an ethno-state in a place where people already lived. These people have been getting confined to smaller and smaller areas ever since. And the oppression continues to this day.
> Regarding the "State founded on ethnic cleaning", in recent times this includes entire South America, parts of Africa, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
>they have ethnically cleansed the Jews like in Hebron
Have you been to Hebron? I'd highly encourage it because you will see literally the most vile state sponsored racists in the western world.
The ethnic cleansing is not as violent as the gazan genocide but it ought to make any person with a conscience sick to the stomach. You walk around looking up at the settlement guards (more of them than there are settlers) pointing guns at you from guard towers as the racist settlers living above literally throw trash down on the Palestinian untermensch living below them.
Every year they squeeze Palestinians who live and work there further and further out.
It's also the home of the venerated terrorist Baruch Goldstein (10% of Israelis consider him a hero because he shot up a mosque), his shrine and Itamir ben Gvir - the national security minister who idolized him.
After seeing that place I became convinced that if anywhere was going to commit a nazi style genocide it would be israel. 8 years later thats exactly what happened.
I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well - the US and the EU states (especially Germany, sadly).
As horrible as the Israeli mindset is, their subjective viewpoint is at least somewhat relatable: An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead - and will with very high likelihood experience terror attacks themselves. That this upbringing doesn't exactly make you want to engage with the other side is psychologically understandable.
(I'm imaging this as the universal experience of all Jewish Israelis, religious or secular, left or right. I'm excluding the religious and Zionist-ideological angles here, because those are a whole different matter once again)
What I absolutely cannot understand is the behavior of our states. We're pretending to be neutral mediators who want nothing more than to end the conflict, yet in reality, we're doing everything to keep the conflict going. We're fully subscribed to Zionist narrative of an exclusive Israeli right to the land (the justifications ranging from ostensibly antifascist to openly religious) and we're even throwing our own values about universal human rights and national sovereignty under the bus to follow the narrative.
If the messianic and dehumanizing tendencies of Israelis are answered by nothing else than full support and encouragement of their allies, I don't find it exactly surprising that they will grow.
> An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else,
They know perfectly well that their settlers are conducting daily pogroms against Palestinian villages in the West Bank, protected by their own army. They know perfectly well that thousands of Palestinians are detained for years without due process, trialled by military courts, kept in a state of apartheid.
What does it even mean 'to want nothing more than to end the conflict'? As far as I can tell it doesn't mean anything. Everybody wants the conflict to end, including the Israelis and the Palestinians. They just want it to end differently, of course.
In theory, we want to end it through the Two-State Solution (though even what this means is vague - certainty not the borders of 1967 that Palestinians and Arabs are demanding)
But yeah, in practice, we seem to want it to end with full Israeli dominance, and the Palestinians either emigrating to Egypt and Jordan or vanishing into thin air, I suppose.
What exactly ARE the goals / demands of every side. Both what they say in public, and what's generally accepted as the rational real goals each side requests / demands / etc via peace talks as well as through violence.
The breakdown could even focus on factions within the nebulous term of 'sides'. An average citizen is likely to have looser criteria than a government / terrorist.
Unfortunately this Israeli government has consisently refused to articulate any sort of positive goal. Netanyahu is only publicly against things. He is adamant about preventing a Palestinian state and crippling Iran, but seems to have no plan for what should happen in Palestine, hence the seemingly endless horrible situation there.
The problem with enunciating real positions to domestic audiences are that the extremists on both sides will literally murder anyone who compromises.
Let's not forget Israel's domestic orthodox/right-wing Jewish terrorism and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.
Ergo, there's even more incentive for leaders to continually espouse positions they know will never happen, but which play well at home.
As a violence in poli sci professor of mine once quipped, this is a 'the only solution is killing the grandmothers' conflict. Because generational narratives of victimization are so ingrained in large parts of both societies that there is no room for compromise.
Silence extremist voices forcefully, wait a generation, and then there might be a path to peace. :(
Who will provide the force to silence these extremist voices?
Maybe there are some parallels in this situation and late 1800’s-mid 1900’s Western Europe. The civil war on the European continent between Germanic states on one hand and French/British ended when two powerful outsiders (US and Soviet Russia) invaded and split the continent. During this occupation west Europeans nations learned how to live with themselves and to atone for their mistakes and to not repeat these mistakes. But they only learned this because they were under military occupation.
This scenario will most likely not happen in the Middle East and so I think there will not be peace there for generations.
The greatest chance for this was probably the US-Arab world, but the Shia/Sunni sectarian-political feudalism made that a non-starter, especially in the context of the Cold War.
As a colleague from Bahrain once quipped, 'the countries of the Arab world love to use Palestinians as propaganda for domestic purposes, but none of them actually give enough of a shit to make hard choices to solve the problem.'
Hamas' explicit goal is "from the river to the sea". If there is an alternative that they are willing to settle for, nobody knows what it is.
The individual Gazans almost certainly have one in mind, likely some variant of the two state solution. But Hamas is in charge, and there is nobody else to talk to about it. Ordinary Gazans don't much like Hamas but they are the only thing standing between them and Israel, who as you know is attacking with impunity.
Israel's nominal goal is to remove Hamas and engage such a negotiation, though there is significant doubt that this tactic is going to lead there. And they know that.
Israelis are roughly equally divided on what they want. About half want to wipe out Gaza and have control of (but not responsibility for) the West Bank. They are the ones in government.
The other half is much more amenable to a two state solution, but they are extremely skeptical of finding it. Long before the October 7 attacks, Israelis routinely have to shelter from rocket attacks. We hear little about them because they are largely ineffective, but it does not give Israelis a lot of confidence in any kind of negotiated settlement. That side is also happy to have Gaza walled off.
And all of these sides are backed by powerful outside forces for whom the conflict itself is their goal.
That is an extremely high level breakdown, as neutral as I can be.
In precisely the same way that the Nazis wanted their conflict to end with Jews emigrating to Africa (Madagascar according to their original plan) or vanishing into thin air.
At this point, I think the Two-State Solution has proven to be incredibly naive.
As long as there are outside forces, such as Iran, willing to embed & fund militants among the Gazan population, the only practical solution towards peace is assimilation: have Gazans broken up & spread out through Israel until law enforcement can be practically achieved.
Now assimilation sucks & will likely result in all sorts of social injustice, but I consider it a better alternative to the current ethnic cleansing.
I'm reminded of an episode of Saga of Tanya the Evil where a 'guerilla military unit' had 'taken over a captured city'. The progag's military unit had to go 'clear the city'. Their military commanders had given clear orders that all hostile forces were enemy soldiers who must be killed. They started by issuing a demand to release the hostages and allow them to exit the war zone. One of the few who didn't want to fight was shot while trying to escape. From that point it predictably went in a very bad direction.
As far as I'm aware, the citizens of Israel are free to leave that country* (free to enter another country is another issue, but they're also free to move about). It's terrorism and illegal military action to knowingly fire upon civilians. I agree with that for all sides of a conflict. The issue with the other side(s) in this conflict is that they do not present as a clearly identified military force. IMO the most proper solution is the same as evaporatively purifying water. Issue sufficient (<< heavy lifting here) warnings for civilians to leave an area, with an area for them to move to. Then any who remain in the military action area are combatants. Probably just like in the anime episode that showcases this circumstance. (war is hell, that's one of the hells.)
When Hamas uses hospitals for military purposes (or any purpose "harmful to their enemy" [other than solely medical care of injured Hamas combatants]), those hospitals lose their protected status otherwise provided by the Geneva Convention.
I don't like the prospect of hospitals being attacked, but if Hamas houses combatants or arms inside a hospital, attacking Hamas therein does not appear to be a war crime, provided Israel has issued a warning and allowed a reasonable time for Hamas to vacate the hospital.
The Geneva Convention does not provide "One Weird Trick to Avoid Being Attacked"
The very existence of guidance change on civilian casualties should constitute a war crime, because to put it another way, the IDF decided that Palestinian civilian lives were worth less after the terror attacks.
In other metrics, the October attacks killed 1,200 Israelis, plus 1,700 killed in the war. Versus 50,000+ Palestinian fatalities.
So we're at ~1:17 Israeli: Palestinian killed.
I feel like any human can agree there should be an ethical ceiling to that number. Maybe it's lower or higher than the current number, but it being unlimited is genocide.
The Gulf War had a more extreme casualty ratio of ~1:1,000+. Would you consider that an extremely unethical war? Should the US have done something differently to even out the ratio?
> The very existence of guidance change on civilian casualties should constitute a war crime
Surely a change in tactics by Hamas could lead to a legitimate reason to change the proportion of civilian risks.
Imagine if Hamas were scrupulously avoiding all civilians and civilian structures by 200 meters before date X and changed tactics on date X to freely intermingle with civilians and occupy civilian structures with military units and arms.
I'd expect before date X for Israel to have minimal civilian casualties be considered acceptable and proportional, but after that change in tactics I would see justification for a change in the math to justify a higher figure as being the lowest reasonable amount of civilian risk.
And indeed, Israel has made token efforts to say this is happening, but I'm not aware of any proof. Which, coupled with the fact that the IDF is explicitly prohibiting reporting, isn't a good look.
Furthermore, even if Israel has a justification for large numbers of civilian casualties, there are other portions of the Geneva Convention it's obviously breaching:
>> ART. 53. — Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or
personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or co-operative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.
>> ART. 55. — To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.
>> ART. 56. — To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the co-operation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.
> It’d be convenient if Jews just stopped existing so the Arabs could take their homeland again
This argument betrays your bias: that the land is yours (Jewish I mean), and "Arabs" stole it and want to steal it again.
Of course, the other side sees it differently. They see a half a century of immigration to their land culminating in a partition that was imposed from the outside in Western colonialist fashion without the consent of the people living there. They saw massacres and expulsions and ethnic cleansing. That is the root of the conflict.
Of course now 80 years and many complications have passed; both sides have legitimate complaints about the other and many people have been born in both territories making them natives and not part of either colonisation or expulsion. It's difficult.
> All of the death toll coming out of Gaza are from Hamas and they revised the numbers back in April to show 72% of the deaths are military aged males.
This betrays it even more. Not only do you cite a non-credible source going against the consensus, but your argument is literally "Palestinian males between 16 and 45 are fair game for extermination". Not sure what to reply to that.
I find it exemplified in the disagreements even in the beginning of the conflict. I feel, pro-Israeli commenters either prefer to start with 1948 (The state somehow appeared like some sort of divine creation and was immediately declared war by all surrounding countries) or in biblical times.
Pro-Palestinian commenters usually start with the Balfour Declaration or Theodor Herzl's books, I believe.
I found 1881/1882 a good starting point, because this was the first time there was organized immigration that explicitly followed Zionist plans and ideology - I.e. people were not abstractly thinking about "returning to Jerusalem" and they weren't immigrating into the Ottoman empire for other reasons, but they were deliberately immigrating with the intention of (re-)establishing a "Jewish homeland" in the biblical Land of Israel.
If you are from US/Australia/... chances are you also think the land is yours and occasionally you celebrate what is for locals an "invasion day"
in this sense Jews are in a much better position because their presence in specifically that area many hundreds of years before Muslim conquest is archeologically documented. Unlike presence of Europeans in Americas or Australia.
What I say does not justify war atrocities. Just that "you are wrong to call it your land" is not a good working logic
I'm unsure what your point is, because that example supports my argument. There is no documented European presence but there is Native presence for millenia in those lands. Yet nobody would seriously argue that non-native Americans/Australians should be kicked out so the land is returned to their "original owners" as defined by "the vague descendents of the earliest known occupiers as defined in a muddy ethnoreligious way"... Yet when talking about this group in particular that claim holds?!
> Yet nobody would seriously argue that non-native Americans/Australians should be kicked out so the land is returned to their "original owners"
Maybe somebody would if they could? Or how about not kicked out but just made subordinate to government by native original owners, how would you like that?
I guess somebody else can say but Americans developed land, built infrastructure and democracy and did good more. But then the same can be said about Israel. And unlike Americans Jews did not invade somewhere new because they were there in BC era
I don't defend bad stuff done by Israel gov but I suggest condemning specifically bad stuff instead of suggesting "bias" that you did. It's a bit more complicated.
Not to mention, the claim that because you’re a boy in your late teens you’re a valid target… it’s just so incredibly…
Do I call it sexist? Stereotyping? What? It entirely denies the existence of males as anything other than enemies, and these are still children we’re talking about.
Israel and people of Jewish heritage has a lot of soft-power in the west. And the anti-terrorism rhetoric that Israeli's using to sell this has has previously been deployed by the west to cover up it's own crimes.
I would argue that the Muslim world has gained quite some political power in the West, perhaps as a simple result of immigration. The EU for example seem to have about 50 times more Muslims than Jews.
Anti-terrorism rhetorics has indeed previously led to terrible crimes, but I wouldn't suppose that's a reason to support pro-terrorism rhetorics. It's probably best to look at the content instead of the type of rhetorics.
You're not making sense my friend. The recent Muslim immigrants have nothing to do with soft power and I don't see how that's relevant to this context. Are you saying that it counters the influence that Israel has?
And if we're talking about terrorism, IDF and Mossad are very much known to deploy terror tactics across a lot of their historical engagements. The definition of the word doesn't hinge on designation by a Western organization. And the vast majority of "pro-palestine" people in the world are not Iran proxies and secret anti-semites. They're actually, for the most part, young people that are working from a place of empathy and horror. The most blatant and harmful propganda in this whole mess is the attempt to designate pro-palestine protestors anti-semites and secretly in support of Iran and Hamas policies. What a terrible cheapening of the word. Point is, the ones using the most pro-terror rhetoric are those trying to defend the IDF right now.
>The most blatant and harmful propganda in this whole mess is the attempt to designate pro-palestine protestors anti-semites and secretly in support of Iran and Hamas policies
Propaganda? I am not very familiar with the details and frankly I don’t really care, but at the two pro-Palestinian rallies that I saw were used "From the river to the sea" slogans, and like all protesters were okay with that.
What evidence of this do you see? Non Jewish natural born Americans also outnumber Jews in America, yet I don’t see any immigrant students getting deported for criticizing Americans.
Jews have disproportionate levels of soft power in the US. Israel receives billions in support every year. Anti Muslim propaganda is pushed out every year in Hollywood. The medias coverage of Gaza is essentially one big lie by omission. Many states pass laws aimed to deter criticism of Israel.
I don’t see any other group in America that receives this level of support.
What are you even commenting on? Did I (or anyone?) say that opposing genocide is supporting terrorism? Did I say that human rights are pro-terrorism?
The parent comment was dismissing anti-terrorism rhetorics because previously they were used to committing crimes. That sounds illogical to me, and that's what I was commenting on.
> I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well - the US and the EU states (especially Germany, sadly).
I understand that you are talking about the recent era, but I wonder if you could speak to the history of the creation of Israel, and the German perception of that. Is there any discussion about the European role in the creation of Israel? After the end of the war, it isn’t as if there was a movement to return property and homes to European Jews. If anything, the powers in Europe after the war (and, in the case of Eichmann, pre war as well) saw Zionism as a solution for what to do with the Jews.
Is there any sympathy or responsibility felt in European communities for essentially using Zionism as a solution?
From my experience, the history of Israel as discussed in the media usually begins in 1948. A standard phrase is "The state was founded and immediately declared war at".
Sometimes discussion goes back a bit further about how the area was a "League of Nations Mandatory Area" before, that was for some reason was administered by the British.
That's usually it.
An interesting detail is that the legitimacy of Israel here is usually explained with the UN (the Partition Plan resolutions and the accepted membership) - not with any kind of divine right. I think that's quite different from how (right wing) Israelis see the source of legitimacy themselves.
I was basically getting at how does Europe see its role in the fact that a big part of what made Israel possible was the more or less complete displacement of European jewry during the war, and the complete lack of will to create a place in post-war europe for their own Jewish community.
This perspective comes from my own family history where a few relatives managed to survive the war in Nazi custody, but then spent longer in Western European refugee camps postwar than they spent in the concentration and death camps during the war. The entire family ended up outside of Europe (USA and Israel) since it was the most viable path out of the camps.
Basically the success of Zionism is due in no small part to the active support from Europe in the years after the war, and my question is, do Europeans see that in as self-interested terms as it can look. More succinctly, does the Western European community realize that creating Israel was a solution to the post-war "Jewish Problem" that conveniently did not require those nations to create a hospitable place for jewish communities within their own borders.
I've noticed that many people justify Hamas's forever war on Israelis with "well Israel stole Palestinian land" while completely ignoring how European and Arab states stole property that adds up to many times bigger than Israel from Jews after WW2.
If we did an honest accounting of who stole land from whom and calculated reparations, Israelis would be owed far more than they owe.
> An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead - and will with very high likelihood experience terror attacks themselves. That this upbringing doesn't exactly make you want to engage with the other side is psychologically understandable.
This "entirety of the surrounding population want them dead" language is both dehumanizing, false, and (perhaps not intended by you) genocidal.
The "surrounding population" is not a monolith. I imagine only a very small minority of people want all Jewish Israelis dead. I do Palestinian liberation work with many non-Jewish people from the middle east (I'm Jewish) and have yet to meet a single one who wants me dead.
They all want an end to Zionism.
Some may want it replaced with an Islamic government (which at its best is not different from the ideal "Zionism" you may hear defended by liberal Zionists, and at its worst is no different from the Zionism instituted by the modern state of Israel today)
Most want it replaced with a secular state where everyone has equal rights.
If your intent was to explain the mindset of an "ordinary Israeli citizen" who supports Zionism, then I agree with you, but it's dangerous to say something like this without distinguishing why this is a flawed mindset which can only exist due to an extensive system of propaganda.
Speaking of Germany - Israel really weaponized the holocaust, in the sense that's absolutely impossible to criticize Israel without being accused of antisemitism. I actually think it got to the point it makes difficult fighting antisemitism because it's evident to any honest person that the accusation is a weapon now.
>> An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead.
You have to look at the other side too. Palestinian's are born knowing that Israeli's have taken lots of their land through violent force. And they want to take more of it. And while the Israeli's live in a well developed wealthy nation they are condemned to poverty.
Consider the King David Hotel Bombing[1]. Israeli terrorists murdered nearly 100 people. In 2006 Netanyahu presided over the unveiling of a memorial plaque, alongside some of the terrorists involved in it, with the plaque specifically remembering the terrorist who died in the attack. So Israeli terrorism is fine, even worthy of praise.
And while the Israelis may grow up scared that the Palestinian's want them dead, 10's of thousands of Palestinian children won't grow up at all.
>> I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well
I agree. It seems that all over Europe at least, the governments are largely going against public opinion on this issue. But it's not the first time we've seen this (Iraq being a recent example).
I found it a remarkable detail that from the shore of Gaza, you see the port of and industrial zone of Ashdod, only a few kilometers away. It seems almost like a permanent reminder that the entire area is in fact well-developed - the wasteland only exists where they live.
I dont disagree with anything you said, but isn't that the role of elected leaders ? Actually making the difficult decisions that may be unpopular, but necessary ?
Or is it the leader class in most western countries have no sense of duty , are effectively cowards, and are in it just to have a profitable, white-collar career ?
It's a bunch of >60yr old western leaders who had 40yrs of seeing violence and terrorism in Israel and Palestine, and every couple years a naive western leader announces they want to fix it, while nothing changes.
People are just numb to the whole area.
The most difficult part is the fact Israel is wealthy and aggressive while (both) Palestine government has been the definition of dysfunction and tribalism for decades, even during peace times. Diplomatic solutions have became harder and harder since the 90s.
You can read the history the political bodies in West Bank and even they seem to not care to fix anything either. They have their own leadership issues (like never electing new leaders).
There’s a major gap between a western savior wanting something bad to stop and actually going there and accomplishing something.
> Or is it the leader class in most western countries have no sense of duty , are effectively cowards, and are in it just to have a profitable, white-collar career ?
They are cowards who are just in it to enrich themselves by bribery, theft, and extortion.
You are looking in the right direction and not seeing just how far our society has gone.
> Actually making the difficult decisions that may be unpopular, but necessary ?
What is the unpopular, necessary decision? GP is commenting on the US/EUs continual campaigns to arm and fund Israel's efforts in Gaza without pushback. I don't wish to misinterpret you, but this read to me, that funding/aiding human rights violations and genocide in Gaza is a "necessary" act.
That's a good question. I know, in Germany, saying - let alone doing - anything critical of Israel as a public figure has effectively been a taboo. The justification had always been the Holocaust and the perpetual guilt of Germany towards the Jewish people arising from it.
For a long time, that made some sense - it's starting to shift into quite horrific territory though, if leaders and communities interpret this obligation as some sort of absolute fealty towards the Israeli government, at the exclusion of everything else - even if that government itself is repeating the path of Nazi Germany. Yet this seems to be how a lot of German politicians interpret it.
I found the distinction exemplified in the "Never again" vs "Never again for anyone" slogans.
I don't understand what exactly is going on in the US, but there seems to have been a similar taboo, though maybe stemming from different sources (like that Evangelical end-of-days prophecy that sees Israel literally as part of a divine plan that trumps everything else).
I find it notable that part of Trump's voter support in the election were actually pro-Palestinian groups - because they saw Trump as the only alternative to a complicit Harris administration. Of course, Trump turned out to be even more complicit and openly embracing the Evangelical narrative.
So as far as US voters were concerned, there was no pro-Palestinian or even neutral options to vote for. There was just secular pro-Israel and religious pro-Israel. (Well, there was also Jill Stein, but she had no realistic chance of winning)
Of course there are other voices saying that all those justifications - Holocaust, biblical prophecy, etc - are just show and the real reason for the unconditional support is just ordinary geopolitics. The image of Israel as the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" that guarantees US dominance in the region.
I do not think this simplification works. A lot of the conflict is about systematic attempts at expansion of Israel itself - that is what settlements are and always were. Removal and mistreatment of original population went hand in hand with that.
We are talking about all settlements into territory that was not Israel's regardless of the year. The settlements like that are internationally illegal precisely because they are clear attempt to use civilian population as shields in a land takeover.
That could all be true, it seems plausible, but I don't think any of it is necessary to explain America's unwaivering support for Israel.
American Evangelical Protestants believe that the continued existence of Israel is a prophesied necessary prerequisite for the resurrection of Jesus, who will then start the Apocalypse. They think they can force prophecy by defending Israel. It doesn't matter how badly Israel behaves, they think the ends justify all of it.
> Prior to this both sides were living reasonably peacefully in Israel and Gaza
That's simply not true. Israel never gave up control over airspace, land and sea borders after the disengagement and effectively put the strip under siege after Hamas came to power.
The west bank is cut up into hundreds of small Palestinian enclaves that are separated and controlled by the IDF. There is also a policy of systematically denying Palestinians in the West Bank resources and on the other hand priorizing the settlers.
Both areas have been under siege for decades, just with different intensity.
When the current government was elected - a year before Oct.7 - it made speeding up the land grabs and eventual full annexation of the West Bank a priority. Look at the ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich: Both have deep connections to the settlers and have made deeply dehumanizing statements towards the Palestinians. (Smotrich officially published his "Decisive Plan" in 2017 about his proposal for a "permanent solution": Either "encourage emigration", allow them to live as non-citizens with restricted rights in isolated enclaves or "let the army deal with them". Both ministers are fully on board with the current starvation policy - or rather, it's still too lenient for them)
Ben Gvir is now head of the Israeli police. Smotrich is finance minister and "Minister in the defense ministry", a special role that gives him the ultimate authority about anything that concerns the West Bank.
When I said reasonable peacefully I meant not killing each other and quite a lot of people in Gaza were crossing for jobs on the Israeli side of the border. I wasn't say love and social justice reigned.
When westerners and people like Bill Clinton have got involved they have mostly proposed having a Palestinian state with their own land but the Palestinians have mostly objected to Israel existing so we have the current stuff.
Yes, there was an exchange of job seekers, however even that was among a deliberately resource-constrained Gaza, with no hope of the situation improving.
Hamas was definitely not helping in those regards and Oct.7 cannot be excused. But Israel also never did anything to support an alternative to Hamas.
“fully subscribed to Zionist narrative of an exclusive Israeli right to the land”
Not really. That ignores all the important nuance. Half of the current American right is America first and or ideologically libertarian, and are being pretty heavily vilified in the press and pundit circles because they want less aid to Israel and fewer forever wars. That’s it, I think they’re called woke-MAGA by detractors. Hillary even suggested Tulsi (who claimed Iran wasn’t building nukes) was a Russian asset.
Israel has a lot of soft power in the west, because our shared history (Jesus was a Jew) and because many of the greatest Americans have been Jewish. We love the Jews because they are great people, and siding with them when they are attacked is what people with western values will do when friends are attacked.
I'm Swedish. Since I was a child, for decades, I was taught and never questioned the idea that Germany had learnt from their history, in the most admirable way. That it was really ingrained into the German culture to never let anything like the holocaust happen again. That the education system there was very good in really making people understand why it happened, what went wrong, and how to make sure there would be no second one.
In early 2024, I was chatting with a German colleague of mine. Great guy, politically we were the most aligned out of anyone in our team. The genocide in Gaza was already well under way, so the topic came up. He told me, as if it was incredibly obvious "Well of course as Germany we couldn't possibly say anything about Gaza, given our history." For the rest of my life I will remember exactly that moment, where we were stood, the scene, because it came as a shock; this belief that I'd had since childhood turned out to be entirely wrong. It was the exact opposite - Germany had learnt nothing, in fact they'd learnt even less than the countries they had occupied. It was all a complete ruse, and I really lost all respect I had for how Germany has dealt with it all. A country like Japan at least doesn't even pretend to have learnt anything, and I'm not convinced that's the worse option.
I should've known the second news started flowing out of Germany such as "Award ceremony set to honor novel by Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled “due to the war in Israel,", along with stuff like designating B.D.S as "antisemitic" but I wanted to believe that was just a tiny minority of ignorant people.
Yes, I know that now "the narrative inside Germany has been turning around" but imo it's far too late, and can't possibly be sincere, being entirely fuelled by external pressure rather than any kind of actual realization.
> "the narrative inside Germany has been turning around"
Fully agreeing with your post - and also, it's not. Maybe for parts of the population (though even there, many are extremely conflicted) but definitely not for the current (conservative) leadership. What worries them is that they find the country increasingly isolated and there is a growing risk they could become personally liable - this forces them to make some concerned noises if the atrocities become undeniable.
But they never stopped practically supporting Israel wherever they can, be it with military aid or preventing EU actions that might put pressure on it. They will also snap back into the unequivocally pro-Israel narrative as soon as they can get away with it.
I am interested to know why you call out Japan as learning nothing. Obviously modern Japan has an excellent reputation and is not known as a warring nation( "no military" but ofc they have the JDF) so I'm guessing there's something deeper I don't know. Genuinely curious.
That's not representative of the Japanese public opinion at all, so I fail to see how it supports the view that the entire country "hasn't learned anything at all."
>As part of a lesson, they were banned having an army
>They have powerful army anyway
>Millions of Koreans live in constant fear of the power and brutality of their army
I've been to SK numerous times. The older people dislike Japan A LOT. But their biggest base is a US one. I've never heard fear of the JDF. They have another more problematic neighbor.
The United States - who made the constitution that banned the military - does exercises with and supports the JDF. Idk if that fits unconstitutional anymore.
Their denial of horrid events and their attempts to suppress the fact that comfort women happened is undeniably awful though and shows many did not learn.
I would not extrapolate from the discourse with one German to a general statement of a heterogeneous population of ~80M people. There are many different opinions and positions in Germany - like in every country in the world. Please keep that in mind.
Germany has indeed still have a ‘vaccination’. How well it works, and whether it is not exploited by politics, is another matter.
Lastly, the conflict in the Middle East is one of the most complex conflicts in recent human history - and there is no easy way out. That also applies to the situation in Gaza.
As someone living in Germany, that philosophy of "we don't have the right to intervene or say anything" is definitely embedded in the culture here. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't follow this philosophy, and there are left-wing pro-Palestine movements here as well, but overall there's a big cultural sense of obligation to Israel due to Germany's history.
A friend of mine even ended up talking to a German diplomat in Israel, who said much the same thing: they could cosign other nations' condemnations of Israeli actions when they happened, but they couldn't condemn Israeli actions unilaterally. Obviously that was just his opinion and not an official viewpoint of the German government, but I found it fascinating that Germany still felt this sense of needing to make things right to Israel specifically.
From the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the vast majority of Israelis haven’t shown any concern about the suffering in Gaza. Those who campaign for an end to the war do so purely as a means to secure the release of the hostages.
And you can think the same way about russians. They support all horrors russian people do to Ukrainian cities. And many are trying to earn some extra cash out of it.
Brainwashing by the government, religion, the media, schools, etc is what I suspect based on documentaries I watched. It’s heartbreaking what people can be made to think and say. I feel bad for the citizens of Israel to have become detached so much from humanity.
I’m becoming very skeptical of the “bad government, good people” idea. Governments need popular support. This goes even for horrible dictatorships. There are degrees, of course. An oppressive state can survive with less popular support than a democracy. But it still needs a decent amount. The machinery of dictatorship is as much about keeping popular support as it is about forcing people to suppress their opposition.
> I’m becoming very skeptical of the “bad government, good people” idea. Governments need popular support. This goes even for horrible dictatorships
You're either being disingenuous or have never experienced real dictatorship. I lived under theocracy in IRAN for more than half my life and I promise you that the Westerns screaming from the back "just revolt!" have no clue what they are talking about.
These regimes control communication, the media, intact laws that punishes any kind of dissent and often has multi layered of security forces to keep the population in check (not including the regular army and police).
It's easy to shout this when it's not your life, your sibling, your child or significant other's life on the line. These regimes will not hesitate to murder their own citizens to stay in power.
I don't know enough about Israel's internal politics and their society to make an assertive comment but what I _can_ say, is that from my interactions with them, they seem like ordinary and kind people who have no intention of harming me or my family.
Unless you are psychopath, you are not going to wake up one day and decide to murder people.
Anyone can be mislead factually, but we can't accept the idea that being told a crime is okay gives you a moral license to do it - otherwise every neo-nazi would escape among innumerable other criminals.
At some point people have to be responsible for themselves if the concept of responsibility is to have any meaning at all. Our views and actions are all the product of our environment.
> Our views and actions are all the product of our environment.
And if that view is manipulated by people way more powerful than you...
I'm all for personal responsibility but we have laws against certain practices because companies can hack brains so well. You don't think states can do it just as well if not better?
There is strong support within Israel for the genocide of Palestinians.
Unfortunately religious zionism isn't limited to Jews. Christian evangelicals also support it, and they make up a huge percentage of voting americans (and even worse, elected officials).
What are you actually expecting an average Israeli who does not agree with this to do? This comment strikes me as wild considering the exact same thing is playing out in America right now, and a bunch of people are making up their minds about "Americans" and what they stand for.
The same has been true for Iran, only up until now (and probably still) we have always had a more nuanced discussion - its the Iranian government, not the people of Iran.
Come on, the government of many countries does not necessarily represent the people.
Israel is supposed to be a democratic state. If the average Israeli disagrees with this they can speak up. The only voices we are hearing now are those who support it's current activities. Those who oppose are fewer and quieter.
I'm also baffled by the suggestion that democracy truly represents a majority and the apparent belief that dissent is quickly processed and rectified by democracy. Which country do you think shows this is working well?
> What are you actually expecting an average Israeli who does not agree with this to do?
Funny you say this because you don’t have to look far for people saying that “Gazans deserve what’s happening” because the average Gazan should fight back against Hamas.
The same thing has been said generally about Muslims and Islamic terror organizations.
Well anyway, it is still crazy to me that somebody is making a decision about the entire population of a country based on the governments actions in 2025.
I would put myself in the timeframe of the Holocaust era. Germans were next to the concentration camps and they did nothing. Germans were conditioned to support nationalism. And they trusted the nationalist party (known as nazionale Party). The Germans had convinced themselves that the Jews were different people. (And the Jews had earned much infamy during the time when Germany was suffering economically.)
Today, we see Israelis who are taught to perceive Palestinians as enemies. They see the Palestinian flag during birthrights and are taught by the IDF to hate it. And they are also taught that the west bank is dangerous and they are not to go there. Then we see IDF operations in West Bank and we see silence. We know Gaza is in a plight caused by Israel and we see silence and ignorance. Israel is bad. Israelis are bad too. And the polls have shown that 80% wish for Gaza to be cleansed, 56% support the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel, 47% want the IDF to act according to the Biblical war against Jericho. That is effectively 47% want murder while 33% want expulsion (equivalent of the ghettos+concentration camps). The benefit of doubt is disappearing rapidly fast.
And the west has been supporting Israel for decades in this campaign. This is the second millenial crusade of Europe (aka the west).
This point of view whitewashes a lot of the history. Israel has been doing horrible things since its founding to Palestinians, starting with the Nakba in 1948 which was an ethnic cleaning campaign to create an ethno state. Many massacres occurred like in Deir Yassin in 1948 and continued with other massacres like in Kahn Younis in 1956 where they lined up more than 200 men over 15 and executed them against the wall.
With the continued persecution of Palestinians, whether its the illegal occupation of the west bank or the siege of Gaza which was essentially a concentration camp, that was "mowed" like grass every few years in terrorist bombing campaigns by Israel, its no surprise that organisations like Hamas, originally a humanitarian charity, exist.
Israelis want peace through domination, just like the French in Algeria. Be aware that Jews are not native to Palestine, except those that had been living there before the state was founded. They are living as colonialists on stolen land, and are continually denying the native Palestinians the right to return, which is part of the definition ethnic cleansing.
I say this as Jewish person originally born in Palestine (or Israel) and who had grandparents that survivide the Holocaust. Once I read about what really happened in 1948, that it was zionist terrorist militias that started the conflict and that Palestinians did not "simply leave", I became an anti zionist. I don't think Israel has the right to exist. People have the right to exist and they have the right to fight back against jewish supremacism.
> Be aware that Jews are not native to Palestine, except those that had been living there before the state was founded.
Not true, many Semitic Jews who fled from those lands due to persecution went to Europe and North Africa, that includes Ashkenazi and Sephardim Jews.
The difficulty I have with your statement is akin to denying a white, blue eyed aboriginal in Australia their heritage to the land just because one of their ancestors slept with a European colonialist - its fundamentally racist.
White skinned blue eyed Australian aboriginals exist.
Netanyahu, when addressing the troops, even said "Do not forget what Amalek has done to you", invoking the memory of the biblical commandment to genocide the Amalekites.
Some context first so my opinion isn't misconstrued as as leftist stereotype. This is within context of the behavior described in the article.
- I'm a Jew in USA, and served in the military for more than a decade.
- I used to get annoyed by the Palestinian protests I'd see in the years before this, and generally sided with Israel, and the operations its military performed in counter-Shia-militia operations etc in the region, and was outraged at the Oct 7 attacks.
Israel's operations as described in the article are clear-cut war crimes. The military and civilian leaders responsible for these ROE should face something similar to the Nuremberg trials. I am embarrassed for my country's support of Israel's operations.
This is large-scale, continued, intentional CIVCAS.
Hamas are not Shia, they're Sunni. And Shia is not some some inherently violent ideology as your usage of the word there implies. And, while I'm at it, you should know the human crimes in the Gaza strip long predate Oct 7. Chemical weapons, starvation, terror bombing, these are tactics that the IDF's deployed in short time I've been alive (21st century).
The commenter is probably referring to Hezbollah and Iran.
And yes, the IDF has been relying on abhorrent & violently escalatory tactics since at least 1982 (Lebanon invasion).
On that note, I recently picked up an excellent book (“Our American Israel”) that dives pretty deep into the US-Israel relationship, and spends a good chunk of time on how the invasion of Lebanon was received by the West.
There are definitely some parallels between 1982 and the ongoing Gaza genocide with regards to the use of violence. But the most salient point to me is that it is quite clear that Israel learned a ton on how to ensure its image in the West does not easily get tarnished going forward.
Yeah, I know the playbook - deflect and deny, etc.
100k dead, more injured, highest number of child casualties in any modern conflict, countless statements of genocidal intent at the highest levels. But population growth is the metric we need focus on at this point, because that’s the Hasbara talking point du jour.
Also, just to add, a lot of this generic population data just doesn't factor in the current military action at all, they just operate on the last known figures. It's a complete red herring to this discussion. No one knows exactly how many people are in Gaza right now. Israeli policy is actively obstructing people from finding out. I suspect (fear) the total death toll may be well above the ~100k figure.
Another POV is that when you distill everyone’s experiences, not just yours, into legitimate votes, people, on both sides of this conflict, choose violence. Does the discourse you participate in achieve your goals? No, it achieves the opposite.
What is this discourse? “Sharpen the fractal of demographics and opinions until you get some rare alignment between them, and you find a supposedly irrefutable and most valid position.” Can you see why winning Internet arguments and getting upvotes doesn’t translate to your goals?
Of course you should share these thoughts and forums like these should publish them. But as much as I hate the Intellectual Dark Web and its philosophies, which are as ridiculous as, “you can gain power by thinking about things differently,” I think they are right that popularity contests are not the end all be all of conflict resolution.
I love the Jewish community, so I don’t say this lightly, but I view Netanyahu actions as somewhat resembling Nazi Germany in one respect (though certainly not others). He may not believe Israeli Jews have a birthright to the whole world (rather they are trying to strengthen one nation’s borders), but there is no doubt in my mind they are indiscriminately cleansing a people out of existence. That is their aim, beyond simple deterrence or defense.
The October terror attack is not to be defended, but the response is disgusting behavior by the state of Israel. There’s nothing proportionate about this. Rather Israel sees this as an opportunity to strengthen its position and wipe out its enemies - and innocent men, women, and children.
In the United States, we talk about Israel as if it must be protected because it’s the Middle East’s only democracy. It is not a liberal democracy. It exists only to protect the rights of one type of people with one particular type of ethnicity. In America, we wouldn’t recognize this as a democracy.
For our part, it’s important to protect our own interests in the region and so yes, strange bedfellows. But given Netanyahu’s comfort with war crime, given Israel’s weak and distorted democratic institution, and given what nationalism can do to a country, we should be very careful to balance and diversify our interests.
Israel in another 10 years might not be recognizable. It’s cause for alarm.
> Israel in another 10 years might not be recognizable.
The strange thing is, this statement held true before October 7th. Hopefully not everyone has forgotten that there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets before the war, protesting what Netanyahu was doing to the Israeli government.
People ought to understand that this problem of innocent Gazans - often children - being fired upon by IDF soldiers isn't a new one, it predates the current food distribution operation.
An article from October in the NY Times detailing some well-documented atrocities ("44 health care workers saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza") was published as an opinion piece, in spite of the fact that it consisted of dozens of eyewitness accounts. [0][1]
The incomparable sway that Israel holds in American media and American politics prevents pressure to hold those responsible accountable on an international level. When there's enough pressure within Israel to demand accountability for something terrible (and that's rare enough, outside of their peace movement) the conclusion drawn is typically that the soldiers are just careless, but not acting with malice. [2] If there's a single instance of an IDF soldier being held accountable for a civilian killing in this conflict, someone could make me feel a little better by sharing it.
Children are children. That's why we respond with abject horror when you see them hungry and huddled, riddled with bullets. If you have to prepend a nationality to "child" to justify it, then I regret to inform you that you are a racist.
It doesn't matter whether it happens in Israeli-occupied territory or an American middle school. It's absolutely reprehensible. "stop killing children you dislike" or "stop targeting journalists" should not be a controversial demand in the 21st century. Certainly not to a modernized military.
The biggest problem with this isn’t the horror of the actual war crime. The far more serious concern are the lengths the government will go to avoid holding anyone accountable. That is so much worse because it unintentionally endorses future crimes and challenges the offenders to take ever more offensive actions without fear of consequences.
They can take out nuclear scientists thousands of kilometers away by either planting bombs in their cars in traffic or firing accurate munitions through their windows when they sleep.
Thousands of kilometers away.
The IDF can be highly sophisticated in their plans and methods when they want to.
I think the point is that if Israel can do pinpoint decapitation strikes anywhere in Iran they sure as hell can do so in Gaza, but they choose to bomb hospitals and flatten every single building in the Gaza Strip instead.
This. Israel demonstrably has the capability for precision warfare.
That they chose to level infrastructure across Gaza instead is indicative.
And it'd be real stretch to assume they did so even for military-economic reasons.
They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
To wit, the elimination of anything resembling a Palestinian state: politically, economically, and demographically.
Which is cynical and evil as fuck, given they're smart enough to realize they eventually either have to (a) kill every Palestinian or (b) make a deal.
Instead, they decided killing 50,000+ Palestinians was worth improving their negotiation position and kicking the can down the road.
I‘m sorry, but you’re comparing apples to bedrooms. Israel vs. Iran is a war/conflict between two proper countries‘ militaries - which means that both belligerents stick to certain agreed upon rules and military traditions, such as trying to separate the civilian from the military world/infrastructure. In lack of another word (haven’t slept, please forgive me for the choice of word), there’s “honor“ and a notion of equality and respect (somewhat) between the foes, even if Iran has declared it wants to wipe Israel off the map.
All of this does not apply to the conflict with Hamas. With them muddling the lines, it’s extremely hard to fight a “clean“ war. You’re between a rock and a hard place - either you lose but with your head held high and your moral compass intact, or you stoop to their level thereby slowly losing your values but win in the end. If that win is worth it or not, is heavily debated in the rest of the world, but only debated in the fringes of Israeli society. But no military expert is able to suggest a real alternative of fighting Hamas without inflicting heavy losses on one’s own army.
I find the committed war crimes abhorrent and wish they’d be heavily prosecuted at least.
Until corrective actions with criminal penalties occur incidents like these almost certainly continue with possible increases of frequency and severity. More importantly though when this becomes a matter of conduct and military discipline is that it will spread to other areas even outside Gaza.
This isn’t just a matter of vague speculation as there are historical cases outside of Israel on which to see how things like this develop and what the consequences are both for the victims and the soldiers. These historical accounts also indicate soldiers committing these sorts of actions become victims themselves with catastrophic mental health disorders.
The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
Israel got in trouble with ICJ court, because of quotes from top government officials. Government of Israel was very specific what they will do to Gaza! This was even full scale bombing started!
Trying to reinterpret this as a problem of "military discipline", and "soldiers are victim as well" is just another level of cynicism!
> The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
It's happened, many times. Usually this doesn't make front-page news, but soldiers that break the law are sometimes held accountable. Not nearly enough, and I think it should be far more publicized as a deterrent effect (the fact that it isn't is a pretty big indictment of the current government). But it's certainly not laughable.
Well, he is on trial. So he could be arrested. Prime Ministers have been arrested (and jailed!) before.
A part of what the Isareli opposition has been pushing for in the last few years has been removing Netanyahu from power and presumably jailing him because of the corruption charges.
For each of their "operations" on Gaza they usually had one or two soldiers in trouble for something like stealing and using a civilians credit card. When there were many more serious crimes like deliberately targeting the disabled.
Even ignoring primary crimes, under Israeli law, even incitement to genocide is punishable by death. But so many members of the political and media elite have made inciting statements, that the rubicon is crossed; the political class cannot allow any serious, independent consideration of war crimes to ever occur, because that would risk them all facing the firing squad. This in turn signals to individual soldiers that there will be no accountability, even in the absence of directives.
Regarding the risk to Israelis facing the firing squad, you do know that Israel only executed Eichmann (and one other person in a field court) since the founding of the country?
When it comes to the list of things that Israelis fear, being sentenced to a firing squad is very low down.
Fair enough, but I don't think that makes the incentive much different. If you are convicted of a crime punishable by death, your actual punishment is not likely to be trivial.
Government and regime can always change. Post socialist countries convinced border guards, for shooting unarmed civilians, who were trying to escape across country borders. That was a crime even under socialist laws.
If Israel had regime change, new regime and majority of voters would be pro Arab... New government could actually enforce existing laws!
Where I hope this comes back, after the conflict and a new Israel government, is human culpability for automated systems.
AI being whitewashing for IP is disruptive and troubling.
It being whitewashing for war crimes is a much more serious problem.
If Israel/IDF put in place a automated system that gave effectively caused war crimes to be committed, some humans in positions of power need to be held responsible and face consequences.
The world should not allow cases where (a) it's undisputed that war crimes occurred but (b) authority was interwoven in an automated system in such a way that humans escape consequences.
Sadly, it'll probably take the fall of right-wing Israeli and current Russian governments to have a hope of passing through.
> even incitement to genocide is punishable by death
For that to happen, the government, and the overall population, would need to consider what's being done in Gaza and on the West Bank to actually be a genocide. I don't think popular support for that actually exists in Israel. Last time I checked, most of the population supported the annexation of Gaza and the forced eviction of the local population to neighboring countries.
I don't think I'll live to see a two-state solution.
There isn't popular support for it when you factor in the Israeli-Palestian but in opinion polling it has now gone beyond 50% among the rest of the Israeli population.
You may be missing a legal wrinkle: the crime of incitement usually does not require the underlying primary crime to actually occur. (Admittedly I'm not sure if that is the definition in Israel, but they inherited a lot of British law so it is likely). So this does not require the Israeli population to accept that this was a genocide, only that some war crimes occurred and that they should be prosecuted. Right now they are not there, but the point is that the government has an incentive to keep the population in that state.
Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully, without snark or flamebait? It's not hard if you choose to, and the site guidelines ask people to do so, regardless of how charged or divisive the topic is.
Ok. The parent is the same kind of rhetorical question, whose counter-argument is so evident that it shouldn’t have existed, and it’s disappointing that one side gets the right of way on HN and the other is downvoted, one camp is making use of flaws in your rules to win without merit, aka bullying.
Yes, the parent was the same kind of question; in fact I almost included that observation in my reply to you. However, it's all a matter of degree, and your comment was significantly worse in the degree of snark and flamebait that you were posting. That's why I replied to you and not the other comment. It had nothing to do with which side either of you are on, although I understand how it ends up feeling that way. (I've posted quite a bit about that elsewhere in this thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403947.)
Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions? Let’s not pretend that this is just some random soldiers doing this, this is exactly what the Israeli government wants.
Soldiers shooting at civilians is a war crime. It does not matter what the intentions of the soldiers are. It doesn’t even matter if the civilians are also armed up until the point they display violent intent according to a common person standard. Shooting at a crowd is a crime.
That said the soldiers pulling the trigger are committing crimes. These are patently illegal actions to a common person standard which eliminates any defense of following military orders. That being said the soldiers, at least, are committing crimes. Accountability starts at the source of the crime.
If the government is ordering these actions then those are illegal orders, according to international standards of military conduct. The soldiers on the ground must ignore those orders on the basis of patently illegal conduct according to a common person standard and the officials facilitating those orders can be investigated for issuing war crimes.
NATO was conducting defensive operations against Yugoslavia around that time. It isn't clear that war crimes can be committed so easily by US allies. It'd be nice if they can be recognised though.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding here. War crimes are not judged by what a diligent investigation after the fact might find. It hinges on the information and judgement by those acting in the moment. You are a soldier told these armed people a click out are the insurgent group you are fighting? Of course you can engage them. And there is a similar lenient standard applied to whoever got that information in the first place. War by any other standard of course would be entirely unworkable.
Because "the govahment" is not a singular entity. In functioning democracies, by popular definition in large parts of the field, legislative and executive powers are kept separated from the judicial powers. So the executive power can not interfere with being held accountable. That's not fullt implemented everywhere, but that is the general idea how it is supposed to work.
Well, the civilian leadership is obviously in favour of massacring civilians, the military leadership orders civilians to be massacred, and the soldiers on the ground revel in the opportunity to massacre civilians. And the courts are happy to allow the massacre of civilians.
In functioning democracies in general, sure, you have to be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush. But in the specific case of Israel in 2015, it's not realistic to argue that the government isn't a single entity, so some parts of it may not be responsible (or even in favour of) crimes against humanity.
> Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions?
Because that is what keeps the ICC off of their backs. The ICC only has authority to step in in cases where national jurisdiction is unable or unwilling to prevent and prosecute war crimes.
Well, there is actually a reasonable reason. Typically you'd want the government to hold people accountable so you could have the thin veneer of operating by the rules of warfare and not committing war crimes. That's usually been a popular strategy of the US for when someone goes a little too far (or gets caught).
As far as I can tell Israel doesn't particularly care for even looking like it's trying to behave responsibly. I don't think they've held anyone responsible for even some of the most obvious war crimes we have evidence of being committed.
It's even worse: Awful lot of people die for the careers of politicians and it's not limited to Israel. If someone needs political tension for weathering a scandal or economic turmoil, it can be created artificially by killing certain people and they do it all the time.
I have distaste for Trump but something I appreciate about him is his abilities to stage a theatre with his "fake" bombings. The more mainstream politicians have much more sociopathic tendencies.
If you think about it, %100 of modern wars are about who is going to be the administrator and doesn't feel like can win an election. We live in a world of abundance, there's no reason for a group of people to kill other group for their resources. If it wasn't for the careers of some people with huge egos all this can be sorted out through civil matters. After the wars it gets sorted out anyway, we don't see mass exterminations anymore.
As a westerner, I feel ashamed that my country is Isreal's ally. It makes me guilty by association because the western world is letting Israel commit thoses atrocities.
Worse, we are helping them when they need it, and closing our eyes when they don't want us to watch.
what about the last two years of video evidence of all the other war crimes?
The bodies of burnt children. The reports of doctors who document multiple sniper rounds found in the bodies of small children and toddlers?
I've been seeing reports about internet connectivity being very touch and go in Gaza the last few weeks.
Is it not unreasonable to think, those who are starving the most might not have internet/electricity to charge a device/care to document when they're starving?
Some of it may be real but you really need to pay attention about who posted it originally, who reposted it etc, even people you wouldn't expect sometimes retweeted recycled Syrian footage...
There is plenty of reason to disbelieve the testimony was reported accurately.
Haaretz’s English edition claims that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza, but the original Hebrew version? It states they were told to fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites. This represents a significant difference in intent, legality, and moral implications
When Netanyahu called the Palestinians Amalek when speaking to the military after October 7th, why do you think he did that? Amalek, the people the Jewish people were commanded to destroy in the Torah?
Why do you think Israel initially funded Hamas? Why would they want these conditions to occur? What must the true goals of the Israeli state be for them to see Hamas as useful?
Or let's go back to the founding of Israel...
Do you know about the Dalet Plan, put forth by Ben-Gurion in the 1948 war:
"The plan's tactics involved laying siege to Palestinian Arab villages, bombing neighbourhoods of cities, forced expulsion of their inhabitants, and setting fields and houses on fire and detonating TNT in the rubble to prevent any return."
Or even its precedent, the 1937 Avnir plan, conceived a decade before the 1948 war and before World War 2 (!):
"In the summer of 1937, the commander of their forces in the Tel Aviv area, Elimelech Slikowitz (nicknamed Avnir) received an order from Ben-Gurion, according to the official history of the Haganah. Ben-Gurion, anticipating an eventual British withdrawal from the country after the Peel Report, asked Avnir to prepare a plan for the military conquest of the whole of Palestine. This Avnir Plan provided a blueprint for future plans. The blueprint was refined in subsequent adjustments (A, B, C) before emerging in its final form over a decade later as Plan Dalet."
Conquest, genocide and ethnic cleansing has been the goal from the beginning and continues to be.
Let's close with some quotes by Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Smotrich, who administers most of the West Bank:
"Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned."
"My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to move around on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than the right of movement of the Arabs."
"I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it."
“Let’s make a decision to end Gaza once and for all"
"The state of Israel is first and foremost Jewish and only then democratic and a judge in a Jewish state must, first of all, consider the State’s Jewish values. Evicting Jews from any settlement is contrary to the decree of the Torah and to Jewish law. It harms the Jewish values of the state and therefore it is not hypocrisy to say that the expulsion of Jews from their homes harms the Jewish value of the state and the expulsion of an enemy from his home is something completely different."
Referring to the annexation of the West Bank: "[I am] In favor of sovereignty, but not in a way that adds hundreds of thousands of enemies. A program that encourages emigration is better..."
Israel has been harming civilians intentionally for a long time, it was built on it, and that is its ultimate goal.
We already knew this was happening from testimony from Gazans, it was obvious that the new US-Israeli monopolized "aid" organization was running the Hunger Games, with dozens killed by Israelis (+ US contractors) every time there was a distribution day, and horrific pictures and video of it. Entirely predictable too when the genocidaires are controlling the aid. It is good there is now proof from the inside as well.
> ...the new US-Israeli monopolized "aid" organization was running the Hunger Games, with dozens killed by Israelis (+ US contractors) every time there was a distribution day ... the genocidaires are controlling the aid.
It was apparently 2 VCs and not the military that came up with GHF (and if I recall, there even was a brief flare up between the ruling Cabinet and the Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, who did not want the IDF to be responsible for aid).
Even though the early planning was led by the Israeli military, two Israeli technology investors played an influential role in shaping discussions as they progressed, according to six Israeli and American individuals familiar with the GHF’s origins. One was Liran Tancman, an entrepreneur and reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution hubs to vet Palestinian civilians. Another was Michael Eisenberg, an American Israeli venture capitalist who argued that existing U.N. aid distribution networks were sustaining Hamas and needed to be overhauled.
> One was Liran Tancman, an entrepreneur and reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution hubs to vet Palestinian civilians.
Gives the feeling of the serial number tattoos the Germans used, with tech "fixing" the bad optics of doing that, but the biometric ID serves as one.
> He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light".
The Israeli tradition of giving their Gaza operations names of children's games also continues, after "Operation Cast Lead".
(Not sure if they wanted to make a reference to Squid Games as well...)
This isn't ambiguous. This is really clear evidence of (at minimum) an atrocious and continuing war crime with full intentionality. Realistically, it is more likely explicitly genocidal in intent.
After moderate partners abandoned Netanyahu, his only source of support was more right-wing partners, which steadily pushed government policy to the ultra-right.
It's not ironic at all, it's democracy working as intended.
It might superficially appear ironic because us in the west confuse being a democracy with being moderate. But that's not the case if a large fraction of your population are religious fundamentalists, which goes to my point. In Israel, the problem isn't just the government, it's also the culture of the majority of the population.
Considering ~50% of the Knesset is in opposition, I don't think it's proof that a politically large fraction of Israeli society is religiously fundamentalist.
It's non-negligible, but the reasons ultra-right parties like Otzma Yehudit [0] have a voice in politics has more to do with election calculus by Netanyahu.
The ideal 2+ party parliamentary system seems to be >2 but <6.
Below that, you get bad outcomes (US). Above that, you get bad outcomes (Israel, India).
Somewhere in the middle, it forces the right amount of coerced cooperation... most of the time (Germany).
> Haaretz’s English edition claims that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza, but the original Hebrew version? It states they were told to fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites. This represents a significant difference in intent, legality, and moral implications.
> Once again, we are faced with the suggestion that not only are the IDF murderous maniacs, but they also have the worst aim on the planet. The monstrous IDF are such terrible shots that they fire heavy machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers at crowds of tens of thousands, yet manage to wound no more than 1 to 5 Gazans at a time.
The following quote seems consistent with much of the journalism I’ve read about the conflict for years. It makes you become a bit cynical of the news outlets when you repeatedly see things like this https://x.com/washingtonpost/status/1929961283593367559 Peoples first impressions often last the longest.
> Later, Haaretz quotes an officer saying the intent behind the live fire was crowd control, not carnage. However, it buries this clarification so deeply that it becomes effectively irrelevant. The reader has already been presented with the moral horror headline, and that’s what will endure.
> The author admits they don’t know who is shooting at civilians near these aid distribution centres. Still, rather than consider the possibility that, for example, Hamas might be involved, the article shifts with the loaded line:
“Fire at unarmed crowds” and “fire towards crowds” is the same thing, what sort of semantic ping pong is this? Also propaganda =/= bad. All media is propaganda, in some languages the word “propaganda” has the same semantic meaning as the English word “advertisement”. This comment is war crime apologia.
Sure there is, but we’re not talking about firing “warning shots” at armed combatants, we’re talking about unarmed civilians, most of whom are minors. If you are sympathetic to the idea that these aid sites need to be heavily guarded, then you need to ask yourself why this level of force is necessary, because the explanation the IDF and Israeli officials are giving makes no sense. Can you imagine if we fired “warning shots” towards the homeless for lining up too early for the food bank?
The Hebrew version had also distanced itself from what would be considered Journalism. But with no real field reporting from Gaza, that's the info you can get, and you have to guesstimate the reality from there.
One could make the argument that it's happening right now. Russia+North Korea, Iran, Hamas, they are all intertwined. And then on the other side you could say Ukraine, US, Israel.
Thought experiment: if the Israel/Gaza conflict didn't pop off, would the US presidency be the same right now? How did that change affect the Russia/Ukraine conflict? Etc.
Israel can't even sustain a hot war with Iran, with US backing, despite assassinating dozens of Iranian top brass. China represents 10-20 Irans.
China (and Turkey, Arab states) is more or less content to sit and watch USA destroy itself domestically and internationally over the failed Zionist project. "Do nothing, win."
The guidelines of HN, to be kind and curious in the comments, are difficult to follow in this case. Outrage doesn't bring anything either, but a polite and curious discussion is impossible. The lack of reflection in the western world on this issue is seriously disturbing.
I hear you and I agree that there are topics which conventional politeness cannot respond to adequately, and that this is one of those topics.
If you take those words "kind" and "curious" in a large sense—larger than usual—I think there's enough room there to talk about even this topic without breaking the guidelines.
How to do this? That is something we have to work out together. You're certainly right that it's difficult.
From a moderation point of view, I can tell you that just avoiding garden-variety flamewar and internet tropes already gets us a lot of the way there. You'd be surprised at how many users who think they're taking a grand moral stand against conventional politeness are simply repeating those. Conventional impoliteness isn't any answer either.
Thanks. I was not critical, especially not of the moderation, just tried to sum up what I think about it, and other than meaningless outrage there was nothing there. And yet there is no point in that because that's just letting off steam. I don't think it should be removed either.
dang, I think you’re getting this badly wrong - there’s nothing intellectually curious happening on this thread, it’s just a hate-fest.
(Don’t feel obliged to reply as I know you’re very busy. I just wanted to give some feedback and it appears flagging is being disregarded for this submission)
(NB: People downvoting this - I’m just giving my opinion to dang in a way that doesn’t waste his time, because I felt I had to say something given a lot of what I was reading)
I'm mostly just seeing people discuss what Israel's military is doing, with people on both sides adding historical context. It's sure as hell not a "hate-fest."
There’s literally “We need to kill all the Jews” posted by FreePalestine12. If what’s being left visible is anything to go by then what’s being deleted must be horrendous.
This thread is completely outside HNs norms. I get people have really strong feelings about I/P but this type of submission isn’t what HNs is for, at least as I understood it.
I don't agree that it's off topic, nor that HN would be better if we suppressed it and acted like this isn't happening. We're trying for a global optimum*, and the most important part of that is not to settle for local optima, such as not discussing difficult things.
I've posted about this quite a bit, since it inevitably comes up every time this topic appears on HN's front page. Here's another part of the current thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403458.
Maybe you should reconsider whether suppressing it would be better. The comments are the usual cesspool that can be found everywhere else. An obvious tell is the incessant attempt at redefining the word genocide.
Funnily enough I just finished responding to someone who makes the opposite complaint about us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403907. Notice that word "always", which both of you use. Interesting, no?
People with strong passions on a topic always feel like the moderators are against them. (As you see, I'm not immune to "always" perceptions either!)
I wish we could do something about that—I don't enjoy having so many people, from all sides of every divisive topic, feeling like we're against them when we're not. However, after years of observing this and thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that it's inevitable. The cognitive bias underlying it is just ironclad. We all share this bias, which is why your complaint and the complaint of someone on the opposite side are basically the same.
It's true that HN has hosted several major threads about Israel/Gaza, but it's also true that many (perhaps a hundred times as many) submissions on the topic have ended up flagged and we haven't turned off the flags. I don't see an "always" in there.
As for Saturdays—that factor is so far from affecting how we moderate HN that I had to puzzle for a bit over what you might mean. Nor does this discussion strike me as one-sided. People wouldn't be disagreeing with each other if it were.
I would be very surprised if the majority, or even a significant fraction, of those who are on the "Israel" side were observing Jews. Jews are probably a minority of Israel-supporting commenters, and observing Jews are, in my experience, a minority of these Jews.
That's a pretty serious accusation, and I don't think you can actually back that up with anything.
Online, pretty much any time Israel is discussed, the majority of commenters (or articles) are anti-Israel. Regardless of why you think that is, it's just a fact. You can't blame dang for that.
I don't blame him for the content I blame him for letting it stay up because it's off topic and not in the spirit of HN yet he allows them to stay up, for the reasons above.
You don't decide what's on topic or the spirit of HN. If anyone does it's Deng, who you're arguing with. Sorry you feel the need to decide what adults can talk about.
I've very well aware who Dang is (clearly you don't, at least write his name correctly). You have a lot of venues to vent on reddit, facebook, twitter etc.
Clearly Dang is biased and therefore he bends the guidelines:
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Maybe you should have a bit more intellectual humility. "Clearly Dang is biased" (emphasis mine)? You might be right, you might be wrong, but I for sure don't think you can be certain of dang's motive here, especially considering lots of people on the "other side" of this issue feel he's biased against them!
I believe the majority of stories are voted on, and flagged, by the community. If the community decides these are stories worth discussing, I think they fit within the guidelines of HN. Stories about the Russia/Ukraine war also appear. So do stories about US politics. In all of these threads some people complain that they're off-scope, but apparently enough of the community wants to talk about them that they sometimes get upvoted.
Now they are being colonized by Morocco. They protested against Spanish domination and now they’ve been deported and oppressed by an autocratic regime.
Spain is still unearthing the dead from its 1936 civil war.
It suffers such a profound trauma that it prevents it from having a capable army.
It has more than eight conflicting national sentiments.
It plunders its citizens with taxes, prevents them from defending themselves with weapons, and violates their most fundamental rights and freedoms in unimaginable ways.
Calling this a circus is unfair, but that's not the focus of the conversation.
I’m not going to claim a side in this, but I do have a question to pose. When you have two ideologies which are so diametrically opposed to each other that they cannot coexist in the same space at the same time, what is the alternative outcome? One must destroy the other for peace to exist - this is the nature of war. To think that there is some world where everyone comes away from this with a handshake and an agreement is just naive.
> two ideologies which are so diametrically opposed to each other that they cannot coexist
Ideologies aren't platonic solids. They must be constantly refurbished in the minds of the avowed. Every moment of every day informs them—reinforces or depletes them. Changes their character.
It's guaranteed that these minds will, eventually, change. Who survives to bare this change remains to be seen.
Keep in mind, also, that Israel vs. Gaza is in some ways just a proxy war between US/Europe and Iran/Russia who support Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Ideological differences, frankly, are only a surface patina on the same old economic games.
Lastly, consider a third framing: that Israel/Gaza is only the hottest segment of a conflict that encircles the globe: the border between imperial powers and colonized peoples, like US/Mexico etc. Borders, passports, and citizenship are a worldwide system of privileges and protections that Westphalian Nationstates collude to maintain.
I'm not sure what ideologies you refer to. Islam and Judaism? Not really relevant to the discussion, I don't think.
Tell that to the victims of gleeful brutality under the guidance of fundamentalist ideology, like that engrained in Islamist governance and extremist militant groups.
Your post reads like the come-down from intellectual pill-popping. Your attempt to dilute a serious problem in the world to "patinas" and reduce the problem to imperial vs colonized peoples, sounds like a manifesto from the lawns of a university activist encampment.
Consider the framing, you ask. I considered it and reject it, The subjugation of "infidels" under expansionist oppressive religious groups with the intent to bring "peace" is an imperialism all of its own, but much worse. Peace... at the cost of freedom, autonomy, expression, equality.
>Israel wouldn't attack Gaza if the terrorists who run that place didn't have a constitutional ambition to destroy Israel.
Really? The > 750,000 Palestinians pushed out of their homes in 1948, when "Israelis" showed up for the first time, backed up by guns, were Hamas? News to me.
We should incorporate a checklist/Q&A into the comments section when these articles come up. The outrage is amusing at best and people tripping over themselves to excuse their embarrassment of their country is the most uninvolved and keyboard warrior sort of activism there is. Right up there with excusing themselves that they’re Jews. Really, you can do more if you care that much about it.
The Q&A is simple: If you’re going to be outraged about Israel for the 100th time, are you going to finally do something about it?
HN should provide a way to filter comments based on answer to the above.
What should or can we do about it? The US government is not representing the will of its citizens. Contacting my legislative representative isn't likely to accomplish anything to influence Trump continuing to directly facilitate and support genocide and other war crimes.
I also still need to work almost every day to pay the bills and care for my family, otherwise I'd be happy to go camp out and peacefully protest in support of change on the daily. What's the best option for the majority who share my situation? Because I do care a lot, and feel stuck.
Why though, what does it achieve? Do they want to make sure that there will be terrorists / freedom fighters in the future so that they have a reason not to negotiate? Because they expect to "win" if violence continues?
From Israel's perspective, Palestinians are a problem. Long term, they have a few options:
1) Give them their own state. This is difficult for quite many reasons, and Israel (by which I mean the current government) doesn't want that
2) Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation, and let them participate in the regular political processes. The current government certainly doesn't want that, and I have no idea what part of the Palestinians would want that.
3) Continue to treat them as sub-human, and deal with the consequences of the hatred that fosters. That seems to have been the "strategy" before October last year.
4) Try to exterminate or exile them, or at least decimating them to such an extend that the problem becomes smaller.
Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.
>Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation
As the Palestinians are the majority, the Jewish Israelis would become a minority in terms of citizens and votes. This is very much akin to Apartheid South Africa, where a minority ethnic group rules over the rest of the population.
The White minority in South Africa were around 15% of the population, while Jews and Palestinians in Israel & Palestine seem to be much more around a 50%-50% split.
Ongoing war has been a crucial component of the current government's re-election campaigns for decades, so any option that ends the war is a non-starter.
I fear their plan is to expand military operations into additional countries until they can get back into a pseudo-stalemate scenario. That'd explain the bombings in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
Many of the Zionists viewed the Holocaust as teaching that the Jewish people need a state of their own, no matter what it takes or how many people they have to kill. They viewed the European Jews who had died in the Holocaust as weak, passive cowards who had "allowed" the Holocaust to happen, and went like sheep to their slaughter (ignoring the Warsaw Uprising, and all of the underground Jewish resistance movements). I think Israel's current actions reflect this viewpoint.
I think it's the contrary. "Never again" means by any means necessary we will prevent another genocide of our people, even if it means committing genocide unto others. That much has become clear.
I don't think there's much overlapping between those who experienced the holocaust and whoever is in charge in Israel right now.
Speaking for experience from some relatives, the immigration laws for people of jewish faith and ancestry were nigh insurmountable if you came from african, arab or middle east countries and pretty much just nominal even in recent times for those who had even a remote connection but came from the US and the UK.
I have the feeling they are jewish the same way Henry IV was a Catholic when he said "Paris is well worth a Mass".
> Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.
The Israeli govt and people would be very supportive of (2). After all, there are more Arabs living in Israel than in Palestine. The Palestineans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly reject this option.
Or exile is probably the key word. There are more historical examples of exoduses than genocides.
The problem with understanding this situation is that it probably has more to do with Israel's internal politics than what the situation looks like on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere. Just a quick read from the wikipedia page should give an idea just how corrupt the situation really is.
There's also the fact that Palestinians aren't a homogenous group in any sense of the word. That makes it hard for them to unite under any political flag. It also doesn't help that the borders are all closed, from both sides, and no neighboring country are willing to accept them.
From the outside the situation certainly looks very bleak.
> Continue to treat them as sub-human, and deal with the consequences of the hatred that fosters. That seems to have been the "strategy" before October last year.
This is a pretty big claim, and I highly disagree with it. I didn't particularly like Israeli policy towards Palestinians for the last 15 years, but they were certainly not treated as "sub-human". Gazans, specifically, were governed by Hamas, which had a lot more say in how the average Gazan was reacted than ISrael did.
> I didn't particularly like Israeli policy towards Palestinians for the last 15 years, but they were certainly not treated as "sub-human".
Garbage. Gaza had its only airport bombed to oblivion 20 years ago and was told any attempt to repair it would result in the same. Its port has been blockaded by the Israeli navy for 15 years. Its only land exits have been heavily locked down.
Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack, or teens throwing stones. They’ve even turned off water for days too.
That’s treating people as subhuman, imprison them and do things like that to them for decades.
The Gazan government is a declared enemy of Israel, wanting its destruction. It has used hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to build its militant group to fight Israel.
Given the circumstances, Gaza's neighbors blockade it to keep it from building an even bigger fighting force.
> Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack,
You mean, when occasionally Hamas will try to kill random Israeli civilians using rocket fire? Which is basically a declaration of war and causes Israel to fight back?
> or teens throwing stones.
I don't think that's actually true.
> That’s treating people as subhuman,
Israel is treating Hamas-controlled Gaza as a hostile enemy that is intent on destroying it. Given that Hamas, even under the blockade and with all the restrictions in place, still managed to invade Israel and kill a thousand citizens, while kidnapping and holding hostage 250 civilians, and still, a year and a half later, is holding these people hostage and torturing them daily... given that, I think it's hard to say blockading them was a bad idea.
If you think the blockade is the reason for their actions, then you're quite simply wrong - they were founded many years before and always had the same goal of destroying Israel, including working hard against the peace process that was forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority.
And when allied countries got too uneasy about them just blocking all aid trucks at the border, they set up their own aid organization to trickle out nominal amounts of food while they take pot shots at people desperate enough to show up: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74ne108e4vo
They didn't just make this up as they go, presumably the plans have been sitting around for a long time waiting for a suitable moment.
1. You definitely can kill 2.1 million people by bombing them. It's actually way easier than doing it with a gun.
2. If you decide to do it with a gun, and you end up killing tens when tens of thousands are gathering for food, you're aiming terribly.
3. There is enough proof of Hamas using hospital facilities as headquarters.
4. Instead of getting food into Gaza (paid partly by Israel) only to get people to gather and then shoot tens of them every day, Israel could have just not let food in.
In other words, none of this makes sense. There's a war. Yes, Israel is committing terrible crimes. No, it's not because they aim to kill everyone, it's because they really stopped caring about killing civilians. It's horrific and is illegal.
There is actually one party in this conflict that has deliberately said it's aiming to kill civilians, and that's Hamas. I have no idea about your personal opinion, but I suspect that many of the people who are shouting "genocide!" would have been very quiet if the Jews were the ones being slaughtered, and I have absolutely no doubt that if only Hamas had the power, it would have committed way more serious crimes than the IDF ever committed.
> You definitely can kill 2.1 million people by bombing them. It's actually way easier than doing it with a gun
Only if you have enough bombs, which they need to constantly purchase from the US using aid money given to them by the US.
They don't have the stockpiles to eradicate without using their (not so) secret nukes. If they were to do that, there'd be a lot worse follow on effects for Israel. If they simply trickle the deaths over time, people get tired of the horror and need to look away for their own sanity.
Genuinely wondering what terrible effects would there be for Israel if they used nukes? Not morally, internationally. IMO it's perhaps one of the few conflicts in the world where one side could theoretically use nuclear weapons and essentially no one will shoot back. "Trickle the deaths over time" doesn't make any sense - there are probably more births in Gaza than deaths now, and that's not including the general Palestinian population.
No one will shoot back now. But it is a signal to other countries that using nukes might not be that bad. Even other banned chemical and biological weapons. So either there is complete chaos or the whole world will have to make sure Israel can not profit from this action.
Well officially Israel doesn't have nukes. They are widely believed to have them ofc but that's something they have to consider. Breaking the ambiguity by using them could spark a lot of 'we told you they were super dangerous' responses(with action) possibly. You might be right tho.
My point was that the comment I was commenting on was false, and that many people who express that sentiment wouldn't be expressing it if the powers were flipped. I'm personally very glad that the powers aren't flipped because I think that if Hamas had F-16s there would many more deaths.
Do you really genuinely believe that typical american liberal types would ignore a genocide committed against Jewish people by anyone, particularly arabs? In the American liberal mind "genocide" is, essentially, synonymous with The Holocaust, and I think your average liberal is, if anything, sensitive to Jewish discrimination, over and above random people out there in the world. There are definitely anti-semetic Americans and they should be launched into the sun, but I think your sense that people wouldn't care if Jews were being killed in the tens of thousands is extremely off point.
I'm sorry, I live in Europe and I was referring more to the kind of protests and protesters I see around me. The aren't many liberal Americans there. I completely agree that the situation could be different elsewhere.
Jewish groups have been supporting those protests in the US, Europe and Israel.
I have no idea what crowd composition at European protests looks like, but the vast majority of the people upset about the ongoing genocide are not antisemetic.
There is a propaganda campaign in the US trying to conflate being against genocide with being antisemetic. I'm sure similar tactics are being used in Europe.
I am myself supporting many of these protests, and it's exactly from this perspective that I say that many of them are antisemitic. But this is a bit of a useless discussion because neither you nor I can bring any evidence into how antisemitic they are, or how and if they would react if (or when) Palestinians are slaughtering Jews.
If you think it's nonsense, try to go into a anti-war protest with a t-shirt saying that Jews too should be able to live in Middle East. If this thought makes you slightly concerned, you got my point.
Where do you live in Europe that you believe those opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza would support a genocide of Jewish people anywhere? Because that is an outrageously delusional view.
I don't think that my exact location is very relevant here, but I urge you to ask protesters around you how they see "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" turning into reality, and let me know what happens with the Jews according to their plans.
If the Israeli administration could get away with fire bombing the strip, it'd have done so a long time ago. The whole world is screaming at them to stop the genocide and you think it's them just not "caring about civilians" that's responsible for this. There's no war in Gaza, there's only a genocide. A holocaust.
I'm not Arab, I'm not Muslim. I've never met a Jewish person. I've no reason to have any prejudice against people of Jewish heritage or ethnicity. But it's still a genocide by any definitions of the word. A lot of Jewish people even agree with this. And the reason that you and most Israeli people seem to struggle to grasp it is because they've been drinking on this exact extremist rhetoric that the "other" side only wants to see them slaughtered. By the same measure, you're saying Hamas can justify it's actions since there will always be ultra-Zionist factions of Israeli societies that wants to see Palestinians slaughtered. I implore you to wake up to what is being done in the name of your people.
I am an Arab Jew, and I actually have many friends in Gaza. I don't disagree about the usage of the words Genocide, though I think the terms is a little too easy to apply. I think a Holocaust is a completely different thing. There are Palestinians in the Israeli parliament, in the Supreme Court. No one is gathering Palestinians in gas chambers, and in general the Palestinian population only grew since the establishment of Israel. If there were more Jews in Europe after WW2 than before it, no one would remember it as a Holocaust.
There is war in Gaza in the simple sense that rockets from Gaza still shoot into Israel, that Israeli hostages are still being held, and that Hamas itself (the elected goverenement) says it would attack again. It's a very unbalanced conflict, and in it terrible crimes are committed that you can call genocidal. But Jews in the ghettos weren't bombing Berlin - not during WW2 and not after it.
That's an interpretation of events that I've heard from a lot of Israeli folks that are in some way horrified what's happening in Gaza. I think it's very naive and I don't even think most folks saying this believe in it themselves. What actions from the IDF, what imbalance of power, what civilian casualty rates will you need to see to believe that it's no longer a war? Are you really waiting for the actual mass starvation to take place before accept there's intent? Does it have to be gas chambers? Does the death toll have to pass 1 million? 6 million? Do you really think that the Israeli government wants to brings the hostages back? What do you think would happen after they did bring them back? Will you rescind your support then?
Jews in the Ghetto didn't get the chance to shoot rockets at Berlin but had they been able to fight back, I'd have given them the same understanding that I currently extends to Palestinians that grew up in the concentration camp that is Gaza. Hamas is the direct results of Israeli policies of the past decades. Even if the IDF manages to somehow invent some purity test for Gazans that it can use to confirm there are no longer any Hamas members left and it finally declares it's operations concluded, you'll have people shooting rockets at Israel if they keep their policies with the Gaza strip and the West Bank. But long term solutions come later, right now, Israelis need to wake up and say no to what is unfolding in the name of their security.
I will stop thinking that this conflict is a war when there will be a side in it that doesn't have the motivation to take over all the land, and acts towards it by attempting to kill the other. As long as there are two parties that are constantly trying to kill each other, I call that a war. As I wrote elsewhere - that doesn't mean I disagree with the idea that genocidal actions are being taken during this war.
Your comment about Jews in Ghetto is wrong at every possible level. Jews were killed in the Holocaust _without_ a conflict, _without_ attempting to kill Germans, _without_ fighting with anyone over the land and _without_ having any aspirations to control the other. That is an example of a situation where there is no war, and no, it has nothing to do with the situation between Israelis and Palestinians.
Stop telling lies about Gaza conflict being "war". Israeli military has absolute superiority over Palestinians. What it is is a genocidal campaign meant to wipe them off the face of the Earth.
Also, stop using the Holocaust as a propaganda tool. My grandfather happened to be a Buchenwald concentration camp survival. It didn't give him or anybody else any right to violate Geneva convention.
First, I don't recall you set the rules for discussion here. Now, to your points:
1. Genocidal actions can take place in a war, and no definition of a war ever said that the parties have to be of equal strength. Every war that was ever won by one side or another had some sort of power supremacy. Go read the legal definition for genocide and you'll learn that the question of imbalance of power plays absolutely no role in it.
2. I haven't used it as a propaganda tool, and in fact it wasn't me who brought it up at all. I was only commenting that the current situation in Gaza is not comparable to the Holocaust, and I fully stand behind it. To make it clear, I am very happy that it isn't comparable, and I wouldn't want to see any Palestinian suffering like my ancestors did. Not once in my life have I used it to justify crimes committed by Jews, so please learn to read before commenting on my posts. If anything, I always believed that what Jews went through should serve as a reminder for us to never allow things like that from happening again, and I still see the Holocaust as perhaps one of the main driving forces in my opposition to this war.
Going through your criteria in order: Of course they defended themselves, including attempts to kill Nazis. They also attempted to keep their homes, and certainly would have rather Germany have different leadership
Does that somehow mean the concentration camps were a "war"?
I suspect that it's you who have undergone deep mental conditioning if you think that I am justifying this war. One can hold a complex opinion, and nowhere have I said that I think this war is justified.
Not only I do not belittler their suffering, I personally helped some of them out. I also ran an organization that provided thousands of Gazan with electricity, and I was arrested by the Israeli police when encouraging Palestinians in Israel to vote. At the same time I have family members who were killed (and kidnapped) on the first day of this war. Life isn't black and white.
I am completely OK with being conditioned against siding with a 20 month long genocidal onslaught committed by an apartheid ethnostate against a blockaded territory with no sovereignty and no actual defenses of its own.
I completely agree that life isn’t always black and white. But right now it is, just like it was in countless other situations in the past. You can think it’s “complicated” all you like, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against such a framing, which is where the conditioning comes into the picture.
It is great that you volunteered in Gaza, but it’s also tragic that you fail to see what is happening even after directly interacting with Gazans.
Some day in the future, when free Palestinians can build museums and monuments and make movies to mourn those lost in this genocide, everyone will always have been against this.
Netanyahu has privately expressed preference for terrorist Hamas over political Fatah, and Israel has propped up those terrorist groups in the past (this is well documented not a conspiracy theory).
Why? Because Netanyahu and a good chunk of the Israeli population want the Palestinians to cease to exist and its territory to be part of Israel. An opponent that wants to achieve its goals through political action and appeals to the international community meant that there was a risk of Israel being dragged into a two-state commitment. A terrorist group attacking civilians gives those hardliners a perpetual excuse to go to war.
In short: the answer is yes, that appears to be precisely the point: to prevent any possibility of peaceful reconciliation and drive the Palestinians to eventual expulsion or eradication.
There is something so deeply disturbing about how casually inhumane Israelis can be. They then drop “Hamas” like it’s a full sentence that magically cleanses whatever depravity they just spewed.
If Israel wanted to kill all Palestinians, wouldn't it be easier to start with the millions of Palestinians living in Israel, unarmed, instead of going into Gaza?
If that is true, Israel would now actually, literally be persuing the exact same politics Nazi Germany did until they escalated their attempted genocide by making it intolerable to genocide by industrial scale murder. Not a good look for Israel, at all.
Please don't take HN threads into hard-core ideological and/or nationalistic flamewar. I realize this topic tends strongly in that direction, but that's not a reason to go there, it's a reason not to go there.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Other commenters are doing it too, but it's a matter of degree, and the rhetoric in your post here is a degree worse. You can make your substantive points without resorting to "cult", "stamped out", "criminal ideology" and so on. Fortunately it doesn't look like your account has a habit of doing this, so it should be easy to fix.
When asked, in an representative online, poll, 47% percent of Israeli agreed that the IDF should kill all the inhabitants of cities it conquered[1].
So sure, workers at Haarez probably don't, but when the extermination feeling is widespread enough that 47% feel they can openly agree to a question proscribing the killing women and children, then insisting on the insistence on precision comes across mostly as an attempt at distraction.
There's a palestinian guy living in the US making the rounds on tiktok, talking to random israeli people on something like omegle. The amount of hate he gets is nothing short of depressing. Children cursing at him, IDF soldiers saying they want to kill every single person in Gaza, calling them sub-humans... sounds like the fourth reich is here already.
All this to say you're right, but the government is indocrinating more and more people for these views.
Be very wary of any such weaponized truth: you don't know how much selection bias is at play, how much confirmation bias is requested, you don't even know if the interviewees are what they say they are.
You raise a very valid point, which i will take in consideration. I don't believe it to be the case, since the person in question also shares positive interactions, and i believe some of the worst "contacts" have been doxxed. But your point still stands.
I disagree: when anything is obviously meaning what someone obviously thinks it means, then others will apply their own obvious understanding of it to justify very non-obvious behaviours.
The perpetual fight is mutually beneficial to all. The extremist right would not have been able to claim large swaths of land had they not had the air cover to raze Gaza. Now there is serious talk of going back into Gaza. And talk by Trump to turn it into a seaside resort has the settler movement giddy.
Considering the discourse of the past two years and personal experience, I am afraid to say that yes, those are most likely very real people who very openly ignore 50% of the context and generalize their hate towards a whole population of a single country. In addition (and that's from, sadly, day to day experience) those are the same people who extrapolate their hate on one particular ethnical group.
I would have expected HN readers at least check on some context before starting beating their drums. Haaretz is a propaganda outlet that has been stocking the fire under everything related to Israel, for decades now.
> I don't know if they're state actors, or if they're real people with those beliefs
Both. And also trolls, and these days GenAI.
Some say "Never again means now", with the flag of Israel, and no sense of irony or hypocrisy. I wonder if any say the same words with the flag of Palestine? Hamas is still also genocidal, with their leaders giving similar comments about all Jews as the current Israel coalition members give about Palestinians.
When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. The IDF and Hamas are the elephants, and there are many innocent civilians (metaphorically grass) suffering because of it. The supremely dominant power of the IDF means the suffering grass is overwhelmingly on one side of a border that Israel doesn't recognise, but there are innocents everywhere.
I don't have any answers. I have learned to recognise this kind of mindset, but I cannot find words to act as levers to change those minds.
Your comment is full of attempts to justify, excuse and underplay what the IDF are doing and many Israelis believe in. From Hamas to GenAI to trolls.
Whatever the historical record that brought us here, the fact is, Israel's standing army (not some personal goons of some dictator, the standing army of a moden democratic nation), appear to be practically all in on executing a systemic genocide. And I don't think there's anyway you can justify or underplay that.
Maybe the answer you're looking for is that good people anywhere shouldn't let anyone sell them a holocaust no matter the deal.
I'm literally in that comment describing the IDF as genocidal and dominant. In another comment on this thread, I liken the damage the IDF is causing to "a nuke going off". If you think this is "underplay", what words would you have used? Would you insist I blame all jews, even though this linked story is literally showing jewish people living in Israel being critical of their own government's actions? Would you insist that I said "Palestinians" instead of Hamas, when it's just the militants and not the civilians whose actions on that side I blame?
I do not divide either my criticism or sympathy by nationality, I divide it by victimising and victimhood — and even then with the humility to know that I cannot see through the fog of all the propaganda I'm being shown.
But can't you see that your description of the situation as elephants crashing, your instinct to bring up a hypothetical that there's some Palestine flag waving person out there that has the same extremist thinking that the Israelis are using today, that your need to remind yourself that Hamas (to borrow the words of some other folks in the comments today, an organization that's literally _surrounded_ by overtly hostile populace) is genocidal...can't you see how replying this to what the GP said and the article as a whole can be "mistaken" to be such an attempt at underplaying?
No, I don't blame all Jews at all and I've seen a lot of Jewish people actively work to stop the genocide. But I definitely blame this narrative of Hamas is what's been used to sell to genocide to what are otherwise normal and compassionate people. I believe the only people who can stop this are the Israeli citizens saying no and the time was way too long ago.
Fwiw, I don't read any excuse or justification in parents post. The fact is that the IDF are (right now) more effective than Hamas in exterminating the other party.
What you're saying is completely true. But I like to think that most Israelis believe that the other party doesn't include the countless civilians that were killed so far and are facing dire starvation right now. Israeli people should not let their grief and their fear prevent them from saying no from those amongst them that want to do terrible things.
Clever piece of engineering that needs to be studied. The US and Israel setup a company/foundation to "distribute" aid. I guess to escape the accusations that they are systematically starving Gaza's population. It seems to be working, they can hide behind this while inflicting even more crimes against Palestinians.
I was going to ask if people really fall for this, but it seems like they do.
Is anyone surprised at horrific behaviour by Israel and the IDF at this point?
Every country has a percentage of right wing psychopaths. Unfortunately, they seem to be running the government in Israel.
Israel's intended end game seem to be to make Gaza completely uninhabitable, so that the Palestinians are forced to leave, then Israel can grab the land. A bit like they are doing in the West Bank, but on turbo mode. However, the Palestinians don't want to leave their land (why should they?) and no other state wants to take them. So we are left with enormous human misery, with no end in sight.
Most baffling of all, many Western states are not just turning a blind eye, but actively supporting Israel. Shame on them.
There has been so much disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda from so many nations and interested parties that I find it impossible to believe any claims anymore without seeing a video for myself. In this case, there are none. Even according to the article, the soldiers were ordered to fire on looters, which seems reasonable in the context of this war.
I really don't think that it's a coincidence that just as this news was starting to gain traction a few weeks ago, Isreal started bombing Iran. It was the perfect distraction.
I'd say it's very hard for a powerful nation to not suppress somebody in the long run.
Just think of any powerful nation (or group of people, or whatever), and try to think of somebody they have oppressed, or are still oppressing. It's typically not hard to come up with examples.
Agreed. Its possible that the group survived their oppression and becomes powerful enough to oppress, they loose their identify, in the sense that their culture evolves, along the way. Resulting in oppression along some axis.
Not sure if I would lump all those up together, these examples are overly broad and have little in common. There's more than a thousand years and basically no causal link between Roman persecution of early Christians and Crusades, let alone European imperialism, especially if you take Ethiopian, Greek, Georgian, and Armenian Christians into account. Same for Russians and Mongols, there's a pretty large gap with a ton of events in between, and Mongol Empire was humongous to begin with, it wasn't about Rus' in particular. And communists that became ruthless oppressors were already radicalized during the persecution, it was literally the radical wing of a militant faction of a huge umbrella party that included people that would have felt right at home in modern EU (e.g. Kollontai and her early activism).
The better explanation is simple and banal - power concentration makes people abuse it.
I wouldn't consider this "lumping the groups together", or that they must exist together in time... its likely a group may require many generations before they can "oppress" another group.
My list of examples is very similar to this one and the ven diagram here is "was oppressed became oppressor"... in most cases it appears that only if the oppressed are destroyed or I would argue in the case of America- controlled at the margins... then they don't circle back around to abuse their newly acquired power.
I don't know if it's always the case, but it's true if given the opportunity. In the end all people are the same. Cultures may be different, but our lizard brains are the same. Us vs them, and dehumanizing others into something less than humans, whose suffering does not concern us.
Edit: yikes—quite apart from the current topic, you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot with flamewar posts and personal attacks. We ban accounts that post like this:
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted good things, but if you want to keep participating in this community, it would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
Wait, my message was obviously intended as a bit sarcastic (which isn't very smart, I'll admit). But are you actually saying that I'm now allowed two racist comments without risking a ban? (three, counting this guideline-abiding comment?)
Then I don't understand what you were saying by "this is how HN moderation has worked for over a decade", wasn't that a response to my previous comment that said exactly that?
It's not the case that "for each post that doesn't break the guidelines, you're allowed one that does", and that's not what I was doing. When I said HN moderation has worked the same way for over a decade, I didn't mean that the description you gave was accurate—it isn't. (Nor, I assume, did you mean it to be, since you were being sarcastic.)
We try to persuade users to follow the site guidelines, and tend to give warnings and make requests before banning accounts, especially if they are active participants who have been around for a while. We don't rush to banning such users; we try to explain the intended use of the site and convince them to honor it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
Thank you for clarifying and sorry about the sarcasm.
I am absolutely no one, but I'd like to highlight that this kind of policy is (indirectly) why I don't use HN. Tolerating intolerance to the extent you do (which isn't 100% but still a lot) allows people like the one you responded to originally to drive hackers like me, my loved ones, my colleagues and my students away, while attracting other hateful people, as they see that they are tolerated here. In a possibly too extreme comparison, this the same dynamic as the "nazi bar problem" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar). I hope you know what kind of community these policies has made of HN.
I don't agree with that characterization of HN. In my experience, people who make this complaint are usually coming from a place of political passion. That's understandable, and we might have more common ground on that level than you'd expect. But it's no basis for operating a community, assuming you don't want to just exclude people with different views and backgrounds to your own.
It's easy to invoke strong pejoratives like "hateful" when describing people who have opposing viewpoints and passions to one's own—in fact, it's hard not to. But it leads to a rapid escalation. A bad comment turns into a "hateful view", "hateful view" turns into "a hateful person", and soon that leaps to "how can you tolerate hateful people on your site". (The next logical step would be to suspect the mods of being "hateful people" themselves.) This escalation is, in my view, bad for community. It leads to uniformity within one's own group and rage and enmity towards difference.
Having banned countless accounts for breaking the site guidelines over the years, I can't accept that "hateful people" are tolerated here for very long. When accounts are posting abusively, we may give them more warnings than you (or a lot of other users) would prefer, but we ban them in the end. A good example is this very subthread. I ended up banning that account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403629). (Not, I should probably add, because of this or any other conversation about moderation, but just out of standard practice.)
p.s. You are not no one! I appreciate your comments and I wish I could write a better reply—I know a better one is possible, that expresses more precisely how I think about this. Alas it would take me hours, so I'm making do with one I don't much care for.
I have trouble seeing it your way. The person you were originally responding to, and originally wanted to tolerate because they also did good posts, was saying blatantly racist things about "the arabs in palestine" and that they essentially deserved the war crimes they're suffering, or that they brought it on themselves or whatever. To me this sounds like pretty straightforward political and ideological hate.
But anyway, this is only one case and we should not base our thinking just on it. The problem is the policy (or the way it's systematically enforced) and its broader results. I don't know the details of how the moderation works here nor have I any statistics. I only know that I saw too much racism and hate towards whole groups of people because of their identity here in the past, and that when I occasionally stumble across a HN link, I usually can still see that hate being a lot more represented than in other spaces I frequent, and that the kind of policy you described to me has never worked at building diverse and interesting communities.
We appreciate your biased comment, aimed at portraying Palestinians as terrorists and non-indigenous to the area, cherry-picking history as it suits your narrative. We're not interested, though. Thank you.
Spoken by the Athenians and resulting in a war that, as Thucydides's audience knew quite well, Athens lost big-time.
Which actually holds up quite well for everybody who loves to bring up that quote: realism aka "we shouldn't face the consequences of our actions" is the obvious rallying cry for people facing the consequences of their actions.
If neither side can agree on peace, if neither side has objectives which the other will accept, if neither side is willing to compromise; What other outcome is possible in terms of realpolitik?
It is upsetting to observe. We all want better for humanity.
There have been cases in the past where an external strong power has been able to suppress both sides but it has to be done for generations until the reasons are lost to time.
Depending on who you ask, there have been a variety of external powers stirring the pot. Most people are horrified by the violence. Beyond the territorial, religious and cultural disputes there are opposing geopolitical factions.
Of course it is understandable to be outraged by the violence and atrocities. The human suffering is real, but arguments focusing on these points can miss the larger picture. The underlying incentives dictate outcomes. Atrocities are often marketed as rationalizations for further violence.
We want to prescribe an outcome without atrocities. Yet discussions fall into recrimination before they can describe the conflict coherently.
377,000 people in Gaza are missing. A few thousand fled to Egypt while they could. The rest: Under rubbles, propably.
When Netanyahu talked about Palestinians in Gaza being Amalek, about the necessity to destroy Amalek, he meant exactly that. And when the defense minister Gallant said: They are human animals, and then he said „no food, no water, no electricity“, he punished 2.3 mill people, half of them children. That’s why both have arrest warrants from ICJ.
Over 90% of Israeli population want more death and destruction in Gaza. Netanyahu and Gallant are no single incidents. The whole Israeli society knows what their soldiers are doing in Palestine. And they are ok with it.
This article and my comment will be flagged until dead. Just like anyone speaking about Israeli Apartheid, genocide, oppression in Palestine. But things are changing. Hasbara troll farms can’t keep up.
I guess the Israeli government's original plan to arm and support drug gangs and literally ISIS (euphemistically called 'clans') as "aid security" wasn't working out? Especially after it was revealed said "security" was stealing and reselling the food aid under the protection of IDF while the Israeli govt. and media blamed the looting on Hamas.
And after the Israeli opposition leader exposed the whole charade and Netanyahu defended it saying “On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. What’s wrong with that? It only saves the lives of Israeli solders, and publicising this only benefits Hamas.”
To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?
"The basis for Lieberman’s allegation of ties to IS was unclear."
It is easy to throw dirt and hope something sticks, but the main thing speaking against his group seems Netanjahu's support in my opinion. But otherwise I don't see the scandal so much here. Especially not compared to the scandal of intentionally targeting civilian population and indiscriminate killing of starving people like the article states.
Also, if, as in the recent New York City mayoral debate, US politicians are supposed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which it recognizes itself as, then I don't see the big deal over Palestine as an Islamic state. I myself would prefer to see a secular PFLP state, but the Zionist entity, US, Canada etc. fight against the PFLP, proscribe them as "terrorists" etc.
"he was propping them up prior to the current battles"
Those words indicate something different, than allowing quatari money to reach the civilian part of Hamas government as part of a temporary peace deal. Because that sounds actually reasonable to me.
Now there is indeed more, like this:
"Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is now Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister, put it bluntly in 2015, the year he was elected to Parliament.
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” he said. “Hamas is an asset.”"
But those words came without context (just a youtube video, that I won't watch right now).
Ironically, the closest you will get to something approaching that type of Marxist-Leninist utopia in the Middle East, is living in an Israeli kibbutz near the border with Gaza.
> To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?
A simple dealer vs an armed wing of a religious theocracy who think people like me are the devil incarnate, I'd pick the dealer.
An organised armed drug network that necessarily has to be at least comparable strength to an existing network of religious theocrats who are obviously getting external support owing to the ability to continue fighting despite the evidence of systematic destruction of their civil environment that satellite imagery shows has been in aggregate comparable in scope and depth to a nuke going off…
I don't want either of them anywhere near anyone I care about. Even if the latter wasn't associated with a different group of religious zealots.
It gets ugly at the latest when remembering that "looting" was always a core part of the Israeli narrative to explain the humanitarian crisis.
Even before the current siege/semi-siege, the standard response to calls from aid orgs had been essentially "Look, it's not us. We're letting in aid, but it's not our fault if Palestinian armed gangs themselves are looting it after we let it in. Palestinians are just too stupid to organize their own survival."
Of course that response was already ridiculous back then: The 1000s of aid trucks stuck at the Egypt-Gazan border are definitely not kept there by Hamas or armed gangs. Even the looting attacks themselves were suspicions: Aid orgs kept reporting they were happening in areas under full control of the IDF - and IDF was forbidding using any other route[1]:
> Israel is doing the opposite of ensuring aid can be delivered to Palestinians in need. For example, a U.N. memo recently obtained by the Washington Post concluded that the armed gangs looting aid convoys could be “benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” and “protection” from Israel’s military, and that a gang leader had a military-like compound in an area “restricted, controlled and patrolled” by the Israeli military.
The gangs operate in areas under Israeli control, often within eyeshot of Israeli forces. When convoys are looted, Israeli forces watch and do nothing, even when aid workers request assistance. Israeli forces refer to one area about a kilometer from its Kerem Shalom border checkpoint as “the looting zone.” The IDF-designated looting zone might be the only place in Gaza that Israeli forces won’t shoot an armed Palestinian.
But there was still at least some benefit of the doubt that the armed gangs were just some ordinary criminals exploiting the situation. Claims that the gangs themselves were operating under Israeli orders were conspiracy theories.
Netanyahu now confirmed those theories as reality.
Because it kind of reads like an attack towards me for not caring about genocide. If you are curious about my point of view, it is that both Hamas and Israeli leadership belongs in prison and the US and EU should stop supporting them immediately.
But that doesn't mean I support anyone who wants to erease Israel. Do you support Hamas?
This is an article about idf warcrimes, I think the comment you are responding to is just pointing out that you are immediately pivotting to condemning Hamas
But the comment he's responding to already talks primerely about Hamas, it's not he who switched the topic from IDFs horrors to Hamas crimes.
> I guess the Israeli government's original plan to arm and support drug gangs and literally ISIS (euphemistically called 'clans') as "aid security" wasn't working out? Especially after it was revealed said "security" was stealing and reselling the food aid under the protection of IDF while the Israeli govt. and media blamed the looting on Hamas.
To which he responded his opinions about drug and faith dealers.
No, because drug dealers by definition mainly sell drugs to people who want them.
A subset of them indeed engages with dark methods like mixing highly addictive drugs into harmless ones and turf war, but the majority just sells things.
Before weed was legal in germany I engaged with quite some of them and they were mostly decent people all in all. Not the greatest and often messed up themself a bit, but otherwise no danger to me or anyone else. My choice if I damaged myself with their products.
A islamist on the other hand is buisy by definition with spreading the rule of Islam over everyone, everywhere.
So you're equating the drug dealing "clans" in Gaza to your local streetside dealer in Germany?
Both Hamas and the clans are cancers to society, and it's abhorrent that the IDF is dealing with them to distribute aid, instead of being directly involved (which they can easily commit to).
My main issue was equating the term "drug dealer" with something worse than a terrorist.
Now as my edit above hopefully made clear, apparently they ain't just "drug dealers", but ruthless criminals who loot and shoot a UN aid convoy for profit.
And abhorrent are indeed many things about the whole situation.
Sourced articles like these are good and further proof that Israel is a psychopathic state and society. But what's odd is to depict is as "surprising" or even shocking when the same state has been carpet bombing civilian, including women and children for 16 months straight, causing what is estimated at 300 000 deaths, committing every single atrocity or infringement to the international law possible, including targeting medics, journalists, using starvation as a weapon of war, bragging on it on social media, having politicians incite to eradicate the remaining part of the Gaza population, and I could go on and on with nameless atrocities. So just to put things in perspective, this article depicts a horrible incident, but it is entirely in line with the rest of the Israeli policy, and unfortunately pales in comparison with the ongoing large-scale massacre.
Your statement paints a one-sided picture that oversimplifies a complex conflict while ignoring critical context. The claim of Israel as a “psychopathic state and society” dismisses the diversity of its population and the internal debates within its democracy, flawed as it may be. Accusations of “carpet bombing” and “300,000 deaths” are inflammatory and lack credible sourcing. Estimates from neutral observers, like the UN or reputable NGOs, place Gaza’s death toll far lower, though still tragic, and often note the difficulty of verifying numbers due to Hamas’s control of local reporting. The charge of “every single atrocity” ignores that international law violations are alleged on both sides, including Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians, use of human shields, and rocket attacks on Israeli population centers, which you omit entirely.
Starvation as a weapon and targeting medics or journalists are grave accusations, but they require rigorous evidence, not blanket assertions. Israel’s military actions, while devastating, occur in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, which killed over 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage, including women and children. This context doesn’t justify all of Israel’s actions, but it complicates the narrative of unprovoked aggression. Social media boasts and political rhetoric, while reprehensible, don’t equate to state policy, and cherry-picking them ignores dissenting Israeli voices calling for restraint or peace.
The article you reference may highlight a horrific incident, but framing it as “entirely in line” with a monolithic “Israeli policy” flattens a multifaceted conflict. It also sidesteps Hamas’s role in prolonging the war by rejecting ceasefires and embedding military infrastructure in civilian areas, as documented by the IDF and independent analysts. Both sides’ actions deserve scrutiny, but your statement’s selective outrage and lack of evidence undermine its credibility. If you’re aiming to critique, provide specific, verifiable data, otherwise it is empty rhetoric.
They are also firing SHELLS for warning. Direct article quote:
> In one incident, the soldier was instructed to fire a shell toward a crowd gathered near the coastline. "Technically, it's supposed to be warning fire – either to push people back or stop them from advancing," he said. "But lately, firing shells has just become standard practice. Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there's never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders."
We've asked you several times to stop breaking the site guidelines. You've continued to do it anyway. That's not cool.
Moreover, your account has been using HN primarily for political/nationalistic battle, which is also a line at which we ban accounts, quite separately from individual violations.
I respect your judgment, so I've edited out the first bit, but honestly I feel it's not an unreasonable thing to say in response to genocide denial - it was said about the claim, not about the person, and in my opinion it's an accurate description of that claim. /my two cents
From a moderation point of view, it's a question of the effect that these bits have on other people in the community, and therefore the quality of the discussion. It's obviously near-impossible to have a thoughtful conversation about a topic like this across the vast differences (ideological, national, emotional) that separate people. In such a context, even provocations that feel small and justified can set the neighborhood on fire.
If the discussion devolves into just another internet screaming match where people hurl pre-existing talking points and just get even more riled up in rage, then the HN thread is a failure. Maybe it's too much to hope for anything better on this topic, which is probably the most divisive and emotional one we've ever seen, but I think we have to try. That's we allow the topic to appear on the HN front page from time to time. Not to allow it would be easier, at least in the short term, but inconsistent with the intended spirit of the site.
The bulk of your post wasn't doing anything like flamewar at all, so the swipey bits were particularly unfortunate.
p.s. I don't mean to pile on, but "please stop pretending" is also a swipe. You can't know whether someone else is pretending, and there's no reason to suppose that people aren't sincere in their convictions about a highly-charged topic (separately from whether their beliefs are true or false). If you lead by denying that, the rest of what you have to say will have little chance of being heard.
If you try to define that in a way that detaches from larger human concerns, you make it smaller. Curiosity doesn't benefit from that.
I agree with you that there are many reasons to be unhappy with threads like this and how the topic lands on HN generally. I am by no means happy with it—I just don't think that the alternative is better. Curiosity ultimately has to do with relating to what's real and what's true. You can't impose a narrow view of on- and off-topcicness on that.
The problem of how to run a site like HN in accordance with a value like that is subject to a thousand constraints, some obvious, many not. That makes the problem interesting, but also means that it can never be solved—not to everyone's satisfaction, nor even to anyone's satisfaction. Therefore we all have a certain amount of dissatisfaction to tolerate.
Have you seen any comments on this submission that demonstrate intellectual curiosity? It's just flamewarring and complaints as far as I can see, at this point.
It's very relevant, the hacker ethos is not just about technology and VC funding, it's also about curiosity, honesty, skepticism, and in a way, also about distrust of the powerful. This revelation is perfectly on topic.
The comments are actually better than expected given the sensitivity of the topic at hand.
I have no idea which side you think we're favoring, but I can tell you two things for sure: (1) it's whichever side you personally disagree with; and (2) they think we're favoring you. Of everything I've learned about how HN functions (and internet dynamics generally), this is by far the most invariant.
With the risk of being moderated myself, why is it the case that is always the not pro-israel comments that get moderated? The original comment seems quite reasonable but the guy even kind of apologized, for no reason! That's pure coercion to conform, if I may be allowed (lol) to have an opinion.
> why is it the case that is always the not pro-israel comments that get moderated
That is far from the case, as you can see for yourself if you look more closely.
People (I don't mean you personally, but all of us—it seems to be basic human bias) are far too quick to jump to "always". I call this the notice-dislike bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), which is a terrible name I'm hoping someone can improve on.
That's about frequency per se, whereas I'm talking about experiences with negative emotional valence.
Thanks for the reply though—I hope someday someone will come up with a good name for it; or better, still, point out that it's a known bias in the standard repertoire and tell me what it's called.
It's "separation between church and state". As in: the institution of The Church. "separation between religion and state" doesn't really exist anywhere, and can't really exist, because it would basically be a thought-crime. For example Joe Biden is a Catholic and I'm some of his actions have almost certainly been inspired in part of fully by his Catholic beliefs. It couldn't be otherwise as being Catholic is part of Joe Biden.
Stories like this often get flagged because they devolve into political/religious flamewars. I think many people might have a knee-jerk reaction to posts about the Israel/Gaza war and flag them, because support for Israel vs. support for Palestine can be quite polarizing and emotional.
Not saying it's right or wrong, or that this sort of article is or isn't interesting to HN readers. But a reasonable reason for flagging an article is a belief that the topic at hand doesn't lend itself to thoughtful, interesting discussion.
Haaretz is generally a liberal Zionist Israeli newspaper. As such, I find it easy to trust that it is not lying when it reports sensitive testimony from multiple IDF soldiers.
I wouldn't say it's thoroughly off-topic because not only do a lot of tech companies directly enable or produce the stuff that's enabling Israel but a fair number of major figures have also directly involved themselves politically with Israel.
That said it's the kind of topic I don't expect HN to be able to particularly handle in an interesting or insightful way. It's mostly just going to be a mix of horrified people and then users trying to gaslight others into how this is a good thing.
Netanyahu is bad, for sure, but are you forgetting the half a million dead after the invasion and regime change in Iraq? Bush and Cheney are living in happy retirement. Rumsfeld has passed, may his soul rot in hell.
The absurd idea of a "genocide" in Palestine is immediately defeated by a simple search showing that the population of Palestine increased close to 600% since 1948, rendering the all claim nothing more than a usual dog whistle from anti-Semite propaganda.
I said ethnic cleansing, not genocide. Although genocide is what has been happening for the past 2 years in Gaza as described by even Holocaust scholars.
Your argument is a typical claim of racists and zionist colonialists.
1st: you claimed Israel was carrying out ethnic cleansing since 1948. You are now trying to mix words, but when you do ethnic cleaning, you carry out genocide. You were caught in your dog whistle and then tried to get out of it with semantics.
2nd: “Zionist colonialists” is what you call the people that want to have their home in the tiny piece of desert where they where expelled from. By contrast you don’t seem to have any qualms about the Arab colonialists that took all the Middle East and north of Africa. In fact, you support they should even get to keep the tiny piece of desert that belongs to the Jew people. Your problem clearly has to lie in the ethnicity of the people doing the so called colonialism (you even go as far as calling colonialism to people taking hold of their homeland).
There were Nuremberg trials because Germany capitulated. We don't even have sanctions on Israel and the people responsible will only be jailed if they step outside Israel.
I am not optimistic at all and I am very afraid for Gazans.
This genocide has, for many people, burst any illusions of a "rules based world order".
There multiple EU signatory countries of the Rome Statute (pledging to cooperate with ICC) that have welcomed these war criminals... who have warrants out by the ICC.
And the same war criminals are invited to give a speech at the U.S Congress to near unanimous applause. It really makes you wonder if we're the "good guys".
-- edit -- If you're curious how much your congressperson receives from AIPAC (Israeli lobby) this website is a great resource:
https://www.trackaipac.com/congress
Indeed, the leading countries of so-called "free world" are willing to commit and support war crimes and break the intl law as well as DPRK or Iran when it serves their intrests, all while signaling virtue and progressiveness.
If you're still wondering if you're the good guys, you haven't been paying attention. I don't think there are any "good guys" when it comes to nations, but for the US it's not even close.
In the world outside the West, 'rules based world order' does not mean what you think it does. To them 'rules based world order' means that the UK/USA/Israel/NATO/EU do whatever they want rather than go through the UN. Going through the UN would be 'international law', which is not to be confused with 'rules based world order'.
With 'rules based world order', there is one rule for the West and one rule for everyone else. Hence it is okay to have a referendum in Kosovo for Kosovo to split away from Serbia, but not okay for a region of the Ukraine to have a referendum, to break away from Ukraine. So Crimea, where everyone speaks Russian and identifies as Russian, with no interest in the Ukraine or the EU, can't get the treatment that was afforded Kosovo. This is because 'rules based world order', and how the global majority sees it.
Almost no-one[1] recognizes Crimea as part of Russia because it was entirely manufactured. Unmarked foreign soldiers invaded a country, pretended to be local rebels, staged a referendum and immediately asked to join the invading country to give the shameless land grab a veneer of legitimacy. It's a total joke that has nothing in common with genuine ethnic conflicts. The referendums in Crimea and elsewhere had to be staged because even internal polling leaked from the Russian military admin showed that nowhere did the local population support the invasion; speaking German doesn't mean that you want to live in the Third Reich.
> Crimea, where everyone speaks Russian and identifies as Russian
Blatant falsehood. In 2014 it was about 65% (ethnicity) and 80% (language).
In addition the referendum happened after the invasion and de-facto annexation, without the option of "keep the current situation with Ukraine". If you ask me "do you want to be punched or stabbed?" then I'll choose a punch. Doesn't mean I want to be punched.
I am not saying this didn't happen but none of the sources in this haaretz piece were named or any actual evidence provided beyond anonymous testimony. The Israeli military is highly bureaucratized and if those incidents did occur there will be documented evidence and the purpotrators will be punished in accordance with the law.
This comment thread is the most civilised online discussion I have seen in a long while about this particular topic, despite people coming from diverse backgrounds and disagreeing.
In this sense, hackernews gives me hope that online culture is not lost yet.
It's because realistically hn is an oasis of educated people that has been overlooked by astroturfers and foreign interests (very strongly including the government in this piece), and hasn't expanded its core demographic for profit. This is what the rest of the internet would be like without manipulation. Imagine how much better things would be
I was encouraged by yours and parents posts to look at some of the comments but I think I just got duped into wasting time with bots that are in fact astroturfing!
If HN is so educated and civic, we would be able to have more of that sort of debate and not just once in a while.
Also note that dang is already pretty active here banning people.
It is a topic where deep emotions come up and where fanatism is widespread. Also among educated people. Also not sure if you have not noticed before, but HN is part of a profit orientated venture capitalist company. Still, I also do enjoy this Oasis here. But I don't see how it can scale in any way you seem to imagine.
I think people understand there's a time and a place for important political discussion on an otherwise tech community, especially because the quality and insight tends to be better than other places.
I don't have any delusions about ycombinator seeing some of the things it has supported recently, but in this laughably dumbed down world you take what you can get.
As for new communities I believe in being selective and restrictive- based on location, education, or interest and think it's the only way we can get smart communities again. Think how the tech barrier and slow adoption in the 90s/2000s resulted in a smart bubble online, and how covid was the death knell for distinct non homogenous smart online spaces because it brought everyone further online. It's discriminatory but look what we've become.
I love how HN has no interest that Israeli civilians are still held hostage. Let's see how you manage with your loved ones held by a terrorist organisation.
Have you seen the Israeli hostage families protest in Israel? They get heckled and threatened by the hardliners in the general public and government who want the war continue to and those hardliners essentially want the hostages as an excuse for war. The democracy in Israel has elected a government that wants to continue to acquire land in Gaza and the West Bank in preference over negotiating for return of the hostages. There are multiple video and text reporting on this issue.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-847290
There are also hardline hostage families that want to continue the war over negotiating.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-hostages-ceasef...
It's complicated and not as simple as your black and white assessment - that people are for either returning the hostages or not returning the hostages and those same opinions are in sync with ending the war/continuing the war with the same priority.
Hamas having hostages serves both Hamas and the hard right wing's long term goals in Israel, and the hard right wing in Israel holds all the power in Israel and Hamas holds the power in Gaza.
> As of November 1, Israeli authorities held nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied territory in detention for alleged security offenses, according to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked. Far more Palestinians have been arrested since the October 7 attacks in Israel than have been released in the last week. Among those being held are dozens of women and scores of children.
> The majority have never been convicted of a crime, including more than 2,000 of them being held in administrative detention, in which the Israeli military detains a person without charge or trial. Such detention can be renewed indefinitely based on secret information, which the detainee is not allowed to see. Administrative detainees are held on the presumption that they might commit an offense at some point in the future. Israeli authorities have held children, human rights defenders and Palestinian political activists, among others, in administrative detention, often for prolonged periods.
Irrelevant. Israel is obliged to not prevent civilians from receiving food, water and medicine. If it can't do so without 'aiding' Hamas, that's Israel's problem.
I think most people consider Oct 7th and the hostages to be a grave criminal act. It doesn't justify genocide, though, which seems to be what you're implying.
If such orders were given, in the manner hereby described, these are clearly illegal orders and MUST be refused by any IDF soldier who listened during training.
But I'm in doubt such orders were given. I assume (or hope, but certainly do not know), they were ordered to not allow any mob to come close to them (this is obviously required). We've been there and it should be possible to attain without killing anyone.
Regardless, it's time to bring all the hostages back home, and stop the war.
This is a normal procedure in a war zone when distributing food. HN people are naive as they have never been close to a war zone.
When you distribute food in a war zone you tell people not to come near the food and they do it anyway. What are you going to do? shoot them? Yes, you shoot them if they get too close. First you fire at the air, then you shoot at people if they get closer anyway.
If you don't shoot them they will take a sack by force, and then everybody will take a sack by force. Usually they coordinate themselves into bands or gangs to steal the food.
Of course, those brave enough to take the sacks by force risking their lives will not distribute them evenly. They will give it to their families, their gang and sell the rest.
Israel could be brutal for a lot of things, but not for this. Hamas was way more brutal to their own people. For example, Hamas executed their own people for wanting to escape the bombing areas so they did not loose their body shields.
This article from the BBC corroprates the claims in the parent article, and also talks about why there are so many civilian casualties at these food distribution centers:
The most obvious problems are that the food distribution centers are placed deep inside military red zones (which is not common practice), and that Israeli soldiers have been ordered to fire at civilians in those zones, even if they obviously pose no threat (which is clearly a war crime).
The sections "Troops describe firing at crowds of aid seekers" and "Aid workers and medics call for end to GHF distribution plan" explain in more detail.
The article you link from NPR seems to mostly cite the Haaretz article. The only possible corroboration are the claims from Adil Husain, but I am hesitant to take his words as corroboration.
The Haaretz article states it is unclear how many died from IDF fire vs the Abu Shabab group. Husain was not at the aid site and so can't state how they were wounded.
If the soldiers truly fired on those who were only running away, not advancing, this should be investigated and charged as a war crime. However, at this point the evidence is not clear aside from a handful of anonymous sources from a single press release.
There have been many many aid trucks refused entry. The famine has been manufactured by Israel. "normal procedure" might have some weight if there weren't 100s of trucks refused entry.
Then they run out of food and their families are starving.
Then you distribute a limited amount of food that will run out long before most get any food.
If your family is starving to death, you can't leave the area and someone is dangling food in front of your face, are you saying you wouldn't risk it for your family and try to get SOME food regardless of the threat of death?
It's just not true that this is "normal procedure". It's just not. It didn't happen before either, and now it's happened how many times? Once or twice, I can believe. This many times? Not so much.
And this line of reasoning:
> If you don't shoot them they will take a sack by force, and then everybody will take a sack by force. Usually they coordinate themselves into bands or gangs to steal the food.
Are we supposed to just accept that because something is status quo, it’s permissible? The consequence for “stealing” food should never be death, ever, in any scenario. It’s also interesting that people taking and distributing food are characterised as “gangs”, this suggests that taking a vital resource and redistributing it is somehow criminal.
You either have not read the article or are deliberately being obtuse.
The article has multiple IDF officers say that this isn't, in fact, normal warzone procedure for distributing food. That they witnessed crowds being dispersed with artillery fire, which isn't normal procedure anywhere.
Like, I don't know what world you live in, but I don't know any other conflict where dozens of civilians get fired upon during food aid distribution every day.
But it's not a warzone, it's a slaughterhouse. The intention isn't to feed people, it's to remove Palestinians from Gaza, by attrition or violence.
Once you understand the motive, you understand why these deliberately concentrated, artificially limited aid delivery systems are used. They make remaining in Gaza the worst option.
Are you suggesting that it is right for Hamas to seek Gazan civilian casualties because it is their only way of fighting back against the IDF at this point?
I agree that Hamas has no other options now, but Hamas has never had a realistic change of winning the battlefield and so has always fought primarily by tring to erode international support for israel by inflating claims of genocide and human-rights abuses,facilitating their own civilian deaths.
Your wording makes it seem like you sympathize with Hamas.
Forgive me if I am not understanding your question.
>...fought primarily by trying to erode international support for Israel
Agreed.
>Are you suggesting that it is right...
Thank you for the opportunity to further clarify my comment. If this is happening I believe that it is deeply immoral.
My comment posed a hypothetical about the incentives which may be driving these events. As you observed above, it does fit with existing knowledge of Hamas strategy. Examples would include pop-up rocket attacks near schools or hospitals.
Here is a source which some have alleged to be sympathetic to Hamas. I have selected this source not because I prefer it, but to avoid allegations of bias.
>UNRWA condemns placement of rockets, for a second time, in one of its schools
>UNRWA strongly and unequivocally condemns the group or groups responsible for this flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law
Haaretz’s English edition claims that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza, but the original Hebrew version? It states they were told to fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites. This represents a significant difference in intent, legality, and moral implications.
Always too many hints of latent anti-semitism in these discussions. It’s clear: war is an abomination. “He to whom harm is done, does harm in return.” So let’s not pretend this, if it’s real, is an Israeli specific thing.
If the claims are accurate, and we don’t know they are yet, they are the direct result of the bad situation we’re all in, and that situation was precipitated by (though perhaps not entirely due to) October 7th. We can’t let that get lost in the noise of what could be legitimate criticism of, hopefully isolated, Israeli military tactics. An overreaction to October 7th is bad, but it’s still just a reaction. The first punch was thrown by hamas. The terrorists videotaped themselves and their atrocities that day, wild celebrations of their horrors broke out, followed within hours and days by, shockingly to those with any sense of human decency, massive anti-Israeli protests in the West. Images of all of that are seared into the hearts and minds of most Israeli’s who will literally never forget. Wars are evil, and once started they are sometimes impossible to stop.
But bottom line, these are particularly disturbing claims and should be investigated, and if they are true then immediate changes should be made, including the removal and punishment of those who may be responsible.
Latent? Ive seen flagged comments playing into age old european conspiracies that Jews are controlling the world - on HN.
The reality is a fortified Israel was born of Jewish trauma and while the citizens of the world continue to propel antisemitic nonesense, despot nationalists like Netanyahu will have excuses to justify horrific actions
Before levelling claims of bias and racism, consider that the reporting is by a Jewish run, Israeli newspaper and that the sources are IDF officers and soldiers. To jump to a claim of anti-semitism suggestions you really need to examine your own biases.
Atrocities against unarmed civilians are not excused by 'but they started it', who did? The old woman, the 10 year old boy? Justifying collective punishment like this takes a huge degree of racism and heartlessness.
"once started (wars) are sometimes impossible to stop". How convenient then that land (belonging to people who also have nothing to do with 'the first punch') continues to be stolen as long as the war drags out.
https://archive.is/8RsGz
I visited Israel for a sports seminar some ~10 years ago and met many nice people. I felt sympathetic to their reality of living in an ever-hostile environment from all sides, and struggle to keep their place in the world safe. I admired their resilience and strength.
When this Gaza conflict started, I saw how the Israeli protested against their government and demanded peace, so I thought there is a semblance of an excuse for glimpses of abhorrence being reported - "it's a small number of people in power, not the Israeli nation doing it, and also there are always 2 sides to the story".
Since then, there have been unfathomable horrors and crimes against humanity done from the Israel side, with extreme intensity and one-sidedness, and it's now been going for so long. I can find no excuse of any kind anymore, for what has been and is being done in Gaza. I don't think any normal person could. The weight of these things, in my mind at least, is such that if the Israeli people really wanted anything different, it was their human duty and utmost responsibility to stop this by now, in whatever way needed. They didn't... It's sad that people who have suffered so much as well, let themselves become the villains to this depth and extent.
It's a state founded on ethnic cleansing. People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves.
In late 1947, their militias begun a campaign of massacring and expelling Palestinians from mostly defenseless villages. These refuges pouring into neighboring Arab countries is what prompted the 1948 war. When the war ended, they murdered any civilians trying to return to their homes.
Gaza was originally a refugee camp created for receiving these expelled people.
The ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since. The current Gaza war is not when the crimes against humanity started. Israel has been commiting crimes against humanity throughout its entire existence.
> People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves
Including a sizeable Jewish minority.
The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region. But it’s a continuation of outsiders (in particular Westerners, though the Iranians also bought this settler-colonialist nonsense which led to their recent miscalculations) with no connection to the land drawing up broad moral claims for how the Middle East should be divided up.
> Including a sizeable Jewish minority.
There was a Jewish community in Palestine (mostly centered around Jerusalem) but they did not come up with the Zionist project. Actually, many were opposed and some of their descendants still do so to this day.
> The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region
The (European) architects of the Zionist project literally called it colonialism.
"You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial." -Theodor Herzl
Ze'ev Jabotinsky literally compared the Zionist project to other colonial projects when arguing the people living there would fight back against their colonizers and the need for numbers and strength to counter them.
> how the Middle East should be divided up
Given how every group claims it is a holy place, I'd expect each group would want it held in a state of peace, prosperity, and reverence for the benefits of creation. Instead they all seem bent on holding their holy lands in states of violence, discord, and waste.
You're not wrong that there is deep external interference but wouldn't holy peoples rise above any of that to do better from every side?
Some people seem to have the idea that most of the people are European Jews, when in reality, it was more Arab jews, in large part due to the Nazis. The standardized language even reflects this, closet to the local pronounciation of hebrew than the "accents" in Europe. Or even Jiddish
There's plenty of videos of orthodox Jewish people getting brutalized in public by Israeli government thugs. There are many Jewish voices that oppose the genocide. Please don't conflate Judaism with a violent project of political extremism, even though the latter uses the former cynically as a "human shield".
> Please don't conflate Judaism with a violent project of political extremism
I’m not. I’m arguing that one can oppose what’s happening in Gaza without careening into counterproductiveness and calling for the destruction of Israel.
A state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere. In fact, it appears to be the opposite, based on historical fact. There are also Jewish communities that live peacefully with dignity in Iran.
> A state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere. In fact, it appears to be the opposite, based on historical fact.
Whatever else you think, this is some massive misunderstanding of history.
Historically, the lack of a state for Jews was one of the main reasons Jews experienced the Holocaust, which originated the term Genocide. Half of the Jewish population, making up (iirc) 90% of the population of Europe, died, because they had nowhere else to go.
And of the ones that survived, they still had nowhere else to go, no one wanted to take them in. The only place they could go, and what was agreed to worldwide, was to go to then-Palestine. Then, the hundreds of thousands of Jews "living peacefully" in Arab countries were ethnically cleansed from their countries, which they'd lived in for generations, and also largely had nowhere to go except Palestine.
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> People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves.
Isn't that just history repeating itself? Even in the old testament, they had to clear the current inhabitants of their promised land after wander the desert for 40 years.
Archeology suggests biblical Israel was actually a federation of tribes, some of which were enemies in early parts of the Bible. For example, the philistines which became one of the 12 tribes and also are the origin of the term Palestinian.
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A right to exist doesn't justify a million other things that are completely unacceptable about the Israeli state.
> things that are completely unacceptable about the Israeli state
To be clear, you find it unacceptable that the Israeli state exists?
It's a popular opinion these days, all the cool kids are doing it
> It's a popular opinion these days
Westerners with no connection to the Middle East deciding they know best for the people actually there has been a popular opinion for a long time.
> Many states were "founded on ethnic cleansing".
So what? I don't get your point.
Israel has continuously been oppressing the Palestinians for almost 80 years. That is immoral. Israel is in the wrong.
> They are widely considered to posses a right of existence, and even expected to defend their citizens.
You are just jumping to a different topic. I said nothing about its right to exist.
The Muslims have systematically eradicated Jews from their entire homeland, the greater middle east, over the last five hundred years, and all the Jews have left is that strip of sand by the sea.
Israel is the last stand against a Holocaust that has been going on a lot longer than eighty years.
That's not entirely true but your are changing the subject.
Have the Palestinians been ethnically cleansed? Yes or no? Have they been oppressed for almost 80 years? Yes or no?
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Wait are you calling me "European"? This is honestly insulting.
Would you please apologize on-record or edit that out? Thanks
> In any case, Israel doesn't even have the right to exist
It does: UN resolution, 1967.
That you do not recognize an entire state to exist is an admission to preparing a genocide. The fact that 4 countries around Israel are preparing genocide justifies Israel’s measures are reasonable to maintain peace.
What is reasonable?
Well it’s not like Gaza didn’t start the shooting with 7000 rockets pre-October festival (I was myself surprised that Israel didn’t respond pre-October). Those rockets were indiscriminate against population centers, each of them were a war crime. So it’s reasonable to reduce the neighbor’s ability to wage war to dust.
Are the Gazans exempt from responsibility of their state’s actions?
To answer, we need to check whether the Hamas was imposed to the Gazans or whether they voted for it and, in a broader sense, whether the Gazans wish the genocide of Israel. It turns out the 2006 elections were almost the last ones in Gaza, and that’s when the Hamas was elected (and the opponents were not better). So the Gazans are aligned with the actions performed by the collective group of their nation, it’s not a small group of extremists, it represents the will of the nation, and therefore the facilities and support network of the Hamas are part of the war logistics, and deserves to be reduced to dust.
Did Israel act with restraint?
Israel has the nuclear bomb and has enough power to genocide if they want. The fact that they perform spot actions instead of sweeping actions is proof that Israel tries to discriminate the military, its support network with genocide intent against Israel (=pretty much everyone) and tries to spare the innocents, is proof that Israel is not committing a genocide.
> That you do not recognize an entire state to exist is an admission to preparing a genocide.
Israel doesn't recognise Palestine as a state, so by your own definition Israel is preparing a genocide.
Would that be the same UN that Israel (and the US, to a large degree) refuses to recognize the authority of? Can't have your cake and eat it too, friend.
> What is reasonable?
Not instituting so many decrees ("militaty orders") that even the military authority responsible for 'ruling' the area can't produce an accurate or complete list of all of said decrees. Decrees which, I might add, forbid planting flowers, raising a flag, operating a farm tractor, going to school, or making a bank account withdrawal without the permission of the Israeli military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Order
Let that sink in: if you're a Palestianian you can't go to the bank and take out your own money without permission of the Israeli military.
Another military order allows the Israeli military to seize your business if you don't open during regular business hours.
Those decrees also allow Jews to "buy" (seize) land from Palestinians who refuse to sell to them, merely by asserting "power of attorney"
Not having snipers executing children. Not conducting missile and gun attacks on ambulances and independent worldwide-recognized medical aid organizations, and then attacking rescuers who show up to render aid. Not slaughtering an entire hospital's worth of patients and burying them in mass graves. Not slaughtering people lined up to get food aid. Not purposefully starving millions of people.
Not using a black-box AI to decide who is a "terrorist" and then blowing up their entire house, thus killing not only the supposed terrorist, but the entire family, or possibly the neighbor - because a "smart" bomb would be too expensive.
Really? Is this why the world does not recognize the north part of Cyprus despite Turkish Cypriots not butchering any Greeks south of the border since 1974, when they unilaterally declared independence?
Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us. And please don't include previously warring peoples whose leaders agreed on a population exchange and imposed that mandatory trauma on their own people.
Palestine, Cyprus, and India had the unenviable luck of being long-term victims of a last gasp British empire's farewell divide-and-conquer gambit.
(and excuse me for ignoring the deflection trolling)
> Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Greeks_from_Istan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_of_Turks_from_Bulgaria_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istrian%E2%80%93Dalmatian_exod...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_expulsion_of_Italians_fro...
It was quite common and very accepted method in the 1940s, hell, expelling 15 million germans, some living there for hundreds of years, was proposed by Churchill.
The reason you never heard about the rest of these is because the people were resettled, not kept in a state of permanent inheritable refugee state financed by the UN with financial incentives to be kept that way.
>Please name some of other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing"
(proceeds to list examples of countries which were already founded before the ethnic cleansing events they mention or events I already alluded to)
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to list Libyans expelling italians as a comparable example, when Libya was a colony of Italy. Ditto Germans, a people of belonging to the aggressor country. Bulgaria declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. And you have to explain why you included the pakistan link, as I already mentioned it in my post.
Look, it's not expelling some imperial troops. but peaceful citizens, who sometimes had lived there for centuries.
The idea that people of different ethnicities live, unmixed, divided by neat borders of nation-states is pretty recent. This was the case neither in Europe, nor in Middle East for a very long time before the advent of state-based nationalism in the 19th century. It was quite normal for people of different ethnicities, languages, and even faiths to live intermixed in certain regions, especially areas of intense trade, which the entire Mediterranean coast used to be. Borders were more about economic and political control than ethnic identity.
(The ethnic unity purportedly achieved by nation-states formed in 19th and early 20th centuries is also often more by fiat: look at the variety of German or Italian languages prior to unification of Germany or Italy, for instance, to say nothing about India.)
>Look, it's not expelling some imperial troops. but peaceful citizens, who sometimes had lived there for centuries.
I'm confused are you talking about the italians in Libya, the Germans, or the Palestinians. It's hard to tell without referencing what you're responding to, or if there is a misunderstanding about the point I'm trying to make.
Palestinians can be arguably labeled as the aggressor country if that's how you want to spin the narrative. As Jews were peacefully buying lands when the massacres and ethnic cleansing started at 1929.
Most germans were living in their respected newly founded Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia for hundreds of years if not more when expelled.
Italians, even if they were colonialists, were expelled from their homes, by people who previously have been colonialists themselves, some when arriving with the arab conquests.
Bulgaria expelled the turks in the 1950s, and the partition of india, forming pakistan and india, were two newly formed countries around the time of israel and palestine, included ethnic cleansing from both sides
Do you think that these examples of ethnic cleansing post ww2 are irrelevant when no new country was formed?
What, like it's happened elsewhere so it's OK now? How do you think that kind of defense argument goes down in court?
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There were hundreds of Palestinians held by the IDF without charges on Oct 6th. What’s another word for “held without charges”? Yes it’s hostage.
There were 3 days of idf bombing in gaza in september 2023.
Bringing up “hostages” as a reason for anything is a lie, a distortion, and a laundering of genocide.
> Bringing up “hostages” as a reason for anything is a lie, a distortion, and a laundering of genocide
One siding a war between Netanyahu and Hamas is a lie, distortion and laundering of atrocities.
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The difference is that e.g. Māori or native Americans and whatnot are full citizens with full rights.
The "founded on ethnic cleansing" is not the most important bit from the previous post. It's the "ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since" that's the most important bit.
No, the difference is that the native population of western countries very much disappeared, because this was an actual genocide their percent of population is now negligible.
While the Palestinian population in Israel proper is around 25% with full rights, while those under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have rights in their respective political entity.
Again there are other examples of countries where the population lost all rights and were expelled like germans in czechoslovakia and poland or greeks from turkey
> the native population of western countries very much disappeared
That's simply not true. It's very obviously not true. Are you denying that Māoris and Native Americans exist today? I cannot phantom why you would say such obvious nonsense.
I no longer believe you are engaging in good faith. Good day.
I said "negligible". The original population was largely killed and replaced
There's a bunch of native tribes that got completely wiped out. What are you talking about?
> Facts is that most of the palestinians fled in the earlier phases of the war, and the very little instances of forced evacuation of the population where within the borders of Israel/Palestine, not out of the country.
People don't leave their homes voluntarily. They leave because of violence or fear of violence. The fact is there were Palestinians living all over the map at the "before" stage. Settlers came to form an ethno-state. The orders given to the Zionist militia commanders were literally "cleanse" this or that village. In the "after" stage, all these people are gone from most of the map and the ones trying to return to their homes are shot dead.
That is ethnic cleansing period. The goal was to create an ethno-state in a place where people already lived. These people have been getting confined to smaller and smaller areas ever since. And the oppression continues to this day.
> Regarding the "State founded on ethnic cleaning", in recent times this includes entire South America, parts of Africa, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
So what? What's your point?
>they have ethnically cleansed the Jews like in Hebron
Have you been to Hebron? I'd highly encourage it because you will see literally the most vile state sponsored racists in the western world.
The ethnic cleansing is not as violent as the gazan genocide but it ought to make any person with a conscience sick to the stomach. You walk around looking up at the settlement guards (more of them than there are settlers) pointing guns at you from guard towers as the racist settlers living above literally throw trash down on the Palestinian untermensch living below them.
Every year they squeeze Palestinians who live and work there further and further out.
It's also the home of the venerated terrorist Baruch Goldstein (10% of Israelis consider him a hero because he shot up a mosque), his shrine and Itamir ben Gvir - the national security minister who idolized him.
After seeing that place I became convinced that if anywhere was going to commit a nazi style genocide it would be israel. 8 years later thats exactly what happened.
Judaism isn't an ethnicity. And I would agree those states are founded on the same ideals. All should be abolished.
I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well - the US and the EU states (especially Germany, sadly).
As horrible as the Israeli mindset is, their subjective viewpoint is at least somewhat relatable: An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead - and will with very high likelihood experience terror attacks themselves. That this upbringing doesn't exactly make you want to engage with the other side is psychologically understandable.
(I'm imaging this as the universal experience of all Jewish Israelis, religious or secular, left or right. I'm excluding the religious and Zionist-ideological angles here, because those are a whole different matter once again)
What I absolutely cannot understand is the behavior of our states. We're pretending to be neutral mediators who want nothing more than to end the conflict, yet in reality, we're doing everything to keep the conflict going. We're fully subscribed to Zionist narrative of an exclusive Israeli right to the land (the justifications ranging from ostensibly antifascist to openly religious) and we're even throwing our own values about universal human rights and national sovereignty under the bus to follow the narrative.
If the messianic and dehumanizing tendencies of Israelis are answered by nothing else than full support and encouragement of their allies, I don't find it exactly surprising that they will grow.
> An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else,
They know perfectly well that their settlers are conducting daily pogroms against Palestinian villages in the West Bank, protected by their own army. They know perfectly well that thousands of Palestinians are detained for years without due process, trialled by military courts, kept in a state of apartheid.
They just don't care.
What does it even mean 'to want nothing more than to end the conflict'? As far as I can tell it doesn't mean anything. Everybody wants the conflict to end, including the Israelis and the Palestinians. They just want it to end differently, of course.
In theory, we want to end it through the Two-State Solution (though even what this means is vague - certainty not the borders of 1967 that Palestinians and Arabs are demanding)
But yeah, in practice, we seem to want it to end with full Israeli dominance, and the Palestinians either emigrating to Egypt and Jordan or vanishing into thin air, I suppose.
I'd like better news coverage of that:
What exactly ARE the goals / demands of every side. Both what they say in public, and what's generally accepted as the rational real goals each side requests / demands / etc via peace talks as well as through violence.
The breakdown could even focus on factions within the nebulous term of 'sides'. An average citizen is likely to have looser criteria than a government / terrorist.
Here's the coverage you've asked (opinions my own, I do not pretend to rep. anyone)
Israel stated goals of war:
1. Return the hostages
2. Remove Hamas regime from Gaza
3. (arguably done) bring north-Israel communities safely back home
Unstated goals:
1. Open Egypt-Gaza border. This had failed.
2. Create safe zone on the Gaza-Israeli border. This is mostly done in practice. This goal cannot be stated (though it'll save many lives)
Hamas goals:
Read Hamas chapter, or see interviews with captured Hamas militants post 7/10 attack (if you believe it's not scripted)
Gazan who are not part of Hamas regime goals: survive
Unfortunately this Israeli government has consisently refused to articulate any sort of positive goal. Netanyahu is only publicly against things. He is adamant about preventing a Palestinian state and crippling Iran, but seems to have no plan for what should happen in Palestine, hence the seemingly endless horrible situation there.
The problem with enunciating real positions to domestic audiences are that the extremists on both sides will literally murder anyone who compromises.
Let's not forget Israel's domestic orthodox/right-wing Jewish terrorism and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.
Ergo, there's even more incentive for leaders to continually espouse positions they know will never happen, but which play well at home.
As a violence in poli sci professor of mine once quipped, this is a 'the only solution is killing the grandmothers' conflict. Because generational narratives of victimization are so ingrained in large parts of both societies that there is no room for compromise.
Silence extremist voices forcefully, wait a generation, and then there might be a path to peace. :(
Who will provide the force to silence these extremist voices?
Maybe there are some parallels in this situation and late 1800’s-mid 1900’s Western Europe. The civil war on the European continent between Germanic states on one hand and French/British ended when two powerful outsiders (US and Soviet Russia) invaded and split the continent. During this occupation west Europeans nations learned how to live with themselves and to atone for their mistakes and to not repeat these mistakes. But they only learned this because they were under military occupation.
This scenario will most likely not happen in the Middle East and so I think there will not be peace there for generations.
The greatest chance for this was probably the US-Arab world, but the Shia/Sunni sectarian-political feudalism made that a non-starter, especially in the context of the Cold War.
As a colleague from Bahrain once quipped, 'the countries of the Arab world love to use Palestinians as propaganda for domestic purposes, but none of them actually give enough of a shit to make hard choices to solve the problem.'
Hamas' explicit goal is "from the river to the sea". If there is an alternative that they are willing to settle for, nobody knows what it is.
The individual Gazans almost certainly have one in mind, likely some variant of the two state solution. But Hamas is in charge, and there is nobody else to talk to about it. Ordinary Gazans don't much like Hamas but they are the only thing standing between them and Israel, who as you know is attacking with impunity.
Israel's nominal goal is to remove Hamas and engage such a negotiation, though there is significant doubt that this tactic is going to lead there. And they know that.
Israelis are roughly equally divided on what they want. About half want to wipe out Gaza and have control of (but not responsibility for) the West Bank. They are the ones in government.
The other half is much more amenable to a two state solution, but they are extremely skeptical of finding it. Long before the October 7 attacks, Israelis routinely have to shelter from rocket attacks. We hear little about them because they are largely ineffective, but it does not give Israelis a lot of confidence in any kind of negotiated settlement. That side is also happy to have Gaza walled off.
And all of these sides are backed by powerful outside forces for whom the conflict itself is their goal.
That is an extremely high level breakdown, as neutral as I can be.
In precisely the same way that the Nazis wanted their conflict to end with Jews emigrating to Africa (Madagascar according to their original plan) or vanishing into thin air.
At this point, I think the Two-State Solution has proven to be incredibly naive.
As long as there are outside forces, such as Iran, willing to embed & fund militants among the Gazan population, the only practical solution towards peace is assimilation: have Gazans broken up & spread out through Israel until law enforcement can be practically achieved.
Now assimilation sucks & will likely result in all sorts of social injustice, but I consider it a better alternative to the current ethnic cleansing.
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Is there a way for IDF to fight Hamas without "inflict war crimes, or terrorism on civilians" though? How would that work in practical terms?
I'm reminded of an episode of Saga of Tanya the Evil where a 'guerilla military unit' had 'taken over a captured city'. The progag's military unit had to go 'clear the city'. Their military commanders had given clear orders that all hostile forces were enemy soldiers who must be killed. They started by issuing a demand to release the hostages and allow them to exit the war zone. One of the few who didn't want to fight was shot while trying to escape. From that point it predictably went in a very bad direction.
As far as I'm aware, the citizens of Israel are free to leave that country* (free to enter another country is another issue, but they're also free to move about). It's terrorism and illegal military action to knowingly fire upon civilians. I agree with that for all sides of a conflict. The issue with the other side(s) in this conflict is that they do not present as a clearly identified military force. IMO the most proper solution is the same as evaporatively purifying water. Issue sufficient (<< heavy lifting here) warnings for civilians to leave an area, with an area for them to move to. Then any who remain in the military action area are combatants. Probably just like in the anime episode that showcases this circumstance. (war is hell, that's one of the hells.)
If fighting X requires you to inflict war crimes, perhaps you should question the premise of why you are fighting in the first place.
And assuming the answer to the questioning is that the war is currently required.
Let's say in order to return the hostages (considered popular amongst the Zionists).
Now what is the practical way to execute the war without the abovementioned consequences?
What's the alternative?
When Hamas uses hospitals for military purposes (or any purpose "harmful to their enemy" [other than solely medical care of injured Hamas combatants]), those hospitals lose their protected status otherwise provided by the Geneva Convention.
I don't like the prospect of hospitals being attacked, but if Hamas houses combatants or arms inside a hospital, attacking Hamas therein does not appear to be a war crime, provided Israel has issued a warning and allowed a reasonable time for Hamas to vacate the hospital.
The Geneva Convention does not provide "One Weird Trick to Avoid Being Attacked"
It's been widely reported that the IDF substantially loosened their acceptable civilian collateral casualty rules after Oct 7th.
>> In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/world/middleeast/israel-h...
The very existence of guidance change on civilian casualties should constitute a war crime, because to put it another way, the IDF decided that Palestinian civilian lives were worth less after the terror attacks.
In other metrics, the October attacks killed 1,200 Israelis, plus 1,700 killed in the war. Versus 50,000+ Palestinian fatalities.
So we're at ~1:17 Israeli: Palestinian killed.
I feel like any human can agree there should be an ethical ceiling to that number. Maybe it's lower or higher than the current number, but it being unlimited is genocide.
The Gulf War had a more extreme casualty ratio of ~1:1,000+. Would you consider that an extremely unethical war? Should the US have done something differently to even out the ratio?
Apples/oranges. In the Gulf War there were identifiable, organized military forces.
Ergo, the majority of those casualties could be attributed to military:military.
Given the nature of the Gaza conflict, trying to sub-classify casualties leads inevitably to the 'military aged male' problem.
> The very existence of guidance change on civilian casualties should constitute a war crime
Surely a change in tactics by Hamas could lead to a legitimate reason to change the proportion of civilian risks.
Imagine if Hamas were scrupulously avoiding all civilians and civilian structures by 200 meters before date X and changed tactics on date X to freely intermingle with civilians and occupy civilian structures with military units and arms.
I'd expect before date X for Israel to have minimal civilian casualties be considered acceptable and proportional, but after that change in tactics I would see justification for a change in the math to justify a higher figure as being the lowest reasonable amount of civilian risk.
And indeed, Israel has made token efforts to say this is happening, but I'm not aware of any proof. Which, coupled with the fact that the IDF is explicitly prohibiting reporting, isn't a good look.
Furthermore, even if Israel has a justification for large numbers of civilian casualties, there are other portions of the Geneva Convention it's obviously breaching:
>> ART. 53. — Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or co-operative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.
>> ART. 55. — To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.
>> ART. 56. — To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the co-operation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
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If that were true, the Palestinians in the West Bank should be living in peace and prosperity. Yet they aren't...
They are considerably better off than Gazans, though I'd agree "living in piece and prosperity" would not be the first adjective comes to mind.
> It’d be convenient if Jews just stopped existing so the Arabs could take their homeland again
This argument betrays your bias: that the land is yours (Jewish I mean), and "Arabs" stole it and want to steal it again.
Of course, the other side sees it differently. They see a half a century of immigration to their land culminating in a partition that was imposed from the outside in Western colonialist fashion without the consent of the people living there. They saw massacres and expulsions and ethnic cleansing. That is the root of the conflict.
Of course now 80 years and many complications have passed; both sides have legitimate complaints about the other and many people have been born in both territories making them natives and not part of either colonisation or expulsion. It's difficult.
> All of the death toll coming out of Gaza are from Hamas and they revised the numbers back in April to show 72% of the deaths are military aged males.
This betrays it even more. Not only do you cite a non-credible source going against the consensus, but your argument is literally "Palestinian males between 16 and 45 are fair game for extermination". Not sure what to reply to that.
I find it exemplified in the disagreements even in the beginning of the conflict. I feel, pro-Israeli commenters either prefer to start with 1948 (The state somehow appeared like some sort of divine creation and was immediately declared war by all surrounding countries) or in biblical times.
Pro-Palestinian commenters usually start with the Balfour Declaration or Theodor Herzl's books, I believe.
I found 1881/1882 a good starting point, because this was the first time there was organized immigration that explicitly followed Zionist plans and ideology - I.e. people were not abstractly thinking about "returning to Jerusalem" and they weren't immigrating into the Ottoman empire for other reasons, but they were deliberately immigrating with the intention of (re-)establishing a "Jewish homeland" in the biblical Land of Israel.
If you are from US/Australia/... chances are you also think the land is yours and occasionally you celebrate what is for locals an "invasion day"
in this sense Jews are in a much better position because their presence in specifically that area many hundreds of years before Muslim conquest is archeologically documented. Unlike presence of Europeans in Americas or Australia.
What I say does not justify war atrocities. Just that "you are wrong to call it your land" is not a good working logic
I'm unsure what your point is, because that example supports my argument. There is no documented European presence but there is Native presence for millenia in those lands. Yet nobody would seriously argue that non-native Americans/Australians should be kicked out so the land is returned to their "original owners" as defined by "the vague descendents of the earliest known occupiers as defined in a muddy ethnoreligious way"... Yet when talking about this group in particular that claim holds?!
> Yet nobody would seriously argue that non-native Americans/Australians should be kicked out so the land is returned to their "original owners"
Maybe somebody would if they could? Or how about not kicked out but just made subordinate to government by native original owners, how would you like that?
I guess somebody else can say but Americans developed land, built infrastructure and democracy and did good more. But then the same can be said about Israel. And unlike Americans Jews did not invade somewhere new because they were there in BC era
I don't defend bad stuff done by Israel gov but I suggest condemning specifically bad stuff instead of suggesting "bias" that you did. It's a bit more complicated.
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Not to mention, the claim that because you’re a boy in your late teens you’re a valid target… it’s just so incredibly…
Do I call it sexist? Stereotyping? What? It entirely denies the existence of males as anything other than enemies, and these are still children we’re talking about.
You just discovered the concept of male expendability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_expendability
I understand the biological incentives, but we’re supposed to be better than that.
Israel and people of Jewish heritage has a lot of soft-power in the west. And the anti-terrorism rhetoric that Israeli's using to sell this has has previously been deployed by the west to cover up it's own crimes.
I would argue that the Muslim world has gained quite some political power in the West, perhaps as a simple result of immigration. The EU for example seem to have about 50 times more Muslims than Jews.
Anti-terrorism rhetorics has indeed previously led to terrible crimes, but I wouldn't suppose that's a reason to support pro-terrorism rhetorics. It's probably best to look at the content instead of the type of rhetorics.
You're not making sense my friend. The recent Muslim immigrants have nothing to do with soft power and I don't see how that's relevant to this context. Are you saying that it counters the influence that Israel has?
And if we're talking about terrorism, IDF and Mossad are very much known to deploy terror tactics across a lot of their historical engagements. The definition of the word doesn't hinge on designation by a Western organization. And the vast majority of "pro-palestine" people in the world are not Iran proxies and secret anti-semites. They're actually, for the most part, young people that are working from a place of empathy and horror. The most blatant and harmful propganda in this whole mess is the attempt to designate pro-palestine protestors anti-semites and secretly in support of Iran and Hamas policies. What a terrible cheapening of the word. Point is, the ones using the most pro-terror rhetoric are those trying to defend the IDF right now.
>The most blatant and harmful propganda in this whole mess is the attempt to designate pro-palestine protestors anti-semites and secretly in support of Iran and Hamas policies
Propaganda? I am not very familiar with the details and frankly I don’t really care, but at the two pro-Palestinian rallies that I saw were used "From the river to the sea" slogans, and like all protesters were okay with that.
What evidence of this do you see? Non Jewish natural born Americans also outnumber Jews in America, yet I don’t see any immigrant students getting deported for criticizing Americans.
Jews have disproportionate levels of soft power in the US. Israel receives billions in support every year. Anti Muslim propaganda is pushed out every year in Hollywood. The medias coverage of Gaza is essentially one big lie by omission. Many states pass laws aimed to deter criticism of Israel.
I don’t see any other group in America that receives this level of support.
> Anti-terrorism rhetorics has indeed previously led to terrible crimes, but I wouldn't suppose that's a reason to support pro-terrorism rhetorics
Opposing genocide is not supporting terrorism. Labelling support for basic human rights as being pro-terrorism is, well, part of the genocide.
What are you even commenting on? Did I (or anyone?) say that opposing genocide is supporting terrorism? Did I say that human rights are pro-terrorism?
The parent comment was dismissing anti-terrorism rhetorics because previously they were used to committing crimes. That sounds illogical to me, and that's what I was commenting on.
> I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well - the US and the EU states (especially Germany, sadly).
I understand that you are talking about the recent era, but I wonder if you could speak to the history of the creation of Israel, and the German perception of that. Is there any discussion about the European role in the creation of Israel? After the end of the war, it isn’t as if there was a movement to return property and homes to European Jews. If anything, the powers in Europe after the war (and, in the case of Eichmann, pre war as well) saw Zionism as a solution for what to do with the Jews.
Is there any sympathy or responsibility felt in European communities for essentially using Zionism as a solution?
From my experience, the history of Israel as discussed in the media usually begins in 1948. A standard phrase is "The state was founded and immediately declared war at".
Sometimes discussion goes back a bit further about how the area was a "League of Nations Mandatory Area" before, that was for some reason was administered by the British.
That's usually it.
An interesting detail is that the legitimacy of Israel here is usually explained with the UN (the Partition Plan resolutions and the accepted membership) - not with any kind of divine right. I think that's quite different from how (right wing) Israelis see the source of legitimacy themselves.
That's a whole other fork of the story.
I was basically getting at how does Europe see its role in the fact that a big part of what made Israel possible was the more or less complete displacement of European jewry during the war, and the complete lack of will to create a place in post-war europe for their own Jewish community.
This perspective comes from my own family history where a few relatives managed to survive the war in Nazi custody, but then spent longer in Western European refugee camps postwar than they spent in the concentration and death camps during the war. The entire family ended up outside of Europe (USA and Israel) since it was the most viable path out of the camps.
Basically the success of Zionism is due in no small part to the active support from Europe in the years after the war, and my question is, do Europeans see that in as self-interested terms as it can look. More succinctly, does the Western European community realize that creating Israel was a solution to the post-war "Jewish Problem" that conveniently did not require those nations to create a hospitable place for jewish communities within their own borders.
Nope. It's basically forgotten. At least, I haven't heard anyone talking about it, either in my circles or in the media.
I've noticed that many people justify Hamas's forever war on Israelis with "well Israel stole Palestinian land" while completely ignoring how European and Arab states stole property that adds up to many times bigger than Israel from Jews after WW2.
If we did an honest accounting of who stole land from whom and calculated reparations, Israelis would be owed far more than they owe.
> An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead - and will with very high likelihood experience terror attacks themselves. That this upbringing doesn't exactly make you want to engage with the other side is psychologically understandable.
This "entirety of the surrounding population want them dead" language is both dehumanizing, false, and (perhaps not intended by you) genocidal.
The "surrounding population" is not a monolith. I imagine only a very small minority of people want all Jewish Israelis dead. I do Palestinian liberation work with many non-Jewish people from the middle east (I'm Jewish) and have yet to meet a single one who wants me dead.
They all want an end to Zionism.
Some may want it replaced with an Islamic government (which at its best is not different from the ideal "Zionism" you may hear defended by liberal Zionists, and at its worst is no different from the Zionism instituted by the modern state of Israel today)
Most want it replaced with a secular state where everyone has equal rights.
If your intent was to explain the mindset of an "ordinary Israeli citizen" who supports Zionism, then I agree with you, but it's dangerous to say something like this without distinguishing why this is a flawed mindset which can only exist due to an extensive system of propaganda.
Speaking of Germany - Israel really weaponized the holocaust, in the sense that's absolutely impossible to criticize Israel without being accused of antisemitism. I actually think it got to the point it makes difficult fighting antisemitism because it's evident to any honest person that the accusation is a weapon now.
>> An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead.
You have to look at the other side too. Palestinian's are born knowing that Israeli's have taken lots of their land through violent force. And they want to take more of it. And while the Israeli's live in a well developed wealthy nation they are condemned to poverty.
Consider the King David Hotel Bombing[1]. Israeli terrorists murdered nearly 100 people. In 2006 Netanyahu presided over the unveiling of a memorial plaque, alongside some of the terrorists involved in it, with the plaque specifically remembering the terrorist who died in the attack. So Israeli terrorism is fine, even worthy of praise.
And while the Israelis may grow up scared that the Palestinian's want them dead, 10's of thousands of Palestinian children won't grow up at all.
>> I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well
I agree. It seems that all over Europe at least, the governments are largely going against public opinion on this issue. But it's not the first time we've seen this (Iraq being a recent example).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
No question about that.
I found it a remarkable detail that from the shore of Gaza, you see the port of and industrial zone of Ashdod, only a few kilometers away. It seems almost like a permanent reminder that the entire area is in fact well-developed - the wasteland only exists where they live.
I dont disagree with anything you said, but isn't that the role of elected leaders ? Actually making the difficult decisions that may be unpopular, but necessary ?
Or is it the leader class in most western countries have no sense of duty , are effectively cowards, and are in it just to have a profitable, white-collar career ?
It's a bunch of >60yr old western leaders who had 40yrs of seeing violence and terrorism in Israel and Palestine, and every couple years a naive western leader announces they want to fix it, while nothing changes.
People are just numb to the whole area.
The most difficult part is the fact Israel is wealthy and aggressive while (both) Palestine government has been the definition of dysfunction and tribalism for decades, even during peace times. Diplomatic solutions have became harder and harder since the 90s.
You can read the history the political bodies in West Bank and even they seem to not care to fix anything either. They have their own leadership issues (like never electing new leaders).
There’s a major gap between a western savior wanting something bad to stop and actually going there and accomplishing something.
> Or is it the leader class in most western countries have no sense of duty , are effectively cowards, and are in it just to have a profitable, white-collar career ?
They are cowards who are just in it to enrich themselves by bribery, theft, and extortion.
You are looking in the right direction and not seeing just how far our society has gone.
> Actually making the difficult decisions that may be unpopular, but necessary ?
What is the unpopular, necessary decision? GP is commenting on the US/EUs continual campaigns to arm and fund Israel's efforts in Gaza without pushback. I don't wish to misinterpret you, but this read to me, that funding/aiding human rights violations and genocide in Gaza is a "necessary" act.
That's a good question. I know, in Germany, saying - let alone doing - anything critical of Israel as a public figure has effectively been a taboo. The justification had always been the Holocaust and the perpetual guilt of Germany towards the Jewish people arising from it.
For a long time, that made some sense - it's starting to shift into quite horrific territory though, if leaders and communities interpret this obligation as some sort of absolute fealty towards the Israeli government, at the exclusion of everything else - even if that government itself is repeating the path of Nazi Germany. Yet this seems to be how a lot of German politicians interpret it.
I found the distinction exemplified in the "Never again" vs "Never again for anyone" slogans.
I don't understand what exactly is going on in the US, but there seems to have been a similar taboo, though maybe stemming from different sources (like that Evangelical end-of-days prophecy that sees Israel literally as part of a divine plan that trumps everything else).
I find it notable that part of Trump's voter support in the election were actually pro-Palestinian groups - because they saw Trump as the only alternative to a complicit Harris administration. Of course, Trump turned out to be even more complicit and openly embracing the Evangelical narrative.
So as far as US voters were concerned, there was no pro-Palestinian or even neutral options to vote for. There was just secular pro-Israel and religious pro-Israel. (Well, there was also Jill Stein, but she had no realistic chance of winning)
Of course there are other voices saying that all those justifications - Holocaust, biblical prophecy, etc - are just show and the real reason for the unconditional support is just ordinary geopolitics. The image of Israel as the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" that guarantees US dominance in the region.
I do not think this simplification works. A lot of the conflict is about systematic attempts at expansion of Israel itself - that is what settlements are and always were. Removal and mistreatment of original population went hand in hand with that.
Are we talking about the expansion out of Lebanon in 2000 or the expansion out of Gaza in 2005?
We are talking about all settlements into territory that was not Israel's regardless of the year. The settlements like that are internationally illegal precisely because they are clear attempt to use civilian population as shields in a land takeover.
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That could all be true, it seems plausible, but I don't think any of it is necessary to explain America's unwaivering support for Israel.
American Evangelical Protestants believe that the continued existence of Israel is a prophesied necessary prerequisite for the resurrection of Jesus, who will then start the Apocalypse. They think they can force prophecy by defending Israel. It doesn't matter how badly Israel behaves, they think the ends justify all of it.
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> Prior to this both sides were living reasonably peacefully in Israel and Gaza
That's simply not true. Israel never gave up control over airspace, land and sea borders after the disengagement and effectively put the strip under siege after Hamas came to power.
The west bank is cut up into hundreds of small Palestinian enclaves that are separated and controlled by the IDF. There is also a policy of systematically denying Palestinians in the West Bank resources and on the other hand priorizing the settlers.
Both areas have been under siege for decades, just with different intensity.
When the current government was elected - a year before Oct.7 - it made speeding up the land grabs and eventual full annexation of the West Bank a priority. Look at the ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich: Both have deep connections to the settlers and have made deeply dehumanizing statements towards the Palestinians. (Smotrich officially published his "Decisive Plan" in 2017 about his proposal for a "permanent solution": Either "encourage emigration", allow them to live as non-citizens with restricted rights in isolated enclaves or "let the army deal with them". Both ministers are fully on board with the current starvation policy - or rather, it's still too lenient for them)
Ben Gvir is now head of the Israeli police. Smotrich is finance minister and "Minister in the defense ministry", a special role that gives him the ultimate authority about anything that concerns the West Bank.
All that happened before Oct.7.
When I said reasonable peacefully I meant not killing each other and quite a lot of people in Gaza were crossing for jobs on the Israeli side of the border. I wasn't say love and social justice reigned.
When westerners and people like Bill Clinton have got involved they have mostly proposed having a Palestinian state with their own land but the Palestinians have mostly objected to Israel existing so we have the current stuff.
They were killing each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settler_violence
Yes, there was an exchange of job seekers, however even that was among a deliberately resource-constrained Gaza, with no hope of the situation improving.
Hamas was definitely not helping in those regards and Oct.7 cannot be excused. But Israel also never did anything to support an alternative to Hamas.
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“fully subscribed to Zionist narrative of an exclusive Israeli right to the land”
Not really. That ignores all the important nuance. Half of the current American right is America first and or ideologically libertarian, and are being pretty heavily vilified in the press and pundit circles because they want less aid to Israel and fewer forever wars. That’s it, I think they’re called woke-MAGA by detractors. Hillary even suggested Tulsi (who claimed Iran wasn’t building nukes) was a Russian asset.
Israel has a lot of soft power in the west, because our shared history (Jesus was a Jew) and because many of the greatest Americans have been Jewish. We love the Jews because they are great people, and siding with them when they are attacked is what people with western values will do when friends are attacked.
I'm Swedish. Since I was a child, for decades, I was taught and never questioned the idea that Germany had learnt from their history, in the most admirable way. That it was really ingrained into the German culture to never let anything like the holocaust happen again. That the education system there was very good in really making people understand why it happened, what went wrong, and how to make sure there would be no second one.
In early 2024, I was chatting with a German colleague of mine. Great guy, politically we were the most aligned out of anyone in our team. The genocide in Gaza was already well under way, so the topic came up. He told me, as if it was incredibly obvious "Well of course as Germany we couldn't possibly say anything about Gaza, given our history." For the rest of my life I will remember exactly that moment, where we were stood, the scene, because it came as a shock; this belief that I'd had since childhood turned out to be entirely wrong. It was the exact opposite - Germany had learnt nothing, in fact they'd learnt even less than the countries they had occupied. It was all a complete ruse, and I really lost all respect I had for how Germany has dealt with it all. A country like Japan at least doesn't even pretend to have learnt anything, and I'm not convinced that's the worse option.
I should've known the second news started flowing out of Germany such as "Award ceremony set to honor novel by Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled “due to the war in Israel,", along with stuff like designating B.D.S as "antisemitic" but I wanted to believe that was just a tiny minority of ignorant people.
Yes, I know that now "the narrative inside Germany has been turning around" but imo it's far too late, and can't possibly be sincere, being entirely fuelled by external pressure rather than any kind of actual realization.
> "the narrative inside Germany has been turning around"
Fully agreeing with your post - and also, it's not. Maybe for parts of the population (though even there, many are extremely conflicted) but definitely not for the current (conservative) leadership. What worries them is that they find the country increasingly isolated and there is a growing risk they could become personally liable - this forces them to make some concerned noises if the atrocities become undeniable.
But they never stopped practically supporting Israel wherever they can, be it with military aid or preventing EU actions that might put pressure on it. They will also snap back into the unequivocally pro-Israel narrative as soon as they can get away with it.
I am interested to know why you call out Japan as learning nothing. Obviously modern Japan has an excellent reputation and is not known as a warring nation( "no military" but ofc they have the JDF) so I'm guessing there's something deeper I don't know. Genuinely curious.
There is some denial about the crimes committed by Imperial Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre_denial https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gb94m1/why_...
That's not representative of the Japanese public opinion at all, so I fail to see how it supports the view that the entire country "hasn't learned anything at all."
That is awful, I see.
>As part of a lesson, they were banned having an army >They have powerful army anyway >Millions of Koreans live in constant fear of the power and brutality of their army
Japan obviously learn nothing.
I've been to SK numerous times. The older people dislike Japan A LOT. But their biggest base is a US one. I've never heard fear of the JDF. They have another more problematic neighbor.
The United States - who made the constitution that banned the military - does exercises with and supports the JDF. Idk if that fits unconstitutional anymore.
Their denial of horrid events and their attempts to suppress the fact that comfort women happened is undeniably awful though and shows many did not learn.
I would not extrapolate from the discourse with one German to a general statement of a heterogeneous population of ~80M people. There are many different opinions and positions in Germany - like in every country in the world. Please keep that in mind.
Germany has indeed still have a ‘vaccination’. How well it works, and whether it is not exploited by politics, is another matter.
Lastly, the conflict in the Middle East is one of the most complex conflicts in recent human history - and there is no easy way out. That also applies to the situation in Gaza.
As someone living in Germany, that philosophy of "we don't have the right to intervene or say anything" is definitely embedded in the culture here. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't follow this philosophy, and there are left-wing pro-Palestine movements here as well, but overall there's a big cultural sense of obligation to Israel due to Germany's history.
A friend of mine even ended up talking to a German diplomat in Israel, who said much the same thing: they could cosign other nations' condemnations of Israeli actions when they happened, but they couldn't condemn Israeli actions unilaterally. Obviously that was just his opinion and not an official viewpoint of the German government, but I found it fascinating that Germany still felt this sense of needing to make things right to Israel specifically.
No, there is nothing “complex” about Gaza - neither before nor after Oct 7.
The late Michael Brooks shared a small thought experiment that might help elucidate this: https://youtu.be/7ebPj_FqM5Q
It’s one thing to call the situation “nothing complex”, but there was no solution in this clip.
Usually when people call something complex they mean that the solution is complex.
From the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the vast majority of Israelis haven’t shown any concern about the suffering in Gaza. Those who campaign for an end to the war do so purely as a means to secure the release of the hostages.
And you can think the same way about russians. They support all horrors russian people do to Ukrainian cities. And many are trying to earn some extra cash out of it.
No different how Americans are brain washed that they are supporting a noble goal democracy at whatever cost around the world
Brainwashing by the government, religion, the media, schools, etc is what I suspect based on documentaries I watched. It’s heartbreaking what people can be made to think and say. I feel bad for the citizens of Israel to have become detached so much from humanity.
I’m becoming very skeptical of the “bad government, good people” idea. Governments need popular support. This goes even for horrible dictatorships. There are degrees, of course. An oppressive state can survive with less popular support than a democracy. But it still needs a decent amount. The machinery of dictatorship is as much about keeping popular support as it is about forcing people to suppress their opposition.
> I’m becoming very skeptical of the “bad government, good people” idea. Governments need popular support. This goes even for horrible dictatorships
You're either being disingenuous or have never experienced real dictatorship. I lived under theocracy in IRAN for more than half my life and I promise you that the Westerns screaming from the back "just revolt!" have no clue what they are talking about.
These regimes control communication, the media, intact laws that punishes any kind of dissent and often has multi layered of security forces to keep the population in check (not including the regular army and police).
It's easy to shout this when it's not your life, your sibling, your child or significant other's life on the line. These regimes will not hesitate to murder their own citizens to stay in power.
I don't know enough about Israel's internal politics and their society to make an assertive comment but what I _can_ say, is that from my interactions with them, they seem like ordinary and kind people who have no intention of harming me or my family.
Unless you are psychopath, you are not going to wake up one day and decide to murder people.
These people are manipulated by the media and by their government and by their spiritual leaders.
Could be, but that doesn’t really matter in the end. Support is support.
You were judging the morality of the people in your above comment. Being manipulated into giving support doesn't make the people bad.
Anyone can be mislead factually, but we can't accept the idea that being told a crime is okay gives you a moral license to do it - otherwise every neo-nazi would escape among innumerable other criminals.
At some point people have to be responsible for themselves if the concept of responsibility is to have any meaning at all. Our views and actions are all the product of our environment.
> Our views and actions are all the product of our environment.
And if that view is manipulated by people way more powerful than you...
I'm all for personal responsibility but we have laws against certain practices because companies can hack brains so well. You don't think states can do it just as well if not better?
There is strong support within Israel for the genocide of Palestinians.
Unfortunately religious zionism isn't limited to Jews. Christian evangelicals also support it, and they make up a huge percentage of voting americans (and even worse, elected officials).
https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-hav...
https://theconversation.com/christian-zionism-hasnt-always-b...
By now Gaza has been so destroyed that it has become a nation of children. About 40% of people there are age 14.
What are you actually expecting an average Israeli who does not agree with this to do? This comment strikes me as wild considering the exact same thing is playing out in America right now, and a bunch of people are making up their minds about "Americans" and what they stand for.
The same has been true for Iran, only up until now (and probably still) we have always had a more nuanced discussion - its the Iranian government, not the people of Iran.
Come on, the government of many countries does not necessarily represent the people.
Israel is supposed to be a democratic state. If the average Israeli disagrees with this they can speak up. The only voices we are hearing now are those who support it's current activities. Those who oppose are fewer and quieter.
what evidence do you have to support that claim?
I'm also baffled by the suggestion that democracy truly represents a majority and the apparent belief that dissent is quickly processed and rectified by democracy. Which country do you think shows this is working well?
> What are you actually expecting an average Israeli who does not agree with this to do?
Funny you say this because you don’t have to look far for people saying that “Gazans deserve what’s happening” because the average Gazan should fight back against Hamas.
The same thing has been said generally about Muslims and Islamic terror organizations.
Well anyway, it is still crazy to me that somebody is making a decision about the entire population of a country based on the governments actions in 2025.
I would put myself in the timeframe of the Holocaust era. Germans were next to the concentration camps and they did nothing. Germans were conditioned to support nationalism. And they trusted the nationalist party (known as nazionale Party). The Germans had convinced themselves that the Jews were different people. (And the Jews had earned much infamy during the time when Germany was suffering economically.)
Today, we see Israelis who are taught to perceive Palestinians as enemies. They see the Palestinian flag during birthrights and are taught by the IDF to hate it. And they are also taught that the west bank is dangerous and they are not to go there. Then we see IDF operations in West Bank and we see silence. We know Gaza is in a plight caused by Israel and we see silence and ignorance. Israel is bad. Israelis are bad too. And the polls have shown that 80% wish for Gaza to be cleansed, 56% support the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel, 47% want the IDF to act according to the Biblical war against Jericho. That is effectively 47% want murder while 33% want expulsion (equivalent of the ghettos+concentration camps). The benefit of doubt is disappearing rapidly fast.
And the west has been supporting Israel for decades in this campaign. This is the second millenial crusade of Europe (aka the west).
This point of view whitewashes a lot of the history. Israel has been doing horrible things since its founding to Palestinians, starting with the Nakba in 1948 which was an ethnic cleaning campaign to create an ethno state. Many massacres occurred like in Deir Yassin in 1948 and continued with other massacres like in Kahn Younis in 1956 where they lined up more than 200 men over 15 and executed them against the wall.
With the continued persecution of Palestinians, whether its the illegal occupation of the west bank or the siege of Gaza which was essentially a concentration camp, that was "mowed" like grass every few years in terrorist bombing campaigns by Israel, its no surprise that organisations like Hamas, originally a humanitarian charity, exist.
Israelis want peace through domination, just like the French in Algeria. Be aware that Jews are not native to Palestine, except those that had been living there before the state was founded. They are living as colonialists on stolen land, and are continually denying the native Palestinians the right to return, which is part of the definition ethnic cleansing.
I say this as Jewish person originally born in Palestine (or Israel) and who had grandparents that survivide the Holocaust. Once I read about what really happened in 1948, that it was zionist terrorist militias that started the conflict and that Palestinians did not "simply leave", I became an anti zionist. I don't think Israel has the right to exist. People have the right to exist and they have the right to fight back against jewish supremacism.
> Be aware that Jews are not native to Palestine, except those that had been living there before the state was founded.
Not true, many Semitic Jews who fled from those lands due to persecution went to Europe and North Africa, that includes Ashkenazi and Sephardim Jews.
The difficulty I have with your statement is akin to denying a white, blue eyed aboriginal in Australia their heritage to the land just because one of their ancestors slept with a European colonialist - its fundamentally racist. White skinned blue eyed Australian aboriginals exist.
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Netanyahu, when addressing the troops, even said "Do not forget what Amalek has done to you", invoking the memory of the biblical commandment to genocide the Amalekites.
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Some context first so my opinion isn't misconstrued as as leftist stereotype. This is within context of the behavior described in the article.
Israel's operations as described in the article are clear-cut war crimes. The military and civilian leaders responsible for these ROE should face something similar to the Nuremberg trials. I am embarrassed for my country's support of Israel's operations.This is large-scale, continued, intentional CIVCAS.
Hamas are not Shia, they're Sunni. And Shia is not some some inherently violent ideology as your usage of the word there implies. And, while I'm at it, you should know the human crimes in the Gaza strip long predate Oct 7. Chemical weapons, starvation, terror bombing, these are tactics that the IDF's deployed in short time I've been alive (21st century).
Tracking on the Shia; sorry about the confusion! Referring to Iran-backed ops in Syria etc.
The commenter is probably referring to Hezbollah and Iran.
And yes, the IDF has been relying on abhorrent & violently escalatory tactics since at least 1982 (Lebanon invasion).
On that note, I recently picked up an excellent book (“Our American Israel”) that dives pretty deep into the US-Israel relationship, and spends a good chunk of time on how the invasion of Lebanon was received by the West.
There are definitely some parallels between 1982 and the ongoing Gaza genocide with regards to the use of violence. But the most salient point to me is that it is quite clear that Israel learned a ton on how to ensure its image in the West does not easily get tarnished going forward.
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Your account was created 30m before writing this comment. There is no evidence you're not a Zionist bot.
Yeah, I know the playbook - deflect and deny, etc.
100k dead, more injured, highest number of child casualties in any modern conflict, countless statements of genocidal intent at the highest levels. But population growth is the metric we need focus on at this point, because that’s the Hasbara talking point du jour.
Also, just to add, a lot of this generic population data just doesn't factor in the current military action at all, they just operate on the last known figures. It's a complete red herring to this discussion. No one knows exactly how many people are in Gaza right now. Israeli policy is actively obstructing people from finding out. I suspect (fear) the total death toll may be well above the ~100k figure.
They absolutely should face something similar to the Nuremberg trials. This is planned extermination of a group of people.
Unfortunately the Israeli lobby has so much money and power they would silence anyone who says that publicly by accusing them of being antisemitic.
Another POV is that when you distill everyone’s experiences, not just yours, into legitimate votes, people, on both sides of this conflict, choose violence. Does the discourse you participate in achieve your goals? No, it achieves the opposite.
What is this discourse? “Sharpen the fractal of demographics and opinions until you get some rare alignment between them, and you find a supposedly irrefutable and most valid position.” Can you see why winning Internet arguments and getting upvotes doesn’t translate to your goals?
Of course you should share these thoughts and forums like these should publish them. But as much as I hate the Intellectual Dark Web and its philosophies, which are as ridiculous as, “you can gain power by thinking about things differently,” I think they are right that popularity contests are not the end all be all of conflict resolution.
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What do you mean by "most likely be banned soon"? Banned from where, and by who?
How many Muslims are writing for Haaretz?
one (used to be two, but one ran away to US)
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I love the Jewish community, so I don’t say this lightly, but I view Netanyahu actions as somewhat resembling Nazi Germany in one respect (though certainly not others). He may not believe Israeli Jews have a birthright to the whole world (rather they are trying to strengthen one nation’s borders), but there is no doubt in my mind they are indiscriminately cleansing a people out of existence. That is their aim, beyond simple deterrence or defense.
The October terror attack is not to be defended, but the response is disgusting behavior by the state of Israel. There’s nothing proportionate about this. Rather Israel sees this as an opportunity to strengthen its position and wipe out its enemies - and innocent men, women, and children.
In the United States, we talk about Israel as if it must be protected because it’s the Middle East’s only democracy. It is not a liberal democracy. It exists only to protect the rights of one type of people with one particular type of ethnicity. In America, we wouldn’t recognize this as a democracy.
For our part, it’s important to protect our own interests in the region and so yes, strange bedfellows. But given Netanyahu’s comfort with war crime, given Israel’s weak and distorted democratic institution, and given what nationalism can do to a country, we should be very careful to balance and diversify our interests.
Israel in another 10 years might not be recognizable. It’s cause for alarm.
> Israel in another 10 years might not be recognizable.
The strange thing is, this statement held true before October 7th. Hopefully not everyone has forgotten that there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets before the war, protesting what Netanyahu was doing to the Israeli government.
People ought to understand that this problem of innocent Gazans - often children - being fired upon by IDF soldiers isn't a new one, it predates the current food distribution operation.
An article from October in the NY Times detailing some well-documented atrocities ("44 health care workers saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza") was published as an opinion piece, in spite of the fact that it consisted of dozens of eyewitness accounts. [0][1]
The incomparable sway that Israel holds in American media and American politics prevents pressure to hold those responsible accountable on an international level. When there's enough pressure within Israel to demand accountability for something terrible (and that's rare enough, outside of their peace movement) the conclusion drawn is typically that the soldiers are just careless, but not acting with malice. [2] If there's a single instance of an IDF soldier being held accountable for a civilian killing in this conflict, someone could make me feel a little better by sharing it.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-...
[1] https://archive.is/9Lr00
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alon_Shamriz,_Yotam...
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Children are children. That's why we respond with abject horror when you see them hungry and huddled, riddled with bullets. If you have to prepend a nationality to "child" to justify it, then I regret to inform you that you are a racist.
It doesn't matter whether it happens in Israeli-occupied territory or an American middle school. It's absolutely reprehensible. "stop killing children you dislike" or "stop targeting journalists" should not be a controversial demand in the 21st century. Certainly not to a modernized military.
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The biggest problem with this isn’t the horror of the actual war crime. The far more serious concern are the lengths the government will go to avoid holding anyone accountable. That is so much worse because it unintentionally endorses future crimes and challenges the offenders to take ever more offensive actions without fear of consequences.
I do not believe it is unintentional.
They can take out nuclear scientists thousands of kilometers away by either planting bombs in their cars in traffic or firing accurate munitions through their windows when they sleep.
Thousands of kilometers away.
The IDF can be highly sophisticated in their plans and methods when they want to.
Those things you described are also war crimes.
Calling it sophisticated does not change that fact.
I think the point is that if Israel can do pinpoint decapitation strikes anywhere in Iran they sure as hell can do so in Gaza, but they choose to bomb hospitals and flatten every single building in the Gaza Strip instead.
This. Israel demonstrably has the capability for precision warfare.
That they chose to level infrastructure across Gaza instead is indicative.
And it'd be real stretch to assume they did so even for military-economic reasons.
They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
To wit, the elimination of anything resembling a Palestinian state: politically, economically, and demographically.
Which is cynical and evil as fuck, given they're smart enough to realize they eventually either have to (a) kill every Palestinian or (b) make a deal.
Instead, they decided killing 50,000+ Palestinians was worth improving their negotiation position and kicking the can down the road.
I‘m sorry, but you’re comparing apples to bedrooms. Israel vs. Iran is a war/conflict between two proper countries‘ militaries - which means that both belligerents stick to certain agreed upon rules and military traditions, such as trying to separate the civilian from the military world/infrastructure. In lack of another word (haven’t slept, please forgive me for the choice of word), there’s “honor“ and a notion of equality and respect (somewhat) between the foes, even if Iran has declared it wants to wipe Israel off the map.
All of this does not apply to the conflict with Hamas. With them muddling the lines, it’s extremely hard to fight a “clean“ war. You’re between a rock and a hard place - either you lose but with your head held high and your moral compass intact, or you stoop to their level thereby slowly losing your values but win in the end. If that win is worth it or not, is heavily debated in the rest of the world, but only debated in the fringes of Israeli society. But no military expert is able to suggest a real alternative of fighting Hamas without inflicting heavy losses on one’s own army.
I find the committed war crimes abhorrent and wish they’d be heavily prosecuted at least.
Until corrective actions with criminal penalties occur incidents like these almost certainly continue with possible increases of frequency and severity. More importantly though when this becomes a matter of conduct and military discipline is that it will spread to other areas even outside Gaza.
This isn’t just a matter of vague speculation as there are historical cases outside of Israel on which to see how things like this develop and what the consequences are both for the victims and the soldiers. These historical accounts also indicate soldiers committing these sorts of actions become victims themselves with catastrophic mental health disorders.
The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
Israel got in trouble with ICJ court, because of quotes from top government officials. Government of Israel was very specific what they will do to Gaza! This was even full scale bombing started!
Trying to reinterpret this as a problem of "military discipline", and "soldiers are victim as well" is just another level of cynicism!
> The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
It's happened, many times. Usually this doesn't make front-page news, but soldiers that break the law are sometimes held accountable. Not nearly enough, and I think it should be far more publicized as a deterrent effect (the fact that it isn't is a pretty big indictment of the current government). But it's certainly not laughable.
Btw, the literal sub-headline of the article includes this sentence:
"prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes".
Who is gonna arrest Bibi?
Well, he is on trial. So he could be arrested. Prime Ministers have been arrested (and jailed!) before.
A part of what the Isareli opposition has been pushing for in the last few years has been removing Netanyahu from power and presumably jailing him because of the corruption charges.
The same people who arrested Olmert
For each of their "operations" on Gaza they usually had one or two soldiers in trouble for something like stealing and using a civilians credit card. When there were many more serious crimes like deliberately targeting the disabled.
Even ignoring primary crimes, under Israeli law, even incitement to genocide is punishable by death. But so many members of the political and media elite have made inciting statements, that the rubicon is crossed; the political class cannot allow any serious, independent consideration of war crimes to ever occur, because that would risk them all facing the firing squad. This in turn signals to individual soldiers that there will be no accountability, even in the absence of directives.
Regarding the risk to Israelis facing the firing squad, you do know that Israel only executed Eichmann (and one other person in a field court) since the founding of the country?
When it comes to the list of things that Israelis fear, being sentenced to a firing squad is very low down.
Fair enough, but I don't think that makes the incentive much different. If you are convicted of a crime punishable by death, your actual punishment is not likely to be trivial.
Government and regime can always change. Post socialist countries convinced border guards, for shooting unarmed civilians, who were trying to escape across country borders. That was a crime even under socialist laws.
If Israel had regime change, new regime and majority of voters would be pro Arab... New government could actually enforce existing laws!
Where I hope this comes back, after the conflict and a new Israel government, is human culpability for automated systems.
AI being whitewashing for IP is disruptive and troubling.
It being whitewashing for war crimes is a much more serious problem.
If Israel/IDF put in place a automated system that gave effectively caused war crimes to be committed, some humans in positions of power need to be held responsible and face consequences.
The world should not allow cases where (a) it's undisputed that war crimes occurred but (b) authority was interwoven in an automated system in such a way that humans escape consequences.
Sadly, it'll probably take the fall of right-wing Israeli and current Russian governments to have a hope of passing through.
> even incitement to genocide is punishable by death
For that to happen, the government, and the overall population, would need to consider what's being done in Gaza and on the West Bank to actually be a genocide. I don't think popular support for that actually exists in Israel. Last time I checked, most of the population supported the annexation of Gaza and the forced eviction of the local population to neighboring countries.
I don't think I'll live to see a two-state solution.
There isn't popular support for it when you factor in the Israeli-Palestian but in opinion polling it has now gone beyond 50% among the rest of the Israeli population.
You may be missing a legal wrinkle: the crime of incitement usually does not require the underlying primary crime to actually occur. (Admittedly I'm not sure if that is the definition in Israel, but they inherited a lot of British law so it is likely). So this does not require the Israeli population to accept that this was a genocide, only that some war crimes occurred and that they should be prosecuted. Right now they are not there, but the point is that the government has an incentive to keep the population in that state.
You mean the government whose leader is facing a corruption trial?
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Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully, without snark or flamebait? It's not hard if you choose to, and the site guidelines ask people to do so, regardless of how charged or divisive the topic is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ok. The parent is the same kind of rhetorical question, whose counter-argument is so evident that it shouldn’t have existed, and it’s disappointing that one side gets the right of way on HN and the other is downvoted, one camp is making use of flaws in your rules to win without merit, aka bullying.
But yes. I’ll speak without snarkiness.
Yes, the parent was the same kind of question; in fact I almost included that observation in my reply to you. However, it's all a matter of degree, and your comment was significantly worse in the degree of snark and flamebait that you were posting. That's why I replied to you and not the other comment. It had nothing to do with which side either of you are on, although I understand how it ends up feeling that way. (I've posted quite a bit about that elsewhere in this thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403947.)
Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions? Let’s not pretend that this is just some random soldiers doing this, this is exactly what the Israeli government wants.
Soldiers shooting at civilians is a war crime. It does not matter what the intentions of the soldiers are. It doesn’t even matter if the civilians are also armed up until the point they display violent intent according to a common person standard. Shooting at a crowd is a crime.
That said the soldiers pulling the trigger are committing crimes. These are patently illegal actions to a common person standard which eliminates any defense of following military orders. That being said the soldiers, at least, are committing crimes. Accountability starts at the source of the crime.
If the government is ordering these actions then those are illegal orders, according to international standards of military conduct. The soldiers on the ground must ignore those orders on the basis of patently illegal conduct according to a common person standard and the officials facilitating those orders can be investigated for issuing war crimes.
As an example read about Slobodan Milošević
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87
NATO was conducting defensive operations against Yugoslavia around that time. It isn't clear that war crimes can be committed so easily by US allies. It'd be nice if they can be recognised though.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding here. War crimes are not judged by what a diligent investigation after the fact might find. It hinges on the information and judgement by those acting in the moment. You are a soldier told these armed people a click out are the insurgent group you are fighting? Of course you can engage them. And there is a similar lenient standard applied to whoever got that information in the first place. War by any other standard of course would be entirely unworkable.
Because "the govahment" is not a singular entity. In functioning democracies, by popular definition in large parts of the field, legislative and executive powers are kept separated from the judicial powers. So the executive power can not interfere with being held accountable. That's not fullt implemented everywhere, but that is the general idea how it is supposed to work.
Well, the civilian leadership is obviously in favour of massacring civilians, the military leadership orders civilians to be massacred, and the soldiers on the ground revel in the opportunity to massacre civilians. And the courts are happy to allow the massacre of civilians.
In functioning democracies in general, sure, you have to be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush. But in the specific case of Israel in 2015, it's not realistic to argue that the government isn't a single entity, so some parts of it may not be responsible (or even in favour of) crimes against humanity.
> Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions?
Because that is what keeps the ICC off of their backs. The ICC only has authority to step in in cases where national jurisdiction is unable or unwilling to prevent and prosecute war crimes.
Well, there is actually a reasonable reason. Typically you'd want the government to hold people accountable so you could have the thin veneer of operating by the rules of warfare and not committing war crimes. That's usually been a popular strategy of the US for when someone goes a little too far (or gets caught).
As far as I can tell Israel doesn't particularly care for even looking like it's trying to behave responsibly. I don't think they've held anyone responsible for even some of the most obvious war crimes we have evidence of being committed.
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It's even worse: Awful lot of people die for the careers of politicians and it's not limited to Israel. If someone needs political tension for weathering a scandal or economic turmoil, it can be created artificially by killing certain people and they do it all the time.
I have distaste for Trump but something I appreciate about him is his abilities to stage a theatre with his "fake" bombings. The more mainstream politicians have much more sociopathic tendencies.
If you think about it, %100 of modern wars are about who is going to be the administrator and doesn't feel like can win an election. We live in a world of abundance, there's no reason for a group of people to kill other group for their resources. If it wasn't for the careers of some people with huge egos all this can be sorted out through civil matters. After the wars it gets sorted out anyway, we don't see mass exterminations anymore.
As a westerner, I feel ashamed that my country is Isreal's ally. It makes me guilty by association because the western world is letting Israel commit thoses atrocities.
Worse, we are helping them when they need it, and closing our eyes when they don't want us to watch.
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what about the last two years of video evidence of all the other war crimes?
The bodies of burnt children. The reports of doctors who document multiple sniper rounds found in the bodies of small children and toddlers?
I've been seeing reports about internet connectivity being very touch and go in Gaza the last few weeks.
Is it not unreasonable to think, those who are starving the most might not have internet/electricity to charge a device/care to document when they're starving?
jsyk many cases of evidence turned out to be propaganda and instead was showing Syria (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231229-war-of-narrat... and Bellingcat looked into it as well)
Some of it may be real but you really need to pay attention about who posted it originally, who reposted it etc, even people you wouldn't expect sometimes retweeted recycled Syrian footage...
Maybe their phones are running a bit low on charge and they can't find an outlet here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kSHED-mRP1g
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Is there a reason to disbelieve the soldiers’ testimony?
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Here's a story from NPR that makes much stronger claims agaist Israel (and cites sources) than the Haaretz story:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/28/nx-s1-5449587/israel-gaza-haa...
> Haaretz has become a radical-Islam mouthpiece and will most likely be banned soon
Okay but this is just another claim that seems to require evidence. Why should I believe this?
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There is plenty of reason to disbelieve the testimony was reported accurately.
Haaretz’s English edition claims that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza, but the original Hebrew version? It states they were told to fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites. This represents a significant difference in intent, legality, and moral implications
https://mrandrewfox.substack.com/p/haaretz-the-lies-continue
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44404779
> fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza
> fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites
I am struggling to understand the distinction.
The difference is the agenda of the reader, sadly.
Who cares about the word used in that sentence. They also said they killed people every day by doing this. How is that explained away?
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I'm fairly certain you haven't read the haaretz article. Otherwise your comment is inexplicable.
When Netanyahu called the Palestinians Amalek when speaking to the military after October 7th, why do you think he did that? Amalek, the people the Jewish people were commanded to destroy in the Torah?
Why do you think Israel initially funded Hamas? Why would they want these conditions to occur? What must the true goals of the Israeli state be for them to see Hamas as useful?
Or let's go back to the founding of Israel...
Do you know about the Dalet Plan, put forth by Ben-Gurion in the 1948 war: "The plan's tactics involved laying siege to Palestinian Arab villages, bombing neighbourhoods of cities, forced expulsion of their inhabitants, and setting fields and houses on fire and detonating TNT in the rubble to prevent any return."
Or even its precedent, the 1937 Avnir plan, conceived a decade before the 1948 war and before World War 2 (!): "In the summer of 1937, the commander of their forces in the Tel Aviv area, Elimelech Slikowitz (nicknamed Avnir) received an order from Ben-Gurion, according to the official history of the Haganah. Ben-Gurion, anticipating an eventual British withdrawal from the country after the Peel Report, asked Avnir to prepare a plan for the military conquest of the whole of Palestine. This Avnir Plan provided a blueprint for future plans. The blueprint was refined in subsequent adjustments (A, B, C) before emerging in its final form over a decade later as Plan Dalet."
Conquest, genocide and ethnic cleansing has been the goal from the beginning and continues to be.
Let's close with some quotes by Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Smotrich, who administers most of the West Bank:
"Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned."
"My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to move around on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than the right of movement of the Arabs."
"I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it."
“Let’s make a decision to end Gaza once and for all"
"The state of Israel is first and foremost Jewish and only then democratic and a judge in a Jewish state must, first of all, consider the State’s Jewish values. Evicting Jews from any settlement is contrary to the decree of the Torah and to Jewish law. It harms the Jewish values of the state and therefore it is not hypocrisy to say that the expulsion of Jews from their homes harms the Jewish value of the state and the expulsion of an enemy from his home is something completely different."
Referring to the annexation of the West Bank: "[I am] In favor of sovereignty, but not in a way that adds hundreds of thousands of enemies. A program that encourages emigration is better..."
Israel has been harming civilians intentionally for a long time, it was built on it, and that is its ultimate goal.
We already knew this was happening from testimony from Gazans, it was obvious that the new US-Israeli monopolized "aid" organization was running the Hunger Games, with dozens killed by Israelis (+ US contractors) every time there was a distribution day, and horrific pictures and video of it. Entirely predictable too when the genocidaires are controlling the aid. It is good there is now proof from the inside as well.
> ...the new US-Israeli monopolized "aid" organization was running the Hunger Games, with dozens killed by Israelis (+ US contractors) every time there was a distribution day ... the genocidaires are controlling the aid.
It was apparently 2 VCs and not the military that came up with GHF (and if I recall, there even was a brief flare up between the ruling Cabinet and the Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, who did not want the IDF to be responsible for aid).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/24/gaza-humanit... / https://archive.vn/TugwR> One was Liran Tancman, an entrepreneur and reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution hubs to vet Palestinian civilians.
Gives the feeling of the serial number tattoos the Germans used, with tech "fixing" the bad optics of doing that, but the biometric ID serves as one.
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It's worth comparing these reports to the Flour Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_Massacre) that occurred over a year ago.
I'd also suggest this (impassioned) video about the event: https://youtu.be/sCW-ARvywto?t=5020
Compare this reporting from a year ago with the Wikipedia page now. How has this reporting from a year ago held up?
> He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light".
The Israeli tradition of giving their Gaza operations names of children's games also continues, after "Operation Cast Lead".
(Not sure if they wanted to make a reference to Squid Games as well...)
Green light : They send out notifications to people telling them aid is available at a certain location.
Red light: 10 minutes later they send out another notification saying no aid is being distributed there today and start shooting anyone in the area
Just like several months ago, “we advise Gazans to move to southern Gaza as operations intensify in the north”.
Within days: “Israeli bombing of southern Gaza intensifies 80%”.
This isn't ambiguous. This is really clear evidence of (at minimum) an atrocious and continuing war crime with full intentionality. Realistically, it is more likely explicitly genocidal in intent.
The UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories has concluded in a pretty comprehensive report that there is a genocide occurring in Gaza. https://reliefweb.int/attachments/f78b0a28-c3af-44ed-a010-9b...
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Right, you can fire really awesome warning shots with mortars.
But that is still a war crime.
And yet this harmelss "scare away" firing has been routinely killing tens of crowd members per day.
Not to mention that Israel is openly using starvation as a weapon of war.
Using ordnance to systematically scare starving people away from aid stations is also genocide. And that's your best case excuse.
Israel is committing a deliberate genocide in Gaza.
Israel is an excellent example of what happens if a fundamentalist theocracy becomes too powerful compared to its neighbors.
Ironically, Israel's government would be less theocratic-conservative if it weren't so hard to form governing coalitions in the Knesset.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_twent...
After moderate partners abandoned Netanyahu, his only source of support was more right-wing partners, which steadily pushed government policy to the ultra-right.
It's not ironic at all, it's democracy working as intended.
It might superficially appear ironic because us in the west confuse being a democracy with being moderate. But that's not the case if a large fraction of your population are religious fundamentalists, which goes to my point. In Israel, the problem isn't just the government, it's also the culture of the majority of the population.
Considering ~50% of the Knesset is in opposition, I don't think it's proof that a politically large fraction of Israeli society is religiously fundamentalist.
It's non-negligible, but the reasons ultra-right parties like Otzma Yehudit [0] have a voice in politics has more to do with election calculus by Netanyahu.
The ideal 2+ party parliamentary system seems to be >2 but <6.
Below that, you get bad outcomes (US). Above that, you get bad outcomes (Israel, India).
Somewhere in the middle, it forces the right amount of coerced cooperation... most of the time (Germany).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otzma_Yehudit
Haaretz's English edition is an anti-Israel propaganda outlet, not a serious newspaper.
https://mrandrewfox.substack.com/p/haaretz-the-lies-continue
> Haaretz’s English edition claims that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza, but the original Hebrew version? It states they were told to fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites. This represents a significant difference in intent, legality, and moral implications.
This bit is also important in my opinion:
> Once again, we are faced with the suggestion that not only are the IDF murderous maniacs, but they also have the worst aim on the planet. The monstrous IDF are such terrible shots that they fire heavy machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers at crowds of tens of thousands, yet manage to wound no more than 1 to 5 Gazans at a time.
The following quote seems consistent with much of the journalism I’ve read about the conflict for years. It makes you become a bit cynical of the news outlets when you repeatedly see things like this https://x.com/washingtonpost/status/1929961283593367559 Peoples first impressions often last the longest.
> Later, Haaretz quotes an officer saying the intent behind the live fire was crowd control, not carnage. However, it buries this clarification so deeply that it becomes effectively irrelevant. The reader has already been presented with the moral horror headline, and that’s what will endure.
> The author admits they don’t know who is shooting at civilians near these aid distribution centres. Still, rather than consider the possibility that, for example, Hamas might be involved, the article shifts with the loaded line:
“Fire at unarmed crowds” and “fire towards crowds” is the same thing, what sort of semantic ping pong is this? Also propaganda =/= bad. All media is propaganda, in some languages the word “propaganda” has the same semantic meaning as the English word “advertisement”. This comment is war crime apologia.
There is a difference between shooting people and firing warning shots.
Sure there is, but we’re not talking about firing “warning shots” at armed combatants, we’re talking about unarmed civilians, most of whom are minors. If you are sympathetic to the idea that these aid sites need to be heavily guarded, then you need to ask yourself why this level of force is necessary, because the explanation the IDF and Israeli officials are giving makes no sense. Can you imagine if we fired “warning shots” towards the homeless for lining up too early for the food bank?
How do warning shots kill over 50 people in a day?
War zone in a dense urban areas where combatants aren’t identified by uniform and are integrated in the civilian population.
The Hebrew version had also distanced itself from what would be considered Journalism. But with no real field reporting from Gaza, that's the info you can get, and you have to guesstimate the reality from there.
Other outlets (including NPR) independently verified the story.
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Exactly. Clear astroturfing to hide war crimes is not going unnoticed anymore.
How credible is the reporting in in Haaretz?
I am normally fairly well accustomed to the reliability and credibility of newspapers, but I have never read this newspaper.
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Thanks for the info. The tone of the publication sounded like that.
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I would be curious if Hamas soldiers were "stealing" the food from the general Palestine populace.
The news from Palestine are atrocious; a genocide is unfolding before our eyes, and world leaders are doing nothing to stop it.
A lot of world leaders are helping speed it up.
That's normal; a lot of them directly or indirectly profit from it.
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Like with most genocides in history.
The vast majority barely make the global news.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
WW3 is going to be China vs Israel. Watch.
One could make the argument that it's happening right now. Russia+North Korea, Iran, Hamas, they are all intertwined. And then on the other side you could say Ukraine, US, Israel.
Thought experiment: if the Israel/Gaza conflict didn't pop off, would the US presidency be the same right now? How did that change affect the Russia/Ukraine conflict? Etc.
Israel can't even sustain a hot war with Iran, with US backing, despite assassinating dozens of Iranian top brass. China represents 10-20 Irans.
China (and Turkey, Arab states) is more or less content to sit and watch USA destroy itself domestically and internationally over the failed Zionist project. "Do nothing, win."
The guidelines of HN, to be kind and curious in the comments, are difficult to follow in this case. Outrage doesn't bring anything either, but a polite and curious discussion is impossible. The lack of reflection in the western world on this issue is seriously disturbing.
I hear you and I agree that there are topics which conventional politeness cannot respond to adequately, and that this is one of those topics.
If you take those words "kind" and "curious" in a large sense—larger than usual—I think there's enough room there to talk about even this topic without breaking the guidelines.
How to do this? That is something we have to work out together. You're certainly right that it's difficult.
From a moderation point of view, I can tell you that just avoiding garden-variety flamewar and internet tropes already gets us a lot of the way there. You'd be surprised at how many users who think they're taking a grand moral stand against conventional politeness are simply repeating those. Conventional impoliteness isn't any answer either.
Thanks. I was not critical, especially not of the moderation, just tried to sum up what I think about it, and other than meaningless outrage there was nothing there. And yet there is no point in that because that's just letting off steam. I don't think it should be removed either.
dang, I think you’re getting this badly wrong - there’s nothing intellectually curious happening on this thread, it’s just a hate-fest.
(Don’t feel obliged to reply as I know you’re very busy. I just wanted to give some feedback and it appears flagging is being disregarded for this submission)
(NB: People downvoting this - I’m just giving my opinion to dang in a way that doesn’t waste his time, because I felt I had to say something given a lot of what I was reading)
I'm mostly just seeing people discuss what Israel's military is doing, with people on both sides adding historical context. It's sure as hell not a "hate-fest."
There’s literally “We need to kill all the Jews” posted by FreePalestine12. If what’s being left visible is anything to go by then what’s being deleted must be horrendous.
This thread is completely outside HNs norms. I get people have really strong feelings about I/P but this type of submission isn’t what HNs is for, at least as I understood it.
Their nonsense is already flag'd and dead'd, you'd need to enable showdead in your profile to see their posts.
Why don't you remove it then? Time and time again you allow this off topic submission to persists on HN
I don't agree that it's off topic, nor that HN would be better if we suppressed it and acted like this isn't happening. We're trying for a global optimum*, and the most important part of that is not to settle for local optima, such as not discussing difficult things.
I've posted about this quite a bit, since it inevitably comes up every time this topic appears on HN's front page. Here's another part of the current thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403458.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Maybe you should reconsider whether suppressing it would be better. The comments are the usual cesspool that can be found everywhere else. An obvious tell is the incessant attempt at redefining the word genocide.
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Funnily enough I just finished responding to someone who makes the opposite complaint about us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403907. Notice that word "always", which both of you use. Interesting, no?
People with strong passions on a topic always feel like the moderators are against them. (As you see, I'm not immune to "always" perceptions either!)
I wish we could do something about that—I don't enjoy having so many people, from all sides of every divisive topic, feeling like we're against them when we're not. However, after years of observing this and thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that it's inevitable. The cognitive bias underlying it is just ironclad. We all share this bias, which is why your complaint and the complaint of someone on the opposite side are basically the same.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's true that HN has hosted several major threads about Israel/Gaza, but it's also true that many (perhaps a hundred times as many) submissions on the topic have ended up flagged and we haven't turned off the flags. I don't see an "always" in there.
As for Saturdays—that factor is so far from affecting how we moderate HN that I had to puzzle for a bit over what you might mean. Nor does this discussion strike me as one-sided. People wouldn't be disagreeing with each other if it were.
You do good work Dang. I'd love to buy you a beer sometime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403907 refers to comments that individuals moderate, you can decide to keep submissions up although they are flagged, and you do.
"submissions on the topic have ended up flagged and we haven't turned off the flags." only because they were flagged before getting traction.
Saturdays - Observing Jewish people don't check HN on a Saturday, and they are one of the major side of the story here, unsurprisingly.
I would be very surprised if the majority, or even a significant fraction, of those who are on the "Israel" side were observing Jews. Jews are probably a minority of Israel-supporting commenters, and observing Jews are, in my experience, a minority of these Jews.
That's a pretty serious accusation, and I don't think you can actually back that up with anything.
Online, pretty much any time Israel is discussed, the majority of commenters (or articles) are anti-Israel. Regardless of why you think that is, it's just a fact. You can't blame dang for that.
I don't blame him for the content I blame him for letting it stay up because it's off topic and not in the spirit of HN yet he allows them to stay up, for the reasons above.
You don't decide what's on topic or the spirit of HN. If anyone does it's Deng, who you're arguing with. Sorry you feel the need to decide what adults can talk about.
I've very well aware who Dang is (clearly you don't, at least write his name correctly). You have a lot of venues to vent on reddit, facebook, twitter etc. Clearly Dang is biased and therefore he bends the guidelines:
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Maybe you should have a bit more intellectual humility. "Clearly Dang is biased" (emphasis mine)? You might be right, you might be wrong, but I for sure don't think you can be certain of dang's motive here, especially considering lots of people on the "other side" of this issue feel he's biased against them!
I believe the majority of stories are voted on, and flagged, by the community. If the community decides these are stories worth discussing, I think they fit within the guidelines of HN. Stories about the Russia/Ukraine war also appear. So do stories about US politics. In all of these threads some people complain that they're off-scope, but apparently enough of the community wants to talk about them that they sometimes get upvoted.
Not remembering history and ignoring the truth is a sin that can only be committed once.
And it's a sin that Israel cannot afford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_March
The Green March or how a crowd of elderly people, women, and children with no other weapon than the Quran in their hands take a military position.
Beachhead!
Now they are being colonized by Morocco. They protested against Spanish domination and now they’ve been deported and oppressed by an autocratic regime.
Spain is still unearthing the dead from its 1936 civil war. It suffers such a profound trauma that it prevents it from having a capable army. It has more than eight conflicting national sentiments.
It plunders its citizens with taxes, prevents them from defending themselves with weapons, and violates their most fundamental rights and freedoms in unimaginable ways.
Calling this a circus is unfair, but that's not the focus of the conversation.
How is that related to the historical context I gave?
Spain is not the focus; Spain isn't even Spain, a failed state, a federation project, a circus of clowns and bearded women.
The focus is the despotic and medieval custom of using the most vulnerable for bellicose and political purposes.
Poor people :(
I’m not going to claim a side in this, but I do have a question to pose. When you have two ideologies which are so diametrically opposed to each other that they cannot coexist in the same space at the same time, what is the alternative outcome? One must destroy the other for peace to exist - this is the nature of war. To think that there is some world where everyone comes away from this with a handshake and an agreement is just naive.
I’ll ask again: What is the alternative?
> two ideologies which are so diametrically opposed to each other that they cannot coexist
Ideologies aren't platonic solids. They must be constantly refurbished in the minds of the avowed. Every moment of every day informs them—reinforces or depletes them. Changes their character.
It's guaranteed that these minds will, eventually, change. Who survives to bare this change remains to be seen.
Keep in mind, also, that Israel vs. Gaza is in some ways just a proxy war between US/Europe and Iran/Russia who support Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Ideological differences, frankly, are only a surface patina on the same old economic games.
Lastly, consider a third framing: that Israel/Gaza is only the hottest segment of a conflict that encircles the globe: the border between imperial powers and colonized peoples, like US/Mexico etc. Borders, passports, and citizenship are a worldwide system of privileges and protections that Westphalian Nationstates collude to maintain.
I'm not sure what ideologies you refer to. Islam and Judaism? Not really relevant to the discussion, I don't think.
> "surface patina"
Tell that to the victims of gleeful brutality under the guidance of fundamentalist ideology, like that engrained in Islamist governance and extremist militant groups.
Your post reads like the come-down from intellectual pill-popping. Your attempt to dilute a serious problem in the world to "patinas" and reduce the problem to imperial vs colonized peoples, sounds like a manifesto from the lawns of a university activist encampment.
Consider the framing, you ask. I considered it and reject it, The subjugation of "infidels" under expansionist oppressive religious groups with the intent to bring "peace" is an imperialism all of its own, but much worse. Peace... at the cost of freedom, autonomy, expression, equality.
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>Israel wouldn't attack Gaza if the terrorists who run that place didn't have a constitutional ambition to destroy Israel.
Really? The > 750,000 Palestinians pushed out of their homes in 1948, when "Israelis" showed up for the first time, backed up by guns, were Hamas? News to me.
History doesn't begin in 1948.
If it the right thing to do, why isn't Israel embracing and announcing the said genocide?
Is the only wrong thing Hitler did is to not make a few false flag attacks on the Germans before announcing the 'Final solution'?
We should incorporate a checklist/Q&A into the comments section when these articles come up. The outrage is amusing at best and people tripping over themselves to excuse their embarrassment of their country is the most uninvolved and keyboard warrior sort of activism there is. Right up there with excusing themselves that they’re Jews. Really, you can do more if you care that much about it.
The Q&A is simple: If you’re going to be outraged about Israel for the 100th time, are you going to finally do something about it?
HN should provide a way to filter comments based on answer to the above.
What should or can we do about it? The US government is not representing the will of its citizens. Contacting my legislative representative isn't likely to accomplish anything to influence Trump continuing to directly facilitate and support genocide and other war crimes.
I also still need to work almost every day to pay the bills and care for my family, otherwise I'd be happy to go camp out and peacefully protest in support of change on the daily. What's the best option for the majority who share my situation? Because I do care a lot, and feel stuck.
And that's just the beginning. They want to expand to the east.
Why though, what does it achieve? Do they want to make sure that there will be terrorists / freedom fighters in the future so that they have a reason not to negotiate? Because they expect to "win" if violence continues?
From Israel's perspective, Palestinians are a problem. Long term, they have a few options:
1) Give them their own state. This is difficult for quite many reasons, and Israel (by which I mean the current government) doesn't want that
2) Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation, and let them participate in the regular political processes. The current government certainly doesn't want that, and I have no idea what part of the Palestinians would want that.
3) Continue to treat them as sub-human, and deal with the consequences of the hatred that fosters. That seems to have been the "strategy" before October last year.
4) Try to exterminate or exile them, or at least decimating them to such an extend that the problem becomes smaller.
Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.
>Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation
As the Palestinians are the majority, the Jewish Israelis would become a minority in terms of citizens and votes. This is very much akin to Apartheid South Africa, where a minority ethnic group rules over the rest of the population.
The White minority in South Africa were around 15% of the population, while Jews and Palestinians in Israel & Palestine seem to be much more around a 50%-50% split.
Ongoing war has been a crucial component of the current government's re-election campaigns for decades, so any option that ends the war is a non-starter.
I fear their plan is to expand military operations into additional countries until they can get back into a pseudo-stalemate scenario. That'd explain the bombings in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
You'd think given Israel's history they'd do everything they could to not make 4) acceptable.
It's very common for people to treat their own side as naturally right, and excuse anything their side does, simply *because* it is their own side.
For a commonplace example, look at a soccer match, fans screaming at the referee whenever a decision doesn't go their team's way.
Many of the Zionists viewed the Holocaust as teaching that the Jewish people need a state of their own, no matter what it takes or how many people they have to kill. They viewed the European Jews who had died in the Holocaust as weak, passive cowards who had "allowed" the Holocaust to happen, and went like sheep to their slaughter (ignoring the Warsaw Uprising, and all of the underground Jewish resistance movements). I think Israel's current actions reflect this viewpoint.
I think it's the contrary. "Never again" means by any means necessary we will prevent another genocide of our people, even if it means committing genocide unto others. That much has become clear.
I don't think there's much overlapping between those who experienced the holocaust and whoever is in charge in Israel right now.
Speaking for experience from some relatives, the immigration laws for people of jewish faith and ancestry were nigh insurmountable if you came from african, arab or middle east countries and pretty much just nominal even in recent times for those who had even a remote connection but came from the US and the UK.
I have the feeling they are jewish the same way Henry IV was a Catholic when he said "Paris is well worth a Mass".
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> Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.
The Israeli govt and people would be very supportive of (2). After all, there are more Arabs living in Israel than in Palestine. The Palestineans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly reject this option.
Or exile is probably the key word. There are more historical examples of exoduses than genocides.
The problem with understanding this situation is that it probably has more to do with Israel's internal politics than what the situation looks like on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere. Just a quick read from the wikipedia page should give an idea just how corrupt the situation really is.
There's also the fact that Palestinians aren't a homogenous group in any sense of the word. That makes it hard for them to unite under any political flag. It also doesn't help that the borders are all closed, from both sides, and no neighboring country are willing to accept them.
From the outside the situation certainly looks very bleak.
Perhaps it shouldn't be up to Israel to decide the future of non-citizens then.
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> Continue to treat them as sub-human, and deal with the consequences of the hatred that fosters. That seems to have been the "strategy" before October last year.
This is a pretty big claim, and I highly disagree with it. I didn't particularly like Israeli policy towards Palestinians for the last 15 years, but they were certainly not treated as "sub-human". Gazans, specifically, were governed by Hamas, which had a lot more say in how the average Gazan was reacted than ISrael did.
> I didn't particularly like Israeli policy towards Palestinians for the last 15 years, but they were certainly not treated as "sub-human".
Garbage. Gaza had its only airport bombed to oblivion 20 years ago and was told any attempt to repair it would result in the same. Its port has been blockaded by the Israeli navy for 15 years. Its only land exits have been heavily locked down.
Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack, or teens throwing stones. They’ve even turned off water for days too.
That’s treating people as subhuman, imprison them and do things like that to them for decades.
The Gazan government is a declared enemy of Israel, wanting its destruction. It has used hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to build its militant group to fight Israel.
Given the circumstances, Gaza's neighbors blockade it to keep it from building an even bigger fighting force.
> Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack,
You mean, when occasionally Hamas will try to kill random Israeli civilians using rocket fire? Which is basically a declaration of war and causes Israel to fight back?
> or teens throwing stones.
I don't think that's actually true.
> That’s treating people as subhuman,
Israel is treating Hamas-controlled Gaza as a hostile enemy that is intent on destroying it. Given that Hamas, even under the blockade and with all the restrictions in place, still managed to invade Israel and kill a thousand citizens, while kidnapping and holding hostage 250 civilians, and still, a year and a half later, is holding these people hostage and torturing them daily... given that, I think it's hard to say blockading them was a bad idea.
If you think the blockade is the reason for their actions, then you're quite simply wrong - they were founded many years before and always had the same goal of destroying Israel, including working hard against the peace process that was forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority.
Gaza was governed by Hamas under an Israeli blockade. You don't think that had any effect on Gaza lives?
(An Israeli and Egyptian blockade)
Yes, I do think it had an effect, but less of one than their governing body did, hence my saying so.
Either way, unless you think the blockade itself is "Israel treating Gazans as sub-human", then my point still stands.
You can't kill 2.1 million people by bombing them.
That's why Israel has systematically taken out every hospital in Gaza: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdd25d9vp2qo
Has blocked and sabotaged aid at every turn, including bombing UN food trucks: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158746
And when allied countries got too uneasy about them just blocking all aid trucks at the border, they set up their own aid organization to trickle out nominal amounts of food while they take pot shots at people desperate enough to show up: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74ne108e4vo
They didn't just make this up as they go, presumably the plans have been sitting around for a long time waiting for a suitable moment.
I think that's a very unsensible comment.
1. You definitely can kill 2.1 million people by bombing them. It's actually way easier than doing it with a gun. 2. If you decide to do it with a gun, and you end up killing tens when tens of thousands are gathering for food, you're aiming terribly. 3. There is enough proof of Hamas using hospital facilities as headquarters. 4. Instead of getting food into Gaza (paid partly by Israel) only to get people to gather and then shoot tens of them every day, Israel could have just not let food in.
In other words, none of this makes sense. There's a war. Yes, Israel is committing terrible crimes. No, it's not because they aim to kill everyone, it's because they really stopped caring about killing civilians. It's horrific and is illegal.
There is actually one party in this conflict that has deliberately said it's aiming to kill civilians, and that's Hamas. I have no idea about your personal opinion, but I suspect that many of the people who are shouting "genocide!" would have been very quiet if the Jews were the ones being slaughtered, and I have absolutely no doubt that if only Hamas had the power, it would have committed way more serious crimes than the IDF ever committed.
> You definitely can kill 2.1 million people by bombing them. It's actually way easier than doing it with a gun
Only if you have enough bombs, which they need to constantly purchase from the US using aid money given to them by the US.
They don't have the stockpiles to eradicate without using their (not so) secret nukes. If they were to do that, there'd be a lot worse follow on effects for Israel. If they simply trickle the deaths over time, people get tired of the horror and need to look away for their own sanity.
Genuinely wondering what terrible effects would there be for Israel if they used nukes? Not morally, internationally. IMO it's perhaps one of the few conflicts in the world where one side could theoretically use nuclear weapons and essentially no one will shoot back. "Trickle the deaths over time" doesn't make any sense - there are probably more births in Gaza than deaths now, and that's not including the general Palestinian population.
No one will shoot back now. But it is a signal to other countries that using nukes might not be that bad. Even other banned chemical and biological weapons. So either there is complete chaos or the whole world will have to make sure Israel can not profit from this action.
Well officially Israel doesn't have nukes. They are widely believed to have them ofc but that's something they have to consider. Breaking the ambiguity by using them could spark a lot of 'we told you they were super dangerous' responses(with action) possibly. You might be right tho.
The point is to colonize Gaza, they won't irradiate it first.
Though probably true, it is irrelevant. Hamas doesn't have the power, and Israel does. This war is almost entirely one sided.
My point was that the comment I was commenting on was false, and that many people who express that sentiment wouldn't be expressing it if the powers were flipped. I'm personally very glad that the powers aren't flipped because I think that if Hamas had F-16s there would many more deaths.
> and that many people who express that sentiment wouldn't be expressing it if the powers were flipped
That is definitely not true.
Do you really genuinely believe that typical american liberal types would ignore a genocide committed against Jewish people by anyone, particularly arabs? In the American liberal mind "genocide" is, essentially, synonymous with The Holocaust, and I think your average liberal is, if anything, sensitive to Jewish discrimination, over and above random people out there in the world. There are definitely anti-semetic Americans and they should be launched into the sun, but I think your sense that people wouldn't care if Jews were being killed in the tens of thousands is extremely off point.
I'm sorry, I live in Europe and I was referring more to the kind of protests and protesters I see around me. The aren't many liberal Americans there. I completely agree that the situation could be different elsewhere.
Jewish groups have been supporting those protests in the US, Europe and Israel.
I have no idea what crowd composition at European protests looks like, but the vast majority of the people upset about the ongoing genocide are not antisemetic.
There is a propaganda campaign in the US trying to conflate being against genocide with being antisemetic. I'm sure similar tactics are being used in Europe.
I am myself supporting many of these protests, and it's exactly from this perspective that I say that many of them are antisemitic. But this is a bit of a useless discussion because neither you nor I can bring any evidence into how antisemitic they are, or how and if they would react if (or when) Palestinians are slaughtering Jews.
If you think it's nonsense, try to go into a anti-war protest with a t-shirt saying that Jews too should be able to live in Middle East. If this thought makes you slightly concerned, you got my point.
Where do you live in Europe that you believe those opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza would support a genocide of Jewish people anywhere? Because that is an outrageously delusional view.
I don't think that my exact location is very relevant here, but I urge you to ask protesters around you how they see "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" turning into reality, and let me know what happens with the Jews according to their plans.
If the Israeli administration could get away with fire bombing the strip, it'd have done so a long time ago. The whole world is screaming at them to stop the genocide and you think it's them just not "caring about civilians" that's responsible for this. There's no war in Gaza, there's only a genocide. A holocaust.
I'm not Arab, I'm not Muslim. I've never met a Jewish person. I've no reason to have any prejudice against people of Jewish heritage or ethnicity. But it's still a genocide by any definitions of the word. A lot of Jewish people even agree with this. And the reason that you and most Israeli people seem to struggle to grasp it is because they've been drinking on this exact extremist rhetoric that the "other" side only wants to see them slaughtered. By the same measure, you're saying Hamas can justify it's actions since there will always be ultra-Zionist factions of Israeli societies that wants to see Palestinians slaughtered. I implore you to wake up to what is being done in the name of your people.
I am an Arab Jew, and I actually have many friends in Gaza. I don't disagree about the usage of the words Genocide, though I think the terms is a little too easy to apply. I think a Holocaust is a completely different thing. There are Palestinians in the Israeli parliament, in the Supreme Court. No one is gathering Palestinians in gas chambers, and in general the Palestinian population only grew since the establishment of Israel. If there were more Jews in Europe after WW2 than before it, no one would remember it as a Holocaust.
There is war in Gaza in the simple sense that rockets from Gaza still shoot into Israel, that Israeli hostages are still being held, and that Hamas itself (the elected goverenement) says it would attack again. It's a very unbalanced conflict, and in it terrible crimes are committed that you can call genocidal. But Jews in the ghettos weren't bombing Berlin - not during WW2 and not after it.
That's an interpretation of events that I've heard from a lot of Israeli folks that are in some way horrified what's happening in Gaza. I think it's very naive and I don't even think most folks saying this believe in it themselves. What actions from the IDF, what imbalance of power, what civilian casualty rates will you need to see to believe that it's no longer a war? Are you really waiting for the actual mass starvation to take place before accept there's intent? Does it have to be gas chambers? Does the death toll have to pass 1 million? 6 million? Do you really think that the Israeli government wants to brings the hostages back? What do you think would happen after they did bring them back? Will you rescind your support then?
Jews in the Ghetto didn't get the chance to shoot rockets at Berlin but had they been able to fight back, I'd have given them the same understanding that I currently extends to Palestinians that grew up in the concentration camp that is Gaza. Hamas is the direct results of Israeli policies of the past decades. Even if the IDF manages to somehow invent some purity test for Gazans that it can use to confirm there are no longer any Hamas members left and it finally declares it's operations concluded, you'll have people shooting rockets at Israel if they keep their policies with the Gaza strip and the West Bank. But long term solutions come later, right now, Israelis need to wake up and say no to what is unfolding in the name of their security.
I will stop thinking that this conflict is a war when there will be a side in it that doesn't have the motivation to take over all the land, and acts towards it by attempting to kill the other. As long as there are two parties that are constantly trying to kill each other, I call that a war. As I wrote elsewhere - that doesn't mean I disagree with the idea that genocidal actions are being taken during this war.
Your comment about Jews in Ghetto is wrong at every possible level. Jews were killed in the Holocaust _without_ a conflict, _without_ attempting to kill Germans, _without_ fighting with anyone over the land and _without_ having any aspirations to control the other. That is an example of a situation where there is no war, and no, it has nothing to do with the situation between Israelis and Palestinians.
Stop telling lies about Gaza conflict being "war". Israeli military has absolute superiority over Palestinians. What it is is a genocidal campaign meant to wipe them off the face of the Earth.
Also, stop using the Holocaust as a propaganda tool. My grandfather happened to be a Buchenwald concentration camp survival. It didn't give him or anybody else any right to violate Geneva convention.
First, I don't recall you set the rules for discussion here. Now, to your points:
1. Genocidal actions can take place in a war, and no definition of a war ever said that the parties have to be of equal strength. Every war that was ever won by one side or another had some sort of power supremacy. Go read the legal definition for genocide and you'll learn that the question of imbalance of power plays absolutely no role in it.
2. I haven't used it as a propaganda tool, and in fact it wasn't me who brought it up at all. I was only commenting that the current situation in Gaza is not comparable to the Holocaust, and I fully stand behind it. To make it clear, I am very happy that it isn't comparable, and I wouldn't want to see any Palestinian suffering like my ancestors did. Not once in my life have I used it to justify crimes committed by Jews, so please learn to read before commenting on my posts. If anything, I always believed that what Jews went through should serve as a reminder for us to never allow things like that from happening again, and I still see the Holocaust as perhaps one of the main driving forces in my opposition to this war.
There were more than 100 armed jewish uprisings in Germany during WWII:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_resistance_in_German-oc...
Going through your criteria in order: Of course they defended themselves, including attempts to kill Nazis. They also attempted to keep their homes, and certainly would have rather Germany have different leadership
Does that somehow mean the concentration camps were a "war"?
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I suspect that it's you who have undergone deep mental conditioning if you think that I am justifying this war. One can hold a complex opinion, and nowhere have I said that I think this war is justified.
Not only I do not belittler their suffering, I personally helped some of them out. I also ran an organization that provided thousands of Gazan with electricity, and I was arrested by the Israeli police when encouraging Palestinians in Israel to vote. At the same time I have family members who were killed (and kidnapped) on the first day of this war. Life isn't black and white.
Thank you for sharing your perspective Yoav, it's refreshing to read comments from an actual observer and not an army of armchair warriors.
I am completely OK with being conditioned against siding with a 20 month long genocidal onslaught committed by an apartheid ethnostate against a blockaded territory with no sovereignty and no actual defenses of its own.
I completely agree that life isn’t always black and white. But right now it is, just like it was in countless other situations in the past. You can think it’s “complicated” all you like, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against such a framing, which is where the conditioning comes into the picture.
It is great that you volunteered in Gaza, but it’s also tragic that you fail to see what is happening even after directly interacting with Gazans.
Some day in the future, when free Palestinians can build museums and monuments and make movies to mourn those lost in this genocide, everyone will always have been against this.
Netanyahu has privately expressed preference for terrorist Hamas over political Fatah, and Israel has propped up those terrorist groups in the past (this is well documented not a conspiracy theory).
Why? Because Netanyahu and a good chunk of the Israeli population want the Palestinians to cease to exist and its territory to be part of Israel. An opponent that wants to achieve its goals through political action and appeals to the international community meant that there was a risk of Israel being dragged into a two-state commitment. A terrorist group attacking civilians gives those hardliners a perpetual excuse to go to war.
In short: the answer is yes, that appears to be precisely the point: to prevent any possibility of peaceful reconciliation and drive the Palestinians to eventual expulsion or eradication.
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> It's not pretty, but
That's a wild phrase to use in the context of killing indiscriminate civilians after luring them to the food they're desperate for.
There is something so deeply disturbing about how casually inhumane Israelis can be. They then drop “Hamas” like it’s a full sentence that magically cleanses whatever depravity they just spewed.
And it’s all so casual and self righteous.
its not pretty? Selling for profit? You missed the "ah war is hell. Just give up resisting so everything will be fine" part of the propaganda book.
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Israel wants to kill all Palestinians. This helps achieve this. They're committing genocide.
If Israel wanted to kill all Palestinians, wouldn't it be easier to start with the millions of Palestinians living in Israel, unarmed, instead of going into Gaza?
They are doing that. Most people in Gaza were displaced from other legal Palestinian territories. Gaza is was the (big) internment camp.
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If that is true, Israel would now actually, literally be persuing the exact same politics Nazi Germany did until they escalated their attempted genocide by making it intolerable to genocide by industrial scale murder. Not a good look for Israel, at all.
Israel cares less about looks and more about american support, ehich this administration has cut them a blank cheque for
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Please don't take HN threads into hard-core ideological and/or nationalistic flamewar. I realize this topic tends strongly in that direction, but that's not a reason to go there, it's a reason not to go there.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Other commenters are doing it too, but it's a matter of degree, and the rhetoric in your post here is a degree worse. You can make your substantive points without resorting to "cult", "stamped out", "criminal ideology" and so on. Fortunately it doesn't look like your account has a habit of doing this, so it should be easy to fix.
What is the evidence for that?
If Israel wanted them to leave, wouldn't they seek cooperation with a nation that is willing to have them, and organize mass transports there?
At least I haven't heard of any such thing.
> wouldn't they seek cooperation with a nation that is willing to have them
There is no such nation. Iirc Israeli politicians have more than once responded to critique with "you take them, then". But there aren't any takers.
Just like the Jews in Germany back before WW2, in fact.
You do realise that the people writing for Haaretz are also nationals of that country right? Maybe learn to be precise, helps in all situations.
When asked, in an representative online, poll, 47% percent of Israeli agreed that the IDF should kill all the inhabitants of cities it conquered[1].
So sure, workers at Haarez probably don't, but when the extermination feeling is widespread enough that 47% feel they can openly agree to a question proscribing the killing women and children, then insisting on the insistence on precision comes across mostly as an attempt at distraction.
[1] https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-hav...
Israel here obviously standing for "the current government of Israel" (with presumed majority support), not "every single Israeli person".
Fortunately many Israelis are against the ongoing genocide, but powerless to stop it.
There's a palestinian guy living in the US making the rounds on tiktok, talking to random israeli people on something like omegle. The amount of hate he gets is nothing short of depressing. Children cursing at him, IDF soldiers saying they want to kill every single person in Gaza, calling them sub-humans... sounds like the fourth reich is here already.
All this to say you're right, but the government is indocrinating more and more people for these views.
Be very wary of any such weaponized truth: you don't know how much selection bias is at play, how much confirmation bias is requested, you don't even know if the interviewees are what they say they are.
You raise a very valid point, which i will take in consideration. I don't believe it to be the case, since the person in question also shares positive interactions, and i believe some of the worst "contacts" have been doxxed. But your point still stands.
You can find the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/@HamzahSaadah
It is indeed sickening. They straight out tell you how they want all Palestinian children to die.
I disagree: when anything is obviously meaning what someone obviously thinks it means, then others will apply their own obvious understanding of it to justify very non-obvious behaviours.
The perpetual fight is mutually beneficial to all. The extremist right would not have been able to claim large swaths of land had they not had the air cover to raze Gaza. Now there is serious talk of going back into Gaza. And talk by Trump to turn it into a seaside resort has the settler movement giddy.
"all"
The comment section in the article is revolting. I don't know if they're state actors, or if they're real people with those beliefs, but my god.
Considering the discourse of the past two years and personal experience, I am afraid to say that yes, those are most likely very real people who very openly ignore 50% of the context and generalize their hate towards a whole population of a single country. In addition (and that's from, sadly, day to day experience) those are the same people who extrapolate their hate on one particular ethnical group.
I would have expected HN readers at least check on some context before starting beating their drums. Haaretz is a propaganda outlet that has been stocking the fire under everything related to Israel, for decades now.
> I don't know if they're state actors, or if they're real people with those beliefs
Both. And also trolls, and these days GenAI.
Some say "Never again means now", with the flag of Israel, and no sense of irony or hypocrisy. I wonder if any say the same words with the flag of Palestine? Hamas is still also genocidal, with their leaders giving similar comments about all Jews as the current Israel coalition members give about Palestinians.
When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. The IDF and Hamas are the elephants, and there are many innocent civilians (metaphorically grass) suffering because of it. The supremely dominant power of the IDF means the suffering grass is overwhelmingly on one side of a border that Israel doesn't recognise, but there are innocents everywhere.
I don't have any answers. I have learned to recognise this kind of mindset, but I cannot find words to act as levers to change those minds.
Your comment is full of attempts to justify, excuse and underplay what the IDF are doing and many Israelis believe in. From Hamas to GenAI to trolls.
Whatever the historical record that brought us here, the fact is, Israel's standing army (not some personal goons of some dictator, the standing army of a moden democratic nation), appear to be practically all in on executing a systemic genocide. And I don't think there's anyway you can justify or underplay that.
Maybe the answer you're looking for is that good people anywhere shouldn't let anyone sell them a holocaust no matter the deal.
I'm literally in that comment describing the IDF as genocidal and dominant. In another comment on this thread, I liken the damage the IDF is causing to "a nuke going off". If you think this is "underplay", what words would you have used? Would you insist I blame all jews, even though this linked story is literally showing jewish people living in Israel being critical of their own government's actions? Would you insist that I said "Palestinians" instead of Hamas, when it's just the militants and not the civilians whose actions on that side I blame?
I do not divide either my criticism or sympathy by nationality, I divide it by victimising and victimhood — and even then with the humility to know that I cannot see through the fog of all the propaganda I'm being shown.
But can't you see that your description of the situation as elephants crashing, your instinct to bring up a hypothetical that there's some Palestine flag waving person out there that has the same extremist thinking that the Israelis are using today, that your need to remind yourself that Hamas (to borrow the words of some other folks in the comments today, an organization that's literally _surrounded_ by overtly hostile populace) is genocidal...can't you see how replying this to what the GP said and the article as a whole can be "mistaken" to be such an attempt at underplaying?
No, I don't blame all Jews at all and I've seen a lot of Jewish people actively work to stop the genocide. But I definitely blame this narrative of Hamas is what's been used to sell to genocide to what are otherwise normal and compassionate people. I believe the only people who can stop this are the Israeli citizens saying no and the time was way too long ago.
Fwiw, I don't read any excuse or justification in parents post. The fact is that the IDF are (right now) more effective than Hamas in exterminating the other party.
What you're saying is completely true. But I like to think that most Israelis believe that the other party doesn't include the countless civilians that were killed so far and are facing dire starvation right now. Israeli people should not let their grief and their fear prevent them from saying no from those amongst them that want to do terrible things.
Clever piece of engineering that needs to be studied. The US and Israel setup a company/foundation to "distribute" aid. I guess to escape the accusations that they are systematically starving Gaza's population. It seems to be working, they can hide behind this while inflicting even more crimes against Palestinians.
I was going to ask if people really fall for this, but it seems like they do.
A street in Gaza, a map of dreams, and the people desperate to live
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/jun/26...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44387199
Is anyone surprised at horrific behaviour by Israel and the IDF at this point?
Every country has a percentage of right wing psychopaths. Unfortunately, they seem to be running the government in Israel.
Israel's intended end game seem to be to make Gaza completely uninhabitable, so that the Palestinians are forced to leave, then Israel can grab the land. A bit like they are doing in the West Bank, but on turbo mode. However, the Palestinians don't want to leave their land (why should they?) and no other state wants to take them. So we are left with enormous human misery, with no end in sight.
Most baffling of all, many Western states are not just turning a blind eye, but actively supporting Israel. Shame on them.
There has been so much disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda from so many nations and interested parties that I find it impossible to believe any claims anymore without seeing a video for myself. In this case, there are none. Even according to the article, the soldiers were ordered to fire on looters, which seems reasonable in the context of this war.
I doubt you will believe even if you see a video. You will probably think it is fake.
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I really don't think that it's a coincidence that just as this news was starting to gain traction a few weeks ago, Isreal started bombing Iran. It was the perfect distraction.
If we look at history, do the oppressed always become oppressors?
No. Many times the oppressed simply cease to exist (by assimilation, assassination, or other means).
Neanderthals aren’t going to become oppressors.
Well yeah, I meant if they go on to survive and become significant enough to be considered oppressive...
I'd say it's very hard for a powerful nation to not suppress somebody in the long run.
Just think of any powerful nation (or group of people, or whatever), and try to think of somebody they have oppressed, or are still oppressing. It's typically not hard to come up with examples.
Agreed. Its possible that the group survived their oppression and becomes powerful enough to oppress, they loose their identify, in the sense that their culture evolves, along the way. Resulting in oppression along some axis.
Mostly, yes.
Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire, then became conquerors of the world.
Russians were oppressed by the Mongols, then became conquerors of Eurasia.
Communists were oppressed by Tsarists, then became ruthless oppressors themselves.
Protestants were oppressed in Europe, so they set sail to America and became oppressors of the natives.
Not sure if I would lump all those up together, these examples are overly broad and have little in common. There's more than a thousand years and basically no causal link between Roman persecution of early Christians and Crusades, let alone European imperialism, especially if you take Ethiopian, Greek, Georgian, and Armenian Christians into account. Same for Russians and Mongols, there's a pretty large gap with a ton of events in between, and Mongol Empire was humongous to begin with, it wasn't about Rus' in particular. And communists that became ruthless oppressors were already radicalized during the persecution, it was literally the radical wing of a militant faction of a huge umbrella party that included people that would have felt right at home in modern EU (e.g. Kollontai and her early activism).
The better explanation is simple and banal - power concentration makes people abuse it.
I wouldn't consider this "lumping the groups together", or that they must exist together in time... its likely a group may require many generations before they can "oppress" another group.
My list of examples is very similar to this one and the ven diagram here is "was oppressed became oppressor"... in most cases it appears that only if the oppressed are destroyed or I would argue in the case of America- controlled at the margins... then they don't circle back around to abuse their newly acquired power.
Communists were absolutely not oppressed by Tsarists.
> Communists were oppressed by Tsarists, then became ruthless oppressors themselves.
Everyone was oppressed by Tsarists. Commies are ruthless oppressors by default.
I don't know if it's always the case, but it's true if given the opportunity. In the end all people are the same. Cultures may be different, but our lizard brains are the same. Us vs them, and dehumanizing others into something less than humans, whose suffering does not concern us.
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No racial flamewar on HN, please. I realize this topic is fraught with it but that's no reason to jump straight in—it's a reason to do the opposite:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: yikes—quite apart from the current topic, you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot with flamewar posts and personal attacks. We ban accounts that post like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43604429 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43604394 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596070 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596065 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593235 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593219 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43322414 (March 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43251495 (March 2025)
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted good things, but if you want to keep participating in this community, it would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
Edit: I did end up banning you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403629. We simply can't have people posting like that to HN.
Is this a new karma system where for each post that doesn't break the guidelines, you're allowed one that does?
No, this is how HN moderation has worked for over a decade.
Wait, my message was obviously intended as a bit sarcastic (which isn't very smart, I'll admit). But are you actually saying that I'm now allowed two racist comments without risking a ban? (three, counting this guideline-abiding comment?)
I'm not saying that, no.
Then I don't understand what you were saying by "this is how HN moderation has worked for over a decade", wasn't that a response to my previous comment that said exactly that?
Oh, I see. Let me try to be clearer.
It's not the case that "for each post that doesn't break the guidelines, you're allowed one that does", and that's not what I was doing. When I said HN moderation has worked the same way for over a decade, I didn't mean that the description you gave was accurate—it isn't. (Nor, I assume, did you mean it to be, since you were being sarcastic.)
I meant that what I was doing in the GP comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403362) was standard practice. As you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it goes back a long time.
We try to persuade users to follow the site guidelines, and tend to give warnings and make requests before banning accounts, especially if they are active participants who have been around for a while. We don't rush to banning such users; we try to explain the intended use of the site and convince them to honor it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
Why such an involved effort just to keep racists on the website?
This feels like a 'have you stopped beating your wife yet' question. Those are not really very motivating.
Thank you for clarifying and sorry about the sarcasm.
I am absolutely no one, but I'd like to highlight that this kind of policy is (indirectly) why I don't use HN. Tolerating intolerance to the extent you do (which isn't 100% but still a lot) allows people like the one you responded to originally to drive hackers like me, my loved ones, my colleagues and my students away, while attracting other hateful people, as they see that they are tolerated here. In a possibly too extreme comparison, this the same dynamic as the "nazi bar problem" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar). I hope you know what kind of community these policies has made of HN.
I don't agree with that characterization of HN. In my experience, people who make this complaint are usually coming from a place of political passion. That's understandable, and we might have more common ground on that level than you'd expect. But it's no basis for operating a community, assuming you don't want to just exclude people with different views and backgrounds to your own.
It's easy to invoke strong pejoratives like "hateful" when describing people who have opposing viewpoints and passions to one's own—in fact, it's hard not to. But it leads to a rapid escalation. A bad comment turns into a "hateful view", "hateful view" turns into "a hateful person", and soon that leaps to "how can you tolerate hateful people on your site". (The next logical step would be to suspect the mods of being "hateful people" themselves.) This escalation is, in my view, bad for community. It leads to uniformity within one's own group and rage and enmity towards difference.
Having banned countless accounts for breaking the site guidelines over the years, I can't accept that "hateful people" are tolerated here for very long. When accounts are posting abusively, we may give them more warnings than you (or a lot of other users) would prefer, but we ban them in the end. A good example is this very subthread. I ended up banning that account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403629). (Not, I should probably add, because of this or any other conversation about moderation, but just out of standard practice.)
p.s. You are not no one! I appreciate your comments and I wish I could write a better reply—I know a better one is possible, that expresses more precisely how I think about this. Alas it would take me hours, so I'm making do with one I don't much care for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 is one time that I got closer to it, and maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31812293. I still like the phrase "supported communication across differences". Unsupported communication across differences just leads to Hobbesian flamewar.
I have trouble seeing it your way. The person you were originally responding to, and originally wanted to tolerate because they also did good posts, was saying blatantly racist things about "the arabs in palestine" and that they essentially deserved the war crimes they're suffering, or that they brought it on themselves or whatever. To me this sounds like pretty straightforward political and ideological hate.
But anyway, this is only one case and we should not base our thinking just on it. The problem is the policy (or the way it's systematically enforced) and its broader results. I don't know the details of how the moderation works here nor have I any statistics. I only know that I saw too much racism and hate towards whole groups of people because of their identity here in the past, and that when I occasionally stumble across a HN link, I usually can still see that hate being a lot more represented than in other spaces I frequent, and that the kind of policy you described to me has never worked at building diverse and interesting communities.
We appreciate your biased comment, aimed at portraying Palestinians as terrorists and non-indigenous to the area, cherry-picking history as it suits your narrative. We're not interested, though. Thank you.
This is a description of blackest evil.
Anyone who knows they are raising an assault rifle to a crowd of civilians and pulls the trigger is a mass murderer and a psychopath
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. -- Thucydidus
Spoken by the Athenians and resulting in a war that, as Thucydides's audience knew quite well, Athens lost big-time.
Which actually holds up quite well for everybody who loves to bring up that quote: realism aka "we shouldn't face the consequences of our actions" is the obvious rallying cry for people facing the consequences of their actions.
It is descriptive, but not prescriptive.
If neither side can agree on peace, if neither side has objectives which the other will accept, if neither side is willing to compromise; What other outcome is possible in terms of realpolitik?
It is upsetting to observe. We all want better for humanity.
There have been cases in the past where an external strong power has been able to suppress both sides but it has to be done for generations until the reasons are lost to time.
Depending on who you ask, there have been a variety of external powers stirring the pot. Most people are horrified by the violence. Beyond the territorial, religious and cultural disputes there are opposing geopolitical factions.
Of course it is understandable to be outraged by the violence and atrocities. The human suffering is real, but arguments focusing on these points can miss the larger picture. The underlying incentives dictate outcomes. Atrocities are often marketed as rationalizations for further violence.
We want to prescribe an outcome without atrocities. Yet discussions fall into recrimination before they can describe the conflict coherently.
377,000 people in Gaza are missing. A few thousand fled to Egypt while they could. The rest: Under rubbles, propably.
When Netanyahu talked about Palestinians in Gaza being Amalek, about the necessity to destroy Amalek, he meant exactly that. And when the defense minister Gallant said: They are human animals, and then he said „no food, no water, no electricity“, he punished 2.3 mill people, half of them children. That’s why both have arrest warrants from ICJ.
Over 90% of Israeli population want more death and destruction in Gaza. Netanyahu and Gallant are no single incidents. The whole Israeli society knows what their soldiers are doing in Palestine. And they are ok with it.
This article and my comment will be flagged until dead. Just like anyone speaking about Israeli Apartheid, genocide, oppression in Palestine. But things are changing. Hasbara troll farms can’t keep up.
I guess the Israeli government's original plan to arm and support drug gangs and literally ISIS (euphemistically called 'clans') as "aid security" wasn't working out? Especially after it was revealed said "security" was stealing and reselling the food aid under the protection of IDF while the Israeli govt. and media blamed the looting on Hamas.
And after the Israeli opposition leader exposed the whole charade and Netanyahu defended it saying “On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. What’s wrong with that? It only saves the lives of Israeli solders, and publicising this only benefits Hamas.”
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/06/netanyahu-defe...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Abu_Shabab
[3] - https://archive.is/20250606144357/https://www.ynetnews.com/a...
To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?
"The basis for Lieberman’s allegation of ties to IS was unclear."
It is easy to throw dirt and hope something sticks, but the main thing speaking against his group seems Netanjahu's support in my opinion. But otherwise I don't see the scandal so much here. Especially not compared to the scandal of intentionally targeting civilian population and indiscriminate killing of starving people like the article states.
Edit: But I just read
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerem_Shalom_aid_convoy_loot...
And well, that is indeed better to show who we are dealing with, ruthless criminals who loot and shoot a UN aid convoy for profit.
> I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists
Netanyahu prefers Hamas, he was propping them up prior to the current battles, according to the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
Also, if, as in the recent New York City mayoral debate, US politicians are supposed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which it recognizes itself as, then I don't see the big deal over Palestine as an Islamic state. I myself would prefer to see a secular PFLP state, but the Zionist entity, US, Canada etc. fight against the PFLP, proscribe them as "terrorists" etc.
"he was propping them up prior to the current battles"
Those words indicate something different, than allowing quatari money to reach the civilian part of Hamas government as part of a temporary peace deal. Because that sounds actually reasonable to me.
Now there is indeed more, like this:
"Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is now Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister, put it bluntly in 2015, the year he was elected to Parliament.
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” he said. “Hamas is an asset.”"
But those words came without context (just a youtube video, that I won't watch right now).
Palestinians preferred them as well since they elected Hamas.
When was the last actual election?
Ironically, the closest you will get to something approaching that type of Marxist-Leninist utopia in the Middle East, is living in an Israeli kibbutz near the border with Gaza.
Why is a civic state in the Middle East is utopia? Do you think that the US not based on white nationalism is also a Marxist-Leninist utopia?
> To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?
A simple dealer vs an armed wing of a religious theocracy who think people like me are the devil incarnate, I'd pick the dealer.
An organised armed drug network that necessarily has to be at least comparable strength to an existing network of religious theocrats who are obviously getting external support owing to the ability to continue fighting despite the evidence of systematic destruction of their civil environment that satellite imagery shows has been in aggregate comparable in scope and depth to a nuke going off…
I don't want either of them anywhere near anyone I care about. Even if the latter wasn't associated with a different group of religious zealots.
It gets ugly at the latest when remembering that "looting" was always a core part of the Israeli narrative to explain the humanitarian crisis.
Even before the current siege/semi-siege, the standard response to calls from aid orgs had been essentially "Look, it's not us. We're letting in aid, but it's not our fault if Palestinian armed gangs themselves are looting it after we let it in. Palestinians are just too stupid to organize their own survival."
Of course that response was already ridiculous back then: The 1000s of aid trucks stuck at the Egypt-Gazan border are definitely not kept there by Hamas or armed gangs. Even the looting attacks themselves were suspicions: Aid orgs kept reporting they were happening in areas under full control of the IDF - and IDF was forbidding using any other route[1]:
> Israel is doing the opposite of ensuring aid can be delivered to Palestinians in need. For example, a U.N. memo recently obtained by the Washington Post concluded that the armed gangs looting aid convoys could be “benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” and “protection” from Israel’s military, and that a gang leader had a military-like compound in an area “restricted, controlled and patrolled” by the Israeli military.
The gangs operate in areas under Israeli control, often within eyeshot of Israeli forces. When convoys are looted, Israeli forces watch and do nothing, even when aid workers request assistance. Israeli forces refer to one area about a kilometer from its Kerem Shalom border checkpoint as “the looting zone.” The IDF-designated looting zone might be the only place in Gaza that Israeli forces won’t shoot an armed Palestinian.
But there was still at least some benefit of the doubt that the armed gangs were just some ordinary criminals exploiting the situation. Claims that the gangs themselves were operating under Israeli orders were conspiracy theories.
Netanyahu now confirmed those theories as reality.
[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/gaza-aid/
Well, Israel could have worked with the UN… it’s not the like choices are ONLY Hamas or Drug Dealers.
Unless, of course, delivering aid is not actually your intent.
> To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?
Comments like this coming from an audience currently not being genocided is going to haunt our history forever.
Can you get a bit more specific here?
Because it kind of reads like an attack towards me for not caring about genocide. If you are curious about my point of view, it is that both Hamas and Israeli leadership belongs in prison and the US and EU should stop supporting them immediately. But that doesn't mean I support anyone who wants to erease Israel. Do you support Hamas?
This is an article about idf warcrimes, I think the comment you are responding to is just pointing out that you are immediately pivotting to condemning Hamas
But the comment he's responding to already talks primerely about Hamas, it's not he who switched the topic from IDFs horrors to Hamas crimes.
> I guess the Israeli government's original plan to arm and support drug gangs and literally ISIS (euphemistically called 'clans') as "aid security" wasn't working out? Especially after it was revealed said "security" was stealing and reselling the food aid under the protection of IDF while the Israeli govt. and media blamed the looting on Hamas.
To which he responded his opinions about drug and faith dealers.
Asking if I support Hamas makes this unworthy of a response.
You could just state "no", if you don't, then I would have apologized.
But you gave a response, but avoided the question. Together with your comment history and wording I do conclude now that you do.
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> First, Hamas are openly genocidal terrorists
Israel is the one actually committing a genocide though.
> the claim that Mossad funded ISIS is antisemitic propaganda, on the face of it.
Is that why ISIS apologised after accidentally attacking IDF? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-is...
> To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?
This is like the equivalent of "Tbh, I do prefer ISIS over Saddam Hussein". Or "I do prefer cancer over heart disease".
No, because drug dealers by definition mainly sell drugs to people who want them.
A subset of them indeed engages with dark methods like mixing highly addictive drugs into harmless ones and turf war, but the majority just sells things.
Before weed was legal in germany I engaged with quite some of them and they were mostly decent people all in all. Not the greatest and often messed up themself a bit, but otherwise no danger to me or anyone else. My choice if I damaged myself with their products.
A islamist on the other hand is buisy by definition with spreading the rule of Islam over everyone, everywhere.
Dangerous to any non muslim.
So you're equating the drug dealing "clans" in Gaza to your local streetside dealer in Germany?
Both Hamas and the clans are cancers to society, and it's abhorrent that the IDF is dealing with them to distribute aid, instead of being directly involved (which they can easily commit to).
My main issue was equating the term "drug dealer" with something worse than a terrorist.
Now as my edit above hopefully made clear, apparently they ain't just "drug dealers", but ruthless criminals who loot and shoot a UN aid convoy for profit.
And abhorrent are indeed many things about the whole situation.
Sourced articles like these are good and further proof that Israel is a psychopathic state and society. But what's odd is to depict is as "surprising" or even shocking when the same state has been carpet bombing civilian, including women and children for 16 months straight, causing what is estimated at 300 000 deaths, committing every single atrocity or infringement to the international law possible, including targeting medics, journalists, using starvation as a weapon of war, bragging on it on social media, having politicians incite to eradicate the remaining part of the Gaza population, and I could go on and on with nameless atrocities. So just to put things in perspective, this article depicts a horrible incident, but it is entirely in line with the rest of the Israeli policy, and unfortunately pales in comparison with the ongoing large-scale massacre.
Your statement paints a one-sided picture that oversimplifies a complex conflict while ignoring critical context. The claim of Israel as a “psychopathic state and society” dismisses the diversity of its population and the internal debates within its democracy, flawed as it may be. Accusations of “carpet bombing” and “300,000 deaths” are inflammatory and lack credible sourcing. Estimates from neutral observers, like the UN or reputable NGOs, place Gaza’s death toll far lower, though still tragic, and often note the difficulty of verifying numbers due to Hamas’s control of local reporting. The charge of “every single atrocity” ignores that international law violations are alleged on both sides, including Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians, use of human shields, and rocket attacks on Israeli population centers, which you omit entirely. Starvation as a weapon and targeting medics or journalists are grave accusations, but they require rigorous evidence, not blanket assertions. Israel’s military actions, while devastating, occur in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, which killed over 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage, including women and children. This context doesn’t justify all of Israel’s actions, but it complicates the narrative of unprovoked aggression. Social media boasts and political rhetoric, while reprehensible, don’t equate to state policy, and cherry-picking them ignores dissenting Israeli voices calling for restraint or peace. The article you reference may highlight a horrific incident, but framing it as “entirely in line” with a monolithic “Israeli policy” flattens a multifaceted conflict. It also sidesteps Hamas’s role in prolonging the war by rejecting ceasefires and embedding military infrastructure in civilian areas, as documented by the IDF and independent analysts. Both sides’ actions deserve scrutiny, but your statement’s selective outrage and lack of evidence undermine its credibility. If you’re aiming to critique, provide specific, verifiable data, otherwise it is empty rhetoric.
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Now try to spin tanks firing ”warning shots” at civilians.
They are also firing SHELLS for warning. Direct article quote:
> In one incident, the soldier was instructed to fire a shell toward a crowd gathered near the coastline. "Technically, it's supposed to be warning fire – either to push people back or stop them from advancing," he said. "But lately, firing shells has just become standard practice. Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there's never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders."
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Condemning Israel will imply admission of complicity for many of these nations.
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We've asked you several times to stop breaking the site guidelines. You've continued to do it anyway. That's not cool.
Moreover, your account has been using HN primarily for political/nationalistic battle, which is also a line at which we ban accounts, quite separately from individual violations.
If you keep doing this, we're going to ban you. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended going forward, we'd appreciate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177567 (Nov 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39151611 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36472783 (June 2023)
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> This is a delusional take, please stop pretending
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only makes things worse.
Your comment would be just fine without those bits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I respect your judgment, so I've edited out the first bit, but honestly I feel it's not an unreasonable thing to say in response to genocide denial - it was said about the claim, not about the person, and in my opinion it's an accurate description of that claim. /my two cents
I don't disagree with that.
From a moderation point of view, it's a question of the effect that these bits have on other people in the community, and therefore the quality of the discussion. It's obviously near-impossible to have a thoughtful conversation about a topic like this across the vast differences (ideological, national, emotional) that separate people. In such a context, even provocations that feel small and justified can set the neighborhood on fire.
If the discussion devolves into just another internet screaming match where people hurl pre-existing talking points and just get even more riled up in rage, then the HN thread is a failure. Maybe it's too much to hope for anything better on this topic, which is probably the most divisive and emotional one we've ever seen, but I think we have to try. That's we allow the topic to appear on the HN front page from time to time. Not to allow it would be easier, at least in the short term, but inconsistent with the intended spirit of the site.
The bulk of your post wasn't doing anything like flamewar at all, so the swipey bits were particularly unfortunate.
p.s. I don't mean to pile on, but "please stop pretending" is also a swipe. You can't know whether someone else is pretending, and there's no reason to suppose that people aren't sincere in their convictions about a highly-charged topic (separately from whether their beliefs are true or false). If you lead by denying that, the rest of what you have to say will have little chance of being heard.
Why not just get rid of the whole post? It's not relevant to HN and the comments range from uninteresting to terrible.
As I said in the comment you are replying to, I believe we have to try, because it would be inconsistent with the intended spirit of this site not to.
I don't agree that it isn't relevant to HN. The central value of this site is intellectual curiosity, construed broadly (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
If you try to define that in a way that detaches from larger human concerns, you make it smaller. Curiosity doesn't benefit from that.
I agree with you that there are many reasons to be unhappy with threads like this and how the topic lands on HN generally. I am by no means happy with it—I just don't think that the alternative is better. Curiosity ultimately has to do with relating to what's real and what's true. You can't impose a narrow view of on- and off-topcicness on that.
The problem of how to run a site like HN in accordance with a value like that is subject to a thousand constraints, some obvious, many not. That makes the problem interesting, but also means that it can never be solved—not to everyone's satisfaction, nor even to anyone's satisfaction. Therefore we all have a certain amount of dissatisfaction to tolerate.
Have you seen any comments on this submission that demonstrate intellectual curiosity? It's just flamewarring and complaints as far as I can see, at this point.
Sorry but I think you made the wrong call here.
It's very relevant, the hacker ethos is not just about technology and VC funding, it's also about curiosity, honesty, skepticism, and in a way, also about distrust of the powerful. This revelation is perfectly on topic.
The comments are actually better than expected given the sensitivity of the topic at hand.
Because then you can't moderate just one side of the discussion. Unfortunately, there's a clear pattern here.
I have no idea which side you think we're favoring, but I can tell you two things for sure: (1) it's whichever side you personally disagree with; and (2) they think we're favoring you. Of everything I've learned about how HN functions (and internet dynamics generally), this is by far the most invariant.
With the risk of being moderated myself, why is it the case that is always the not pro-israel comments that get moderated? The original comment seems quite reasonable but the guy even kind of apologized, for no reason! That's pure coercion to conform, if I may be allowed (lol) to have an opinion.
> why is it the case that is always the not pro-israel comments that get moderated
That is far from the case, as you can see for yourself if you look more closely.
People (I don't mean you personally, but all of us—it seems to be basic human bias) are far too quick to jump to "always". I call this the notice-dislike bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), which is a terrible name I'm hoping someone can improve on.
> which is a terrible name I'm hoping someone can improve on
It seems to be very similar to Baader-Meinhoff. I guess it’s called “frequency illusion” now, which is much more descriptive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
That's about frequency per se, whereas I'm talking about experiences with negative emotional valence.
Thanks for the reply though—I hope someday someone will come up with a good name for it; or better, still, point out that it's a known bias in the standard repertoire and tell me what it's called.
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Ok.
Can we stop the genocide now?
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You know, we had separation between church/religion and state for a good reason.
Who has it? Certainly not Israel. Or America. The U.K. does far better in practice, but not fully - nor does it claim to be.
It's "separation between church and state". As in: the institution of The Church. "separation between religion and state" doesn't really exist anywhere, and can't really exist, because it would basically be a thought-crime. For example Joe Biden is a Catholic and I'm some of his actions have almost certainly been inspired in part of fully by his Catholic beliefs. It couldn't be otherwise as being Catholic is part of Joe Biden.
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Stories like this often get flagged because they devolve into political/religious flamewars. I think many people might have a knee-jerk reaction to posts about the Israel/Gaza war and flag them, because support for Israel vs. support for Palestine can be quite polarizing and emotional.
Not saying it's right or wrong, or that this sort of article is or isn't interesting to HN readers. But a reasonable reason for flagging an article is a belief that the topic at hand doesn't lend itself to thoughtful, interesting discussion.
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> by the same people who claim they had a genocide commited against them
C'mon, you can't just go around implying that the Jews only "claimed" to have a genocide against them.
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Haaretz is generally a liberal Zionist Israeli newspaper. As such, I find it easy to trust that it is not lying when it reports sensitive testimony from multiple IDF soldiers.
It’s pretty thoroughly off-topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I wouldn't say it's thoroughly off-topic because not only do a lot of tech companies directly enable or produce the stuff that's enabling Israel but a fair number of major figures have also directly involved themselves politically with Israel.
That said it's the kind of topic I don't expect HN to be able to particularly handle in an interesting or insightful way. It's mostly just going to be a mix of horrified people and then users trying to gaslight others into how this is a good thing.
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> We are the most moral and ethical army in the world.
I mean, the Swiss army has never invaded another country.
That's a pretty high bar to surpass.
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US/UK, Iran?
Notice how israel (the country currently committing the genocide) is not even mentioned in your reply.
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Netanyahu is bad, for sure, but are you forgetting the half a million dead after the invasion and regime change in Iraq? Bush and Cheney are living in happy retirement. Rumsfeld has passed, may his soul rot in hell.
Pretty sure the various polling in Israel has shown that the majority of the population do not think there are innocent civilians in Gaza.
IMO Netanyahu changing won’t make this go away.
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I never thought I would see the end of the Status Quo in my lifetime and yet here we are.
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You can't do this here. We've banned the account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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You mean the barbarity of the zionist militias and IDF who have been ethnically cleansing and murdering Palestinians since 1948?
This is no different thank French people in Algeria who committed a genocide during all the way up to the liberation.
Its the same standard that should be upheld with South Africa and the Nazi regime
The absurd idea of a "genocide" in Palestine is immediately defeated by a simple search showing that the population of Palestine increased close to 600% since 1948, rendering the all claim nothing more than a usual dog whistle from anti-Semite propaganda.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/state-of-pale...
I said ethnic cleansing, not genocide. Although genocide is what has been happening for the past 2 years in Gaza as described by even Holocaust scholars.
Your argument is a typical claim of racists and zionist colonialists.
1st: you claimed Israel was carrying out ethnic cleansing since 1948. You are now trying to mix words, but when you do ethnic cleaning, you carry out genocide. You were caught in your dog whistle and then tried to get out of it with semantics.
2nd: “Zionist colonialists” is what you call the people that want to have their home in the tiny piece of desert where they where expelled from. By contrast you don’t seem to have any qualms about the Arab colonialists that took all the Middle East and north of Africa. In fact, you support they should even get to keep the tiny piece of desert that belongs to the Jew people. Your problem clearly has to lie in the ethnicity of the people doing the so called colonialism (you even go as far as calling colonialism to people taking hold of their homeland).
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It lasted only a few minutes initially before being flagged, but now it seems officially allowed and not just vouched for.
I am glad it is visible. And hope for some more civic debate about the topic.
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HN is explicitly about more than tech. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Cannot believe there are still people doing the “both sides” thing. Nothing remotely justifies the Israeli government’s actions.
Israel is knowingly committing a genocide, and there will be a Nuremberg 2 for the perpetrators and the people supporting it
There were Nuremberg trials because Germany capitulated. We don't even have sanctions on Israel and the people responsible will only be jailed if they step outside Israel.
I am not optimistic at all and I am very afraid for Gazans.
Learn the definition of genocide before misusing it.
This genocide has, for many people, burst any illusions of a "rules based world order".
There multiple EU signatory countries of the Rome Statute (pledging to cooperate with ICC) that have welcomed these war criminals... who have warrants out by the ICC.
And the same war criminals are invited to give a speech at the U.S Congress to near unanimous applause. It really makes you wonder if we're the "good guys".
-- edit -- If you're curious how much your congressperson receives from AIPAC (Israeli lobby) this website is a great resource: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress
Indeed, the leading countries of so-called "free world" are willing to commit and support war crimes and break the intl law as well as DPRK or Iran when it serves their intrests, all while signaling virtue and progressiveness.
If you're still wondering if you're the good guys, you haven't been paying attention. I don't think there are any "good guys" when it comes to nations, but for the US it's not even close.
In the world outside the West, 'rules based world order' does not mean what you think it does. To them 'rules based world order' means that the UK/USA/Israel/NATO/EU do whatever they want rather than go through the UN. Going through the UN would be 'international law', which is not to be confused with 'rules based world order'.
With 'rules based world order', there is one rule for the West and one rule for everyone else. Hence it is okay to have a referendum in Kosovo for Kosovo to split away from Serbia, but not okay for a region of the Ukraine to have a referendum, to break away from Ukraine. So Crimea, where everyone speaks Russian and identifies as Russian, with no interest in the Ukraine or the EU, can't get the treatment that was afforded Kosovo. This is because 'rules based world order', and how the global majority sees it.
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Please don't attack other users, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comment would be fine without that bit.
Almost no-one[1] recognizes Crimea as part of Russia because it was entirely manufactured. Unmarked foreign soldiers invaded a country, pretended to be local rebels, staged a referendum and immediately asked to join the invading country to give the shameless land grab a veneer of legitimacy. It's a total joke that has nothing in common with genuine ethnic conflicts. The referendums in Crimea and elsewhere had to be staged because even internal polling leaked from the Russian military admin showed that nowhere did the local population support the invasion; speaking German doesn't mean that you want to live in the Third Reich.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
> Crimea, where everyone speaks Russian and identifies as Russian
Blatant falsehood. In 2014 it was about 65% (ethnicity) and 80% (language).
In addition the referendum happened after the invasion and de-facto annexation, without the option of "keep the current situation with Ukraine". If you ask me "do you want to be punched or stabbed?" then I'll choose a punch. Doesn't mean I want to be punched.
Black Hawk Down comes to mind, sadly. :-(
I am not saying this didn't happen but none of the sources in this haaretz piece were named or any actual evidence provided beyond anonymous testimony. The Israeli military is highly bureaucratized and if those incidents did occur there will be documented evidence and the purpotrators will be punished in accordance with the law.
Are you really of this opinion or are you trying to incite replies? :)
This comment thread is the most civilised online discussion I have seen in a long while about this particular topic, despite people coming from diverse backgrounds and disagreeing.
In this sense, hackernews gives me hope that online culture is not lost yet.
It's because realistically hn is an oasis of educated people that has been overlooked by astroturfers and foreign interests (very strongly including the government in this piece), and hasn't expanded its core demographic for profit. This is what the rest of the internet would be like without manipulation. Imagine how much better things would be
I was encouraged by yours and parents posts to look at some of the comments but I think I just got duped into wasting time with bots that are in fact astroturfing!
HN has an experienced and famously fair moderator for whom cultivating the conversation on this site is a full time job.
I have no doubt whatsoever that dang is the biggest reason that HN comment sections are so high quality compared to the rest of the web.
If HN is so educated and civic, we would be able to have more of that sort of debate and not just once in a while.
Also note that dang is already pretty active here banning people.
It is a topic where deep emotions come up and where fanatism is widespread. Also among educated people. Also not sure if you have not noticed before, but HN is part of a profit orientated venture capitalist company. Still, I also do enjoy this Oasis here. But I don't see how it can scale in any way you seem to imagine.
I think people understand there's a time and a place for important political discussion on an otherwise tech community, especially because the quality and insight tends to be better than other places.
I don't have any delusions about ycombinator seeing some of the things it has supported recently, but in this laughably dumbed down world you take what you can get.
As for new communities I believe in being selective and restrictive- based on location, education, or interest and think it's the only way we can get smart communities again. Think how the tech barrier and slow adoption in the 90s/2000s resulted in a smart bubble online, and how covid was the death knell for distinct non homogenous smart online spaces because it brought everyone further online. It's discriminatory but look what we've become.
This is at t= 3 hours, and large swathes of people asleep on a weekend.
These types of topics pull themselves apart VERY fast, as the homogenity of discussion norms / definitions, shared by users decreases.
I love how HN has no interest that Israeli civilians are still held hostage. Let's see how you manage with your loved ones held by a terrorist organisation.
Have you seen the Israeli hostage families protest in Israel? They get heckled and threatened by the hardliners in the general public and government who want the war continue to and those hardliners essentially want the hostages as an excuse for war. The democracy in Israel has elected a government that wants to continue to acquire land in Gaza and the West Bank in preference over negotiating for return of the hostages. There are multiple video and text reporting on this issue. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-847290 There are also hardline hostage families that want to continue the war over negotiating. https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-hostages-ceasef... It's complicated and not as simple as your black and white assessment - that people are for either returning the hostages or not returning the hostages and those same opinions are in sync with ending the war/continuing the war with the same priority. Hamas having hostages serves both Hamas and the hard right wing's long term goals in Israel, and the hard right wing in Israel holds all the power in Israel and Hamas holds the power in Gaza.
> As of November 1, Israeli authorities held nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied territory in detention for alleged security offenses, according to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked. Far more Palestinians have been arrested since the October 7 attacks in Israel than have been released in the last week. Among those being held are dozens of women and scores of children.
> The majority have never been convicted of a crime, including more than 2,000 of them being held in administrative detention, in which the Israeli military detains a person without charge or trial. Such detention can be renewed indefinitely based on secret information, which the detainee is not allowed to see. Administrative detainees are held on the presumption that they might commit an offense at some point in the future. Israeli authorities have held children, human rights defenders and Palestinian political activists, among others, in administrative detention, often for prolonged periods.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/29/why-does-israel-have-so-...
The civilians that are also being starved?
Israel's official policy is that "Hamas must not get aid". If that were successful, there'd be no food for the hostages either.
Irrelevant. Israel is obliged to not prevent civilians from receiving food, water and medicine. If it can't do so without 'aiding' Hamas, that's Israel's problem.
Is shooting unarmed civilians trying to avoid starvation supposed to free the hostages, or what’s the connection here?
I think most people consider Oct 7th and the hostages to be a grave criminal act. It doesn't justify genocide, though, which seems to be what you're implying.
If such orders were given, in the manner hereby described, these are clearly illegal orders and MUST be refused by any IDF soldier who listened during training.
But I'm in doubt such orders were given. I assume (or hope, but certainly do not know), they were ordered to not allow any mob to come close to them (this is obviously required). We've been there and it should be possible to attain without killing anyone.
Regardless, it's time to bring all the hostages back home, and stop the war.
Oh boy
This is a normal procedure in a war zone when distributing food. HN people are naive as they have never been close to a war zone.
When you distribute food in a war zone you tell people not to come near the food and they do it anyway. What are you going to do? shoot them? Yes, you shoot them if they get too close. First you fire at the air, then you shoot at people if they get closer anyway.
If you don't shoot them they will take a sack by force, and then everybody will take a sack by force. Usually they coordinate themselves into bands or gangs to steal the food.
Of course, those brave enough to take the sacks by force risking their lives will not distribute them evenly. They will give it to their families, their gang and sell the rest.
Israel could be brutal for a lot of things, but not for this. Hamas was way more brutal to their own people. For example, Hamas executed their own people for wanting to escape the bombing areas so they did not loose their body shields.
This article from the BBC corroprates the claims in the parent article, and also talks about why there are so many civilian casualties at these food distribution centers:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/28/nx-s1-5449587/israel-gaza-haa...
The most obvious problems are that the food distribution centers are placed deep inside military red zones (which is not common practice), and that Israeli soldiers have been ordered to fire at civilians in those zones, even if they obviously pose no threat (which is clearly a war crime).
The sections "Troops describe firing at crowds of aid seekers" and "Aid workers and medics call for end to GHF distribution plan" explain in more detail.
The article you link from NPR seems to mostly cite the Haaretz article. The only possible corroboration are the claims from Adil Husain, but I am hesitant to take his words as corroboration.
The Haaretz article states it is unclear how many died from IDF fire vs the Abu Shabab group. Husain was not at the aid site and so can't state how they were wounded.
It is also the case that doctors without borders is far from a non-partisan group and has harbored terrorists in the past (e.g. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-slain-gazan-named-as-docto...)
If the soldiers truly fired on those who were only running away, not advancing, this should be investigated and charged as a war crime. However, at this point the evidence is not clear aside from a handful of anonymous sources from a single press release.
There have been many many aid trucks refused entry. The famine has been manufactured by Israel. "normal procedure" might have some weight if there weren't 100s of trucks refused entry.
First you impose a blockade against people.
Then they run out of food and their families are starving.
Then you distribute a limited amount of food that will run out long before most get any food.
If your family is starving to death, you can't leave the area and someone is dangling food in front of your face, are you saying you wouldn't risk it for your family and try to get SOME food regardless of the threat of death?
It's just not true that this is "normal procedure". It's just not. It didn't happen before either, and now it's happened how many times? Once or twice, I can believe. This many times? Not so much.
And this line of reasoning:
> If you don't shoot them they will take a sack by force, and then everybody will take a sack by force. Usually they coordinate themselves into bands or gangs to steal the food.
is just dehumanising and morally abject.
Are we supposed to just accept that because something is status quo, it’s permissible? The consequence for “stealing” food should never be death, ever, in any scenario. It’s also interesting that people taking and distributing food are characterised as “gangs”, this suggests that taking a vital resource and redistributing it is somehow criminal.
Edited to correct syntactical error.
You either have not read the article or are deliberately being obtuse.
The article has multiple IDF officers say that this isn't, in fact, normal warzone procedure for distributing food. That they witnessed crowds being dispersed with artillery fire, which isn't normal procedure anywhere.
Like, I don't know what world you live in, but I don't know any other conflict where dozens of civilians get fired upon during food aid distribution every day.
They don’t have basic crowd control tools such as water and tear gas, so instead they use state of the art lethal weapons?
But it's not a warzone, it's a slaughterhouse. The intention isn't to feed people, it's to remove Palestinians from Gaza, by attrition or violence.
Once you understand the motive, you understand why these deliberately concentrated, artificially limited aid delivery systems are used. They make remaining in Gaza the worst option.
This is genocide. It's unforgivable.
If we accept this and the claim that Hamas deliberately seeks to maximize civilian casualties, then consider the hypothetical:
What would stop them from deliberately drawing fire under this scenario?
Aside from meeting the Israeli demands, what other options remain for Hamas?
Are you suggesting that it is right for Hamas to seek Gazan civilian casualties because it is their only way of fighting back against the IDF at this point?
I agree that Hamas has no other options now, but Hamas has never had a realistic change of winning the battlefield and so has always fought primarily by tring to erode international support for israel by inflating claims of genocide and human-rights abuses,facilitating their own civilian deaths.
Your wording makes it seem like you sympathize with Hamas.
Forgive me if I am not understanding your question.
>...fought primarily by trying to erode international support for Israel
Agreed.
>Are you suggesting that it is right...
Thank you for the opportunity to further clarify my comment. If this is happening I believe that it is deeply immoral.
My comment posed a hypothetical about the incentives which may be driving these events. As you observed above, it does fit with existing knowledge of Hamas strategy. Examples would include pop-up rocket attacks near schools or hospitals.
Here is a source which some have alleged to be sympathetic to Hamas. I have selected this source not because I prefer it, but to avoid allegations of bias.
https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns...
>UNRWA condemns placement of rockets, for a second time, in one of its schools
>UNRWA strongly and unequivocally condemns the group or groups responsible for this flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law
Haaretz’s English edition claims that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza, but the original Hebrew version? It states they were told to fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites. This represents a significant difference in intent, legality, and moral implications.
https://mrandrewfox.substack.com/p/haaretz-the-lies-continue
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44404779
So there's a substantial difference between "firing towards masses" (comprised of Palestinians) and "firing at Palestinians"?
Laughable spin.
I think that's also what they said on Bloody Sunday: not firing "at Catholic protestors", but firing "towards the masses".
This is just war crime denying spam. Words do not matter in the light of what the IDF actually did.
Always too many hints of latent anti-semitism in these discussions. It’s clear: war is an abomination. “He to whom harm is done, does harm in return.” So let’s not pretend this, if it’s real, is an Israeli specific thing.
If the claims are accurate, and we don’t know they are yet, they are the direct result of the bad situation we’re all in, and that situation was precipitated by (though perhaps not entirely due to) October 7th. We can’t let that get lost in the noise of what could be legitimate criticism of, hopefully isolated, Israeli military tactics. An overreaction to October 7th is bad, but it’s still just a reaction. The first punch was thrown by hamas. The terrorists videotaped themselves and their atrocities that day, wild celebrations of their horrors broke out, followed within hours and days by, shockingly to those with any sense of human decency, massive anti-Israeli protests in the West. Images of all of that are seared into the hearts and minds of most Israeli’s who will literally never forget. Wars are evil, and once started they are sometimes impossible to stop.
But bottom line, these are particularly disturbing claims and should be investigated, and if they are true then immediate changes should be made, including the removal and punishment of those who may be responsible.
Oct 7th is not when anything started.
So if Hitler did some false flag attacks, do you expect the whole world to be okay with the Holocaust?
Latent? Ive seen flagged comments playing into age old european conspiracies that Jews are controlling the world - on HN.
The reality is a fortified Israel was born of Jewish trauma and while the citizens of the world continue to propel antisemitic nonesense, despot nationalists like Netanyahu will have excuses to justify horrific actions
Before levelling claims of bias and racism, consider that the reporting is by a Jewish run, Israeli newspaper and that the sources are IDF officers and soldiers. To jump to a claim of anti-semitism suggestions you really need to examine your own biases.
Atrocities against unarmed civilians are not excused by 'but they started it', who did? The old woman, the 10 year old boy? Justifying collective punishment like this takes a huge degree of racism and heartlessness.
"once started (wars) are sometimes impossible to stop". How convenient then that land (belonging to people who also have nothing to do with 'the first punch') continues to be stolen as long as the war drags out.
The responsible are all ministers in the administration.
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