For everyone in this thread hoping for a "Marshall Plan" or other functional aid regime for Gaza, keep in mind that the Marshall Plan began with defeat. It was only with Germany's unconditional surrender that the Allies could establish security and make a plan for the future. Hamas has had many opportunities to surrender and hasn't taken them.
Hitler had many opportunities, as well; but chose not to. Surrender was not a choice the Allies could make for him or for Germany; and it is not a choice Israel can make for Hamas or Gaza.
zetazzed · 7h ago
I see an increasing number of politicians taking the position:
"I supported Israel's government's actions when they first attacked, given the goals of destroying Hamas' leadership and freeing hostages, but now that it has turned into a brutal siege with mass civilian casualties on a horrific scale, I'm strongly against their actions." E.g. Macron, Angus King, and many people I know personally.
And I think we need to say "Great!" The dumbest reaction is "screw you, you were for Israel's invasion and you're an asshole." Movements that want to grow should accept people who change their minds when the situation changes, they get new data, or they learn a new perspective.
kn0where · 7h ago
It’s fine to accept your mom or your neighbor changing their mind, but I think we should be skeptical of politicians changing their mind and consider what hidden, calculated motives they may have for changing it now, when they had plenty of information to reach the same conclusion over a year ago.
carefulfungi · 6h ago
Then what does winning actually look like today? Sure. Run against these people and support their political opposition in the next election. But take the win on the short term and get food to Gaza.
rendaw · 1h ago
It feels more likely that if you push the message "yes, this is great" for the short term win they get elected again next term.
When do you switch from saying "yes these people are great for flip-flopping" to "no these people are terrible don't vote for them", and how do you say it in a way that gets through people's subtlety filters and doesn't make it look like you're flip flopping yourself?
asddubs · 3h ago
it's worth noting that joe biden lied about trying to get a ceasefire, as we now know. So it's worth being skeptical, though of course I agree that ultimately what matters are results.
webstrand · 2h ago
Do you have a source for your claim? The Biden administration did present a ceasefire plan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_war_ceasefire>. If not that, then I don't know enough about the situation to find what you're referring to.
The Biden administration also kept publically decrying the situation in Gaza while also promising full support and increasing weapon shipments to Israel. Saying one thing and doing the exact opposite over and over again.
aSanchezStern · 2h ago
Cite?
mjevans · 3h ago
Think about it from a logical perspective.
Israel's real enemy won't stop and won't surrender until that country and it's people don't exist. They have taken the innocent civilian's of Gaza / Palistine / whatever you want to call the area hostage. They are also so ingrained into the region that resources are literally siphoned from humanitarian sites like hospitals into deep tunnels beneath; as just one example of reporting I'm inclined to believe is credible, even with the mutual atrocities both sites are carrying out.
What would winning look like from a moral and ethical standpoint? Liberating the people of that region from the violence and suffering. Return them to a functioning society with social and civic infrastructure. Fully deny major violence and terrorism in the region for LIFETIMES to the point that the hate and anger finally cool off enough for people to move on.
...
Winning is going to require a multi-generational investment in humanity by humanity. It's going to require the buy in of the people on the ground. It's going to require a United Nations coalition and boots on the ground from interests in that region who want to raise everyone above the hate. Also the afflicted country will need to be an absolute DMZ for that entire time. Membership in the UN peacekeeping organization the only military service allowed (and then likely in other countries).
Getting from here to there? Even less popular than the hugely unpopular war(s) anywhere else in the world. Don't ask me how anyone could do it, those skilled in the art of diplomacy have tried for longer than my lifetime and probably longer than your's and NOTHING has stuck.
arunabha · 1h ago
> Israel's real enemy won't stop and won't surrender until that country and it's people don't exist
Funny, this seems to be a pretty accurate description of Netanyahu's current position. He understands that he exists politically only as long as he can keep the war going. So, of course there is going to be no end to the 'war' against Hamas, even though it has transformed into mass genocide of civilians using starvation.
mjevans · 1h ago
I don't believe any part of my statement endorsed or supported the leader of that country either.
I offered a supposition for what real peace might look like in the region. One component of which is a peace keeping force that is not too close to the action, but also not from so far away as to be entirely insensitive or invasive themselves.
arunabha · 1h ago
Understood. My point was that the current state is entirely of Israel's choosing. At this point, there is no functional Hamas resistance left in Gaza. There is no need to starve people by restricting aid and then gunning down desperate civilians when they try to get the meager food aid that trickles in.
Israel has lost all moral superiority at this point and probably alienated an entire generation across the globe. All so that Bibi can cling to power a bit longer.
Edit: Spelling
sudopluto · 22m ago
you bring up an interesting point, in that after two years of war, almost none of the pre-war hamas leadership is left alive. why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead? it should be clear that the "axis of resistance" wasn't coming to help on oct 8th itself, and two years later iran and it's proxies are toast. yet hamas opts to continue fighting, at this point it looks like a suicide cult that wants to drag civilians down with it for the purpose of martyrdom
tdeck · 7m ago
What Netanyahu is doing in Gaza to Palestinians is broadly popular in Israel. The "opposition" coalition leader has made genocidal statements about Palestinians and there's no reason to think his leadership would be any better. This is a society where people directly benefit from ethnic cleansing and have spent decades already justifying it to themselves to get to this point. It's not going to be an easy fix of replacing one guy and focusing on him misses all the institutions that were constructed to facilitate genocide.
eastbound · 24m ago
Wait, didn’t they launch 6500 rockets on Israel civilians in the 8 months before October? How doesn’t that moot your point, attacking while in a peace period?
cauefcr · 2h ago
Removing the colonizers from Palestine would also work.
sudopluto · 44m ago
how are refugees from russia and germany colonizers? are venezuelan refugees colonizing america by your logic? if the zionists aren't the colonizers, but allied with colonizers, then who is the backer? the ottomans? the british? the french? the russians? what prevented the palestinians from allying with outside powers if the israelis were doing the same?
when you claim colonizers, you're just making an excuse for the repeated strategic errors that the palestinians made, and will continue to make, that led them into this humiliating situation.
whatshisface · 12m ago
You're touching on a very true point by saying that the high-level ideas, like ancient homelands or Marxist theory, create a lot of argument that in the end seems to distract people from the obvious reality, which is the mass slaughter of civilians, many of them children.
DaveExeter · 20m ago
It looks like the Israeli-bots are out in full force tonight!
flyinglizard · 1h ago
Calling Jews “colonizers” of their historical homeland is ridiculous, not to mention that about half of Israeli Jews fled there from Arab countries, not from Europe.
Sources from the early Zionist movement are replete with discussion of colonization. It's only now when the connotation (not the reality) of the term has changed that Israel supporters try to pretend it never happened.
beezlewax · 17m ago
No-one is calling Jews colonisers. They're calling people who bulldoze their neighbours houses to create "settlements" colonisers.
Half of these people were born and raised in America or other countries yet it is their birth right because god said so?
Ludicrous behaviour whatever you want to call it.
tehjoker · 3h ago
[flagged]
dang · 2h ago
Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned here. We've had to warn you about this multiple times before.
When you use a phrase like "genocidal rhetoric", I assume that you consider certain comments to be wrong and bad. From that perspective your question could be generalized to "what's the best way to respond to wrong and bad comments on this site?" Keeping in mind that "bad" here doesn't just mean the comment is badly written, it means the commenter is bad.
Curiosity doesn't exclude wrongness or badness—it's interested in it. How did this comment (or person) get so wrong and bad? Could that change? Is there a response that could pull them out of wrongness and badness into rightness and goodness? Why do most of my (<-- I mean any of us, of course) attempts to do this fail so badly? Is there a more effective way to respond? Might there be something interesting here beyond wrongness and badness?
That's the spirit we're trying for on this site, so that's the answer to your question.
If I ask myself what other approaches are possible, there's one obvious option, and that is to crush/destroy/defeat the wrong and bad argument (and person) utterly. This is the desire to kill the other person (if only metaphorically (and maybe not always so metaphorically)), and thus establish rightness and goodness over wrongness and badness.
So the "accepted way" here is to listen to the other and dance with them, rather than killing them (or their position). Dance rather than war, if you like.
Is there a third option? I'm not sure. When I look inside myself, I can find the listen/dance option (or one could say give-and-take), and I can find the kill option. But I'm not sure I can find a third.
tbrownaw · 6h ago
Would it help to think of them as partially being mirrors rather than people? Needing to win elections means they can't push too hard against whatever's popular just because they might not like it.
t-3 · 2h ago
I would buy that argument if they followed the popular will more often than the "monied will". Most of the western ruling class having financial interests in weapon production through investments in the MIC drives government-level support for Israel's war on Gaza, while Palestine has had popular support for much longer than the current conflict.
atoav · 34m ago
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Cane and stick. Politician who come over to your site get the cane, those who continue to support Netanyahu get the stick. Always give cornered animals a way out unless you want to have them put up more fight than you want.
This is the smart thing to do if your goal is to build a broad movement that achieves effective change in the real world. When serving emotions and looking edgy to your viewers online is more important than stopping the genozide then you should go the vindictive route and purity-test each person joining your side. Pragmatism is not selling well online, the crowd wants to see blood.
That means usually ot serves well to take such unappologetic stances with a grain of salt, while they sound strong, they are not usually effective positions for a broad societal movement. That btw. doesn't mean you have to forget any politicians positions earlier in this conflict. That's what I meant with "We can walk and chew gum at the same time". Makw the movement broad and keep track who was on your side early on.
blast · 2h ago
Politicians respond to pressure.
myvoiceismypass · 4h ago
Flip Flopping! Thank the FSM we have a stupid term for this, a critique that only seems to apply to people with a (D) next to their name.
chris_wot · 4h ago
I think when a politician takes a principled stance, we should applaud them and encourage them to continue on this path.
somenameforme · 2h ago
It's not principled in the least. Politicians knew what they were supporting from the onset, but society at large was supposed to act like they ostensibly usually do and just start putting Israeli flags in their social media profiles after the media spammed out 'they're just defending themselves' and ran appeals to emotion enough. That didn't work, so politicians are swapping their public positions.
And this is important because what usually then happens in these scenarios is that there will be some token vote about ceasing shipping bombs to Israel which are then being dropped on civilians en masse, and it'll fail by 51/49, but the Senators who voted for it will be the ones who are up for elections in 2026. And as soon as they get back in power, they'll go back to cheering on Israel, while the next group up for election in 2028 will suddenly start taking a 'principled stance', with the net result that we can just manage to fail the next vote by 51/49 again as well.
Now - if these sort of motions start actually passing, then I'll happily eat crow. But, in general, this scenario has played out repeatedly in various forms, and it never changes.
atoav · 13m ago
So let's make the assumption that all politicians flip-flop in their opinions, depending on what the popular opinion is these days.
If your goal is to get politics to take a tougher stance on a foreign government that matters how exactly?
I know it doesn't feel good and it is certainly not ideologically pure, but those are the politicians you got now, if they come over at your side welcome them with a knife hidden behind your back. You can always vote them out of office next time anyways, what you need now is their representation and vote.
IMO this mixes up two issues (genocide in Gaza and the wrong people in political office) and tries to solve both. But one of the issues has a different urgency than the others and I am afraid by purity-testing too hard a broad movement against Netanjahu is delayed.
If you don't want a specific politician vote for someone else next time and ensure there is a viable alternative when you do. That means you have lists who flip-flopped and try to tackle those who can be easily replaced first. But it is a separate problem.
YZF · 6h ago
I'm in the same camp tbh. I think Israel should not be putting all of Gaza under siege. It's not moral. This will also not work because the Hamas doesn't care about Gazans. It's also not helping Israel (other than some internal politics between Netanyahu and his right wing extremists).
Totally agree on people need to be able to change their minds based on new data and as the situation changes. I'm personally constantly trying to evaluate that. You do need to keep in mind though that data coming out of Gaza is still to a large extent controlled by Hamas. There is definitely a humanitarian crisis but it's amplified by Hamas for obvious reasons (trying to force Israel into stopping the war and allowing it to recover Gaza). Hamas is also benefiting from the crisis and it's actively fueling it. It also needs to have enough food for its fighters to keep going.
Technically from an international law perspective a siege is legal as long as civilians have a chance to leave. Israel can legally lay siege to Gaza city and the northern Gaza strip as long as it allows civilians to move south. This isn't working because the civilians don't want to move, or are forced to not move, or can't move, or have no place to really go to, so it's just not a good idea.
Another thing you're missing IMO is that some of the people attacking Israel here aren't generally in the camp of supporting Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas or use force to free the hostages. If your starting point is either denying Oct 7th or trying to somehow excuse Hamas or even support Hamas then you are not in the same camp as these politicians and you'll never be.
For the people who genuinely care and want to see an end to the war and a path forward, we need to find a way to get Hamas to yield. If there was a path that could get us there from an immediate ceasefire and end to the war I'd get behind it. It's not clear that path exists. In the absence of this path then Israel can and should do better to aid civilians but the war is not going to end.
ivape · 5h ago
The problem is the narrative the Israeli expansionist war machine peddles is that just about everyone in Gaza is Hamas. If they happen to not be Hamas, then their house is sheltering Hamas weaponry. Therefore, by these simple definitions, everyone in Gaza is Hamas, and therefore, everyone can die if necessary.
This is the problem.
I fear many Jewish people hide their utter hatred for Palestinians behind this callous shrug off, as in, “well what are we supposed to do? They are either a terrorist or sheltering for one”. Low key callous, but truthfully, murderous.
The lies are so incredible, that one might even believe Gazans are staging the world’s greatest photo shoot of starvation and devastation. Make up, lighting, props, casting, and everything. They even casted Israeli soldiers, straight from Israel. Quite the production, eh? It’s a sick world.
YZF · 3h ago
You're confusing hatred for Palestinians with hatred for Gazans. Most Israelis do not hate Palestinians. There might be some. There's definitely a lot of hate to Gazans after Oct 7th which is understandable. As to the "what are we supposed to do" part- What are they supposed to do? How would you navigate this better after Oct 7th given the setup/hostages etc.?
Israel has officially said many times they are not targeting civilians but they are targeting Hamas. Israel is even arming Palestinians that oppose Hamas: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyn2m9yk0vo - "Netanyahu confirms Israel arming clans opposed to Hamas in Gaza"
So Israel is certainly not universally saying that everyone in Gaza is Hamas and the official Israeli position is one of separating the uninvolved from Hamas.
There is a lot of nuance here. Some Israelis, including soldiers, do consider the entire Gaza population to be complicit in Hamas' crimes. A large number of Palestinians support Hamas, support the Oct 7th attack on Israel, and there are even "civilians" who participated in murder and looting on Oct 7th and in abuse of hostages. Some hostages were held by "civilians". Hamas makes it intentionally hard/impossible to distinguish between a civilian and a combatant and they report all their deaths as civilian deaths.
The devastation of large swaths of the Gaza strip is real. But not all of Gaza is devastated. There are still some parts of Gaza city that are not. You can't tell and media will show you the parts that are not. You can notice however how the narrative magically switches from "Israel destroyed all the hospitals" to "injured people treated in hospitals from some IDF attack" as is convenient without people for a second questioning how the hospitals are still functioning despite Israel supposedly having bombed them all to the ground. We also had images early on in the war that told us "everything is devastated" but yet the IDF keeps toppling more buildings (that supposedly according to the media were already all bombed a year ago). The various UN groups still have buildings, warehouses, etc. In Gaza.
There's little doubt Gazans are suffering a lot in this war. But they're definitely staging a lot of stuff as well. Anything to manipulate public opinions is game. Truth is not a requirement. They've shared images from Yemen and Sudan claiming those to be Palestinians. They misrepresent other medical conditions as starvation. Check out: https://gazawood.com/
Now I'm not naive, both sides are pushing a narrative, the Palestinians are actually suffering, but it's not as clear cut as you're trying to paint it either.
Who benefits and who loses from news of "starvation in Gaza"? Hamas benefits. Israel loses. If you look you'll find images out of Gaza of people trying to make a buck by selling aid packages in the markets. How many times since the war began have we heard about famine and starvation? The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. There are likely poor people or people who can't fight with the others that steal aid who are doing badly. There are people who can afford to or who use violence to procure food for themselves (e.g. Hamas). There is certainly not an abundance of food and certainly whatever is available isn't the most nutritious.
Gazans have and do use civilian infrastructure extensively for military purposes. They booby trap houses. They have tunnels running everywhere.
mitthrowaway2 · 2h ago
I was willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt on this before the 2024 World Central Kitchen Aid convoy attack. That really made me re-evaluate what Israel's general standard level of carefulness is, and how much they weigh the balance between avoiding noncombatants when pursuing military targets. And there have been multiple other incidents since then in which international aid workers have been targeted, whether purposefully or accidentally. There's no way to attribute that to Hamas militants pretending to be civilians or sheltering in proximity. I don't believe that any of those incidents would have happened if the Israeli military were applying an appropriate standard of care in target selection, which in turn inclines me toward believing almost any other claim about civilian casualties.
I also think unless they want to kill or evict all two million Gazans, Israel's #1 priority in this conflict should be convincing Gazans that the Israelis are the good guys and Hamas are the bad guys. No matter how you spin it, they are failing at this, and they're using the wrong sort of weapons. It's merely sowing seeds for another three generations of unshakable hatred. That is not at all good for Israel but it might be just fine for Benjamin Netanyahu.
YZF · 1h ago
I'm going to agree with you the standard of carefulness has been at times pretty low. If it moves and looks like it might be Hamas - shoot it. I was also not happy about that incident and others. There were also plenty of friendly fire incidents (where soldiers were killed by other soldiers) and the incident where hostages were killed by other soldiers. The level of "discipline" in the IDF isn't what it used to be and definitely the mood in Israel in the early days of the war was of revenge (though the military is not supposed to be thinking like that).
The other side of this coin is when you fight this kind of fight, in a dense urban environment, where combatants intentionally blend with civilians, and use any imaginable tactic they can to attack you, and put weapon stashes in civilian homes, and tunnel entrances etc. Where the enemy may even want to increase civilian casualties on their side, and when you have infantry and armor fighting day in and day out with no sleep and under constant pressure. You are going to have more of these incidents. There might be some at the margin that are actually war crimes but many are just what happens in this kind of war and in this specific scenario.
I'm not going to judge those people when I'm not in their shoes. Including the people who ordered the strike on that convoy. I am Israeli (who hasn't lived there in a long time, but I served in the distance past in the IDF) and I have spoken to people who have been in Gaza. So I know targeting an international aid group is not who we are. I also know that if it was decided that they were Hamas then they'd get obliterated, so that part is not a surprise.
The other thing I do know for sure, is that Hamas started this war and that Israel can not accept Hamas in Gaza after the war and it can not accept Hamas holding hostages after the war.
I'm not sure I see what Israel can do here in terms of Gazan perception of Israel or why it even matters. Many Gazans hate the Hamas but they have no control.
mitthrowaway2 · 59m ago
Thanks, that's a very reasonable comment on a sensitive subject, and I appreciate that.
I don't disagree with you. But because this is a predictable result, it's also part of the calculus that Israel has to weigh as part of the choice to deploy its soldiers in those positions in the first place.
I do think that Israel doesn't have to be fighting this fight; instead it could be playing the soft power game in Gaza much better, and it's barely even trying to. In my opinion the carrot almost always works better than the stick, and Israel should be throwing a Marshall plan at Gaza, literally truck-tons of money making Palestinians rich and happy, under the one condition that they turn over the hostages and any Hamas militants who don't surrender. All that would cost pennies compared to the costs of waging war (and the eventual rebuilding, and the next century of anti-terrorism policing, all of which Israel will undoubtedly be footing the bill for). Instead Israel is choosing to stir the pot in the West Bank at the same time, removing any chance of getting the Palestinian Authority as an ally against Hamas, and burning through what was left of the post-WW2 international goodwill that got it statehood in the first place.
It's understandable and predictable but I think it's still deeply mistaken, and very sad for me to watch.
solidsnack9000 · 19m ago
I do think that Israel doesn't have to be fighting this fight; instead it could be playing the soft power game in Gaza much better...
What makes you think that?
You mention the Marshall Plan, but the Marshall Plan worked in part because of Germany's unconditional surrender and the Allies complete assumption of control of Germany. If Israel wanted to follow the same game plan, they would have to do what they are doing, until Hamas was utterly defeated militarily.
It's important to recognize that Germany's surrender was not conditioned on any aid or support or anything else. Imagine if the Marshall Plan had been started prior to Germany's defeat -- it would only have prolonged the conflict.
YZF · 35m ago
There was a ton of money thrown into Gaza: "agencies spent nearly $4.5 billion in Gaza, including $600 million in 2020 alone. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aid to Palestinians totaled over $40 billion between 1994 and 2020." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_aid_to_Palestini...
This is not a problem that has a money solution. At least not at this point. One big misunderstanding of the "west" is that everyone wants the things that "they" do. Like a nice car, house, money, Costco, Walmart. Doesn't work like that.
Oddly enough the Palestinian Authority is siding with Israel in that Hamas can not control Gaza after the war. They just made a statement to that effect. The PA depends on Israel, Israel supports the PA, the Palestinians don't always like the PA. The PA is arguably happy with the IDF going after Hamas and PIJ in the West Bank in places like Jenin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenin_Brigades ) because Hamas wants to overthrow the PA just like it did in Gaza. The Israeli government makes a bit of a show of being against the PA while actually knowing very well it needs the PA and collaborating with the PA on security. OTOH the current government does not want the PA to get control of Gaza.
The "west bank" problem right now is that the extremists amongst the west bank settlers have more or less free reign by the government to attack Palestinians (and sometimes other Israelis). This is a result of Netanyahu's brittle coalition and the war. The Israeli right wing has always wanted to make sure there can not be a two state solution. What they still haven't quite wrapped their heads around is that they will instead have a one state solution. Really that would appear to be the only solution of sorts. Oddly enough the international community is still stuck in this "two state solution" despite it being completely unacceptable to both sides in this conflict and having proven to not work.
mitthrowaway2 · 26m ago
I don't think it's really worth going into the fine details here, because I'm sure we've both done our respective research on this, but I do again appreciate that you keep presenting reasonable responses on a charged topic.
$40 billion over 26 years does certainly sound like a lot of aid money, but it works out to just around $300 per Palestinian per year, which is, I think, not even enough to counterbalance the economic damage that Israel imposes on Palestine (and especially Gaza) through movement restrictions and trade barriers and blockades. It certainly pales in comparison to the budget of the Israeli military (which, admittedly, obviously has more on its plate than just Palestine, and couldn't be entirely repurposed towards aid). At any rate it's not in the realm of what I contemplate as a Marshall plan approach.
And for it to work, that aid all has to come prominently stamped "courtesy of your friends in Israel". International aid from other sources can improve living standards but doesn't build much goodwill with the neighbours.
But I agree with you on the rest of what you say.
scotty79 · 1h ago
Aren't your standards for morality of target selection unrealistically high? I don't think US had a better one in any conflict it participated. It went as far as defining "enemy combatant" as anyone within blast radius. War is brutal and messy. Atrocious things always happen. It's very hard to take any moral stance except blaming the one who started killing and waiting till the matter is resolved. It's not perfect, but this world is very far from perfect in every aspect.
mitthrowaway2 · 1h ago
Maybe? Maybe not. I'm not an American and my statement is no stronger than condemnations I have made throughout my life about the US' conduct throughout the War on Terror (in both the Bush and Obama years and beyond). I believe that drone-bombing weddings in Pakistan creates more terrorists than it kills, and that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake from day one. I believe the war in Vietnam (and the bombing of Laos and Cambodia) was an atrocity and without it there would have never been a Khmer Rouge. I also decry the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Dresden, but I am more willing to accept that that kind of murderous excess can happen in a total war for survival against a near-equal.
What I am sure of is that Israel's situation is not a war against a near-equal. The kind of rules of engagement I'm talking about are par for the course in peacekeeping operations, and there's no reason Israel cannot be employing them. Israel is shooting fish in a barrel, and if there's not enough time for them to double-check their homework on a missile strike then they have plenty of time to wait for a cleaner opportunity to take a shot. More importantly, I think that being extremely delicate is not only a moral imperative but a strategic one. Realistically, bombs dropped on Gaza can do more damage to Israel than to Hamas, both by causing fresh grievance in Palestinian hearts, which is the sustenance on which Hamas feeds for support and soldiers, and by gaining them sympathy abroad. I've been watching this happen in real time and it's playing out like clockwork, and I am sure that Israeli strategists see it too. But I also think Israel's loss is Netanyahu's win, and the stronger Hamas gets, the more justification Netanyahu has to push things further. So I see a feedback loop playing out in which Netanyahu and Hamas are on the same side, buffing each other while Israelis and Palestinians both lose.
(It also goes without saying that I also, obviously, denounce Hamas and the Oct 7th attacks, just like I denounce Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Un, Putin, and other villains. But I rarely see any point wasting breath on that kind of denouncement, at least not until I meet someone who thinks otherwise.)
protocolture · 2h ago
>You're confusing hatred for Palestinians with hatred for Gazans.
I'm not blind to the realities of Israel having blocked some aid and the realities of living in a war zone. I'm sure the Palestinians are suffering and I wouldn't want to live in Gaza these days. Israel will and is exerting the maximum possible pressure. However it is not starving the population.
You are blind to the Hamas' control of the narrative coming out of Gaza. You are also blind to the Hamas' ability to impact the situation and to their absolute control of any word coming out of the mouth of a "hospital director" or a "journalist" who are either Hamas or operating under the threat of death, torture, and violence to themselves and their families if they don't say what they're asked to say.
The article is an interview with: "David Satterfield, who served during early months of war, says dangerous transport routes, looting by desperate Palestinians severely hinder ability to pick up and deliver aid"
... "UN trucks repeatedly looted, including by thousands of desperate Palestinians, unsure when they and their families will receive their next meal."
"UN trucks repeatedly looted, including by thousands of desperate Palestinians, unsure when they and their families will receive their next meal."
"Moreover, looting carried out for purposes of commoditization will also dissipate because the value of assistance in the marketplace will drop due to the rise in supply."
So Palestinians are stealing food from other Palestinians to make a buck.
"Satterfield said “there’s no question” that the terror group has worked to take “political advantage and certainly some physical substantive advantage out of the aid distribution process.”
Hamas operatives have made a point of “flaunting” their presence at aid sites in a message to Palestinians that the group has no intention of ceding its role in the distribution process."
lazyasciiart · 1h ago
Israel is starving the population. Inability to accept that is inability to accept reality.
scotty79 · 1h ago
I'm sure you also wouldn't like a person who completely accepts that Izrael is starving the population of Gaza, both the reality of it and everything about it.
licebmi__at__ · 1h ago
>David Satterfield, who served during early months of war
So we should not trust "hospital director" or "journalist" with scare quotes as they MIGHT be Hamas, but happily take IDF soldier's words as truth. The transparent bias is laughable.
I guess also that Israel forbids aid airplanes to take air footage of Gaza because Hamas bends the light to make it seem like IDF is committing war crimes. How devilish of them.
crawfordcomeaux · 1h ago
The nuance of all you wrote is missing the context in which it is written:
Israel is a settler-colonial white supremacist occupation and reporting on the "nuance" of how that situation has evolved over 76+ years without acknowledging Israel has no right to exist only serves the genocidal occupation of Palestine. We need to abolish all white supremacy projects, including those from Zionist entities.
yieldcrv · 50m ago
> What are they supposed to do? How would you navigate this better after Oct 7th given the setup/hostages etc.?
The real answer is 19th century warfare in the tunnels where all of Israel's tactical advantages disappeared.
But instead they cowardly ordered 2,000 lb bombs that didn't accomplish any of their stated goals and killed their own hostages. Instead they designated everyone in Gaza as a terrorist and killed their own hostages when they managed to escape because everyone has the same Semitic phenotypes (awwwwkwaaaard). Instead they put their freshman IDF conscripts on social media to claim any dissent of the military strategy was incitement against Jewish people's right to exist. On the social media front, I'm not sure what's more embarrassing, getting paid to do that, or not getting paid to do that.
sudopluto · 34m ago
try some empathy. if you were conscripted to fight, i don't think your mom would approve of your "19th century warfare" plan. she would want the air force to drop the bombs if there was any improvement to your odds of coming home. she would smack you on the head and say there is nothing "cowardly" about avoiding unnecessary danger
vFunct · 1h ago
> Most Israelis do not hate Palestinians.
LOL 51% of Israelis gave Palestinians a 0 out of 100 score rating of their humanity, according to PCPSR and the Times of Israel poll: https://pcpsr.org/en/node/989
YZF · 1h ago
I just think of hate as a very specific emotion.
"When asked about the level of humanity of other side, Palestinians gave Jews an average score of 6 out of 100; Jews gave Palestinians an average score of 14. 51% of Jewish Israelis gave Palestinians a score of zero, and 71% of Palestinians gave the same score to Israelis. One percent of Palestinians gave Israeli Jews a score of 80 or higher, and 2.7% of Israeli Jews scored Palestinians in this range. This question could reflect respondents’ perception of the inherent qualities of the other side, or their assessment of the other side’s behavior, or both."
Here is some older (pre-Oct 7th) but maybe more "color":
I recommend the ask project on Youtube for people who want to get a little less black and white opinions on these topics.
woodruffw · 1h ago
I think the most salient takeaway is that sentiments between the groups mirror each other. Here's the exact language from the PCPSR:
> Mirror image negative perceptions: Israeli Jews and Palestinians hold near-mirror images regarding the current war: a majority on each side views the other as seeking to commit genocide; each side believes it is the worst victim in the world, and on each side, a large majority believes the other lacks humanity.
I think Israel is disproportionately responsible for the atrocities in this war, given that it's militarily ascendant. But the two groups are about the same in terms of sentiment, which bodes poorly for any future peace in the region (and plays into Israel's standard refrain, i.e. that peace is structurally impossible because Palestinian extremist groups would reward peace with violence (much like how Israeli extremist groups reward peace with violence)).
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jahewson · 4h ago
The problem is not the narrative. The problem is Hamas.
kalberg6429 · 3h ago
[flagged]
dang · 2h ago
> You Zionists are really not even putting any effort into your hasbara anymore.
This is also in your interest, since you can always make your substantive points without it and it will make your comments more persuasive.
edit: I appreciate that you edited that bit out of your comment, but once there are replies, you should make it clear how you edited it. Otherwise you deprive the replies (like this one) of their original context.
kelthuzad · 2h ago
Why is an entire comment like his with solid evidence flagged because of 1 mild line, but the parent comment is itself a baseless 1-liner flamebait with zero effort to substantiate but is allowed to stay up? That's not even the worst - some usual suspects are literally using Nazi rhetoric to engage in denial or justification of Genocide, but they get a pass. The line is drawn at "swipes and flamebaits"? Pro-Genocide ? Fine. No swipes and flamebaits tho!
Jensson · 45m ago
The rules permits posts that are incorrect or unsubstantiated, downvotes handles that. You can see the post was downvoted, so its working as intended.
The rules however do not permit personal attacks and name-calling. You can say the same things without the name calling or attacks.
dang · 26m ago
I agree that the parent comment was a bad HN comment. But it didn't clear the threshold for a mod reply. If we tried to reply to all bad (for HN) comments, we'd run into impossibilities: (1) we'd have to post 10x as many replies, which we can't do; and (2) we'd run to a buzzsaw of "why do you reply to this bad thing and not that other bad thing over there".
What made the difference between that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718039) and the one I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718268) was the pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling in "You Zionists are really not even putting any effort into your hasbara anymore." (this line has since been edited out by the GP commenter). That is a dividing line where we can post mod comments because (1) there aren't so many such posts, so it's feasible, and (2) attacks like that have a particularly bad effect on threads.
> Pro-Genocide ? Fine. No swipes and flamebaits tho!
I hear you, but these two things are on different levels. To explain what I mean, let's assume that I completely agree with you on this topic. Ok? We agree that genocide is wrong and bad—far more than somebody being snarky in an internet comment, right? So wtf is wrong with the mods if they penalize one and not the other? Is "pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling" worse than genocide? Of course not; only a monster would say so.
The answer is that we're not trying to exclude wrongness and badness in the comments here. I know that sounds bad, but suppose I said "the mods' job is to decide what's true and good and then impose it on everyone else". You wouldn't want that, right? what if we disagreed? Certainly the community as a whole would not want that.
Rather it's your job (i.e. the commenters) to work that out through discussion and argument. The mods' job is to try to keep that discussion and argument respectful* between the players. When we see people crossing that line, we respond. Otherwise we don't respond, even when someone says something which we feel is both wrong and bad, because it's not our place to impose that on the community.
I think us Zionists are pretty consistent and what we are saying agrees with the objective reality. It's the anti-zionists who are cherry-picking and can't form a coherent argument other than "colonialism" or something and are excusing the agency of Hamas and the Gazans.
It's true that Netanyahu is and was opposed to a Palestinian state and that dividing the Palestinians between Hamas and the PA was strategic in that regard. However he misjudged Hamas as not having motivation or ability to attack Israel. A by the way is that since 2007 Israel has attacked Hamas in Gaza and Hamas attacked Israel as well so it's not exactly like they were pals. It was more of the devil we (thought we) know kind of situation.
But there is a previous there which is the failure of the Oslo accords due to Hamas' suicide bombing campaign on Israel. Hamas bombed the peace process to death (alongside with hundreds of random civilians) and also directly cause the rise of the right in Israel and the change of opinion in the Israeli public from accepting the idea of a two state solution to a belief that Israel can not accept that solution. Dividing the Palestinians as a strategy came after the Palestinians showed Israelis that living side by side is impossible. And if the Israelis needed further proof we got the Oct 7th attack.
It's also worth mentioning that short of re-taking Gaza (which we see is not simple) Israel didn't really have a lot of choices once Hamas took and established itself in Gaza. Maybe the right thing to do was to retake Gaza immediately in 2007. I'm sure the world, including you, would scream bloody murder occupation if that happened. Otherwise there's not a lot that could have been done. The civilian aid that made its way into Gaza and Hamas' hands was also a result of international pressure on Israel under the idea that if there was some sort of stability/prosperity in Gaza that would lead to peace. What happened in practice is Hamas channeled all of that into its military efforts and we see where that led us.
Your quotes are not in the article cited, which does say though that
> According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
mjevans · 3h ago
These terrorists, yield? Already faulty logic. Their proclaimed goals and historic record show that will never happen and their budget for violence knows no limit.
It's as tough as desalinating water, but removing the civilians from the terrorists must happen. Otherwise the result will either be genocide of the 'salt water', or of the 'plants' the salt in that water is bent on destroying.
What is an acceptable plan for reaching the result of the civilians on both sides being safe? This is a political question, but it is one all must consider; at least as it informs our own votes where we reside.
YZF · 3h ago
I'll give you my honest opinion here and a criticism of Israeli government all at once. Israel should have moved the Palestinians civilians into Israel proper, e.g. the Negev. It should have created refugee camps for them there and provided them with all the support/aid while it went after Hamas. They'd be able to filter the people going in, make them surrender their weapons etc. No tunnels, no weapons caches, etc.
It's a very tough one to swallow for Israelis. I'm also not positive it would have worked. But I think it would be worth a try.
I think in the beginning of the war there was some thought of Egypt playing that role but it was pretty clear that wasn't going to happen.
The problem is throughout the war Israel had no appetite/desire to own the problem of Gazan civilians. Israel intentionally left that part to Hamas and the UN and at no time during this conflict has controlled any piece of land with Palestinian civilians.
protocolture · 2h ago
>I'll give you my honest opinion here and a criticism of Israeli government all at once. Israel should have moved the Palestinians civilians into Israel proper, e.g. the Negev. It should have created refugee camps for them there and provided them with all the support/aid while it went after Hamas. They'd be able to filter the people going in, make them surrender their weapons etc. No tunnels, no weapons caches, etc.
It should have simply returned the refugees to their land. But then they wouldnt be stateless individuals, they would have (minimal, as second class subjects) rights, and present a greater challenge to settlement like those in the west bank. Ultimately this is a settlement project, and distracting from that, and the right of those refugees in gaza to return to their land, is the ultimate point of the conflict.
YZF · 2h ago
The return of the so called 1948 refugees to Israel is never going to happen. Other wars from the same era had a lot more refugees and nobody returned anywhere.
Just like the Jewish refugees from Arab countries or Europe are not returning there either.
It the Palestinians are stuck in 1948 over the war they and the Arabs started and lost they're never going to get anywhere. They had a chance when Israel was established to be equal citizens and they decided not to take it. It might be tough, it might not be "just", but that clock is never turning back.
The sad thing is how Palestinians and Arabs treat those people. Everywhere else in the world refugees were taken in. But other than Jordan all Arab countries have decided to just keep those people as refugees for eternity. Including the Palestinians, and Gazans, who treat the refugees like second class people.
xdennis · 24m ago
> Israel should have moved the Palestinians civilians into Israel proper, e.g. the Negev.
This is so silly. Israel is a tiny country. There are countless huge Muslim countries, none of which want to help Gazans.
How many German refugees did the Allies take in WW2?
trustinmenowpls · 2h ago
If they had done this they would be accused of ethnic cleansing as well as genocide. the negev isn't an altogether welcoming place, any death natural or otherwise that happened there would be blamed on the jews as proof and it would be an even bigger PR disaster. Egypt and the sinai would have a similar problem. Even Trump's recent suggestion of temporary resettlement to a populated area has been met with calls of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Most of the supposed supporters of the palestinian people don't care so much about their fate so much as they hate Jews and love the easy cudgel they make for attacking jews.
Putting that aside, no one, not Hamas, not the Israeli public, not Netanyahu, and certainly not the IDF, not any neighboring countries, not the wider world believed the war would drag on this long. Everyone thought it would be over fairly soon. Hamas probably didn't think there would be a war because israel itself was on the brink of a civil war, the Israeli public with their strong belief in their military might thought the war would be over before the new year and the IDF and politicians (BN included) likely had a similar belief, that A) Hamas didn't have an apatite for a long war, and B) the IDF would be able to quickly return the hostages. Everyone else also believed in the might of a stronger more organized force against a much weaker force that supposedly also had to care for their own people.
Instead Hamas showed they had no concern for their own people, and they had significantly deeper fortifications than the israeli security establishment knew about. So here we are almost two years later, and no end in sight.
scotty79 · 1h ago
Still it would be better for civilians even if not any better from PR standpoint. Also with some of the civilians filtered out Israel might have easier time acting boldly against Hamas in Gaza.
subpixel · 3h ago
Those who wield power in Israel have calculated that they can do whatever they want at this moment and that they will enjoy functional impunity.
I repudiate what they are doing, but I do not disagree with their calculation. I can imagine no scenario where any foreign power tries to actually stop them.
waterlaw · 3h ago
There are numerous clips of Rabbis openly promoting the extermination of Palestinians.
They use the story of Amalek from the Torah.
One of the Rabbis I watched recently said "when you kill the first child it breaks your heart [...] then you start to enjoy it."
_Many_ Rabbis are demanding that animals, children, women and unarmed males be "erased." IDF soldiers are bragging about killing and raping civilians on social media. One IDF soldier was complaining he hasn't shot any children under 12 yet.
Netanyahu is a moderate. He's not an "extremist."
jibal · 2h ago
I've seen the video on Twitter but no confirmation that it was actually an IDF soldier -- Grok claimed it was authenticated as such but when further challenged said it was a South African satirist. I don't know one way or the other but again cannot find any confirmation. (But I'm aware of plenty of other unspeakable horrors committed by IDF soldiers and similar horrible things said.)
As for Netanyahu ... the Overton window in Israel has shifted far to the right so one can say in those terms that he's a "moderate", but I think it's a bit of a semantic game. His behavior is extreme, regardless of the fact that the behavior of the whole damn country is extreme.
arbitrary_name · 3h ago
Evidence please!
somenameforme · 1h ago
South Africa's genocide case against Israel [1] is chock full of quotes from high level Israeli officials, including Netanyahu. Check page 59. Obviously much more has been said since that claim was filed, but the nature of genocidal rhetoric is such that you can't get much more extreme. Netanyahu himself repeatedly referenced the biblical tale of Amalek [2] which reaches its climax with this passage [3] : "Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."
He didn't reference that particular passage about Amalek though, he just said "Remember what Amalek did to you". And it was pretty clear from the context of his speech that he was talking about Hamas and their invasion, not regular Gazans.
His office pointed out that the same phrase appears at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, as well at a memorial in The Hague, in reference to the Nazis. Of course they're statements about remembering Nazi atrocities, and not calls to genocide the German people.
GP asked for proof of "numerous clips of Rabbis openly promoting the extermination of Palestinians". If there are numerous, he should be able to post some.
South Africa has no moral authority given that it refuses to arrest Putin.
em3rgent0rdr · 2h ago
I don't know what specific rabbis the parent referring to, but Israel's PM has referenced the Amalek story:
So they basically caught up with the rhetoric of the other side of the conflict?
supplied_demand · 5h ago
I remember a lot of people predicting it would lead to this from the start. The response was often along the lines of “If you don’t support Israel’s invasion, you are pro-Hamas.”
If those people had a come-to-Jesus moment, great. That said, they probably owe an apology to the people they demonized as supporting terrorism.
yieldcrv · 47m ago
That's what stands out to me the most, when they change their mind that means everyone else was always right.
Blaming all of Israel's chosen military strategy on Hamas invading at all is just weird. Like, there should really be a mental evaluation of everyone that repeated lines like that. Like seriously, trawl the entire internet for those people's screennames.
dfxm12 · 4h ago
Movements that want to grow should accept people who change their minds when the situation changes, they get new data, or they learn a new perspective.
The situation hasn't changed. The data is the same going back years. It's healthy to be cautious of people who join a movement under false pretenses like that.
If they learned a new perspective, that's great! I just wish it didn't have to come to personally witnessing such brutality to gain a new perspective...
tim333 · 7h ago
Pretty much my take. I thought Israel's actions were reasonable at first but out of hand now.
umanwizard · 5h ago
Israel has been blockading the Gaza Strip by air and sea for 18 years. The Gaza Strip is, as far as I know, the only place in the world whose fishermen can't fish in the full extent of its territorial waters. This has been true since way before Oct. 7th 2023.
fsckboy · 1h ago
>The Gaza Strip is, as far as I know, the only place in the world whose fishermen can't fish in the full extent of its territorial waters.
well, you're leaving out the UK wrt French fisherman invading, thus depriving them of the full extent of their territorial waters. And Ukraine's territorial waters have been curtailed.
but the only place I can think of that's similar to what you're talking about would be the Houthis. I guess they do have free navigation in their territorial waters, and turns out they make great neighbors! https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3071vp2d8yo I guess nothing can go wrong!
unwise-exe · 5h ago
Israel's response was obvious as soon as the attack happened. "Oh, looks like they've got that excuse they've been wanting."
Spooky23 · 3h ago
There’s a case that it was darker than that. The IDF is arguably the best army of its type in the world.
Yet the level of incompetence demonstrated when Hamas took the hostages was beyond incompetence. A retired general hopped in his car and rounded up a bunch of troops to extract his daughter. No officers were present in the area.
It seems weird that a military that had 3D mapping and monitoring of a region allowing it to detect and target concealed Hezbollah artillery in buildings somehow was caught flat footed. It’s weirder that there hasn’t been any commentary about this in an age where every decision made is analyzed to death.
lazyasciiart · 3h ago
There has been some commentary. For instance reports of rising levels of intense military activity on the border, sent by IDF female spotter squads on the border for months, were ignored by command centers. This was explained as “chauvinism” - crippling incompetence if true.
It's hard to describe to people who don't have family there, but this exactly. The goal is similar to American "manifest destiny". They want to, through whatever means necessary, displace (at best) the existing Palestinian population and take their land.
beepbopboopp · 4h ago
Please explain to me what you mean.
From my perspective, they handed over control of the region and have had countless opportunities since the handoff to occupy the land permanently had they so chosen. Couldn't it just as easily be argued that they no longer trust sharing a border with them?
2muchcoffeeman · 3h ago
I feel like it would have been harder to get this far without international support had the Oct 7th attack not happened. I don’t know about you, but I’d be a bit more lenient if you’re trying to rescue civilian hostages.
I don’t know anything about the impetus for the Oct 7th attack was, but you have to wonder why.
beepbopboopp · 2h ago
Im not following this comment. Please say it again.
flyinglizard · 52m ago
Israelis voted in a government 20 years ago just to pull out from Gaza and give them their autonomy (which Gazans used to swiftly vote in Hamas, and that was the single and last time they had elections since). Saying Israel was interested in that land is disingenuous.
FabHK · 3h ago
Why did Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces from Gaza and dismantled its settlements in 2005? It gave them what they wanted, and look what it got in return. Murderous terrorism.
I feel like this has been the case for decades. It is very asymmetrical.
SauciestGNU · 5h ago
I think many people have their own personal revelation where they come to believe what Israel is doing is not self-defense but rather genocide. For me that came in the 2008/2009 Gaza offensive where they inflicted roughly 100 deaths for every Israeli who was killed in the initial attack. The Freedom Flotilla incident in early 2010 where they murdered the aid volunteers in international waters only further solidified my opinion.
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kristopolous · 5h ago
Historically, any nationalist project on behalf of any group requiring large migration for it to work led to a removal and replacement of some group with another. United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, failed ones like Rhodesia...there's really no counter-example I can think of.
Regardless of where you land, I don't think anyone can look at what's going on in the middle east and think things are going fine - or ever were.
Perhaps, if we ever decide to act globally, we shouldn't permit any more migratory nationalist projects - they seem to be inherently problematic.
bamboozled · 5h ago
No, people just nee to learn to live alongside eachother ffs.
tbrownaw · 5h ago
How does this work when a group wants to move in to an area that's already completely in use by another group?
Gormo · 46m ago
Perhaps thinking about "groups" having exclusive control of large regions of territory is itself the core of the problem.
SR2Z · 4h ago
It's not completely in-use. The motivation for the entire state of Israel's existence is that the Jewish people need a homeland or else they will keep getting persecuted. That rules out a Muslim-majority state with a lot of Jews in it.
Given the demographics of Jewish people outside of Israel, it's hard to disagree with. When you consider the early years of Israel, and how many wars were started to run the Jews out of it, it's even more well-supported.
The best hope for a lasting peace was with the Oslo accords. They were torpedoed by the Palestinians themselves, who were unwilling to accept any kind of compromise that maintained a Jewish state.
Not saying Israel is innocent, but the idea that so many people seem to have that the region would be happy-go-lucky and peaceful for Jewish people if not for the war is hopelessly naive.
mitthrowaway2 · 2h ago
Speaking as a Jewish person I feel like our odds of survival are much better in the diaspora. And the way Israel is behaving is not doing us any favours in the long term.
Jensson · 2h ago
> Speaking as a Jewish person I feel like our odds of survival are much better in the diaspora
You probably wouldn't feel that way 1945.
mitthrowaway2 · 1h ago
Most of my family died in the Holocaust and the ones who made it escaped with nothing. They would not have made it out but for the generosity and compassion of a handful of people.
But despite that I still stand by my statement. Especially in the nuclear age. History does not repeat but it does rhyme. And in 2025, Jews aren't the ones clawing for an exit visa. I'll leave it there because I don't feel the need to argue this point further.
davkan · 4h ago
Architects of this tragedy like Anthony Blinken should absolutely not be given the opportunity to whitewash their involvement.
myvoiceismypass · 4h ago
It’s lazy and disingenuous to “both sides” this mess.
umanwizard · 5h ago
Yep. "Always give your opponent a path to retreat".
eviks · 2h ago
There is no reason to believe that what you've described happened since those politicians knew about the "situation change" many months before the change in position, so they don't deserve the charitable acceptance
protocolture · 2h ago
Eh nuance. Accept anyone who can accept they were wrong. But it has to come with that understanding, that they were wrong. Growth and understanding are great. "I love bombing civilian populations, I just hate the consequences of bombing civilian populations" is not the amazing support that people on the ground are looking for. Gotta attack the why. Why would you support killing civilians who pose no threat to you in the name of defense.
Its been the common theme of anti war sentiment for the better part of a century. "Never Again". "Lest We Forget". etc. What was all that holocaust remembrance for if not to get ahead of and prevent situations like this (While Gaza doesnt have a lot to do with the holocaust in totality it sure looks like a Warsaw Ghetto).
Its kind of useless to get people along for a single issue, ending the genocide in Gaza, but for them to not understand why the things that lead up to the genocide in Gaza are bad also. Mobilising a military, into a civilian area, that has been trained from birth to resent the people in that space, that they own that space, told that the government will support them killing civilians, is going to cause this. Supporting that action is bad actually. Wanting that military, in that area, is something an Asshole would want.
Its like closing a ticket without addressing the root cause. Just gonna come up again.
>but now that it has turned into a brutal siege with mass civilian casualties on a horrific scale
Its been that(again) since the IDF got organized, late 2023.
0xbadcafebee · 1h ago
Israel has been an apartheid state for decades. This has nothing to do with Hamas. Anyone who is "changing their mind" now, hasn't - it's merely no longer socially acceptable to support naked indiscriminate brutality.
Jensson · 56m ago
> Israel has been an apartheid state for decades
Around 20% of Israelis are Muslims and they have full rights and get to vote, so no its not an apartheid state.
scotty79 · 52m ago
How can it be apartheid state with 1/5th of its population being non-Jewish and having strong anti-discrimination laws? They don't count people living in Gaza and West-Bank who want and/or try to kill them as their own and why would they? What "being apartheid state" even means?
cm2012 · 5h ago
One could certainly argue about methods, but on October 8th, what options did Israel have except invasion of Gaza?
beepbopboopp · 4h ago
This, but further more, there are 100s of comments about "the genocide" here, but almost none about what Israel should do. They have a neighbor who just committed a huge act of terror and whos standing installed political party calls for the elimination of the country. They live in a region where their ethnic group has essentially been wiped out systematically in all neighboring countries.
So, "Stop the genocide" and then what? Build a bigger fence? Wait for the next episode? Im generally interested if anyone has an opinion that goes beyond leave Gaza alone and considers Israelis dilema.
droopyEyelids · 4h ago
I’m having trouble distilling the essence of your message in a way that leaves us with any common moral ground.
Would you agree that “an eye for an eye” type justice is undesirable? Because it seems like you are advocating for genocide as a response to the oct attack, going well beyond “eye for an eye”!
beepbopboopp · 2h ago
Boiling it down to a catch phrase does it no justice. The war is being fought in a urban area, with an armed forced who refuses ceasefire and has repeatedly said it wont rest until all isrealis are dead. Again, my comment is, if you want them to stop fighting, what would you have them do next? Im not being rhetorical.
TFYS · 7m ago
> said it wont rest until all isrealis are dead
You would say the same about any group that did the same things to you as the Israeli have done to Palestinians. Answer this: will these actions by Israel decrease or increase the number of people who think that way? Even if they kill all the Palestinians and get rid of the threat in Gaza, they'll just create more, deeper and stronger hate against themselves in the region and the world. If at any point in time they lose the support of the most powerful country on earth, they'll be in huge danger and they can only blame themselves for creating that danger.
ImPostingOnHN · 2h ago
> refuses ceasefire and has repeatedly said it wont rest until all isrealis [sic] are dead
Unfortunately, this is true of both sides, and one side seems much closer to accomplishing its goal than the other side.
I guess if everyone in the region is ok with genocide as an option, the only thing Palestine’s doing wrong is losing.
sudopluto · 12m ago
with all of the parroting of "colonizers" and "they should go back to europe", your sarcasm is sadly more truth than humor.
xdennis · 10m ago
What moral people want is to give Israel the same leeway the allies had in WW2. Nothing more, nothing less.
The expectation back then was you should kill Nazis and Japanese until they surrender without any conditions. Hamas always puts conditions on releasing hostages.
ivape · 5h ago
It’s more likely that Israel was given free rein for the timeline they wanted from the global order. Let’s say they asked for a full two years, where countries were basically under a gentleman’s gag order.
Two years is enough time for the deed to be done, say whatever you need to say now, it doesn’t matter. You see that Israel has allowed aid in all of a sudden according to this contrived timeline. It’s not different than a teacher letting a bully beat down a kid for a solid 10 minutes and jumping in after with a “ok that’s enough now”. Such an actor is complicit.
I’d urge people read Marin Luther King’s words on inaction.
unwise-exe · 5h ago
That seems like a somewhat unlikely degree of international coordination.
ivape · 5h ago
It’s really not. France and England are suddenly realizing the genocide, and Israel has decided that now is the time aid gets to come in. Trump just admitted there is starvation in Gaza. It’s pretty coordinated. It’s an easy ask, “we just need 14 months of silence plus or minus, then whatever”.
jahewson · 4h ago
The U.K. didn’t even have the same government 14 months ago. Completely different party in power. The degree of coordination you’re talking about is not just unlikely but fantastical.
SR2Z · 4h ago
The "suddenly" is likely because Trump took office and started making noises about paving Gaza over to build resorts. It was much easier for these countries to look the other way when the US was notionally holding Netanyahu's leash.
actionfromafar · 3h ago
Yeah, pretty long leash, but still.
eutropia · 6h ago
Yes we should encourage changing minds.
...Except I clocked Israel as having genocidal ambitions within days of Hamas' attack, right about the time their generals started talking about cutting off power and water to the entirety of gaza.
I have imagine I am both less informed and more naive than any of these politicians. I don't have to applaud them when they spinelessly slither with the prevailing political winds.
sudopluto · 15m ago
hamas could surrender tomorrow and end any pretense or cover for the "genocidal ambitions". you are being incredibly racist towards palestinians by infantilizing them and suggesting that hamas doesn't have any agency or responsibility for this war or it's effect on innocent civilians.
Cyph0n · 6h ago
[flagged]
trhway · 3h ago
>new data
that is the main point for me. There are a lot of claims, yet almost no verifiable data. With smartphones everywhere and having seen how war is documented say in Ukraine (and also how the propaganda lies are made there), i believe practically no claim until there is a video for it. For example the news of shooting near aid distribution centers come almost every day. How come nobody has recorded it? Especially with Hamas flying a bunch of drones there, they would undoubtedly have made such footage and published the footage around the world.
An interesting thing in this case then is to see how these mind-changers are treating the people who called it correctly from the beginning. Is there any mea culpa, any contrition for the lives they could have saved by acting earlier? apologies for the protestors they attacked, the movements they painted as antisemitic? Anything learned for the future. We all had the same information after all.
josephg · 6h ago
What do you imagine that mea culpa to look like?
Personally I don’t see it being a case of one side of protesters being “right” and “wrong”. I just think Israel should have pulled out an awfully long time ago. They went too far, have done too much damage and the calculus doesn’t make sense any more. I have no problem with the initial invasion of Gaza to stop Hamas and get their people back. I’m not sorry for saying so, or holding that position after Hamas gave them such a clear casus belli. But it doesn’t seem to be about that any more. There’s been too much bloodshed. Something needs to change.
I’m not sure what you’re looking for. An apology? For what, exactly? For being told there are antisemitic people taking advantage of this conflict to hate on Jews? There are.
wredcoll · 6h ago
> I have no problem with the initial invasion of Gaza to stop Hamas and get their people back. I’m not sorry for saying so, or holding that position after Hamas gave them such a clear casus belli. But it doesn’t seem to be about that any more.
The point is that you were told this was the inevitable consequences of such actions and yet chose to ignore it. That's probably the kind of mea culpa they're looking for.
Predicting the future is notoriously tricky, but pretending like this outcome was in any way unlikely is extremely disengenuous.
josephg · 3h ago
That logic cuts both ways.
We could equally say that this overreaction by Israel was entirely predictable - and inevitable - after Hamas’s murderous rampage on Oct 7. And to take hostages and not return them? What did they think Israel would do? Capitulate to Hamas’s demands, thereby encouraging Hamas to do the same thing again every few months when they want treats? Invasion was perhaps the only option the Israelis had. Hamas played chicken, using their own civilians as human shields. And Israel called their bluff. To the death of tens of thousands of innocent lives.
The heartbreaking part is that I agree with you. I feel like this conflict is inevitable. And it’s the civilians on both sides - but especially Gaza - who are bearing the brunt of misery as a result.
What on earth do I have to be sorry about? Of course their murderous rampage through Gaza happened after October 7. Even with the benefit of hindsight I’m not sure what better options Israel had.
I just wish they’d pull out and let the rebuilding begin. This conflict won’t be healed with more blood.
seanmcdirmid · 2h ago
I'm pretty sure Hamas went into this expecting Israel to respond with war crimes, it was probably the reaction they were going for with the kidnappings. What I don't understand is how Hamas thought that they could take advantage of it (if not for the betterment of the Gazans, for themselves)?
giraffe_lady · 6h ago
It was clear to me and many other people from the first days after oct 7 that the actions taken by israel in gaza did not align with their stated goals, and that genocide was the likely outcome.
I hope people changing their view of it now will reflect on at what point they could have seen that, and what prevented them from seeing it, and what prevented them from taking seriously the people who did see it. Does everyone hold the belief that everything was fine until two days ago? I don't think that's a very strong position.
josephg · 2h ago
Oh?
Help me understand this position. If you were in charge of Israel on October 7, what would you have done differently?
It sounds like there was some better course of action they could have taken that seems obvious to you. It’s not at all obvious to me. Please share.
maroonblazer · 5h ago
Israel didn't take any actions until Oct 13. What actions 'from the first days' are you referring to?
lazyasciiart · 2h ago
Israel was launching air strikes before noon on October 7, killing hundreds of people with those strikes that day alone. Israeli news reports on Sunday morning variously mentioned 800 strikes and more than 16 tons of munitions dropped on the Gaza Strip.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/we-are-at-war-netanyahu-says-a...
On October 8 they cut all imports to Gaza, and cut off the electricity and gas supplies to the entire civilian population. That was probably a war crime by itself, as collective punishment. Palestinian hospitals reported being overwhelmed by Sunday morning. Netanyahu said civilians should all leave Gaza - without opening any exits - and promised to inflict an unprecedented price in response to the attacks.
It's good to be honest about all the horrors going on in the world, not just when they're committed by jewish people (I'm not jewish btw).
For example there are recents vids of syrian muslims going door to door in villages in Syria and asking people if they are muslims or of the Druze faith: those answering they're from the Druze faith are shot on the spot.
This qualify as war crimes too to me.
But you don't get to read much about it in the mainstream media and many NGOs (not all) who are very active when it's about helping palestinians are keeping totally quiet on the subject too.
I see much more outrage about what's happening to palestinians then what's happening to Druze people.
Why is that? How comes it's so selective?
Similarly: the western world is constantly reminded of colonialism. But why are the hutis getting a free pass for the 800 000 tustis they genocided 25 years ago? How comes they're not constantly reminded of what they did? Those who committed these atrocities, including regular citizens, are still alive today.
And somehow we should pay because our great-great-great-great-grandfather was a colonialist?
It's that dual standard, that highly selective outrage, that is very hard to stomach for me.
BTW I don't recommend watching the vids of syrian muslims executing Druze people: it's hard.
umanwizard · 5h ago
> Why is that? How comes it's so selective?
The main reason is that Israel is materially supported by the West, so Westerners feel morally responsible for what it does.
It has little to do with whether the perpetrators are Jewish or not[1]. There were gigantic protests against the Iraq war, whose main perpetrators (e.g. Bush) were not Jewish.
1: I edited this from "nothing" to "little". I concede it might have something to do with anti-Semitism, because there is some non-zero group of people whose opposition to Israel is purely motivated by anti-Semitism, but I don't get the sense that they're the majority, at least among Westerners.
t-3 · 1h ago
The current Syrian government is also supported by the west, just not to the same degree and not as publically. Myanmar is basically not mentioned at all in the Western press, nor Sudan or Libya or anywhere else war crimes are regularly taking place. I'd guess that the reason for Israel being in the media so much is that there are many more Palestinians and Jews than Rohingya or Burmese or Druze or Syrians in Western countries.
xdennis · 14m ago
Saudi Arabia, Egypt[1], Morroco, Jordan, and others have used American weapons to attack Yemen for 10 years now. [2]
No one ever says anything because there are no Jews to blame.
That’s not the reason. Almost certainly people feel a strong reaction, then when asked why it’s selective reach for a plausible answer. “Israel is supported by the west” is plausible.
tbrownaw · 4h ago
What's this denial based on? Would you consider "Israel is part of the West" (rather than "supported by") to be more credible (and different enough to distinguish)?
n8cpdx · 5h ago
If you have quality news sources you hear about these things all the time (e.g. Economist).
One reason Israel gets so much attention in the US is that US taxpayers are underwriting the war; both by selling arms and by defending attacks on Israel. So in other words, every tax paying US person who works is working hard every day to further genocide. It is a bitter pill to swallow, and highlights the contradictions and hypocrisy of US foreign policy.
My tax dollars are not as clearly implicated in the wars in Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, or the various other genocides.
senderista · 4h ago
They were implicated in Yemen.
zinodaur · 3h ago
> Why is that? How comes it's so selective?
Most of the weapons used to kill civilians in Gaza are payed for by American taxpayers. US citizens bear a large responsibility for what is going on there.
> But why are the hutis getting a free pass for the 800 000 tustis they genocided 25 years ago? How comes they're not constantly reminded of what they did? Those who committed these atrocities, including regular citizens, are still alive today.
The world stood by and let that genocide happen, and we appear to be standing by and letting this one happen too
fn-mote · 5h ago
On one hand, I agree that honesty is important.
On the other hand, this seems like whataboutism instead of honestly facing the truth.
> not just when they're committed by jewish people
Really skeptical that’s the filter that’s being applied here.
23david · 10m ago
This has no business being on HN.
orbisvicis · 3h ago
What's everyone's thoughts on the GHF? They're the only way that food officially enters Gaza. IDF is not supposed to be immediately present at the distribution sites, and yet are shooting civilians. As are contractors hired by GHF. In fact there are cases of nationals joining IDF for the explicit purpose of shooting civilians, seemingly. There are movements to disband the GHF, but how else would Gazans eat?
6yyyyyy · 16m ago
The ideal answer is the UN sends in peacekeeping forces to kick out the IDF.
That won't happen due to the USA. So in practice the answer to "How will the Gazans eat?" is "They won't."
fahhem · 1h ago
> how else would Gazans eat?
UNRWA, WFP, etc. You know, the ones with decades of experience in Gaza and other war zones with sites, warehouses, and all the other infrastructure necessary to support a population under siege.
AuthAuth · 2h ago
The reports that i've seen for most of those instances are reporting shootings of people on the way to a GHF site and one shooting at the site at night.
churchill · 9h ago
Does anyone still need testimonies like these to be convinced that Israel is systematically exterminating the Palestinians using kinetic force and starvation? We're past that point now. Making Gaza unlivable by carpet-bombing the strip, telegraphing mass murder in unambiguous statements at the highest levels of government, dehumanizing the Palestinians and silencing anyone who dares to speak up?
I, for one, am thankful this hasn't been taken down like any article remotely critical of Israel.
And this has eliminated the whole Western bullshit about human rights maximalism - it's just the same damn thing every time. Like the atrocities in the Congo free State, the Scramble for Africa, etc. the West will sponsor unspeakable atrocities overseas and then act shocked when they actually happen.
Many people in the West don't realize it, but Palestine will wreck severe damage on the West. Just like Gorbachev visiting a random store in the US and seeing insane abundance in a shop in the middle of nowhere while Soviet citizens starved, what killed the Soviet Union was disillusion; people at all levels realized that a system that couldn't provide its people the basics didn't deserve to exist.
That's what happening in the West: American GWOT veterans are still feeling disillusioned about what they went to do in Iraq & Afg. (and Vietnam, before it), and now their kids are seriously asking, "Are we the baddies?"
What's the point of this industrial capacity and wealth if all we do with it is bomb kids? No political system can survive disillusion, that is, the point where people across the spectrum start seeing their nation as hypocritical.
solidsnack9000 · 11m ago
One reason to doubt that Israel is systematically exterminating the Gazan population is simply that the population is not decreasing or projected to decrease, which is to say, the excess deaths due to the conflict are not all that great relative to the natural rate of increase of the population.
Israel should be as aware of the statistics as anyone, especially when undertaking the systematic extermination of a population. If Israel actually intended this, don't you think it would go much faster, with the tremendous amount of ordnance that has been expended and the overwhelming military force Israel has in place? It just doesn't add up.
elihu · 7h ago
I think the thing that should have been a clear unambiguous sign (if nothing up to then were convincing enough) that Israel's intentions weren't just to defeat Hamas but cause severe harm to the civilian population of Gaza was when they blocked all food and aid into Gaza for months. I mean, why would you do that unless you want people to die?
Even the stated explanation that they wanted to deprive Hamas of the ability to fundraise by stealing food and selling it back didn't make sense. Food shortages would cause the market value of hoarded food to rise, thus helping Hamas. Flooding the region with food would collapse the prices and deprive them of a revenue stream.
Cyph0n · 6h ago
The intention was clearly communicated from day 1. But Western governments willingly decided to provide diplomatic cover & military support - some to this very day - with the backing of the Western media apparatus.
ainiriand · 55m ago
Not the spanish government at least, now we are horrible aparently.
insane_dreamer · 4h ago
"destroy Hamas" has become "kill everyone with Hamas sympathies" -- but you can be sure that every boy who can carry a gun, who has seen family members die, who is living the destruction and desolation, is itching for a chance to join the next version of Hamas (which may not be Hamas itself, but something else built on the same shouldering fires that burn when people are oppressed, bombed, and starved, repeatedly for generations. They're not destroying Hamas -- they're just creating a new one (if anyone survives).
mupuff1234 · 4h ago
The market value of hoarded food going up only helps Hamas if they are the one managing to do the hoarding - otherwise it actually works against Hamas (if there's another distributor)
fahhem · 1h ago
Exactly. If Hamas is doing it, it's self-defeating. If Hamas isn't doing it then you're just starving people. Because the point is just starvation, nothing to do with Hamas.
BTW, all orgs (other than the lyin' IDF) says Hamas wasn't stealing significant amounts of aid (nowhere near the 10% claimed). Therefore it's clear starvation was the goal, not targeting funding or Hamas at all.
Aunche · 21m ago
> Does anyone still need testimonies like these to be convinced that Israel is systematically exterminating the Palestinians using kinetic force and starvation?
Before October 7, activists insisted that Gaza’s border restrictions were driven purely by hatred rather than any legitimate security concerns. That view was completely discredited by the attacks on October 7, so forgive me for being skeptical of similarly absolutist claims being made now.
To be clear, preventing famine should take far greater priority than intercepting a few more rockets with Iron Dome. The suffering in Gaza is undeniable. But I see Israel’s actions as driven more by indifference or strategic rigidity than by a calculated intent to exterminate.
Maybe that distinction doesn't matter to you, since it doesn't change how people are dying needlessly, but how we interpret Israel’s intent shapes how we respond. Backing Israel into a corner tends to make things worse, not better. That’s why the Biden administration’s approach of supporting military aid while applying diplomatic pressure was the only viable path to avoid even greater catastrophe.
somedude895 · 8m ago
> Israel is systematically exterminating the Palestinians
This would be the dumbest way to do this. It would take centuries to exterminate them at this rate. The genocide narrative makes no sense to any person with a brain.
tim333 · 7h ago
I mostly agree except the "no political system can survive disillusion" bit. In most of the examples you give the political system survived.
churchill · 6h ago
For now. Eventually, the injuries your system takes over time grinds your gears to a halt.
And I can provide numerous examples: Portugal's colonial holdings (Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique) were unwound after the carnation revolution because the overseas wars were consuming 50% of the national budget while the Estado Novo at home was a corrupt, violent, authoritarian, corporatist state.
The Brits could not square a global empire while their countrymen were rationing food, etc. at home. That had to go as well.
Despite all the Cold War propaganda spread since the fall of the USSR, in 1991, the Soviet Union was still a first-rate military power, with 35k to 40k nuclear warheads and >150 divisions, totaling 3.4M troops. It could easily suppress any of those pro-democracy protests, and all the CIA's burrowing in the Sovbloc would come to nought.
But there was no longer anything worth fighting for. Even people within the Party infrastructure had come to admit that they'd been living for a lie, lying for a lie, killing for a lie-all that for a lie!
The Qing dynasty faced massive internal revolts (Taiping, Boxer), external invasions (Opium Wars), and technological stagnation. The empire resisted modernization too long, then tried too little, too late.
Overwhelmed by foreign powers and internal revolution (1911), it died because it could no longer defend the illusion of legitimacy.
In France's Ancien Regime, nobles were exempt from taxes while peasants starved; France had a bloated, corrupt court and massive debt (partly from helping America fight the British!), yet refused reforms.
Nazi Germany claimed to be defending “Western civilization” while practicing industrial genocide and totalitarian control over - wait for it - Europeans!
One contradiction doesn't bring down a political system, but it cascades, because a hypocritical system dives deeper into hypocrisy until it eventually collapses.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t · 1h ago
I get that things are bad. But how do we fix it?
geysersam · 5h ago
> And this has eliminated the whole Western bullshit about human rights maximalism
That's the truth. "Never again". Clearly our politicians do not believe in human rights or international law. What do they believe in? Democracy? I doubt it. Money? Western exceptionalism? More likely. Where do we go from here? Why would anyone ever take any moral argument from a western nation seriously ever again?
selimthegrim · 6h ago
It was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev
leosanchez · 9h ago
> I, for one, am thankful this hasn't been taken down like any article remotely critical of Israel.
Wait for few more hours to be thankful.
churchill · 9h ago
Was flagged and restored just now, haha.
Edit: And this comment is flagged to hell, as well, haha. I guess saying that the systematic murder of civilians is bad is now a controversial opinion, lmao.
josephg · 6h ago
Honestly I find it kind of sickening how much people treat this conflict like picking a sports team. I’ve been saying that from the start - I feel for the civilians caught in the middle of this conflict, from both Israel and Gaza.
I’ve caught flak from both sides for saying so. Some people seem deadset on making an enemy of nuance.
No comments yet
zahlman · 4h ago
> I guess saying that the systematic murder of civilians is bad is now a controversial opinion, lmao.
No, but this mode of discourse is obnoxious and uncharitable.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
No comments yet
johnisgood · 9h ago
People form beliefs and make judgments based on things they do not know, it is nothing surprising[1]. I would recommend reading the history of Israel (vs. Palestine, especially).
Yeah, Hamzah has been making lots of videos of IDF soldiers (and other Israelites) saying that they want all Palestinian children to die, and that their lives are worth more than Palestinians' lives.
I am not surprised by any of this, the media is probably controlled. They hear what the Government wants them to hear, which is this: they are the good guys.
[1] I do not claim to know everything either, which should be very obvious, but I try to postpone forming a judgment.
churchill · 9h ago
I feel it's not going to last longer. With the advent of modern, mass media, young people across the West can see for themselves and they're taking a side. More specifically, they don't want their governments funding genocide with their taxes. This cannot be made to go away, which is why Zionist activists and their lackeys are pulling out all the stops: no one expected the outburst of disgust at Israel's actions would get this severe, so they're in nonstop damage control mode.
LorenPechtel · 6h ago
The problem is the modern mass deception. We keep seeing "evidence" that doesn't support the claims.
johnisgood · 9h ago
I only know the history, I do not know what exactly is happening today.
It is still sickening (in my humble opinion) that many people straight out tell him that they want children to die, but only Palestinian children.
speakfreely · 8h ago
That's why I say the war is already over. Hamas won. The Israeli public is too enraged by Oct 7 and it can't pursue a long term goal because it has to feed the need for vengeance. The only group that truly benefits from continued conflict is Hamas, everyone else is a victim of circumstance.
forty · 6h ago
> The only group that truly benefits from continued conflict is Hamas
Well, them and Israeli far right who have been able to stay in power so far.
antonvs · 8h ago
I hope what you're saying is true. But I fear that the ability of the genociders to control the narrative is still very strong.
zahlman · 5h ago
> I, for one, am thankful this hasn't been taken down like any article remotely critical of Israel.
?????
I am generally not at all invested in this conflict and I cede that I have very little information about what is going on, and it's been like that for me for decades.
But the information that is available to me, in the current context, from looking at HN, is: pro-Palestine and anti-Israeli sentiments are the norm in comment sections here; comments resisting this viewpoint are routinely downvoted and flagged; news stories about the conflict that make it to the HN front page (including this one) overwhelmingly are taking Palestine's side; and on occasions where I've tried to flag submissions that I felt were grossly uncharitable (making claims beyond what their evidence supports, and/or using inflammatory language) they have not been taken down (and I've only seen anti-Israel examples of such to flag).
At any rate, your comment is a polemic that appears not to even consider reasons why other people might see the issue differently, and implicitly shames people for not coming to a conclusion you consider obvious. That is not up to the standard I understood HN political discussion to expect.
(And since I have showdead on, I can see the replies to you that were flagged and killed. They are really not any worse from what I can tell, but they apparently have the wrong political polarity — the one you claim is endorsed, directly counter to the evidence available to me.)
P.S. Whoever downvoted and flagged this, please explain your reasoning. I am happy to consider your point of view.
rixed · 2h ago
If didn't downvote nor flag, but wanted to help you clarify your misunderstanding.
The vast majority of people across the world is in favour of the end of bombing and segregation, and against the regime that perpetuate it, if only because of empathy alone. And HN does indeed reflects this to some extent.
What the OP was alluding to when he said that pro palestinian view points were silenced is the more or less dissimulated support for the war and systematically misleading depiction of the situation in the mainstream news. To say nothing about the exceedingly harsh criminalization of dissent.
You might not be aware of it, if really you don't read anything beyond tech news, and I'm not going to blame you for that.
zahlman · 1h ago
>The vast majority of people across the world is in favour of the end of bombing and segregation
Should you not feel the need to evidence this?
> the more or less dissimulated support for the war and systematically misleading depiction of the situation in the mainstream news.
First, I don't see why I should conclude that that's what the comment was about. The part I quoted was:
> I, for one, am thankful this hasn't been taken down like any article remotely critical of Israel.
I understood this to mean "taken down from HN".
But I see nothing of the sort in mainstream news, either. The news coverage available to me is full of stories like the submission, and says rather little that would tend to justify Israel. If I search, for example, for coverage in the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) of the conflict, I find plenty of independent sources claiming that there is some kind of whitewashing going on (and none of the people making these claims seem to face any negative repercussions for doing so — as they shouldn't, since Canada is also pretty good on the freedom of speech thing), but then I look at the actual CBC articles I find and they're just... not as described.
The general sense I get is that people who characterize this as a genocide are upset that other people fail to accept this characterization by fiat.
> To say nothing about the exceedingly harsh criminalization of dissent.
Who has been imprisoned for merely expressing the view that this is a genocide, as opposed to being imprisoned for the usual disorderly, anti-social actions that typically get protesters (in general, whatever they're protesting for) imprisoned?
starik36 · 3h ago
> Anyone still need testimonies like these to be convinced that Israel
You are operating until a false premise that Palestinians/Hamas are some sort of children and bear no responsibility for anything at all.
Where in reality, the war could have been over in 5 minutes if they released the hostages at any time during the past 3 years. It still can be over in 5 minutes if they choose to do that. But no, they will put as many of their own people in harm's way as necessary to get to the world opinion to be what it is. And literally no one, including you, is questioning that. But please, do tell me that hostages have nothing to do with anything or Netanyahu bad or whatever else you can cook up.
> while Soviet citizens starved
As someone who grew up in the USSR, I can assure you - no one was starving.
> what killed the Soviet Union was disillusion. People at all levels realized that a system that couldn't provide its people the basics didn't deserve to exist.
That is such a simplistic view of what happened. I don't think that the system cared what its people thought at any time during the existence of the Soviet Union.
ImPostingOnHN · 2h ago
> You are operating until a false premise that Palestinians/Hamas are some sort of children and bear no responsibility for anything at all.
Where in reality, the war could have been over in 5 minutes if they released the hostages at any time during the past 3 years. It still can be over in 5 minutes if they choose to do that. But no, they will put as many of their own people in harm's way as necessary to get to the world opinion to be what it is. And literally no one, including you, is questioning that.
Palestinians and Hamas are 2 different groups of people. Which 1 are you referring to when you say "they"? Only the Hamas can legally be punished as a result of Hamas's actions. Punishing Palestinians because you're mad at Hamas is a war crime.
No comments yet
pfannkuchen · 7h ago
Nit: Congo free state and Scramble for Africa were pretty different as I believe most Europeans didn’t realize and/or accept that sub Saharan Africans are humans at that point. They had an extremely different exposure to them (level and type) than we have today, and I don’t think we today can say whether we would have reacted differently to the Africans immediately post mass scale contact.
Do people in the west today consciously consider Palestinians to be subhuman? I don’t think so? So this today is like much much worse actually IMO from a moral defensibility standpoint.
This is orthogonal to your point, I agree with your point.
No comments yet
imchillyb · 6h ago
Removal of occupants from West Bank and Gaza, completely, was always the overall goal here. Israel doesn't seem to care overly much how this occurs, but they're making it happen. The goal is almost reached.
There will be no Palestine. Egypt doesn't want the refugees. Jordan doesn't want the refugees. Qatar doesn't want the refugees. UAE doesn't want the refugees. Syria doesn't want the refugees. Lebanon doesn't want the refugees. Iran and Iraq don't want the refugees. America doesn't want the refugees. Europe doesn't want the refugees. Russia & China don't want the refugees.
When the fortnite-circle closes in Gaza and West Bank, where do you think these people will go? To a gigantic concentration camp? They'll fight -and die- first. Israel, and all of the surrounding nations are counting on this fact.
Palestine is done. Over. Finished. They have nowhere to go. They won't accept permanent incarceration. That leaves rebellion unto death.
That is the option the world has given these people. Do we help them? Move them? No. We condemn Israel's actions and blah-blah-blah.
Humanity makes me nauseous.
lazyasciiart · 2h ago
When there’s only 100,000 Palestinians left, Israel will announce that they accept a one-state solution.
konart · 8m ago
For now they seem to accept the final solution though.
JamesAdir · 55m ago
Can you point out to any action about the removal of West Bank arabs? There are an estimation of 2.5-3 million arabs there.
There is actually a country for these people and this is Jordan. Since in '48 the arabs didn't accept the two state solution then, they are forced to live in a country which is not for them.
Also, could you please point out where are they refugees from? '48 is 77 years ago, how is the 2nd and 3rd generation are still refugees? There are no other people in the world who claim to be refugees in the 2nd and 3rd generation.
yieldcrv · 40m ago
Executive Order 14046 was signed in 2021 to direct the OFAC agency to cut off Ethopia and Eritrea from the global financial system specifically for the mere allegation of causing famine to the Tigray people.
Specifically it targeted the entire ruling party, the head of state, representatives, their spouses, and their businesses, and the military, including former officials.
This doesn't require Congress, it requires the stroke of a pen.
Hamas is already economically sanctioned so I feel immune from criticism here. If the exact same standard was applied to Israel as EO 14046 levied, then it would practically affect the entire population of the country given the participation in the IDF.
But since only anti-semites believe Jewish people are tightly integrated in global finance, and that's presumably not true then this should be no big deal right?
diebeforei485 · 7h ago
Israel does not allow international journalists in and it's fairly obvious why.
Cyph0n · 6h ago
Yes, they learned an important lesson on how to deal with Western media from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. There's a decent amount of exploration of this topic in the excellent book "Our American Israel".
vdfs · 5h ago
New lesson is learned about tiktok and live streams
marai2 · 6h ago
BBC's Jeremy Bowen was on the Jordanian aid-dropping plane yesterday or day before.
"He was told by the Jordanians that Israel did not want our crew to film outside the plane's windows while he was onboard".[1]
Obviously why - then he'd be able to film the ... not decimation, but total destruction of some of the cities in Gaza that would provide evidence for the genocide.
The destruction is fully visible in satellite footage. Associated Press has “before and after” comparisons.
diebeforei485 · 5h ago
Israel lobbied for restrictions on the resolution of satellite footage of the occupied Palestinian territories, so it tends to be a lot more blurred than images of anywhere else.
(Disclaimer: I'm out of my depth on satellites, photography, and international relations... & almost everything really)
kayodelycaon · 3h ago
Wonderful. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be hiding much.
I can see destroyed buildings on Google Maps. :(
Cyph0n · 4h ago
Unbelievable.. first time hearing about this.
mjevans · 3h ago
I'd understand a delay for operational security; it is a war zone. However banned entirely?
mousethatroared · 3h ago
Why is it reasonable for operational security? They're not Israeli satellites!
JamesAdir · 53m ago
Israel allows international journalist to enter, along with IDF escort. Since this is an active combat zone, letting journalist run around will make them vulnerable to injuries.
dismalaf · 8h ago
Criticizing Israel is in vogue but what's the solution?
Gazans still hold Israeli hostages, Hamas has publicly stated that more civilian deaths helps their cause [1], they're still fighting, the UN refused to distribute aid because they were getting attacked [2], and Israel unilaterally pulling out of Gaza and leaving them to govern themselves is literally what led to October 7th...
Edit - I love it. Down votes instead of responding to this comment's question. Again, what's your solution people?
Edit 2 - is this really a good use of the flagging tool? Is this what HN is about?
crystal_revenge · 2h ago
> Hamas has publicly stated that more civilian deaths helps their cause
The fact that Israel has no problem creating these civilian deaths is part of the problem. If you claim "human shields" you lose all credibly when you shoot nonetheless. It genuinely horrifying that you accept "well they made us kill all those kids".
This would be easy to see if you accepted the Palestinian people as, well, people.
> Again, what's your solution people?
Two states, stop holding a people in a perpetual refugee camp and you might be surprised and how much less they fight you. And, if you really have two states, then there's a framework for retaliation if it comes to that.
Jensson · 1h ago
> Two states, stop holding a people in a perpetual refugee camp and you might be surprised and how much less they fight you. And, if you really have two states, then there's a framework for retaliation if it comes to that.
This was Israel's solution, its the other side that keeps rejecting this solution and has been rejecting it for many generations now.
So after 70 years of that it makes sense Israel are fed up with trying to ask for two state solution, because the other side will never agree that wont work, they have to solve it in another way.
FireBeyond · 1h ago
> This was Israel's solution, its the other side that keeps rejecting this solution and has been rejecting it for many generations now.
Arafat and the PLA/PLO, let's be clear, were responsible for many terrorist atrocities. But let's not forget, their softening, and efforts at the negotiation table, put the Israel far right in a tough spot. Questions were really starting to get awkward - "Arafat is negotiating and making concessions, so why isn't Israel?"
That's when Netanyahu and his buddies decided that Israel needed to start supporting Hamas, because Hamas was more hardline than the PLO. And their rise would make it easy to deflect blame away from Israel for being unwilling to explore the peace process.
robertoandred · 1h ago
Gaza doesn't want two states. It's in their charter. They don't accept the Israeli people as, well, people.
FireBeyond · 1h ago
Added by Hamas. When was the last time Gaza had an election?
robertoandred · 48m ago
The last time Gaza had an election they elected Hamas, because they don’t see Israelis as people.
dismalaf · 1h ago
> stop holding a people in a perpetual refugee camp and you might be surprised and how much less they fight you
Israel completely pulled out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. Allowed them work permits in Israel, didn't control the border with Egypt, etc...
Then October 7th happened...
fahhem · 1h ago
Israel didn't pull out of Gaza, it simply moved its people to the border and continued its subjugation. They bombed Gaza's airport and implemented a land and sea blockade where they controlled everything that went in or out (to the point where they put the Palestinians on a diet with calorie counting at one point). That's not pulling out.
The border with Egypt was controlled indirectly, Egypt is a puppet state of the US. For a moment it wasn't and suddenly they got a military coup and nobody stopped them in the name of democracy...
karim79 · 4h ago
> Gazans still hold Israeli hostages,
Hamas, not Gazans. Nice play with language.
> hostages,
The thousands of Palestinian "administrative detainees" held without charge in Israel, are not hostages?
dismalaf · 1h ago
> Hamas, not Gazans. Nice play with language.
Hamas claimed non-Hamas groups and some civilians held hostages. Some hostages were found in captivity guarded by "civilians". Groups like PIJ held hostages.
So what's a nice catch-all term for the above groups?
sudopluto · 1m ago
terrorists? extremist groups? combatants? there is a large jump from hamas -> the entire population, including innocent civilians.
lmm · 4h ago
> Criticizing Israel is in vogue but what's the solution?
At a minimum stop funding them, stop selling weapons to them, at an absolute minimum repeal the rules against boycotting them. Yes that wouldn't be a complete solution but it would be a step in the right direction.
9dev · 8h ago
Well the solution certainly isn’t letting an entire People starve to death?
By the way, I don’t see criticism of Israel, but Israel’s current extremist government. I’d even argue that supporting Israel means opposing that administration.
dismalaf · 8h ago
> Well the solution certainly isn’t letting an entire People starve to death?
So answer the question with your solution.
9dev · 6m ago
No, that's a logical fallacy. I can be against something obviously wrong without offering an alternative action. In fact, this is a case of "something needs to be done, this is something, so this must be done". Wrong. Doing nothing—not starving Gaza—was also an option; one that the Israeli government decided against. They are responsible for the current situation.
rendall · 8h ago
"The solution is certainty not x" is not a solution. Saying "it's not x" is easy.
If you really believe that Gazans are being starved, then save them by coming up with a great solution for Israel. Let's hear what you think Israel should do.
Ericson2314 · 8h ago
That is not how "don't do war crimes" works. It's incumbent upon Israel to find an alternative.
rendall · 8h ago
Let's assume for the sake of argument that Israel has decided to starve out Gazans in order to end the war. You have the choice to save them by offering a better solution. What is it?
"Not X!" is a copout.
Unfortunately for that perspective, finding a good solution means diving in and understanding the conflict from the Israeli perspective.
ImPostingOnHN · 4h ago
Occupying powers have a legal responsibility to provide aid to civilians in territories they occupy. They also have a legal responsibility to figure out the logistics. They also cannot commit war crimes. So the solution is for israel to do what they are legally required to do, and stop doing what they are legally proscribed from doing.
Everything else (hostage return, feelings of safety, etc) is:
1. Less important, and
2. Equally applicable to both israel and palestine
Finding a good solution means diving in and understanding the conflict beyond israel's perspective: There is simply no legal or moral justification for the atrocities we see here. None whatsoever.
No comments yet
dmix · 8h ago
That would probably require some serious infrastructure to set up secure food distribution points, which I'm assuming isn't easy because the locations have to change as the evacuation areas also constantly changimg. From the video it looks like they only have some berms and small fences so I'd imagine it's a dangerous security situation.
Although having way more food/distribution points might help reduce the violent mobs.
9dev · 9m ago
Do you realise how incredibly cynical you sound? We're not discussing the finer details of a logistical challenge here, but the fate of people starving to death. People that by and large are innocent.
Also: It'd require infrastructure that did exist before the IDF destroyed it. To feed people that weren't hungry before Israel blocked humanitarian aid. Don't reverse the guilt.
saubeidl · 8h ago
No. Not starving people is a bare minimum. A better solution would be literally doing nothing.
No comments yet
protocolture · 2h ago
>Criticizing Israel is in vogue but what's the solution?
Return the refugees to their land and disband the settlements (west bank too). Cash payouts for palestinian refugees to rebuild their homes whether returned to previously occupied lands or just needing to rebuild gaza itself.
After reintegrating the civilian population they can go on an anti hamas witch hunt. And Hamas can be put on trial at the hague next to bibi and gvir. Easy.
rixed · 2h ago
Are you seriously asking for what's the alternative to the bombing of tens of thousands of innocent people because some hostages were taken?
dismalaf · 1h ago
If it's so obvious give your alternative.
coffeeboy27 · 1h ago
Not the OP but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say not bombing civilians, in general, is a path exploring.
dismalaf · 1h ago
Ok. So you stop bombing. How do you get the hostages back? Do you just abandon them?
You still answered with a negative, not a real answer.
rixed · 27m ago
How do you get the hostages back with the bombing?
Oh, you are going to say, "that's to prevent future fighters from capturing future hostages", I guess?
But wait, we know that today's bombings are making future fighters, so, really, what's the plan??
You know, the evening of the 9/11 I remember spending the whole night depressing, thinking "omg, now the US are going to wage war all around the globe, my son will grow up in a terrible place". Because how could the military behemoth answer in any other way? And sure enough, that's what happened.
After the 7th of October, I had similar thoughts: "omg, now Israel is going to act stupid and make Jews hated again".
I've lost friends who had to leave my country because of antisemitism. I've also had my life threatened by right wing extremist zionists. So at least take my words on this: The first and most natural answer to violence and hated is more violence and hatred, universally. If that's not what you want for the next generation make the first move to stop it.
grandiego · 2h ago
Hope some day Muslims (in all Arab countries) just accept the right of Israel to exist. Else, this attack/retaliation dynamic will continue for ever, with people taking sides from a blob of propaganda channels disguised in news platforms.
croes · 2h ago
If more civilian death help Hamas why does Israel‘s government help getting more dead civilians?
unwise-exe · 5h ago
>>> Gazans still hold Israeli hostages,
I believe that capturing POWs is fairly common when at war.
zdragnar · 5h ago
Capturing soldiers, sure, but that's not what happened.
The whole point of capturing soldiers is to keep them from returning to the field. You deny the other side fighters.
Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped civilians.
FireBeyond · 1h ago
There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilian "administrative detainees" who would love to know why you're not as concerned about them being held.
jraby3 · 55m ago
Link to show hundreds of thousands of detainees in Israel?
That seems like a massive exaggeration.
daveguy · 8h ago
To your edit: feed the people in Gaza, and don't commit war crimes. At this point Israel should be guaranteeing safe passage of food aid in Gaza.
insane_dreamer · 4h ago
stop bombing, killing, and starving civilians for starters; the long-term solution is the two-state solution but you can't get there if the population is either dead or scattered (which is what Israel successfully did in 1948 and is now trying to finish it off)
So don't do this "what's the solution??" while tens of thousands are being killed and starved.
ajb · 3h ago
This is actually a valid question*, although you probably won't like the answer.
One side will concede in a war if there are no gains to be had, and conceding will stem the losses. So at a minimum, the side that wants a victorious peace has to credibly promise not to kill the women and children of the other side. At the moment, Israel is unable to credibly promise that, and it's difficult to see how in the short term it can generate any such credibility. So external parties such as the US need to form part of the commitment mechanism. Under both Biden and Trump, the US has neglected it's responsibility to do that.
*Apart from implying that civilian Gazans are responsible for the hostages
tayo42 · 2h ago
Why? It would be terrible politically for Israel to keep attacking Palestine if Palestine and hamas agreed to peace. All of the ambiguity of right and wrong would be gone.
lazyasciiart · 2h ago
But Israel does that constantly, because they say the peace that Hamas agreed to doesn’t count. And the peace offer that Israel is waiting for is basically every male over 16 handed over for interrogation as Hamas members, with the chances of survival for actual Hamas leaders being about none.
Jensson · 1h ago
Do you think USA would agree to peace with Nazi Germany or Japan without being allowed to root out all the Nazis or Japanese extremists? WWII was ended in an extremely brutal way, but it did work and effectively ended the genocidal extremism in both Japan and Germany.
dismalaf · 1h ago
Israel pulled out of Gaza for nearly 20 years... Then October 7th happened.
> *Apart from implying that civilian Gazans are responsible for the hostages
I look up the first of those “human rights groups” and see that it’s explicitly a Palestine advocacy group with 38 employees. How’s this anywhere near objective?
cypherpunks01 · 2h ago
PHRI was founded by an Israeli who served in the IDF, among other Israeli physicians.
There's nearly 200 citations in their report, citing a wide variety of Israeli and international media, medical journals, statements by the IDF, etc.
They must have been referring to B'Tselem since they have 38 employees, but it's an Israeli organization headed by an Israeli human rights lawyer, Yuli Novak.
I assume the person you're responding to is not Israeli and has not been following this conflict very closely if they've never heard of B'Tselem.
crystal_revenge · 9h ago
As someone who went to US high school in the 90s, a good 1/3 of our curriculum seemed to be "never again" studies of the holocaust and other genocides throughout history. Which makes it completely incomprehensible to me that suddenly "don't talk about genocide" has become the basically law.
What's worse is I actually feel openly saying "I don't support this genocide and I'm critical of the state committing it" is a risky thing to say in public. I wouldn't say it not behind a pseudonymous account without some level of plausible deniability. Even peak cancel culture wasn't quite so chilling.
It's also the area with the most clear manipulation of information on social media. The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic", and the same pattern can be seen all over the web.
We've truly entered a dystopian age that seems completely unfamiliar from the exciting world of tech I wanted to be a part of decades ago.
dang · 8h ago
> The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic"
FWIW the downvotes and flags in threads like this, including this thread, do seem largely organic to me, and well within the range of what one expects from a divisive and emotional topic.
People often use words like "clearly" in making such descriptions (I don't mean to pick on you personally! countless users do this, from all sides of all issues), but actually there's nothing so clear. Mostly what happens is that people have perceptions based on their strong feelings and then call those perceptions "clear" because their feelings are strong.
We do occasionally turn off flags in order to allow a discussion to happen because allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong. I've posted lots of explanations of how we approach this in the past (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
hughlomas · 4h ago
With respect, allowing political posts that clearly violate the HN guidelines will normalize such posts, incentivize them in the future due to karma, and attract the type of people that want to soapbox to the community.
dang · 3h ago
This post doesn't violate the site guidelines, nor does having it on HN's frontpage.
If you want to understand how we think about and approach moderation of political stories on HN, probably the best set of explanations is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourself with those explanations and then still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But do please read some of that stuff first because the questions (and therefore the answers) are nearly always the same.
p.s. All that said, I appreciate your watching out for the quality of HN and I understand the concern.
EvgeniyZh · 2h ago
Is it accidental or intentional that all political posts on this war are biased towards one of the sides? Do you think it is the best option?
Scramblejams · 2h ago
I guess with polarizing topics it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right? And there's some fuzzy line that you want the thread to stay on one side of.
I will freely admit my view may be too dismissive and that I should change my ways, but these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze. In other words, that ratio I mentioned seems out of whack. Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead, not enough people vouch for 'em (I'm sometimes guilty of that), and the amount of invective and judgment they're met with just seems to depend on how fast they got downvoted or flagged to oblivion.
I realize I'm shouting into the wind, and you have no obligation to change any of this for me. But I really do not see how this sort of thing is good for the site long-term. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a certain set that needs to scream about something every month or they start vandalizing less controversial threads and it's net positive to let them have their moment. Maybe I'll go write something that auto-hides threads for me when there's been a certain proportion of flagging and downvoting.
Anyway, you've got a tough job and do it with grace. No reply necessary, but thanks for all you do.
dang · 2h ago
> these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze
I agree. The trouble is that not discussing it at all is not a solution either.
> it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right?
I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is.
> Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead
I don't think there's a "thread mainstream" here. I think the community is deeply divided.
If you (or anyone) see good-faith comments getting mistreated in this way, we'd appreciate links so we can take a look. Sometimes we restore those comments, other times we find that the comment broke the site guidelines and thus should stay flagged. But we always look, and usually also have enough time to reply.
> I realize I'm shouting into the wind
Not at all! We're interested. We just don't necessarily have good answers.
Scramblejams · 2h ago
> The trouble is that not discussing it at all is not a solution either.
So, sending it to page 4 quick-like has too many downsides? I am not an expert in community management, I'm interested to understand why.
> I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is.
If you have the time, I'd love to read more about this.
> We're interested. We just don't necessarily have good answers.
Fair enough! Thank you for your patience and perseverance!
dang · 2h ago
> So, sending it to page 4 quick-like has too many downsides? I am not an expert in community management, I'm interested to understand why.
We're not experts either. It's not as if there's any foundation for this job other than just doing it, badly.
I'll try to explain how I personally think about this. One thing is clear: the core value of HN is intellectual curiosity so that's what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). I'd refine that one bit further by saying it's broad intellectual curiosity. There's also narrow intellectual curiosity, which has its place but isn't what we're trying for here. (And there are other forms of curiosity, e.g. social curiosity, which motivates things like celebrity news and gossip. Those also have their place but are less relevant here.)
What's the difference between broad and narrow intellectual curiosity? If you think of curiosity as desire and willingness to take in new information, then I'd say "broad" means wanting to take in new information about anything—whatever's going on in reality, the world, etc., because it's there; and "narrow" means wanting new information, but only about a restricted subset of things. That means there's an excluded set of topics—things about which one could take in new information, but for whatever reason, doesn't want to. Maybe it's too painful, for example.
What I'm saying is that the current topic is one of a few topics which are painful (and the pain shows up as anger in the comments), but which broad intellectual curiosity simply cannot exclude. If we exclude it, then we fail to optimize for what we're optimizing for. In that sense, not discussing it amounts to failing.
But discussing it also amounts to failing, because it's not realistically very possible for this community to discuss it while remaining within the site guidelines. It's too painful, too activating, and crosses too many of the red lines that past generations have left pulsating in all our bodies. That is why I said "I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is".
We can try to mitigate that through moderation ("please don't cross into personal attack", "please don't post flamebait", etc.), but those lines are particularly feeble in this case. There's little scope for those to land as neutral with commenters and readers. It too easily feels like we're adding to the conflict when we post that way.
Therefore this is a case where we can only fail, and all we can do is follow what Beckett said and fail better. Failing better is still failing and still feels like failing—there's no way out of that. I'm just pretty sure that the alternative in this case would be worse overall, even if it felt easier in the short term. It's always easier to go narrow in the short term. But we're in this for the long haul.
crystal_revenge · 7h ago
> a divisive and emotional topic.
I strongly suspect that this "divisive" nature of the topic is precisely the illusion being created. That's exactly what I am challenging here.
In my non-online life I've known many vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, crypto enthusiasts, extreme right/left-wingers, people with complex view of trans issues, divisions on BLM topics, gun fanatics, gun abolitionists etc, etc.
But the opinion around what's happening in Gaza right now doesn't fit into this category. Regardless of political opinion, outside of Zionists, I have not met anyone who will not, in private of course (for the reasons mentioned previously), agree that what's happening in Gaza is genocide and is not in the interests of the United States. The strength of the opinion can vary, but the general direction of opinion is consistent.
Another reason I added "clearly" is because, compared to say climate change posts that are often filled with climate denial comments, there are typically very few commenters engaging in any controversial discussions. Nearly all the top level comments are in agreement, the majority of the replies are as well. Compared to genuinely controversial topics which often do quickly devolve into impossible arguments.
There's also the broader issue that silence is not always a neutral position. When one side benefits much, much more from silence than the other, you can't simply shrug your shoulders and say "well it's controversial so let's not talk about it". In this case, silencing conversations about the genocide in Gaza is very beneficial to the state perpetuating this genocide and likewise very harmful to the people suffering from it.
The strategy is simple: make the topic appear to be more divisive than it is, which makes it easy to silence as "divisive and emotional", which is essentially the most desirable outcome.
unclad5968 · 7h ago
It's just your social circle. Where I live (still USA) it's the opposite. I don't know a single person who doesn't think the Palestinian support isn't propaganda. It is for sure a controversial topic.
tbrownaw · 5h ago
That is "I don't know a single person who thinks it is propaganda", or equivalently "everyone I know thinks it's real", yes? Triple negatives can be a pain to keep track of.
unclad5968 · 3h ago
Yeah, re-reading that was confusing. I mean that everyone I know thinks it is propaganda.
rixed · 1h ago
This is still unclear. The opposite of "what's happening is genocide" is not "support for Palestine is propaganda".
Do people around you think that the number of victims are manipulated? Or do they think that civilians were bombed and displaced, the infrastructure destroyed, the supplies stopped, but that's just fair game?
thoroughburro · 7h ago
[flagged]
nomdep · 44m ago
Some people in my circle see “supporting the people of Palestine” as equivalent to “supporting the people of Germany during WW2”. In other words, until a total surrender , they see the deaths as justified and a necessary evil.
dang · 3h ago
Other users have already made some good replies, but I want to add that this is an example of what I wrote about in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (one's feeling of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases). The community is much bigger than people assume it is, and therefore contains a much wider range of backgrounds and views than people assume it ought to.
I believe this is the main factor that tricks readers into assuming that (legit) comments and votes on a story must be manipulated. It's hard to fathom how anyone could in good faith hold views so different from one's own, views that seem not just obviously wrong but monstrous.
BobaFloutist · 7h ago
>outside of Zionists
Well that sure seems a bit tautological.
TinkersW · 3h ago
You live in a bubble then, most people I know don't care very much about this issue. We have bigger issues to worry about, like our buffoon President & spiraling climate change.
The pro Palestine side has also given themself a pretty bad image, so it will take some very compelling evidence(which this video is not as it doesn't show anything clearly), to make this issue higher priority.
linehedonist · 5h ago
I live in Westchester County NY, quite possibly the living breathing heart of Reform Judaism in the US (outside the UES anyway). Plenty of genuine supporters of Israel here, even among the Gentiles. I try hard to avoid the topic even with friends. I don’t really want to hear a defense or denial of genocide.
Scramblejams · 7h ago
allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong
Could it actually be right?
It's hard for me to feel like these political flagfests make the rest of the site any better, while the rest of the site is what I find value in. If I want to witness mobs possessing massive standard deviations in knowledge and experience with the subject matter flamewarring each other, there are already a whole lot of places on the Internet I can go for that. It's the tech-and-genuine-curiosity-not-yelling part of HN that's the value prop for me here, and FWIW, for a sample size of one, threads like this do little to improve on that.
Of course I can hide this story and move on. But it's hard for me to believe that all the stress hormones flowing in the people reading and participating don't have some kind of negative knock-on effects on other, more peaceful threads.
arp242 · 7h ago
The problem with this line of reasoning is that a few bad faith actors can kill any topic on the site simply by showing up and being unpleasant.
Scramblejams · 6h ago
Seems like the existing mechanisms and moderation are designed to already handle this case to me. No?
dang · 2h ago
We turn off flags in some (though not all) of those cases.
iw7tdb2kqo9 · 8h ago
you detached/flagged my comment from thread, shadow banned my account and disabled signup in my IP because I said something against them. That was "clearly" enough.
dang · 8h ago
I'd need a specific link to say anything specific, but the general answer that we moderate HN based on the site guidelines, and those don't vary based on who you've "said something against".
Over the past few months, I’ve been dejected to see a large number of articles that were politics-adjacent, but otherwise thoughtful and topical, get flagged and remain that way. The mods told us that HN is not supposed to be a news aggregator. Begrudgingly, I accepted the justification, since fostering intelligent discussion in a diverse community can be incredibly challenging.
So… why were the flags on the article covering Hulk Hogan’s (tech-irrelevant) death turned off? The article was flagged, then inexplicably came back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672329
And it's not the first time I've seen this happen with various news fluff.
I’ll be frank: I’ve had faith in the mod team in the past, but the lack of consistency is becoming offensive to me. Celebrity gossip is OK, but not most things ICE or Musk related for example, even when there's direct involvement from SV elites? I'm finding it hard to see the throughline here. What am I missing?
tomhow · 5h ago
That story spent 9 minutes on the front page.
Turning off the flags on a story doesn't mean we want to give it front page exposure (and in that case, we didn't give it front page exposure). It allows people who want to discuss that topic to do so whilst not taking up front page space and also not drawing complaints from people who feel strongly that they want to discuss it.
We do the same thing with some of the politics-related topics you're talking about too. The primary consideration is always whether the story contains "significant new information", and another significant consideration is whether the discussion thread is of a reasonably high standard.
rendall · 8h ago
It's unfortunate and notable that whenever Israel hits the front page of HN and avoids getting flagged, the perspective is reliably anti-Israel.
It's worth recalling that confirmation bias, which we’re all prone to, kicks in hard on this topic. We are all subject to the tendency to notice and remember things that back up what we already believe, while tuning out anything that contradicts it.
With Israel, that often means people stick to sources and angles that reinforce their stance, whether pro- or anti-Israel, and dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their narrative.
It’d be a welcome change to see top comments or stories that challenge anti-Israel assumptions, not just confirm them.
mjamil · 8h ago
Have you considered that your framing exposes implicit bias? It breaks posts down in a binary (pro- or anti-Israel) formation. It’s not that simple.
One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians. It’s also reasonable at this point to believe that Israel - for the last year, at least - is pursuing military action without a strategic goal or a long-term plan other than “encouraging voluntary transfer” of the civilian population.
To you, does the above paragraph immediately strike you as pro- or anti-Israel?
JumpCrisscross · 8h ago
> One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians
And then extend that to believing Hamas are monsters, that whenever Palestine has--in modern times--had any power or leverage, it has used it to be a pest to its neighbors, and yet still believe that those people don't deserve to face starvation, bombing, economic ruin and forced displacement.
No comments yet
rendall · 7h ago
You are arguing for confirmation bias, unfortunately. It costs you nothing to understand Israeli perspectives. You don't have to agree, but you will elevate the discourse.
mjamil · 7h ago
You (a) did not respond to my question and (b) now stated a claim that I'm arguing for confirmation bias without articulating an argument backing this new claim.
I would love to understand what you mean by my lack of understanding of Israeli perspectives. I talk to Israelis regularly. What perspectives do you believe I'm missing? If you're think I don't care about the safety and wellbeing of Israelis (and, to be specific, Israeli Jews), you'd be incorrect. I believe in Israel being a strong and prosperous state. If you think that means I should blindly ignore the fact that Israeli polls show that the Israeli public is unconcerned about the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and that this consequently leads me to believe Israelis are shortsightedly reducing their own security in the long term, then I wouldn't be able to agree with you. If you think I should similarly ignore that - under Bibi and Likud - Israel has deliberately acted against US policy to encourage the formation of a Palestinian state, and has created a defacto one-state reality which again reduces the security of the Israeli state, I wouldn't be able to agree with you either.
rendall · 5h ago
Solidly anti-Israel. Like "somewhat pregnant" there is no "somewhat pro-Israel". Either you believe that Israel has the right to exist, that its public statements are reasonably accurate reflections of its intentions, and that those goals and intentions are reasonable, and are thus pro-Israel; or you are anti-Israel. The rest is just decoration.
Polls about Israeli indifference to Palestinians is a non-sequitur.
Israel tells us all daily what its goals are and why, and how it intends to achieve those goals. Its actions then match those statements.
However, it is very difficult for most people, apparently, to listen to Israel and falsify its statements. Too much history, propaganda, false consensus, confirmation bias, and, frankly, anti-Semitism. Much easier for everyone to agree with each other that Israel bad, to attribute motives, to assume the worst, to believe Israel's enemies. Those people think it's reasonable to say something like "while I agree that Israel has the right to exist, that does not give them the right to commit war crimes and genocide."
submeta · 8h ago
Dang, how can you say for sure they are organic? Just because the downvoters appear to be human and seem not to be bots? Even if the dovnvotes came from human beings: Israel apologists are very organised. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett publicly emphasized the importance of Wikipedia as an information source and stated that Israelis should learn how to edit Wikipedia. Israeli Hasbara, also known as public diplomacy or pro-Israel advocacy, uses various strategies to promote Israel’s perspective on campuses and online.
On university campuses, examples include Hasbara Fellowships (training students to advocate for Israel), pro-Israel student clubs (organizing events and campaigns), social media trainings, resource support from Jewish organizations, and counter-actions against pro-Palestinian movements.
Online, Israeli ministries and affiliated organizations operate official social media teams, develop advocacy platforms and tools (like the Act.IL app), and use influencer campaigns, bots, and coordinated digital actions to shape public opinion. After October 7, 2023, civilian Hasbara initiatives on social media expanded rapidly, ranging from individual efforts to coordinated campaigns with governmental support.
So how can you say that this is a controversial topic and the dovnvotes are organic?
How is it controversial when 2mil. peope are being starved? When thousands of children have been killed by a country whose prime minister is a wanted war criminal?
Edit: Corrected "not organic" => organic
dang · 8h ago
I can't say for sure. What I said is that they seem that way to me, and are within the range of what one expects from divisive and emotional topics. That isn't proof (which is elusive if not impossible in any case), but is at least based on many years and god knows how many lost hours poring over this sort of data.
Incidentally, I was talking about downvotes and flags from every side of the conflict, not just the side you're talking about. I don't see a lot of difference there either.
woooooo · 7h ago
For what it's worth, I think the current cadence of allowing one flamewar every 3-4 weeks on this topic is bang on, you're not censoring it and also not letting it take over the site. Nice job.
dang · 2h ago
Thanks for demonstrating that at least one user feels this way. I wasn't sure.
Even if literally no one agreed, I still feel that not this topic is not an option, and I still think that could be derived from the first principle of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), although I admit that the exact proof escapes me.
fsckboy · 6h ago
it isn't a flamewar, it's one side flaming and flaming. allowing them to do that once a month while stopping them from injecting it everywhere all the time might be a good policy, but I don't get a sense I'm hearing both sides
dang · 2h ago
It's definitely not just one side flaming. As evidence of that, I have no idea which side you're saying this about.
fsckboy · 2h ago
there are plenty of pure "Israelis bad" comments, not downvoted. Can you point me to a "Palestinians bad" comment that's not downvoted? I don't mean this as part of the debate, I would just enjoy reading it, don't kinkshame me.
dang · 47m ago
Not sure what kinkshaming is but fully on board with not doing it!
It's hard to respond without specific links. From my perspective, there are throngs of comments on both sides of this getting downvoted and flagged, mostly for good reason but not always.
FWIW, I think any "$large-group-bad" comment probably should be downvoted on HN. The world doesn't work that way, so any such comment is likely to be a pretty bad one (relative to what we're trying for here).
submeta · 8h ago
Are you familiar with Tal Hanan, an Israeli businessman and former special forces operative alleged to have run disinformation campaigns to manipulate elections in several countries? That activity was pre‑LLM. What concrete safeguards, audits, and transparency measures does this platform use to detect and prevent similarly professional manipulation?
runarberg · 7h ago
I think it is a mistake of moderation to treat this as any divisive topic. The division line here is support for genocide. Users which are in favor of genocide—no matter how they justify it—are clearly in the wrong, both morally, and probably legally, and should not be given any ways to influence the discussion here.
dang · 2h ago
I think that argument is making an is/ought error. I'm simply describing how it is. Whether it ought to be that way or not, I leave to you and other commenters.
cm2012 · 6h ago
I think one could very easily argue there is no genocide in Gaza, so this doesnt work.
No comments yet
mupuff1234 · 4h ago
And how can you say it's not the opposite?
China, Russia, Iran, etc would definitely benefit from pouring fuel on this topic.
Not sure why you think only one side does it.
Guid_NewGuid · 8h ago
Yes, never again is right now and I am afraid to even say that under my real name because it would put my job at risk.
Watching a redux of the Warsaw Ghetto being livestreamed, watching children starving to death because of state military decisions, watching 500 pounder bombs being dropped on seaside cafes and ambulance medics being murdered. Never again is right now and I'm doing this, bitching pseudonymously. It is truly dystopian as you say.
Further, state influence campaigns using social media are well known, it is absolutely happening on this forum and all forums as you say. What to do? I have no idea but I know that those who suffer the consequences of speaking out against this, such as the tens of people arrested in the UK, are truly brave.
Never again is right now. One day everyone will have been against this.
throwawaybob420 · 7h ago
That’s the part that sickens me, if anyone says anything about the genocide, your livelihood is at risk.
It’s disgusting, and it works to prevent people from saying anything publicly.
No comments yet
LorenPechtel · 6h ago
And there's some reason to believe there isn't a state influence campaign in favor of Hamas?
ajsnigrutin · 6h ago
That would be easy to disprove, just let international journalists enter the area and film whatever is happening there. Israel won't let them.
dkarl · 8h ago
For progressive, educated people, Holocaust education was a double-edged sword. It made us keenly aware that the belief in the need for the existence of a Jewish state came from centuries of European Christian anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust. Therefore, when Israel justified its actions as defense against an existential threat, I think Europeans and American descendants of Europeans felt very nervous about rejecting that justification, since historically we're a big part of why they perceive an existential threat to their people.
I think we're well past that now, though.
throwway120385 · 8h ago
For a while people would label arguments against Israel as being against the Jewish people or the Jewish faith. That is, decrying how Gaza and the West Bank were formed were seen as anti-semitic arguments. It was essentially an argument that Israel is Judaism. Whereas mature people can usually argue against a behavior without arguing against a person or a group of people.
burnt-resistor · 7h ago
In so weaponizing "antisemitism" through unethical and immoral political attacks, it increases actual antisemitism and makes the term lose its importance. Meanwhile, 20k Hasidic Jews met in an arena in NYC to denounce what Israel was doing and that they don't speak for them. The sheer arrogance of a secular political regime claiming to speak for an entire people whom aren't citizens of their country and never agreed to this association.
woodruffw · 4h ago
A thought-provoking argument that I read recently was that Israel's relationship with the diaspora has undergone a fundamental shift in the last 20 years, largely tracking with demographics: it's no longer the case that Jewish life is primarily diasporic in nature, and Israel's growing impatience (and sometimes open disdain) for the diaspora tracks with that demographic reality.
I think this is an underrepresented factor in why Israel feels unilaterally emboldened in this conflict: there's no longer a statistically more liberal, secular, identifiably Jewish majority outside of the country that serves as a check on its actions.
jedimind · 8h ago
That's what we were thought in school as well, but the actual history quite a bit more complicated than that.
Modern racial antisemitism and political Zionism were two modern political projects that grew from the same 19th century soil of nationalism and race theory. They did not agree with each other, but they converged, from opposite directions, on the same fundamental conclusion: that the Jewish people constituted a distinct, unassimilable national and racial body that could not coexist as equals within a European nation-state. Political Zionism did not adopt the idea of Jewish separateness from antisemites. It inherited this idea directly from traditional Judaism itself. The entire structure of Halakha (Jewish Law), with its dietary codes, Shabbat observance, and, most crucially, its powerful prohibition on intermarriage, was a system designed to maintain the Jewish people as a distinct, separate, and unassimilated nation in exile. This was the internal, self-defined jewish reality for millennia. Modern racial antisemitism took this existing reality of Jewish separatism and reframed it as a hostile, biological threat to the European nation-state.
The secular European Zionists looked at this situation and synthesized two ideas. Zionists accepted the traditional Jewish premise ("we are a separate people") and accepted the antisemite's practical diagnosis ("they will never accept us as equals"). They rejected both solutions, the religious passivity of waiting for a Messiah and the "liberal delusion"(as Zionists described it) of assimilation. Instead, they chose to take the existing identity of Jewish separateness and reforge it using the modern tools of European nationalism and colonialism. That's also why Zionists published scathing articles about assimilated jews whom they perceived as deluded, cowardly, and "self-hating" for trying to be part of a European society.
The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism, which they also documented themselves ("the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend"). Zionist actions and attitudes were thus the direct, confident expression of 19th Century European settler colonialism, as evident in the writings of Herzl, Jabotinsky and co. Zionism was born in the same intellectual environment as the "Scramble for Africa" and the "White Man's Burden."
Their argument was not: "We are traumatized victims who need a safe space.", because if that had been the case they wouldn't have rejected the ugandan land they were offered - it was: "You Europeans have successfully conquered and colonized vast territories inhabited by inferior natives. We, as a superior European people currently without a state, claim the right to do the same thing as you". It was the logical, confident, and systematic execution of a European colonial project by a group that chose to see itself as a superior people with the right to displace and subjugate an indigenous population it viewed as inferior (i.e. the 'kushim' of Palestine). Those secular European atheist jews who, despite rejecting religion as superstitious and irrational, still saw value in it as essential myth-making tool to justify the dispossession of natives and legitimize their colonial zionist project by weaponizing those myths ("our God [which they as atheists didn't even believe in] promised this land to us") .
wahern · 7h ago
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
You're conveniently ignoring the Eastern European pogroms during the late 19th and especially early 20th century. Jewish immigration, in both number and origin, to Palestine not-so-coincidentally tracks the severity of the pogroms. And actually, during this time many times more Jews immigrated to New York than to Palestine. Immigration to Palestine didn't explode until the rise of Nazi anti-semitism.
Collective punishment is wrong. Full stop. Global civil society largely internalized this ethic, after millennia of accepting collective punishment as legitimate, in large part because of the experience of Jews in Europe. It's ridiculous to deny the history of how this norm came about no less than it is to deny that collective punishment has become the facial justification for Israel's war in Gaza.
kalberg6429 · 4h ago
You're conveniently imposing your misreading on that quote since it's clearly talking about the experiences of _those Zionists living in Palestine_ around 1900.
David Ben-Gurion was the founder of Israel and its first Prime Minister and he confirms that: "They are nearly all good-hearted, and are easily befriended. One might say that they are like big children." David Ben-Gurion in Igrot (Letters), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Tel Aviv University, Vol. I, 1971
And how come those pogroms didn't make those Zionist-Jews more empathetic to suffering and persecution? Instead they had the exact same racist and supremacist attitudes as the europeans they were complaining about.
"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
wahern · 1h ago
I responded to
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
Ben-Gurion himself was witness to pogroms in Poland. Does one need to be murdered or violently attacked to "suffer antisemitism"?
Every group is capable of and, in fact, exhibits racist attitudes. Hannah Arendt observed and commented on the racial hierarchy among Jewish Israel's when attending the Eichmann trial, with the European immigrants having higher socio-economic status than the native, darker-skinned Jewish population. Jews are no different than any other group, ethnic or otherwise.
And, FWIW, Jews are hardly the only ethnic or religious (or mixed ethnic-religious) group which has maintained a distinct identity across millennia and within larger populations, or found itself displaced and then displacing others. In fact, the Middle East has many such groups. The insistence on distinguishing and rationalizing Jews as being peculiar in this and similar regards is a distinctively European cultural obsession, though many regions around the world have their own "Jews" that play this perpetual "other" cultural role.
Again, collective punishment is wrong[1]. Full stop. There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Jews, Israelis, or Zionists as the bad guy in the unfolding Gaza crisis. There's zero need to make recourse to centuries of history to deduce what's wrong with Gaza or even how it came about. The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Zionists emigrating from Europe to Palestine to flee persecution... bad. Salvadorians and other populations chain migrating to the US to flee persecution or economic hardship... good. But these assessments can and will flip on a dime.
[1] At least in the modern Westernized ethos, though it seems this judgment re the legitimacy of collective punishment or collective blame is sadly, demonstrably precarious.
wk_end · 7h ago
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
I might be misreading you here, but it really sounds like you're claiming that antisemitism began and ended with the Third Reich. You're aware that's not the case, right?
jedimind · 7h ago
I'm clearly specifying a subset of Zionist-Jews in a specific location at a specific time "The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project *in Palestine* ..." and the crucial part which you simply dropped in your quote "which they also documented themselves [i.e. their experiences with the natives of Palestine] ("the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend")"
I honestly don't get how one can read that sentence and come to that conclusion, but at least you already suspected yourself of misreading
magic_quotes · 5h ago
> "the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend"
You might want to provide the source for this. (The phrase is not directly googlable.)
kalberg6429 · 5h ago
that seems to be the abridged version, the exact quote I found says:
"They are nearly all good-hearted, and are easily befriended. One might say that they are like big children." David Ben-Gurion in Igrot (Letters), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Tel Aviv University, Vol. I, 1971
wk_end · 5h ago
The problem is your comment doesn't make much sense unless you come to the conclusion I did - who cares if they weren't traumatized by the Holocaust specifically (of course they weren't!) if they were instead traumatized by, say, pograms?
kalberg6429 · 4h ago
They were so "traumatized" that they became racist and supremacist?
"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
Interesting behavior. One would assume that those horrible pogroms would have thought those Zionist-Jews the value of empathy, but they just seem to have taken it as instruction manual and have been applying it themselves for almost a century now.
wk_end · 2h ago
The question of whether you can find third-hand (or even first-hand) accounts of Zionists saying or doing bad things doesn’t really have any bearing on the question of to what extent Jews faced persecution, or to what extent that persecution motivated the Zionist project.
Incidentally, the idea that persecution or trauma necessarily makes a person (or a people!) better is flatly untrue; anyone familiar with psychology knows that. And, after all, we can find lots of examples of Palestinians doing bad things too.
burnt-resistor · 7h ago
I lost 3 great uncles in WW2, one lost his mind to PTSD and drink, and my grandfather came back a different human forever changed. That they fought and died fighting Nazis only for America to adopt and support ethnonationalist fascism is beyond my comprehension and tolerance.
globalnode · 7h ago
Germany refuses to speak up against anything Israel is doing. Hows that for cowed? Poor country has had a number done on them almost 100 years and now theyre done. For that matter all the western countries are done.
zahlman · 4h ago
> What's worse is I actually feel openly saying "I don't support this genocide and I'm critical of the state committing it" is a risky thing to say in public. I wouldn't say it not behind a pseudonymous account without some level of plausible deniability.
In the world I can observe (especially social media), the opposite is true; characterizing the situation as a genocide is normal and accepted, disputing that will get you shunned, and depending on who your friends are you may find yourself subjected to purity testing of that opinion.
Consider, for example, who does and doesn't get banned on Twitch for the things they say about this issue, and what their positions are. Or have a look around Fosstodon, or among FOSS developers on other Mastodon instances; "Free Palestine" is at least as common in bios and screen names as BLM support, while opposed slogans don't even exist as far as I can tell or would be unconscionable to use if they do.
Or consider for example this thread, which is full of people who agree with you, at least among the live comments.
anonymars · 7h ago
Probably not going to find this one encouraging:
> A Columbia genocide scholar says she may leave over university’s new definition of antisemitism
> ... Hirsch, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom altogether.
> Tangentially related, I never understood how the anti-BDS laws square with the first amendment
At my university, a portion of my dues went to funding BDS efforts (what expenses do they even have?) and I had no clear means to object to this. This was in Canada, but it seems to me perfectly fair to oppose that. That said:
> Most anti-BDS laws have taken one of two forms: contract-focused laws requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel; and investment-focused laws, mandating public investment funds to avoid entities boycotting Israel.
Substitute, for example, any domestic racial minority for "Israel"; does your opinion change?
anonymars · 4h ago
> At my university, a portion of my dues went to funding BDS efforts
Surely you can protest that at the university and it is not a government-enforced policy?
> Substitute, for example, any domestic racial minority for "Israel"
Is "Israel" a race or a country? Should a Canadian not be allowed to boycott the US?
zahlman · 4h ago
> Is "Israel" a race or a country? Should a Canadian not be allowed to boycott the US?
The legislation described does not prevent boycotts, except by government contractors who have a duty to government policy and thus do not necessarily enjoy those protections (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47986):
> Speech restrictions imposed by private entities, and government limits on its own speech, usually do not implicate the First Amendment.
As for public investment funds: you'll need to explain to me how saying that X may not invest in Y because Y is refusing to buy things from Z, causes Y to stop being able to refuse to buy things from Z (i.e., compels Y to buy things from Z).
If you want to not buy things from Israel, then... just don't. You don't need my money, or a private investment firm's, in order to achieve that.
anonymars · 2h ago
> Speech restrictions imposed by private entities, and government limits on its own speech, usually do not implicate the First Amendment
How does this apply to the matter at hand? The restrictions on doing business are being imposed on (not by) a private entity, by (not on) the government. The government is free to do business with Israel if it so chooses
As a private entity doing business with the government, why is it permissible to boycott other countries or entities, but not Israel?
Moreover, why is this a state matter? What relevance is it to Kansas whether one boycotts a foreign country?
zahlman · 1h ago
>How does this apply to the matter at hand? The restrictions on doing business are being imposed on (not by) a private entity, by (not on) the government.
>requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel
anonymars · 1h ago
I'm aware of what the law says. How does that justify such a law?
I don't really see any responses to any of the questions I have raised.
zahlman · 1h ago
You originally asked how the provision holds up against the First Amendment. I showed how it is government contractors being restricted. Government contractors act on behalf of the government. I then showed how the First Amendment does not necessarily protect those who act on behalf of the government, because this is the government placing a limit "on its own speech".
anonymars · 1h ago
I did not find anything about contractors in the link you provided and the excerpt did not apply.
Even if that were present, why should "Congress said so" have any meaning?
I am aware the judiciary has occasionally upheld the legality of such laws--just as they have upheld Civil Asset Forfeiture, Qualified Immunity, given us Citizens United, ended the Voting Rights Act, and sundry other decisions that will surely be judged well by future history.
Appeal to authority is not a convincing argument.
pstuart · 9h ago
The problem is simple: conflicts like this are made into binary good vs evil arguments where the other side is bad and your side is good.
The reality is that both sides have legitimate concerns, and likewise, are doing very bad things. Intelligent and caring people get sucked up into this and can only echo their hate for the other side.
The exciting world of tech is designed to amplify the opposition but not to find consensus.
7952 · 8h ago
You are just heading into another set of abstractions. A third neutral path that still misses the most important factor. That human life and dignity is the overwhelming priority. A legitimate" concern is a very bad reason for death, injury, trauma and hunger.
pstuart · 8h ago
My heart goes out to the people of Palestine, and I'm rooting for them.
I'm not a fan of Hamas though.
No comments yet
mandmandam · 9h ago
Colonial invasion, occupation, genocide, ethnic cleansing and holocaust aren't really 'both sides' kind of issues.
However, every colonial invader, occupier, genocidaire and war criminal of the last few hundred years has done their best to flip the blame.
Some of them have been really, really good at it, and each learns from the previous efforts.
No comments yet
dimator · 7h ago
> It's also the area with the most clear manipulation of information on social media. The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic", and the same pattern can be seen all over the web.
Unfortunately the techno optimism that we grew up with has given way to the stark reality that it is now easier than ever to manage the truth and squash dissent.
Which, btw, is the exact opposite of what we thought the Internet would be: the democratization of truth and voices. Instead we've allowed a handful of media oligarchs to own and distort the spin landscape.
jahewson · 1h ago
I would argue that we have democratized voices, the problem is that many of those voices want to lie, for the same reason that oligarchs want to lie.
gambiting · 8h ago
>>As someone who went to US high school in the 90s, a good 1/3 of our curriculum seemed to be "never again" studies of the holocaust and other genocides throughout history. Which makes it completely incomprehensible to me that suddenly "don't talk about genocide" has become the basically law.
I used to live right outside of Auschwitz. Been inside many times, and it's an absolutely harrowing experience - the scale of human suffering inflicted upon the people brought there exceeds almost any kind of scale. But similar to what you said, majority of that place is dedicated to "never again" messaging - so it must feel weird to go in, see the pictures of starving children inside the camp(those that weren't sent to the gas chambers straight away anyway), only to go outside and see images of equally starved Palestinian children and watch Natenyahu say "there's no starvation in Gaza". I feel personal discomfort knowing that the famous "those who don't remember history" quote is on a sign right there in Auschwitz, seen by millions of people every year, yet Israel is comitting genocide against the people of Gaza.
>> The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic", and the same pattern can be seen all over the web.
Any topic related to this gets flagged within few hours. No doubt this one will be too.
jahewson · 8h ago
What was it like for you living Germany in that period?
gambiting · 8h ago
>>What was it like for you living Germany in that period?
Auschwitz isn't in Germany, it's in Poland. Unless I'm misunderstanding your question?
jacquesm · 6h ago
I think there are a large number of people from the United States who would be looking for Auschwitz on a map in Germany rather than in Poland. For some reason it ticks me off when Germans persist in using the German names for Polish cities while at the same time I'm not upset at the Dutch for saying Berlijn or Parijs instead of Berlin or Paris. It's inconsistent.
emchammer · 5h ago
The gift shop at Auschwitz sells refrigerator magnets underlining that it is a German concentration camp.
jacquesm · 5h ago
It was. But it is in Poland, where it always was, even though it was occupied at the time.
wredcoll · 6h ago
> Even peak cancel culture wasn't quite so chilling.
Wait. What?
Are you trying to imply this was some kind of a real thing that happened?
Sarcasm on the internet doesn't always travel well, I can't tell if you're just using this fiction as a metaphor or trying to convince people it actually happened.
zamadatix · 4h ago
This is hard to read as a genuine question so I'm not sure you'll get a genuine answer (if any response).
rightbyte · 9h ago
Ye it is surreal. Dunno what to add really. I might think pf something later...
calmbonsai · 9h ago
IDF fired on World Central Kitchen workers April of 2024 so this, sadly, isn't surprising. At least more and more video is, finally, coming out vividly capturing these atrocities.
lawlessone · 9h ago
When they accidently shot those three hostages escaping that should have been the moment more people realized all this talk about acting on intelligence was just marketing.
dralley · 8h ago
On the other hand - when Israel struck the parking lot of that hospital a couple of weeks ago everyone was so confident that the IDF was lying when they said that there was a command bunker just underneath the entrance of the hospital.
Not only did that end up being completely true, but the IDF killed Muhammad Sinwar in that strike.
You understand that you just said "they're the monsters for using human shields, but not us for shooting through the human shields", right?
Make no mistake, its 100% a war crime to use civilians as human shields. But that doesn't magically absolve the IDF of also committing a war crime. And if they can't meet their military objectives without committing war crimes, maybe that's a sign. In any case, bombing a hospital to kill a terrorist is a very efficient tactic if your goal is to create more terrorists. If you learn nothing else from the UK's administration of Mandatory Palestine, learn that.
aklein · 3h ago
Not a lawyer, but my understanding is civilian casualties are not unlawful (according to international law) when the target is legitimate (on the theory that it is otherwise impossible to legally fight a war with an enemy that hides behind its citizens). To be clear this is not to say war crimes are not also happening.
orthogonal-wren · 2h ago
Also the israeli military seems to be using "human shields" itself.
Holding up war crimes as a positive examples really just illustrated how far gone Israels actions have gone past any normal standard.
There is also no independent verification so it's debatable what the actual facts are. The IDF have long ago lost any right to be believed without that.
bigyabai · 8h ago
That doesn't exonerate anything, though. It shows Israel's willingness to put innocent lives in harm's way to plug potential future threats before they form. Threats they are overwhelmingly capable of deterring during transit, urban warfare or border conflicts.
The doctrinal violence against civilian infrastructure (Dahiya doctrine) and the deliberate homicide of hostages (Hannibal directive) are inexcusable no matter how many military brass it kills.
mandmandam · 7h ago
> As a condition for joining the controlled tour, The New York Times agreed not to ... publish geographic details
> according to the Israeli military
> There are no known entrances to the tunnel within the hospital itself
> According to the World Health Organization, Israel has conducted at least 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the start of the war, damaging at least 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals
> In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to scour for traps.
... You read this article as proof vindicating the IDF's version of events? ... Huh.
You can literally see both the tunnel and the hospital entrance in the picture NYT provides.
bigyabai · 3h ago
To echo the parent; it doesn't matter. It didn't matter 2 weeks ago when Israel killed 3 Catholics bombing a church.
The IDF's doctrinal destruction of civilian infrastructure and attacks on hostages are illegal under international law. If the target was entrenched personnel, then leveling a hospital reflects absolutely miserable trigger discipline on the IDF and their officer's behalf. It's not WWI anymore, if we can't agree on international accountability then we learn nothing from the horrors of our mistakes.
dralley · 2h ago
It literally does matter. International law literally makes this exact distinction. And the very article we're commenting on states as much.
>Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in very rare cases. If one side uses the site for military purposes, that may make it a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack.
If you want to argue it's illegal, you have to make an argument that it's not proportional vis-a-vis the colocated military infrastructure, because otherwise international law says it's fair play in both letter and spirit. If they were completely off-limits then everybody would co-locate their military and humanitarian infrastructure without much thought - and the end result of that game would be worse for everyone. That's why international law is the way it is. Civilian infrastructure cannot be allowed to be used as a shield for military infrastructure.
On that point - you would have a difficult time making a legal argument that hitting the edge of the parking lot (deliberately avoiding a strike to the hospital itself, and without doing significant structural damage to the hospital) to kill the Hamas #1 (at that time) was not proportional. If you want to make that argument with some other strike (like the church one) then go ahead - I'm extremely open to the idea that the IDF is crossing the line with many of their strikes - but that's a different argument than falsely saying that any strike next to civilian infrastructure is a war crime by default.
mandmandam · 8h ago
Hind Rajab being used as bait to murder aid workers was kind of a tell also.
Or when they bombed all the hospitals [0], or targeted pediatricians and oncologists, and their families [1] for assassination.
Or leaving preemie babies to rot and be eaten by wild dogs at Al Nasr [2].
Or when they dropped over 6 Hiroshimas worth of explosives [3] onto an area roughly equal to a 12 x 12 mile square, populated with over a million children - in Biden's term alone.
There's a lot more. Suffice to say that anyone paying attention has known that the US, Israel, Germany, England and more have been propping up a genocide for quite some time now.
"....
At the WCK Welcome Centre, locally-contracted security personnel got on and into the trucks and the convoy
continued the journey to the warehouse. As the trucks moved away from the Welcome Centre, one locallycontracted security person on top of the trailer of the third truck fired his weapon into the air. This was clearly
visible in the UAV video, observed by the UAV operator and assessed by the Brigade Fire Support Commander to be
consistent with Hamas hijacking the aid convoy.
During the aid convoy transit to the warehouse the Brigade Attack Cell contacted CLA with concerns there were
armed individuals on the convoy. CLA attempted through various means to contact WCK, first directly to the
convoy, then to international WCK contacts. CLA eventually made contact with the WCK Headquarters in the
United States who, after multiple attempts, made text message contact via WhatsApp with a WCK member who
had gone ahead of the convoy to the warehouse. They replied that the locally-contracted security personnel had
‘fake guns’. WCK Headquarters replied to CLA that they had made contact with WCK in Gaza and would address the
gun issue when WCK completed the task. It was difficult to tie down the exact timing of this extended set of
communications; however, they appear to have continued after the WCK vehicles had already been attacked,
indicating a lack of awareness by CLA of real-time events.
Once at the warehouse, the aid trucks entered and the WCK vehicles joined up and parked outside along with the
locally-contracted security vehicle. At this point the UAV operator identified the original gunman dismounting from
the truck and joining with another individual identified as a gunman. Over the next ten minutes approximately 15-
20 people, including two to four gunmen, moved around the escort vehicles. During this period, the gunmen were
classified by the Brigade Fire Support Commander and Brigade Chief of Staff as Hamas. P ....
> The identification of the armed individuals on the convoy and near/in the WCK vehicles had not been done in a professional manner. The mindset involved in the decision making was wrong.
> It was inferred a number of times that not only had the gunmen associated with the WCK aid convoy exhibited tactics similar to Hamas, but that in fact ‘they were Hamas’.
> Head FFAM confirmed that only the video feed being used by the UAV operators was used to identify the
gunmen as Hamas.
vorpalhex · 8h ago
And one of those WCK workers was in fact a rifle wielding Hamas member who had participated in Oct 7th.. as well as an actual bonafide WCK worker.
Admittedly blowing up the entire van was probably wrong in retrospect.
ryoshoe · 8h ago
> And one of those WCK workers was in fact a rifle wielding Hamas member
As far as I know this was the result of the IDF's own investigation so there's some conflict of interest
> one of those WCK workers was in fact a rifle wielding Hamas member who had participated in Oct 7th
Source?
cypherpunks01 · 8h ago
Oh wait, except that's not true.
Retired Maj Gen Yoav Har-Even described how the IDF's drone operators mistook an aid worker carrying a bag for a gunman, and then targeted one of the World Central Kitchen vehicles with a missile.
The IDF then described how two people escaped that vehicle and got into a second car, which was hit by another missile from a drone.
The military confirmed that there were survivors from the second explosion, who managed to get into the third vehicle - which was then also hit by a missile.
Agreed that bombing the 1st vehicle of aid workers was a mistake. Then bombing the 2nd vehicle was a mistake, and the 3rd vehicle bombing was also a mistake.
Even your link calls out that one of the vehicles that split from the convoy was carrying armed gunmen.
cypherpunks01 · 1h ago
Sorry but there's zero point in providing justification for this. Even the IDF said "it was a mistake that followed a misidentification" and that it "it shouldn’t have happened" [1]. Everyone's in agreement on this point.
If any other country than Israel was committing these atrocities, we would have by now sent in UN peacekeepers (or invaded, if they had resources of value, a-la-Iraq) to prevent what is clearly attempted genocide. Or at the very very least, pretty serious sanctions.
Instead we're sending money and weapons to help.
skybrian · 4h ago
Well, maybe not. Did the UN send peacekeepers when Russia invaded Ukraine? Do they send peacekeepers to stop the war in Sudan? Intervening in an active war is not what peacekeepers are for.
Why are Palestinian refugees still in Gaza when the whole place is a war zone? Certainly some would stay, but mostly they are trapped.
Under the circumstances, for Gaza, having Israel as a neighbor is worse than having Russia as a neighbor. Even if enough food is shipped in to temporarily resolve the current crisis, people in Gaza won't be safe where they are.
So, here's a question that's rarely asked: which countries will accept refugees from Gaza? Obviously not the US with the current administration. Why not France, Germany, or other European countries?
According to Wikipedia, since 2022, Europe took over five million Ukrainian refugees due to the war. [1] This is more than twice the population of Gaza.
> Did the UN send peacekeepers when Russia invaded Ukraine? Do they send peacekeepers to stop the war in Sudan? Intervening in an active war is not what peacekeepers are for.
True. But what's happening in Gaza is not an active war. Its oppression of a civilian population by a powerful military force.
But certainly we've let other genocidal atrocities go by without intervening, such as Rwanda in '94. So you have a point there.
> which countries will accept refugees from Gaza? Obviously not the US with the current administration. Why not France, Germany, or other European countries?
Good questions. At this point as far as I know they can't even get out because Israel has closed the borders, much less apply for asylum. Also, countries accepting them as asylum seekers would be acknowledging that Israel is the aggressor. AFAIK France is one of the few countries that has said that Palestinians can apply for asylum.
asdefghyk · 32m ago
UN is suspect and in effective
Consider
Several UNWRA staff accused of participating in Oct 7 Attack
also reported
UNWRA staffer held Oct7 hostage in their building
jahewson · 2h ago
Nonsense. UN peacekeepers are observers deployed with the consent of both parties. They are not sent into active combat zones.
There is literally a genocide in Sudan right now with 25 million in extreme hunger. At least half a million children are dead. Yet we hear hardly any mention of it.
insane_dreamer · 59m ago
Sudan is in the news literally every day.
But yeah, sadly, the world has never cared about Africa and the many who die there.
jiggawatts · 6h ago
Something to keep in mind when listening to "first hand accounts" like this is that even if they're honest statements, everybody is subject to the fog of war and skewed statistics.
An example that came up a few months ago was a surgeon in a Gaza hospital making the honest statement to BBC journalists that he had seen dozens of children coming into the hospital near death with a "single shot" to a vital organ. He claimed they were purposefully "sniped" by IDF soldiers because in his mind it was "impossible" that they were all so accurately shot precisely once.
What he didn't see coming into his O/R were the children with multiple gunshot wounds... because they died. Conversely, a grazing wound from shrapnel is too minor to go to his well equipped hospital, because the hospital is overloaded and taking only the severely wounded. So he saw just the filtered subset of injuries that were very severe but just barely survivable, giving him the false impression that the IDF was going out of its way to snipe children with a single well-placed shot. (This isn't some random anecdote either, there were long articles circulating around the international media!)
From the surgeon's point of view, he saw only a subset of what's going on, and he drew a conclusion that wasn't actually supported by the evidence. The problem is that his point of view supported a popular narrative, was amplified, and nobody bothered to verify statistics because.. sss... that's hard in a war zone.
I'm not advocating for either side and support neither. I'm just recommending reading all articles related to the war with a critical eye.
dubyah · 3h ago
There's a group signed letter by 99 American volunteer medical professionals stating:
Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis.
They’re not in the war zone taking an unbiased sample.
They’re in a hospital receiving critical but patients after triage
Inherently, their statistical sample of war injuries is biased. It’s a textbook example of the survivorship statical bias!
This is all I’m trying to say: not that their observations are false or that children aren’t being shot, but that they’re not in a position to draw accurate conclusions about what goes on outside the walls of their hospitals based on information they receive inside its walls. They certainly can’t draw conclusions about the motivations of IDF soldiers from the information available to them.
This logic applies to both sides, of course, and to all similar scenarios.
A random example are the Russian claims of having destroyed ‘X’ instances of ‘Y’ weapons system when Ukraine got less than ‘X’ delivered. The reason is simple — they’re not lying — they just counted the decoys they also blew up!
It’s war. It’s messy. Information is hard to interpret.
SirSavary · 4h ago
> What he didn't see coming into his O/R were the children with multiple gunshot wounds... because they died. Conversely, a grazing wound from shrapnel is too minor to go to his well equipped hospital, because the hospital is overloaded and taking only the severely wounded. So he saw just the filtered subset of injuries that were very severe but just barely survivable, giving him the false impression that the IDF was going out of its way to snipe children with a single well-placed shot. (This isn't some random anecdote either, there were long articles circulating around the international media!)
The source for that is the “pretraining” we all share: children generally don’t survive multiple gunshot wounds from military battle rifles. One… maybe, but not two or three to the chest… or anywhere really.
I mean, you can debate that point if you choose, but you’d have to make a convincing argument that children are more likely to cling to life with more gunshot wounds.
mjamil · 7h ago
The UN definition is quoted here:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Note that to meet this definition, the following conditions must be met (among others):
1. Intent to destroy must be present.
2. The intent must be to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
3. The destruction can be serious bodily or mental harm, or it can mean creating conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part.
This means that:
- people that believe that genocide must be about a race is misguided (it can be about a nationality, and Palestinians identify as a nationality that is recognized by over 75% of the countries in the UN);
- the fact that there are Palestinians elsewhere (the West Bank and Jordan, as two examples) isn't relevant to deciding whether this is a genocide (since genocide can be about destruction targeted at a part of a group); and,
- there are many examples of Israeli ministers and government personnel stating goals that sound genocidal, which people interpret to affirm intent.
IANAL, and genocide is a legal term, so I am not weighing in on this with a personal opinion, but it seems reasonable that laypeople, at least, can read that definition and reach the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. The fact that various genocide scholars (including Omer Bartov at Brown); the Lemkin Institute (named after the Lemkin who coined the term genocide); HRW; Amnesty; MSF; and other institutions have called this a genocide is also probably helping laypeople believe the claim.
Finally, there is not just a moral imperative but a legal requirement under the Geneva Convention to feed people. Article 55 states that an occupying power is responsible for this.
Almost 100 years later, and it is still being debated whether or not Holodomor was genocide.
And one could argue that Holodomor was less "intentional" than what is going on in Gaza now.
So, I don't think we'll get any official status on this anytime soon.
ars · 7h ago
Israel is not an occupying power in Gaza, but rather a warring power. And Article 23 of the 4th Geneva Convention says:
".... are no serious reasons for fearing:
(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,"
i.e. if the warring party believes the supplies will be diverted they have no obligation to supply them.
And that's what is going on here.
mjamil · 7h ago
Thank you for your opinion (stated as a fact, I'll add) that Israel doesn't occupy Gaza. Can you please state your source for this belief?
To state why I believe Israel is occupying Gaza, I'll point out that Israel’s continued status as an occupying power has been affirmed repeatedly by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and human rights groups. Do you believe all of these entities are incorrect?
rightbyte · 7h ago
Diverted to where? It is one city.
ars · 7h ago
Gaza is not one city. Hu?? And diverted to Hamas who then sell it.
What is your source to justify your claim (stated as a fact) that Hamas is diverting supplies and then selling them? Here [1] is a recent article in the NYT this week quoting two unnamed Israeli military officials saying Israel has found no proof of this claim despite Israeli officials repeatedly stating otherwise, and that the UN had been largely successful (via UNRWA) in feeding the Gazan population.
Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.
tehjoker · 3h ago
This was utterly predictable. GHF is a mercenary front plan developed by Israel and implemented by the United States to displace UNRWA so they can starve Palestinians and draw them into zones that are easier to ethnically cleanse.
The first video shots reminded me of the balcony scenes in Schindler's List.
lanfeust6 · 4h ago
You have to love the snark in here with "I was able to tell it would go this way from the beginning! I'm enlightened!"
Israel has been provoked and attacked many times. The cautious hope seemed to be a rehash of the previous times there's been strife, that doesn't necessarily mean it was a prediction but it was unclear how long Israel would push this. After the completely kneecapping Hamas some thought they'd be wrapping up. From a self-defense standpoint there just isn't that much more to gain, and they're burning away all the global political goodwill they had.
fuck_AI · 9h ago
Three words - Boycott, Divest, Sanction.
If BDS didn't work, they wouldn't be trying to ban it.
churchill · 9h ago
oh, the Zionists got that covered already: 35 US states have passed laws/executive orders prohibiting boycotts of Israel.
hermitcrab · 9h ago
Someone from the Texas state government wanted to buy a $75 licence for my event planning software. Fine. Then they told me I had to sign an agreement that I wouldn't boycot Israel. Ridiculous. It's none of their business. I refused to sign it and didn't get the sale.
axblount · 5h ago
Arizona has a similar law regarding the Uyghurs. Every contact needs a clause that says no Uyghur "forced labor" was used.
unwise-exe · 5h ago
That seems a rather different sort of declaration though? "I did not participate in this harm" vs "I will not speak against this group".
whatshisface · 9h ago
Those laws never made any sense to me from a constitutional or even a practical standpoint. What's being banned? Are they supposed to force you to buy things?
eviks · 1h ago
The political opinions and political actions are what's being banned. You're free to silently buy whatever you want
esseph · 9h ago
The latter. They effectively get exclusivity if they want.
whatshisface · 9h ago
How does that work?
esseph · 8h ago
Ah, this may require digging into the local politics of your US state and the particular law.
Here's the thing, fighting this in court would be extremely politically inconvenient for a lot of people.
churchill · 6h ago
Texas requires contractors to certify that they're not boycotting Israel; Florida maintains a public list of companies that boycott Israel and prohibits state investment in them; in Arkansas, the law has been upheld in federal court after a challenge.
actionfromafar · 6h ago
It's funny how state rights are so important, but only for certain kinds of rights. The extreme rights.
churchill · 9h ago
It's not supposed to make sense: lobbyists paid your politicians and now, you have to support Israel, or else...
There's nothing more to it. Israel knows that with access to Western weapons, it will reliably win every confrontation with the Palestinians, just like in Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa. The only thing that did both regimes in was sanctions, or boycotts. I believe they literally studied these nations. So, they want to preempt any attempt at boycotting Israel, because it's the only way they'd ever face reckoning for all the unspeakable atrocities they've committed against the palestinians.
I agree with the means, one has to but economic pressure on Israel, but the BDS movement holds some non-viable positions.
umanwizard · 7h ago
Like what? (Honest question).
danbruc · 6h ago
Do you mean what non-viable positions? First and foremost the unrestricted right to return as this has the potential to end the state of Israel as a Jewish state if Palestinians become the majority population.
tmnvix · 6h ago
As a humanist, I consider the right of return to be undeniable. Given your logic, this would make the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state the unviable option. I've been of that opinion for some time now. Nothing to do with antisemitism as some might try to suggest - just the logical conclusion of a humanist position.
I'm heartened to see that more people are coming to this same conclusion. Talk of a 'two state solution' has always been a convenient excuse for more of the same as far as I am concerned.
danbruc · 6h ago
Israel will not agree to a right to return that might result in the destruction of its status quo. So even if you think that this would be the morally desirable outcome, it is not going to happen. How many of the people displaced during the Nakba are even still alive? We are not talking about letting people displaced a couple of years ago return, we are talking about people and their descendants that have been displaced generations ago, most of them have never lived in the place you want to let them return to. Make them a good enough offer to forfeit their right to return.
tmnvix · 5h ago
In response to the dead response... (not sure why it is dead)
> Israel will not agree to a right to return
This government will not.
My view is that the Israeli state is failing through its own actions and at some point will experience regime change (i.e. a drastic change in government - possibly, or possibly not as a result of a democratic election). I expect that a new regime may not be Zionist (at least not in the exclusionary sense we are familiar with) and could well introduce something similar to South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission.
That type of government could very possibly recognise the right of return - possibly in some compromised form such as a willingness to pay compensation as has happened following other colonialist endeavours.
umanwizard · 5h ago
It is not just the government. The overwhelming majority of Israelis are opposed to what you're suggesting and there's no way to force them to accept it (they have nuclear weapons).
A global coordinated sanctions regime might work, like it did on South Africa, but that is pretty unlikely to ever happen because outside of Arab states, almost no country is opposed to Israel’s existence within its recognized borders. If Israel stopped actively oppressing/colonizing Gaza and the West Bank, opposition against them would evaporate, even if they remain an explicitly Jewish state and never grant right of return for the descendants of Nakba refugees.
tmnvix · 5h ago
> ...almost no country is opposed to Israel’s existence within its recognized borders
Unfortunately Israel itself seems opposed to this. Part of the reason they are authoring their own demise in my opinion.
flyinglizard · 40m ago
Israel gave Arabs land larger than its entire current size in the quest for peaceful coexistence (Gaza, Sinai and you could count in West Bank in terms of PLO governance).
zoratu · 3h ago
Israel is a Jewish state, but it's also a safe harbor for minorities. It is the only place in the Middle East where you can be openly gay or trans and not be killed for it (or Druze, as it turns out).
Even for Israelis that are against the current government and want to see equal rights for all peoples in the Middle East, there is an abundance of evidence to show that you don't get that without Israel.
umanwizard · 3h ago
Totally irrelevant deflection. How Israel treats Israelis inside the borders of Israel is really not what anyone's complaining about.
Yes, the fact that many Middle Eastern countries are backwards on gay rights is bad! This doesn't remotely address the question of whether Israel bombing cities to dust and starving their population is also bad.
zoratu · 41m ago
Not irrelevant at all. There have been two periods of right to return, and they've both been causal in the current Israeli Muslim and Israeli Arab populations in Israel. If right to return includes voting rights, then it's likely that the voting population would ultimately legislate Israel to not be a Jewish state, and fundamentally shift the laws away from democracy and away from equal rights of Israelis. There are 50 Muslim majority countries and countless data points to reach such a conclusion, and this is fundamentally why an unconditional right to return will never happen.
tmnvix was advocating for the collapse of the only democracy in the region--tantamount to advocating for worse outcomes for more people (and likely to an actual genocide of the Jewish people, who evacuated predominately Muslim countries and populated Israel at its re-formation). There are still 50 hostages in Gaza that have been held for 514 days and counting.
In Yemen 39.5% of the population is undernourished and 48.5% of children under five are stunted. Nearby, in East Africa, the South Sudan death toll and starvation numbers also dwarf this conflict. Mysteriously, and predictably, the world is silent. But, an opportunity to put down Israel, it seems is unfortunately very popular.
ars · 7h ago
The head of the BDS supports the expulsion and/or murder of all Jews in Israel.
Quote:
Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement, made that perspective clear: “Good riddance! The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead. But someone has to issue an official death certificate before the rotting corpse is given a proper burial and we can all move on and explore the more just, moral and therefore enduring alternative for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Mandate Palestine: the one-state solution.”
Barghouti also opposed a bi-national Arab and Jewish state:
“I am completely and categorically against binationalism … because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and, therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that.”
umanwizard · 5h ago
He wants a unitary democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs and the right of return for Palestinian refugees abroad and their descendants. Is that too idealistic to ever happen? Yes, probably. But it’s nowhere near what you’re claiming he says.
ars · 4h ago
That's the "sanitized" version of what he wants. He actually wants the Jews gone, it's pretty obvious from the other words he has said, and especially from his outright refusal to condemn attacks.
umanwizard · 4h ago
If that’s obvious from other things he said, why don’t you cite those, instead of something completely different?
ars · 3h ago
It seemed like a good summary to me.
I mean saying he wants the end of peaceful coexistence is not enough for you?
And he claims the Jews will have zero rights, and that's also not enough?
If you need more, well, I gave you his name, he has said lots of stuff.
umanwizard · 3h ago
Come on, you are badly misreading these quotes.
> saying he wants the end of peaceful coexistence
He does not say this. He says he wants the end of the two-state solution; that is, he wants the entire area to be one state (in which people coexist peacefully).
> he claims the Jews will have zero rights
No he doesn't. He says they will have no national right; that is, they will not have the right to claim the land as the exclusive home of the Jewish Nation. They will still have civil rights as normal citizens like everyone else. In fact, let me paste the full quote, since you left off the clarifying explanation that immediately follows it:
> I am completely and categorically against binationalism because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that, but it would take me too long to explain why, so I will stick to the model I support, which is a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote — regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on and so forth … Full equality under the law with the inclusion of the refugees — this must be based on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. In other words, a secular, democratic state that accommodates our inalienable rights as Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as settlers.
rixed · 1h ago
> The head of the BDS supports the expulsion and/or murder of all Jews
>> peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs
What is going on here?
rizs12 · 8h ago
Isn't the Prime Minister of Israel wanted by the Hague?
9dev · 8h ago
He is, but many heads of state already declared they are going to ignore that should Netanjahu fancy a visit.
The hypocrisy is stunning.
DyslexicAtheist · 7h ago
you say "many" but other than "fotzenfrize" Merz who declared this?
rixed · 1h ago
France apparently allowed several times the suspect to fly over its territory without arresting him, for instance.
strictnein · 5h ago
The US isn't a member of the ICC. Clinton signed it, but the senate never ratified the treaty.
elihu · 8h ago
Yes, there's an ICC warrant out by for Netanyahu and Gallant.
Basically that just means that they won't travel to or even be invited to countries that would arrest them.
The same goes for Putin.
A lot of pro-Israel people just think the ICC is just a tool used by countries that hold a grudge against Israel and don't take it seriously (e.g. the Biden administration released a statement condemning the ICC when they announced they were seeking the warrants), so having more first-hand witnesses stating clearly that war crimes are happening is relevant.
Ideally we'd have journalists reporting these things, but Israel blocks those from entering Gaza too.
No comments yet
colechristensen · 8h ago
"international law" is, i don't know how to say this quite right, largely for show
when both sides seem to be willing and eager to order, participate in, and cheer for atrocities from leadership to the common people... I don't want to take ideological sides or tally up crimes to decide who to root for in millennia old conflict mostly over a single city
it's a terrible shame for the people who want to live together in peace, clearly there are not enough of them
wayeq · 7h ago
> "international law" is, i don't know how to say this quite right, largely for show
Turns out most law in western democracies was largely for show
"Gaza Humanitarian Foundation chair Johnnie Moore accuses UN of 'playing politics' with Gazan lives, defends IDF and denies claims of mass casualties near aid sites, saying more people harmed in 24 hours of UN efforts than during weeks of GHF operations"
He also discusses the specific individual here:
"How do you respond to the claim from a former special forces operative who worked with your foundation, alleging that IDF troops shot and massacred Gazans coming to the aid centers?
“That’s a personal matter, and I’m limited in what I can say. This is not a credible individual, and these are not credible accusations. I’m more than confident we have a great deal of evidence to refute them.”"
"7/15/25 – The 4th Estate Sale: How American and European Media Became an Uncritical Mouthpiece for a Designated Foreign Terror Organization"
The report is from:
Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)
Rutgers University Social Perception Lab
Headlines of key findings:
- Mainstream media spread hostile, and often unverified, narratives delegitimizing U.S.-backed humanitarian aid efforts in Gaza.
- Major media headlines cited Hamas-linked officials more than any other source – making a foreign terrorist organization one of the leading voices shaping news about GHF
- Unverified headlines triggered viral, conspiratorial social media posts, often amplified by foreign state media.
- GHF-related media coverage undermined trust in America while shielding Hamas-linked actors by inducing bias.
- Narrative backlash closely tracked U.S. operational success on the ground.
- The GHF’s competitors amplified Hamas-sourced claims to undermine U.S.-led aid efforts.
"NCRI assesses that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not merely the subject of criticism, but the
target of a convergent narrative attack in which American and European media acted as a de facto
mouthpiece for a foreign terrorist organization. This environment systematically elevated Hamas-linked
claims, which were often unverified, uncontextualized, or outright false. Major headlines were repeatedly
exaggerated or framed to imply atrocity, often without source transparency or sufficient evidentiary
scrutiny."
- More than 79 million meals distributed to date (update from about a week ago, might be more recent ones)
Synaesthesia · 8h ago
UNRWA managed to distribute food without killing Palestinians, as did many other agencies. I don't see why GHF has to commit these frequent massacres in their aid distribution.
LorenPechtel · 6h ago
Because UNRWA gives the aid to Hamas, no fighting. GHF doesn't give Hamas power, Hamas attacks the GHF, Hamas shoots people trying to pick up food.
cypherpunks01 · 3h ago
Right, except that all credible reports from the US government and senior Israeli military officials indicate there was never any large diversion of UN aid to Hamas. It was just a fog-of-war story made up by the Israeli government as a supposedly plausible reason to hermetically seal Gaza and prevent millions of civilians from receiving food.
Sources:
NYT: No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say
This is not as clear as you say. "No proof" and "no evidence" doesn't mean it didn't happen. Hamas controls Gaza with an iron fist. They are the ones carrying guns. They have no qualms about torturing, threatening, executing anyone who doesn't tow the line.
Hamas didn't just steal all the aid and put it in its tunnels. Hamas exerted influence by controlling the aid and its distribution. It did also steal some of it. You are to some degree misrepresenting the Israeli concern. Israel isn't simply concerned about Hamas stealing all the aid, it is concerned both about stealing and reselling (which does happen) and about control of the aid as means of continuing to establish itself as the governing body of Gaza. The UN agencies have and do work with Hamas in Gaza since nobody can be in Gaza without working with Hamas.
The NYT article is doing some hair splitting:
"Over the course of the war, the Israeli military released records and videos purporting to show how Hamas has been exploiting humanitarian aid. The army also shared what it described as internal Hamas documents found in a headquarters in Gaza, which discuss the percentage of aid taken by various Hamas wings and dated to early 2024. But those documents do not specifically refer to the theft of U.N. aid."
"Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.
A Hamas representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment." - I like that last bit.
Your Reuters article also says: "A State Department spokesperson disputed the findings, saying there is video evidence of Hamas looting aid, but provided no such videos. The spokesperson also accused traditional humanitarian groups of covering up "aid corruption.""
and:
"The study noted a limitation: because Palestinians who receive aid cannot be vetted, it was possible that U.S.-funded supplies went to administrative officials of Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza."
"Satterfield said “there’s no question” that the terror group has worked to take “political advantage and certainly some physical substantive advantage out of the aid distribution process.”
Hamas operatives have made a point of “flaunting” their presence at aid sites in a message to Palestinians that the group has no intention of ceding its role in the distribution process.
However, Satterfield maintained that “the bulk of all assistance delivered by the UN and by the international organizations has gone to the population of Gaza and not to Hamas. Full stop.”"
These are not contradictory, Hamas controlled the aid, but still the bulk of it got delivered. The problem is the control they asserted. Israel has tried, via GHF, to take them out of the loop. Nobody is disputing that when aid was flowing in it did eventually end up reaching the people (who sometimes had to buy it).
cypherpunks01 · 1h ago
Yes, I buy most of that, nothing is black and white. Hamas definitely controls Gaza and are the ones with guns, and certainly took whatever advantage they could and continue to. The commenter I was responding to just said "UNRWA gives the aid to Hamas" which I didn't find justified by any reputable source at all.
Many details on the ground are hidden in a fog of war and propaganda from all sides. I just think a couple measures of success of food distribution are to step back and ask, "are people able to get food without being killed on a daily basis?" and "is the population generally receiving food and not starving to death?". And it seems pretty clear to most of the world the answers to these are emphatically "No" since the time the GHF was put in control of food distribution, and when all established aid groups were blocked from providing humanitarian assistance.
Cutting off food supply drives up the prices, both causing mass starvation and providing a great opportunity for Hamas and other entities to resell food at huge profits. If there was more than adequate food instead, then nobody would be starving to death, and Hamas would not gain much benefit from reselling food.
actionfromafar · 3h ago
What is your argument? That if Hamas could eat, nobody can?
cypherpunks01 · 2h ago
I think the most common string of arguments is that Hamas steals all the food being brought into Gaza, causing extreme food scarcity. Then Hamas corners the market on all food, raises food prices with its monopoly, and extracts big profits from the rest of the Gaza population. The claim, in conclusion, is that well-intentioned aid organizations bringing food into Gaza to feed starving people are actually funding Hamas.
The argument has proven totally wrong, because as every single humanitarian organization that operates in Gaza has repeatedly warned in recent months, famine conditions are the direct result of Israel generally disallowing food and other aid into Gaza since March. Had Hamas actually diverted billions of dollars into their food storage tunnels, then logically they would've continued selling it at market price when demand is high now. But actually in reality, there's nothing to buy. [1]
The market solution to prevent Hamas from profiting off food is to first allow in enough food to Gaza such that babies are no longer starving to death, and to then bring in so much food supply that prices decrease until it's no longer economically profitable to resell food, because it's widely available. That solution is never brought up for some reason.
This is simply not true. The first part isn't true, people have gotten killed during UN related aid operations. The second part isn't true either, GHF has not committed "frequent massacres" during aid distribution. The single event I've heard about involving GHF directly is where there was a stampede in one of their facilities:
The IDF has used live fire for crowd control but there is zero evidence that it directly or intentionally attacked civilians. This is definitely a problematic practice but the exact causes and the number of casualties related to these events is unclear.
What has happened though is that Hamas attacks aid distribution centers, e.g.:
What's also true is that the UN and Hamas are doing their best to make sure the alternative efforts to distribute good to Gazans fail. Neither of these organizations actually care about Gazans. They care about their existence and power.
gausswho · 8h ago
Each of those headlines can be summarized as: not speaking the official narrative hurts the official narrative.
danbruc · 7h ago
»If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?«
David Ben-Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel
Come to your senses and end this tragedy, give the Palestinians their own sovereign state, and then hope that they can forgive what you have done to them!
slibhb · 7h ago
Palestinians have been offered a state 5 times starting in 1937. They rejected each offer.
They don't want a state of their own; they want to conquer Israel.
I don't see a solution. Maybe establish a somewhat repressive non-democratic Palestinian state?
danbruc · 7h ago
This is simply not true, there was never any offer with acceptable terms. I am not going to repeat this here, this has been discussed countless times and you can easily find this if you want to.
slibhb · 6h ago
All of the offers seem acceptable to me. In the first offer, the Jewish state was quite small. None of the offers were acceptable to Palestinians because they include a Jewish state.
Virtually all Arabs want to fight a war against Israel and destroy it. They view that land as theirs. The only reason there haven't been more wars is due to repressive Arab governments that have been willing to compromise.
danbruc · 5h ago
This is nonsense, the Palestinians and Palestinian organizations - even including Hamas - have to varying degrees accepted or shown willingness to accept a Palestinian state that does not encompass all of Mandatory Palestine. Israel is unwilling to have a two state solution, they always desired all of Mandatory Palestine and saw any division plan only as stepping stone for further expansion in the future.
zahlman · 4h ago
> This is nonsense, the Palestinians and Palestinian organizations - even including Hamas - have to varying degrees accepted or shown willingness to accept a Palestinian state that does not encompass all of Mandatory Palestine.
This cannot be reconciled with the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea". (Wikipedia claims that the slogan is used by both sides of the conflict, citing a JSTOR article I can't access; but I have only ever seen it used by Hamas and their supporters.)
Per Wikipedia, Hamas does not recognize Israel as of their most recent 2017 charter, and "called for a Palestinian state on all of Mandatory Palestine" in 1988.
While I'm sure that many Palestinians do not support Hamas and desire to co-exist with Israel, I see no good reason to suppose that this is any more common than the other way around.
> Israel is unwilling to have a two state solution, they always desired all of Mandatory Palestine
There is ample evidence to contradict this — enough that I can look it up on the fly. Were it true, for example, the Knesset would have had no need to pass a resolution declaring this to be their current position, barely a year ago. Netanyahu also claimed in 2015 to want a two-state solution, and of course there are other Israeli political parties with warmer attitudes towards Palestine.
danbruc · 4h ago
The obvious evidence that Israel is unwilling to have a two state solution is its non-existence - they could do this unilaterally and just withdraw.
zahlman · 4h ago
Your claim was that they have always desired all of Mandatory Palestine. This clearly does not hold up.
The reason they might currently feel differently seems pretty obvious to me, even though this is a topic I rarely ever think about.
danbruc · 4h ago
»Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country? My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning.... This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself, but because through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole. The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.«
David Ben-Gurion, 1937
zahlman · 4h ago
You can draw a straight line through two points, but that doesn't mean the line is actually there.
danbruc · 3h ago
How many dots do we have to fill in? The next obvious one is settlement expansion, that certainly undermines the possibility of a two state solution.
7402 · 1h ago
> they could do this unilaterally and just withdraw
Which they tried in 2005 in Gaza. They evicted the remaining settlers in Gaza and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.
Hamas won the first and only election thereafter and ruled in Gaza from that point on.
In the years during and after the pandemic, Hamas deceived Israel in the way it presented itself. An IDF report assessing the massive intelligence failure on Oct 7 reported [0], "Israel saw Hamas as a pragmatic movement with whom it could do business." That was a tragic mistake.
The opinion of the Israeli public towards the desirability (and feasibility) of a two-state solution has tended to vary over the decades depending on the actions of external Palestinian and Arab actors. After the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings of buses and restaurants starting around the year 2000 it went down. Two years after the Gaza withdrawal it was back up, with 70% support for the two-state solution in 2007, when there were peace talks. [1]
The mass killings and kidnappings that Hamas did in 2023 pretty much eliminated any enthusiasm for two states at present. A recent poll put Israeli opinion at 70% opposition to a Palestinian state.
That could change again. Israel is a democracy, and people vote depending on what they see. The idea that a Palestinian nation will ever encompass "the river to the sea," is a complete delusion. The idea that Israel will ever see peace and security by annexing the entire area of the former British Mandate is likewise a complete delusion. If Hamas can be defeated, if the Palestinian Authority can get more effective, less corrupt leadership, if Israel can get a parliamentary majority that is no longer dependent on right-wing parties, if ordinary Israelis can get a hint that Oct 7 is not something that will happen again, then there might be hope for peace.
> This cannot be reconciled with the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea". (Wikipedia claims that the slogan is used by both sides of the conflict, citing a JSTOR article I can't access; but I have only ever seen it used by Hamas and their supporters.)
It was literally Likud's electioneering slogan throughout the 70s. It's not just that it's been used by both sides - it was actually created by Israelis.
beepbopboopp · 4h ago
This is not true, even in their acceptance of THEIR land, they will not acknowledge or turn over their territorial claim to the rest of the land.
wslh · 5h ago
> ...even including Hamas
That is not true. Trivial to check on Wikipedia [1] and go to factual information.
»On 2 May 2017, Khaled Mashal, chief of the Hamas Political Bureau, presented a new Charter, in which Hamas accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state "on the basis of June 4, 1967" (West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).«
wslh · 5h ago
You cut the entire paragraph.
danbruc · 5h ago
You mean the part where it says they did still not recognize the state of Israel or relinquish claims to all of Palestine? You overlooked the part in my comment where I said to varying degrees. Also to me that seems not too different from the position Israeli politicians had and some still have, we accept the partition plan but still desire to expand into all of Mandatory Palestine eventually.
mrs6969 · 6h ago
no one really believes such stuff anymore.
Israel really the invader according to UN and many other organization.
The UN General Assembly does not make legally binding decisions, they express majority opinions. Only the Security Council can make legally binding decisions. There is also the question whether the UN General Assembly even has the legitimation to suggest the partitioning of some land against the will of its population. There was an attempt to decide on this but that did not get the necessary votes. And even the partition plan was only accepted because several countries where pressured or incentivized to vote for it.
joyeuse6701 · 4h ago
That cannot be. Hamas isn’t interested in a Palestinian state, they are interested in the destruction of Israel. Iran and all its proxies think this way. It is their raison d’etre. Giving them a state would not end the war.
dmix · 8h ago
Did the air dropping of food not work out?
coderjames · 7h ago
It has not so far.
"Experts say that airdrops, another measure Israel announced, are insufficient for the immense need in Gaza and dangerous to people on the ground."[1]
"[T]he airdrops have an advantage over trucks because planes can move aid to a particular location very quickly. But in terms of volume, the airdrops will be 'a supplement to, not a replacement for moving things in by ground.'"[2]
The airdrops killed people when 1) the containers landed on occupied tents and, 2) containers landed in the water and people drowned attempting to retrieve the aid. Trucks can also delivery vastly larger quantities of aid substantially faster and cheaper than planes.
surely it can be; why don't israel let journalists to enter gaza, so that many eyes will be there to see what is going on actually...
oh I think I know why, everyone knows why...
anonu · 6h ago
One data point is not enough to draw a line. But if you have two, three, dozens of data point... And the line points to the same thing over and over again.
LightBug1 · 6h ago
This man is definitely not the only one who has come forward. At want point to do you actually take multiple witnesses and believe them?
Many aid agencies and other sources on the ground have also verified many of the claims, when journalists can't (considering they've been banned from entering). Are all the aid agencies lying too?
And sometimes, just sometimes, in this world of AI now, video evidence is accurate.
The world is imperfect, and so we go with the balance of probabilities.
And I'll confirm for you. There's a murderous genocide taking place.
asdefghyk · 4h ago
How do you know that Hamas is not involved in these cases? You can not.
Also a high percentage of the said 50,000 killed would have to be Hamas terrorists.
Also, Hamas would be working overtime to make this new way of food distribution to fail.
Gaza people would not want to blame Hamas at ALL, since Hamas kills people who criticize them. This has happened in Past
In fact it is reported Hamas told Gaza people not to get food from the new distrubution places.
Hamas would also have to be guilty of genocide. In fact they have previously stated this in writing. Hamas is prepared to sacrifice Gaza people. Also Hamas committed genocide on October 7th
edsammy · 1h ago
Why is this here? I come to HN for hacker news not this. Go write some code you fucking nerds.
On the other hand, if you just feel like this isn't the site you want HN to be, I hear that and, yeah, sorry. It's kind of been this way since forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869).
https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Democracies-and-Death-Cults-Au... ) should be required reading for anyone who wants to write about/speak about this extremely unfortunate situation. it's pretty "rich" (and telling) for Hamas to initiate an unfathomably brutal, unprovoked attack on Israelis during their "holy days" (Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah), and, perhaps bizarrely, the U.N. and other institutions to have not only failed to highlight/adequately emphasize that Hamas started the war, but to have both explicitly and implicitly condoned it by portraying the (undeniably innocent) civilian casualties as "victims of Israel's cruelty/"war crimes" when, in "fact" Hamas does things like hide weapons and supplies in civilian homes, Mosques, schools, hospitals, etc so that when the IDF is essentially forced to preemptively defend itself/protect innocent lives from murderous anti-Semitic terrorists, the public sees headlines like "Israel bombs hospital in Gaza" rather than "Hamas hides weapons in hospitals in Gaza". I highly recommend both "On Democracies and Death Cults" by Douglas Murray and "The Parasitic Mind" by Dr. Gad Saad:
It is said, that the first causality of a war is truth.
We do not know what is true and what is not.
EchoReflection · 16m ago
That is a great quote, but we do know that it is "true" that Hamas started the war when they attacked Israel on October 7th and took many Israelis hostage :(
We do occasionally turn off flags in order to allow a discussion to happen because allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong
Many people have different views on whether this and other topics should have significant exposure and discussion on HN, but in this case it seems enough of the community sees the topic as important to discuss, that we need to respect that sentiment.
dang · 3h ago
To add to what Tom posted, it's worth remembering that HN has always hosted a certain number of political stories, and that this question of how-much-is-too-much has been around as long as the site has (or since 2008 at least).
Hitler had many opportunities, as well; but chose not to. Surrender was not a choice the Allies could make for him or for Germany; and it is not a choice Israel can make for Hamas or Gaza.
When do you switch from saying "yes these people are great for flip-flopping" to "no these people are terrible don't vote for them", and how do you say it in a way that gets through people's subtlety filters and doesn't make it look like you're flip flopping yourself?
The Biden administration also kept publically decrying the situation in Gaza while also promising full support and increasing weapon shipments to Israel. Saying one thing and doing the exact opposite over and over again.
Israel's real enemy won't stop and won't surrender until that country and it's people don't exist. They have taken the innocent civilian's of Gaza / Palistine / whatever you want to call the area hostage. They are also so ingrained into the region that resources are literally siphoned from humanitarian sites like hospitals into deep tunnels beneath; as just one example of reporting I'm inclined to believe is credible, even with the mutual atrocities both sites are carrying out.
What would winning look like from a moral and ethical standpoint? Liberating the people of that region from the violence and suffering. Return them to a functioning society with social and civic infrastructure. Fully deny major violence and terrorism in the region for LIFETIMES to the point that the hate and anger finally cool off enough for people to move on.
...
Winning is going to require a multi-generational investment in humanity by humanity. It's going to require the buy in of the people on the ground. It's going to require a United Nations coalition and boots on the ground from interests in that region who want to raise everyone above the hate. Also the afflicted country will need to be an absolute DMZ for that entire time. Membership in the UN peacekeeping organization the only military service allowed (and then likely in other countries).
Getting from here to there? Even less popular than the hugely unpopular war(s) anywhere else in the world. Don't ask me how anyone could do it, those skilled in the art of diplomacy have tried for longer than my lifetime and probably longer than your's and NOTHING has stuck.
Funny, this seems to be a pretty accurate description of Netanyahu's current position. He understands that he exists politically only as long as he can keep the war going. So, of course there is going to be no end to the 'war' against Hamas, even though it has transformed into mass genocide of civilians using starvation.
I offered a supposition for what real peace might look like in the region. One component of which is a peace keeping force that is not too close to the action, but also not from so far away as to be entirely insensitive or invasive themselves.
Israel has lost all moral superiority at this point and probably alienated an entire generation across the globe. All so that Bibi can cling to power a bit longer.
Edit: Spelling
when you claim colonizers, you're just making an excuse for the repeated strategic errors that the palestinians made, and will continue to make, that led them into this humiliating situation.
Sources from the early Zionist movement are replete with discussion of colonization. It's only now when the connotation (not the reality) of the term has changed that Israel supporters try to pretend it never happened.
Half of these people were born and raised in America or other countries yet it is their birth right because god said so?
Ludicrous behaviour whatever you want to call it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
When you use a phrase like "genocidal rhetoric", I assume that you consider certain comments to be wrong and bad. From that perspective your question could be generalized to "what's the best way to respond to wrong and bad comments on this site?" Keeping in mind that "bad" here doesn't just mean the comment is badly written, it means the commenter is bad.
Curiosity doesn't exclude wrongness or badness—it's interested in it. How did this comment (or person) get so wrong and bad? Could that change? Is there a response that could pull them out of wrongness and badness into rightness and goodness? Why do most of my (<-- I mean any of us, of course) attempts to do this fail so badly? Is there a more effective way to respond? Might there be something interesting here beyond wrongness and badness?
That's the spirit we're trying for on this site, so that's the answer to your question.
If I ask myself what other approaches are possible, there's one obvious option, and that is to crush/destroy/defeat the wrong and bad argument (and person) utterly. This is the desire to kill the other person (if only metaphorically (and maybe not always so metaphorically)), and thus establish rightness and goodness over wrongness and badness.
So the "accepted way" here is to listen to the other and dance with them, rather than killing them (or their position). Dance rather than war, if you like.
Is there a third option? I'm not sure. When I look inside myself, I can find the listen/dance option (or one could say give-and-take), and I can find the kill option. But I'm not sure I can find a third.
This is the smart thing to do if your goal is to build a broad movement that achieves effective change in the real world. When serving emotions and looking edgy to your viewers online is more important than stopping the genozide then you should go the vindictive route and purity-test each person joining your side. Pragmatism is not selling well online, the crowd wants to see blood.
That means usually ot serves well to take such unappologetic stances with a grain of salt, while they sound strong, they are not usually effective positions for a broad societal movement. That btw. doesn't mean you have to forget any politicians positions earlier in this conflict. That's what I meant with "We can walk and chew gum at the same time". Makw the movement broad and keep track who was on your side early on.
And this is important because what usually then happens in these scenarios is that there will be some token vote about ceasing shipping bombs to Israel which are then being dropped on civilians en masse, and it'll fail by 51/49, but the Senators who voted for it will be the ones who are up for elections in 2026. And as soon as they get back in power, they'll go back to cheering on Israel, while the next group up for election in 2028 will suddenly start taking a 'principled stance', with the net result that we can just manage to fail the next vote by 51/49 again as well.
Now - if these sort of motions start actually passing, then I'll happily eat crow. But, in general, this scenario has played out repeatedly in various forms, and it never changes.
If your goal is to get politics to take a tougher stance on a foreign government that matters how exactly?
I know it doesn't feel good and it is certainly not ideologically pure, but those are the politicians you got now, if they come over at your side welcome them with a knife hidden behind your back. You can always vote them out of office next time anyways, what you need now is their representation and vote.
IMO this mixes up two issues (genocide in Gaza and the wrong people in political office) and tries to solve both. But one of the issues has a different urgency than the others and I am afraid by purity-testing too hard a broad movement against Netanjahu is delayed.
If you don't want a specific politician vote for someone else next time and ensure there is a viable alternative when you do. That means you have lists who flip-flopped and try to tackle those who can be easily replaced first. But it is a separate problem.
Totally agree on people need to be able to change their minds based on new data and as the situation changes. I'm personally constantly trying to evaluate that. You do need to keep in mind though that data coming out of Gaza is still to a large extent controlled by Hamas. There is definitely a humanitarian crisis but it's amplified by Hamas for obvious reasons (trying to force Israel into stopping the war and allowing it to recover Gaza). Hamas is also benefiting from the crisis and it's actively fueling it. It also needs to have enough food for its fighters to keep going.
Technically from an international law perspective a siege is legal as long as civilians have a chance to leave. Israel can legally lay siege to Gaza city and the northern Gaza strip as long as it allows civilians to move south. This isn't working because the civilians don't want to move, or are forced to not move, or can't move, or have no place to really go to, so it's just not a good idea.
Another thing you're missing IMO is that some of the people attacking Israel here aren't generally in the camp of supporting Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas or use force to free the hostages. If your starting point is either denying Oct 7th or trying to somehow excuse Hamas or even support Hamas then you are not in the same camp as these politicians and you'll never be.
For the people who genuinely care and want to see an end to the war and a path forward, we need to find a way to get Hamas to yield. If there was a path that could get us there from an immediate ceasefire and end to the war I'd get behind it. It's not clear that path exists. In the absence of this path then Israel can and should do better to aid civilians but the war is not going to end.
This is the problem.
I fear many Jewish people hide their utter hatred for Palestinians behind this callous shrug off, as in, “well what are we supposed to do? They are either a terrorist or sheltering for one”. Low key callous, but truthfully, murderous.
The lies are so incredible, that one might even believe Gazans are staging the world’s greatest photo shoot of starvation and devastation. Make up, lighting, props, casting, and everything. They even casted Israeli soldiers, straight from Israel. Quite the production, eh? It’s a sick world.
Israel has officially said many times they are not targeting civilians but they are targeting Hamas. Israel is even arming Palestinians that oppose Hamas: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyn2m9yk0vo - "Netanyahu confirms Israel arming clans opposed to Hamas in Gaza"
So Israel is certainly not universally saying that everyone in Gaza is Hamas and the official Israeli position is one of separating the uninvolved from Hamas.
There is a lot of nuance here. Some Israelis, including soldiers, do consider the entire Gaza population to be complicit in Hamas' crimes. A large number of Palestinians support Hamas, support the Oct 7th attack on Israel, and there are even "civilians" who participated in murder and looting on Oct 7th and in abuse of hostages. Some hostages were held by "civilians". Hamas makes it intentionally hard/impossible to distinguish between a civilian and a combatant and they report all their deaths as civilian deaths.
The devastation of large swaths of the Gaza strip is real. But not all of Gaza is devastated. There are still some parts of Gaza city that are not. You can't tell and media will show you the parts that are not. You can notice however how the narrative magically switches from "Israel destroyed all the hospitals" to "injured people treated in hospitals from some IDF attack" as is convenient without people for a second questioning how the hospitals are still functioning despite Israel supposedly having bombed them all to the ground. We also had images early on in the war that told us "everything is devastated" but yet the IDF keeps toppling more buildings (that supposedly according to the media were already all bombed a year ago). The various UN groups still have buildings, warehouses, etc. In Gaza.
There's little doubt Gazans are suffering a lot in this war. But they're definitely staging a lot of stuff as well. Anything to manipulate public opinions is game. Truth is not a requirement. They've shared images from Yemen and Sudan claiming those to be Palestinians. They misrepresent other medical conditions as starvation. Check out: https://gazawood.com/
Now I'm not naive, both sides are pushing a narrative, the Palestinians are actually suffering, but it's not as clear cut as you're trying to paint it either.
Who benefits and who loses from news of "starvation in Gaza"? Hamas benefits. Israel loses. If you look you'll find images out of Gaza of people trying to make a buck by selling aid packages in the markets. How many times since the war began have we heard about famine and starvation? The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. There are likely poor people or people who can't fight with the others that steal aid who are doing badly. There are people who can afford to or who use violence to procure food for themselves (e.g. Hamas). There is certainly not an abundance of food and certainly whatever is available isn't the most nutritious.
Gazans have and do use civilian infrastructure extensively for military purposes. They booby trap houses. They have tunnels running everywhere.
I also think unless they want to kill or evict all two million Gazans, Israel's #1 priority in this conflict should be convincing Gazans that the Israelis are the good guys and Hamas are the bad guys. No matter how you spin it, they are failing at this, and they're using the wrong sort of weapons. It's merely sowing seeds for another three generations of unshakable hatred. That is not at all good for Israel but it might be just fine for Benjamin Netanyahu.
The other side of this coin is when you fight this kind of fight, in a dense urban environment, where combatants intentionally blend with civilians, and use any imaginable tactic they can to attack you, and put weapon stashes in civilian homes, and tunnel entrances etc. Where the enemy may even want to increase civilian casualties on their side, and when you have infantry and armor fighting day in and day out with no sleep and under constant pressure. You are going to have more of these incidents. There might be some at the margin that are actually war crimes but many are just what happens in this kind of war and in this specific scenario.
I'm not going to judge those people when I'm not in their shoes. Including the people who ordered the strike on that convoy. I am Israeli (who hasn't lived there in a long time, but I served in the distance past in the IDF) and I have spoken to people who have been in Gaza. So I know targeting an international aid group is not who we are. I also know that if it was decided that they were Hamas then they'd get obliterated, so that part is not a surprise.
The other thing I do know for sure, is that Hamas started this war and that Israel can not accept Hamas in Gaza after the war and it can not accept Hamas holding hostages after the war.
I'm not sure I see what Israel can do here in terms of Gazan perception of Israel or why it even matters. Many Gazans hate the Hamas but they have no control.
I don't disagree with you. But because this is a predictable result, it's also part of the calculus that Israel has to weigh as part of the choice to deploy its soldiers in those positions in the first place.
I do think that Israel doesn't have to be fighting this fight; instead it could be playing the soft power game in Gaza much better, and it's barely even trying to. In my opinion the carrot almost always works better than the stick, and Israel should be throwing a Marshall plan at Gaza, literally truck-tons of money making Palestinians rich and happy, under the one condition that they turn over the hostages and any Hamas militants who don't surrender. All that would cost pennies compared to the costs of waging war (and the eventual rebuilding, and the next century of anti-terrorism policing, all of which Israel will undoubtedly be footing the bill for). Instead Israel is choosing to stir the pot in the West Bank at the same time, removing any chance of getting the Palestinian Authority as an ally against Hamas, and burning through what was left of the post-WW2 international goodwill that got it statehood in the first place.
It's understandable and predictable but I think it's still deeply mistaken, and very sad for me to watch.
What makes you think that?
You mention the Marshall Plan, but the Marshall Plan worked in part because of Germany's unconditional surrender and the Allies complete assumption of control of Germany. If Israel wanted to follow the same game plan, they would have to do what they are doing, until Hamas was utterly defeated militarily.
It's important to recognize that Germany's surrender was not conditioned on any aid or support or anything else. Imagine if the Marshall Plan had been started prior to Germany's defeat -- it would only have prolonged the conflict.
This is not a problem that has a money solution. At least not at this point. One big misunderstanding of the "west" is that everyone wants the things that "they" do. Like a nice car, house, money, Costco, Walmart. Doesn't work like that.
Oddly enough the Palestinian Authority is siding with Israel in that Hamas can not control Gaza after the war. They just made a statement to that effect. The PA depends on Israel, Israel supports the PA, the Palestinians don't always like the PA. The PA is arguably happy with the IDF going after Hamas and PIJ in the West Bank in places like Jenin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenin_Brigades ) because Hamas wants to overthrow the PA just like it did in Gaza. The Israeli government makes a bit of a show of being against the PA while actually knowing very well it needs the PA and collaborating with the PA on security. OTOH the current government does not want the PA to get control of Gaza.
The "west bank" problem right now is that the extremists amongst the west bank settlers have more or less free reign by the government to attack Palestinians (and sometimes other Israelis). This is a result of Netanyahu's brittle coalition and the war. The Israeli right wing has always wanted to make sure there can not be a two state solution. What they still haven't quite wrapped their heads around is that they will instead have a one state solution. Really that would appear to be the only solution of sorts. Oddly enough the international community is still stuck in this "two state solution" despite it being completely unacceptable to both sides in this conflict and having proven to not work.
$40 billion over 26 years does certainly sound like a lot of aid money, but it works out to just around $300 per Palestinian per year, which is, I think, not even enough to counterbalance the economic damage that Israel imposes on Palestine (and especially Gaza) through movement restrictions and trade barriers and blockades. It certainly pales in comparison to the budget of the Israeli military (which, admittedly, obviously has more on its plate than just Palestine, and couldn't be entirely repurposed towards aid). At any rate it's not in the realm of what I contemplate as a Marshall plan approach.
And for it to work, that aid all has to come prominently stamped "courtesy of your friends in Israel". International aid from other sources can improve living standards but doesn't build much goodwill with the neighbours.
But I agree with you on the rest of what you say.
What I am sure of is that Israel's situation is not a war against a near-equal. The kind of rules of engagement I'm talking about are par for the course in peacekeeping operations, and there's no reason Israel cannot be employing them. Israel is shooting fish in a barrel, and if there's not enough time for them to double-check their homework on a missile strike then they have plenty of time to wait for a cleaner opportunity to take a shot. More importantly, I think that being extremely delicate is not only a moral imperative but a strategic one. Realistically, bombs dropped on Gaza can do more damage to Israel than to Hamas, both by causing fresh grievance in Palestinian hearts, which is the sustenance on which Hamas feeds for support and soldiers, and by gaining them sympathy abroad. I've been watching this happen in real time and it's playing out like clockwork, and I am sure that Israeli strategists see it too. But I also think Israel's loss is Netanyahu's win, and the stronger Hamas gets, the more justification Netanyahu has to push things further. So I see a feedback loop playing out in which Netanyahu and Hamas are on the same side, buffing each other while Israelis and Palestinians both lose.
(It also goes without saying that I also, obviously, denounce Hamas and the Oct 7th attacks, just like I denounce Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Un, Putin, and other villains. But I rarely see any point wasting breath on that kind of denouncement, at least not until I meet someone who thinks otherwise.)
No, the post you are responding to is correct.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/24/video-jewish-e...
You are blind to the Hamas' control of the narrative coming out of Gaza. You are also blind to the Hamas' ability to impact the situation and to their absolute control of any word coming out of the mouth of a "hospital director" or a "journalist" who are either Hamas or operating under the threat of death, torture, and violence to themselves and their families if they don't say what they're asked to say.
Here's some coverage: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-us-humanitarian-envoy-pans-... It's not super favorable for Israel but has some nuance that you're missing.
The article is an interview with: "David Satterfield, who served during early months of war, says dangerous transport routes, looting by desperate Palestinians severely hinder ability to pick up and deliver aid"
... "UN trucks repeatedly looted, including by thousands of desperate Palestinians, unsure when they and their families will receive their next meal."
"UN trucks repeatedly looted, including by thousands of desperate Palestinians, unsure when they and their families will receive their next meal."
"Moreover, looting carried out for purposes of commoditization will also dissipate because the value of assistance in the marketplace will drop due to the rise in supply."
So Palestinians are stealing food from other Palestinians to make a buck.
"Satterfield said “there’s no question” that the terror group has worked to take “political advantage and certainly some physical substantive advantage out of the aid distribution process.”
Hamas operatives have made a point of “flaunting” their presence at aid sites in a message to Palestinians that the group has no intention of ceding its role in the distribution process."
So we should not trust "hospital director" or "journalist" with scare quotes as they MIGHT be Hamas, but happily take IDF soldier's words as truth. The transparent bias is laughable.
I guess also that Israel forbids aid airplanes to take air footage of Gaza because Hamas bends the light to make it seem like IDF is committing war crimes. How devilish of them.
Israel is a settler-colonial white supremacist occupation and reporting on the "nuance" of how that situation has evolved over 76+ years without acknowledging Israel has no right to exist only serves the genocidal occupation of Palestine. We need to abolish all white supremacy projects, including those from Zionist entities.
The real answer is 19th century warfare in the tunnels where all of Israel's tactical advantages disappeared.
But instead they cowardly ordered 2,000 lb bombs that didn't accomplish any of their stated goals and killed their own hostages. Instead they designated everyone in Gaza as a terrorist and killed their own hostages when they managed to escape because everyone has the same Semitic phenotypes (awwwwkwaaaard). Instead they put their freshman IDF conscripts on social media to claim any dissent of the military strategy was incitement against Jewish people's right to exist. On the social media front, I'm not sure what's more embarrassing, getting paid to do that, or not getting paid to do that.
LOL 51% of Israelis gave Palestinians a 0 out of 100 score rating of their humanity, according to PCPSR and the Times of Israel poll: https://pcpsr.org/en/node/989
"When asked about the level of humanity of other side, Palestinians gave Jews an average score of 6 out of 100; Jews gave Palestinians an average score of 14. 51% of Jewish Israelis gave Palestinians a score of zero, and 71% of Palestinians gave the same score to Israelis. One percent of Palestinians gave Israeli Jews a score of 80 or higher, and 2.7% of Israeli Jews scored Palestinians in this range. This question could reflect respondents’ perception of the inherent qualities of the other side, or their assessment of the other side’s behavior, or both."
Here is some older (pre-Oct 7th) but maybe more "color":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dPoDb81OiI - "Israeli Soldiers: Do you hate Palestinians?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=r5168ysQ2rU&t=37... - "Israelis: How much do you hate Palestinians?"
I recommend the ask project on Youtube for people who want to get a little less black and white opinions on these topics.
> Mirror image negative perceptions: Israeli Jews and Palestinians hold near-mirror images regarding the current war: a majority on each side views the other as seeking to commit genocide; each side believes it is the worst victim in the world, and on each side, a large majority believes the other lacks humanity.
I think Israel is disproportionately responsible for the atrocities in this war, given that it's militarily ascendant. But the two groups are about the same in terms of sentiment, which bodes poorly for any future peace in the region (and plays into Israel's standard refrain, i.e. that peace is structurally impossible because Palestinian extremist groups would reward peace with violence (much like how Israeli extremist groups reward peace with violence)).
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Please omit swipes and flamebait from your posts, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This is also in your interest, since you can always make your substantive points without it and it will make your comments more persuasive.
edit: I appreciate that you edited that bit out of your comment, but once there are replies, you should make it clear how you edited it. Otherwise you deprive the replies (like this one) of their original context.
The rules however do not permit personal attacks and name-calling. You can say the same things without the name calling or attacks.
What made the difference between that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718039) and the one I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718268) was the pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling in "You Zionists are really not even putting any effort into your hasbara anymore." (this line has since been edited out by the GP commenter). That is a dividing line where we can post mod comments because (1) there aren't so many such posts, so it's feasible, and (2) attacks like that have a particularly bad effect on threads.
> Pro-Genocide ? Fine. No swipes and flamebaits tho!
I hear you, but these two things are on different levels. To explain what I mean, let's assume that I completely agree with you on this topic. Ok? We agree that genocide is wrong and bad—far more than somebody being snarky in an internet comment, right? So wtf is wrong with the mods if they penalize one and not the other? Is "pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling" worse than genocide? Of course not; only a monster would say so.
The answer is that we're not trying to exclude wrongness and badness in the comments here. I know that sounds bad, but suppose I said "the mods' job is to decide what's true and good and then impose it on everyone else". You wouldn't want that, right? what if we disagreed? Certainly the community as a whole would not want that.
Rather it's your job (i.e. the commenters) to work that out through discussion and argument. The mods' job is to try to keep that discussion and argument respectful* between the players. When we see people crossing that line, we respond. Otherwise we don't respond, even when someone says something which we feel is both wrong and bad, because it's not our place to impose that on the community.
(Btw I posted a bit more on this theme here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719138)
* For practical purposes "respectful" means in keeping with the guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's true that Netanyahu is and was opposed to a Palestinian state and that dividing the Palestinians between Hamas and the PA was strategic in that regard. However he misjudged Hamas as not having motivation or ability to attack Israel. A by the way is that since 2007 Israel has attacked Hamas in Gaza and Hamas attacked Israel as well so it's not exactly like they were pals. It was more of the devil we (thought we) know kind of situation.
But there is a previous there which is the failure of the Oslo accords due to Hamas' suicide bombing campaign on Israel. Hamas bombed the peace process to death (alongside with hundreds of random civilians) and also directly cause the rise of the right in Israel and the change of opinion in the Israeli public from accepting the idea of a two state solution to a belief that Israel can not accept that solution. Dividing the Palestinians as a strategy came after the Palestinians showed Israelis that living side by side is impossible. And if the Israelis needed further proof we got the Oct 7th attack.
It's also worth mentioning that short of re-taking Gaza (which we see is not simple) Israel didn't really have a lot of choices once Hamas took and established itself in Gaza. Maybe the right thing to do was to retake Gaza immediately in 2007. I'm sure the world, including you, would scream bloody murder occupation if that happened. Otherwise there's not a lot that could have been done. The civilian aid that made its way into Gaza and Hamas' hands was also a result of international pressure on Israel under the idea that if there was some sort of stability/prosperity in Gaza that would lead to peace. What happened in practice is Hamas channeled all of that into its military efforts and we see where that led us.
> According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
It's as tough as desalinating water, but removing the civilians from the terrorists must happen. Otherwise the result will either be genocide of the 'salt water', or of the 'plants' the salt in that water is bent on destroying.
What is an acceptable plan for reaching the result of the civilians on both sides being safe? This is a political question, but it is one all must consider; at least as it informs our own votes where we reside.
It's a very tough one to swallow for Israelis. I'm also not positive it would have worked. But I think it would be worth a try.
I think in the beginning of the war there was some thought of Egypt playing that role but it was pretty clear that wasn't going to happen.
The problem is throughout the war Israel had no appetite/desire to own the problem of Gazan civilians. Israel intentionally left that part to Hamas and the UN and at no time during this conflict has controlled any piece of land with Palestinian civilians.
It should have simply returned the refugees to their land. But then they wouldnt be stateless individuals, they would have (minimal, as second class subjects) rights, and present a greater challenge to settlement like those in the west bank. Ultimately this is a settlement project, and distracting from that, and the right of those refugees in gaza to return to their land, is the ultimate point of the conflict.
Just like the Jewish refugees from Arab countries or Europe are not returning there either.
It the Palestinians are stuck in 1948 over the war they and the Arabs started and lost they're never going to get anywhere. They had a chance when Israel was established to be equal citizens and they decided not to take it. It might be tough, it might not be "just", but that clock is never turning back.
The sad thing is how Palestinians and Arabs treat those people. Everywhere else in the world refugees were taken in. But other than Jordan all Arab countries have decided to just keep those people as refugees for eternity. Including the Palestinians, and Gazans, who treat the refugees like second class people.
This is so silly. Israel is a tiny country. There are countless huge Muslim countries, none of which want to help Gazans.
How many German refugees did the Allies take in WW2?
Putting that aside, no one, not Hamas, not the Israeli public, not Netanyahu, and certainly not the IDF, not any neighboring countries, not the wider world believed the war would drag on this long. Everyone thought it would be over fairly soon. Hamas probably didn't think there would be a war because israel itself was on the brink of a civil war, the Israeli public with their strong belief in their military might thought the war would be over before the new year and the IDF and politicians (BN included) likely had a similar belief, that A) Hamas didn't have an apatite for a long war, and B) the IDF would be able to quickly return the hostages. Everyone else also believed in the might of a stronger more organized force against a much weaker force that supposedly also had to care for their own people.
Instead Hamas showed they had no concern for their own people, and they had significantly deeper fortifications than the israeli security establishment knew about. So here we are almost two years later, and no end in sight.
I repudiate what they are doing, but I do not disagree with their calculation. I can imagine no scenario where any foreign power tries to actually stop them.
They use the story of Amalek from the Torah.
One of the Rabbis I watched recently said "when you kill the first child it breaks your heart [...] then you start to enjoy it."
_Many_ Rabbis are demanding that animals, children, women and unarmed males be "erased." IDF soldiers are bragging about killing and raping civilians on social media. One IDF soldier was complaining he hasn't shot any children under 12 yet.
Netanyahu is a moderate. He's not an "extremist."
As for Netanyahu ... the Overton window in Israel has shifted far to the right so one can say in those terms that he's a "moderate", but I think it's a bit of a semantic game. His behavior is extreme, regardless of the fact that the behavior of the whole damn country is extreme.
[1] - https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/So...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalek
[3] - https://biblehub.com/1_samuel/15-3.htm
His office pointed out that the same phrase appears at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, as well at a memorial in The Hague, in reference to the Nazis. Of course they're statements about remembering Nazi atrocities, and not calls to genocide the German people.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pms-office-says-its-prepostero...
South Africa has no moral authority given that it refuses to arrest Putin.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-referen...
If those people had a come-to-Jesus moment, great. That said, they probably owe an apology to the people they demonized as supporting terrorism.
Blaming all of Israel's chosen military strategy on Hamas invading at all is just weird. Like, there should really be a mental evaluation of everyone that repeated lines like that. Like seriously, trawl the entire internet for those people's screennames.
The situation hasn't changed. The data is the same going back years. It's healthy to be cautious of people who join a movement under false pretenses like that.
If they learned a new perspective, that's great! I just wish it didn't have to come to personally witnessing such brutality to gain a new perspective...
well, you're leaving out the UK wrt French fisherman invading, thus depriving them of the full extent of their territorial waters. And Ukraine's territorial waters have been curtailed.
but the only place I can think of that's similar to what you're talking about would be the Houthis. I guess they do have free navigation in their territorial waters, and turns out they make great neighbors! https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3071vp2d8yo I guess nothing can go wrong!
Yet the level of incompetence demonstrated when Hamas took the hostages was beyond incompetence. A retired general hopped in his car and rounded up a bunch of troops to extract his daughter. No officers were present in the area.
It seems weird that a military that had 3D mapping and monitoring of a region allowing it to detect and target concealed Hezbollah artillery in buildings somehow was caught flat footed. It’s weirder that there hasn’t been any commentary about this in an age where every decision made is analyzed to death.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/01/israels-female...
From my perspective, they handed over control of the region and have had countless opportunities since the handoff to occupy the land permanently had they so chosen. Couldn't it just as easily be argued that they no longer trust sharing a border with them?
I don’t know anything about the impetus for the Oct 7th attack was, but you have to wonder why.
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Regardless of where you land, I don't think anyone can look at what's going on in the middle east and think things are going fine - or ever were.
Perhaps, if we ever decide to act globally, we shouldn't permit any more migratory nationalist projects - they seem to be inherently problematic.
Given the demographics of Jewish people outside of Israel, it's hard to disagree with. When you consider the early years of Israel, and how many wars were started to run the Jews out of it, it's even more well-supported.
The best hope for a lasting peace was with the Oslo accords. They were torpedoed by the Palestinians themselves, who were unwilling to accept any kind of compromise that maintained a Jewish state.
Not saying Israel is innocent, but the idea that so many people seem to have that the region would be happy-go-lucky and peaceful for Jewish people if not for the war is hopelessly naive.
You probably wouldn't feel that way 1945.
But despite that I still stand by my statement. Especially in the nuclear age. History does not repeat but it does rhyme. And in 2025, Jews aren't the ones clawing for an exit visa. I'll leave it there because I don't feel the need to argue this point further.
Its been the common theme of anti war sentiment for the better part of a century. "Never Again". "Lest We Forget". etc. What was all that holocaust remembrance for if not to get ahead of and prevent situations like this (While Gaza doesnt have a lot to do with the holocaust in totality it sure looks like a Warsaw Ghetto).
Its kind of useless to get people along for a single issue, ending the genocide in Gaza, but for them to not understand why the things that lead up to the genocide in Gaza are bad also. Mobilising a military, into a civilian area, that has been trained from birth to resent the people in that space, that they own that space, told that the government will support them killing civilians, is going to cause this. Supporting that action is bad actually. Wanting that military, in that area, is something an Asshole would want.
The phrase "Mowing the grass" was coined in like 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
Its like closing a ticket without addressing the root cause. Just gonna come up again.
>but now that it has turned into a brutal siege with mass civilian casualties on a horrific scale
Its been that(again) since the IDF got organized, late 2023.
Around 20% of Israelis are Muslims and they have full rights and get to vote, so no its not an apartheid state.
So, "Stop the genocide" and then what? Build a bigger fence? Wait for the next episode? Im generally interested if anyone has an opinion that goes beyond leave Gaza alone and considers Israelis dilema.
Would you agree that “an eye for an eye” type justice is undesirable? Because it seems like you are advocating for genocide as a response to the oct attack, going well beyond “eye for an eye”!
You would say the same about any group that did the same things to you as the Israeli have done to Palestinians. Answer this: will these actions by Israel decrease or increase the number of people who think that way? Even if they kill all the Palestinians and get rid of the threat in Gaza, they'll just create more, deeper and stronger hate against themselves in the region and the world. If at any point in time they lose the support of the most powerful country on earth, they'll be in huge danger and they can only blame themselves for creating that danger.
Unfortunately, this is true of both sides, and one side seems much closer to accomplishing its goal than the other side.
> what would you have them do
The same question was answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718080
The expectation back then was you should kill Nazis and Japanese until they surrender without any conditions. Hamas always puts conditions on releasing hostages.
Two years is enough time for the deed to be done, say whatever you need to say now, it doesn’t matter. You see that Israel has allowed aid in all of a sudden according to this contrived timeline. It’s not different than a teacher letting a bully beat down a kid for a solid 10 minutes and jumping in after with a “ok that’s enough now”. Such an actor is complicit.
I’d urge people read Marin Luther King’s words on inaction.
...Except I clocked Israel as having genocidal ambitions within days of Hamas' attack, right about the time their generals started talking about cutting off power and water to the entirety of gaza.
I have imagine I am both less informed and more naive than any of these politicians. I don't have to applaud them when they spinelessly slither with the prevailing political winds.
that is the main point for me. There are a lot of claims, yet almost no verifiable data. With smartphones everywhere and having seen how war is documented say in Ukraine (and also how the propaganda lies are made there), i believe practically no claim until there is a video for it. For example the news of shooting near aid distribution centers come almost every day. How come nobody has recorded it? Especially with Hamas flying a bunch of drones there, they would undoubtedly have made such footage and published the footage around the world.
At the beginning of the Gaza war i put a bit of effort to calibrate for myself how much lying is there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38751882
Personally I don’t see it being a case of one side of protesters being “right” and “wrong”. I just think Israel should have pulled out an awfully long time ago. They went too far, have done too much damage and the calculus doesn’t make sense any more. I have no problem with the initial invasion of Gaza to stop Hamas and get their people back. I’m not sorry for saying so, or holding that position after Hamas gave them such a clear casus belli. But it doesn’t seem to be about that any more. There’s been too much bloodshed. Something needs to change.
I’m not sure what you’re looking for. An apology? For what, exactly? For being told there are antisemitic people taking advantage of this conflict to hate on Jews? There are.
The point is that you were told this was the inevitable consequences of such actions and yet chose to ignore it. That's probably the kind of mea culpa they're looking for.
Predicting the future is notoriously tricky, but pretending like this outcome was in any way unlikely is extremely disengenuous.
We could equally say that this overreaction by Israel was entirely predictable - and inevitable - after Hamas’s murderous rampage on Oct 7. And to take hostages and not return them? What did they think Israel would do? Capitulate to Hamas’s demands, thereby encouraging Hamas to do the same thing again every few months when they want treats? Invasion was perhaps the only option the Israelis had. Hamas played chicken, using their own civilians as human shields. And Israel called their bluff. To the death of tens of thousands of innocent lives.
The heartbreaking part is that I agree with you. I feel like this conflict is inevitable. And it’s the civilians on both sides - but especially Gaza - who are bearing the brunt of misery as a result.
What on earth do I have to be sorry about? Of course their murderous rampage through Gaza happened after October 7. Even with the benefit of hindsight I’m not sure what better options Israel had.
I just wish they’d pull out and let the rebuilding begin. This conflict won’t be healed with more blood.
I hope people changing their view of it now will reflect on at what point they could have seen that, and what prevented them from seeing it, and what prevented them from taking seriously the people who did see it. Does everyone hold the belief that everything was fine until two days ago? I don't think that's a very strong position.
Help me understand this position. If you were in charge of Israel on October 7, what would you have done differently?
It sounds like there was some better course of action they could have taken that seems obvious to you. It’s not at all obvious to me. Please share.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/08/israel-gaza-ha...
On October 8 they cut all imports to Gaza, and cut off the electricity and gas supplies to the entire civilian population. That was probably a war crime by itself, as collective punishment. Palestinian hospitals reported being overwhelmed by Sunday morning. Netanyahu said civilians should all leave Gaza - without opening any exits - and promised to inflict an unprecedented price in response to the attacks.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/08/middleeast/israel-gaza-attack...
What on earth does “no actions” mean to you!?!?
For example there are recents vids of syrian muslims going door to door in villages in Syria and asking people if they are muslims or of the Druze faith: those answering they're from the Druze faith are shot on the spot.
This qualify as war crimes too to me.
But you don't get to read much about it in the mainstream media and many NGOs (not all) who are very active when it's about helping palestinians are keeping totally quiet on the subject too.
I see much more outrage about what's happening to palestinians then what's happening to Druze people.
Why is that? How comes it's so selective?
Similarly: the western world is constantly reminded of colonialism. But why are the hutis getting a free pass for the 800 000 tustis they genocided 25 years ago? How comes they're not constantly reminded of what they did? Those who committed these atrocities, including regular citizens, are still alive today.
And somehow we should pay because our great-great-great-great-grandfather was a colonialist?
It's that dual standard, that highly selective outrage, that is very hard to stomach for me.
BTW I don't recommend watching the vids of syrian muslims executing Druze people: it's hard.
The main reason is that Israel is materially supported by the West, so Westerners feel morally responsible for what it does.
It has little to do with whether the perpetrators are Jewish or not[1]. There were gigantic protests against the Iraq war, whose main perpetrators (e.g. Bush) were not Jewish.
1: I edited this from "nothing" to "little". I concede it might have something to do with anti-Semitism, because there is some non-zero group of people whose opposition to Israel is purely motivated by anti-Semitism, but I don't get the sense that they're the majority, at least among Westerners.
No one ever says anything because there are no Jews to blame.
[1]: second highest recipient of US aid [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi-led_intervention_in_the_...
One reason Israel gets so much attention in the US is that US taxpayers are underwriting the war; both by selling arms and by defending attacks on Israel. So in other words, every tax paying US person who works is working hard every day to further genocide. It is a bitter pill to swallow, and highlights the contradictions and hypocrisy of US foreign policy.
My tax dollars are not as clearly implicated in the wars in Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, or the various other genocides.
Most of the weapons used to kill civilians in Gaza are payed for by American taxpayers. US citizens bear a large responsibility for what is going on there.
> But why are the hutis getting a free pass for the 800 000 tustis they genocided 25 years ago? How comes they're not constantly reminded of what they did? Those who committed these atrocities, including regular citizens, are still alive today.
The world stood by and let that genocide happen, and we appear to be standing by and letting this one happen too
On the other hand, this seems like whataboutism instead of honestly facing the truth.
> not just when they're committed by jewish people
Really skeptical that’s the filter that’s being applied here.
That won't happen due to the USA. So in practice the answer to "How will the Gazans eat?" is "They won't."
UNRWA, WFP, etc. You know, the ones with decades of experience in Gaza and other war zones with sites, warehouses, and all the other infrastructure necessary to support a population under siege.
I, for one, am thankful this hasn't been taken down like any article remotely critical of Israel.
And this has eliminated the whole Western bullshit about human rights maximalism - it's just the same damn thing every time. Like the atrocities in the Congo free State, the Scramble for Africa, etc. the West will sponsor unspeakable atrocities overseas and then act shocked when they actually happen.
Many people in the West don't realize it, but Palestine will wreck severe damage on the West. Just like Gorbachev visiting a random store in the US and seeing insane abundance in a shop in the middle of nowhere while Soviet citizens starved, what killed the Soviet Union was disillusion; people at all levels realized that a system that couldn't provide its people the basics didn't deserve to exist.
That's what happening in the West: American GWOT veterans are still feeling disillusioned about what they went to do in Iraq & Afg. (and Vietnam, before it), and now their kids are seriously asking, "Are we the baddies?"
What's the point of this industrial capacity and wealth if all we do with it is bomb kids? No political system can survive disillusion, that is, the point where people across the spectrum start seeing their nation as hypocritical.
Israel should be as aware of the statistics as anyone, especially when undertaking the systematic extermination of a population. If Israel actually intended this, don't you think it would go much faster, with the tremendous amount of ordnance that has been expended and the overwhelming military force Israel has in place? It just doesn't add up.
Even the stated explanation that they wanted to deprive Hamas of the ability to fundraise by stealing food and selling it back didn't make sense. Food shortages would cause the market value of hoarded food to rise, thus helping Hamas. Flooding the region with food would collapse the prices and deprive them of a revenue stream.
BTW, all orgs (other than the lyin' IDF) says Hamas wasn't stealing significant amounts of aid (nowhere near the 10% claimed). Therefore it's clear starvation was the goal, not targeting funding or Hamas at all.
Before October 7, activists insisted that Gaza’s border restrictions were driven purely by hatred rather than any legitimate security concerns. That view was completely discredited by the attacks on October 7, so forgive me for being skeptical of similarly absolutist claims being made now.
To be clear, preventing famine should take far greater priority than intercepting a few more rockets with Iron Dome. The suffering in Gaza is undeniable. But I see Israel’s actions as driven more by indifference or strategic rigidity than by a calculated intent to exterminate.
Maybe that distinction doesn't matter to you, since it doesn't change how people are dying needlessly, but how we interpret Israel’s intent shapes how we respond. Backing Israel into a corner tends to make things worse, not better. That’s why the Biden administration’s approach of supporting military aid while applying diplomatic pressure was the only viable path to avoid even greater catastrophe.
This would be the dumbest way to do this. It would take centuries to exterminate them at this rate. The genocide narrative makes no sense to any person with a brain.
And I can provide numerous examples: Portugal's colonial holdings (Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique) were unwound after the carnation revolution because the overseas wars were consuming 50% of the national budget while the Estado Novo at home was a corrupt, violent, authoritarian, corporatist state.
The Brits could not square a global empire while their countrymen were rationing food, etc. at home. That had to go as well.
Despite all the Cold War propaganda spread since the fall of the USSR, in 1991, the Soviet Union was still a first-rate military power, with 35k to 40k nuclear warheads and >150 divisions, totaling 3.4M troops. It could easily suppress any of those pro-democracy protests, and all the CIA's burrowing in the Sovbloc would come to nought.
But there was no longer anything worth fighting for. Even people within the Party infrastructure had come to admit that they'd been living for a lie, lying for a lie, killing for a lie-all that for a lie!
The Qing dynasty faced massive internal revolts (Taiping, Boxer), external invasions (Opium Wars), and technological stagnation. The empire resisted modernization too long, then tried too little, too late.
Overwhelmed by foreign powers and internal revolution (1911), it died because it could no longer defend the illusion of legitimacy.
In France's Ancien Regime, nobles were exempt from taxes while peasants starved; France had a bloated, corrupt court and massive debt (partly from helping America fight the British!), yet refused reforms.
Nazi Germany claimed to be defending “Western civilization” while practicing industrial genocide and totalitarian control over - wait for it - Europeans!
One contradiction doesn't bring down a political system, but it cascades, because a hypocritical system dives deeper into hypocrisy until it eventually collapses.
That's the truth. "Never again". Clearly our politicians do not believe in human rights or international law. What do they believe in? Democracy? I doubt it. Money? Western exceptionalism? More likely. Where do we go from here? Why would anyone ever take any moral argument from a western nation seriously ever again?
Wait for few more hours to be thankful.
Edit: And this comment is flagged to hell, as well, haha. I guess saying that the systematic murder of civilians is bad is now a controversial opinion, lmao.
I’ve caught flak from both sides for saying so. Some people seem deadset on making an enemy of nuance.
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No, but this mode of discourse is obnoxious and uncharitable.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
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Yeah, Hamzah has been making lots of videos of IDF soldiers (and other Israelites) saying that they want all Palestinian children to die, and that their lives are worth more than Palestinians' lives.
I am not surprised by any of this, the media is probably controlled. They hear what the Government wants them to hear, which is this: they are the good guys.
[1] I do not claim to know everything either, which should be very obvious, but I try to postpone forming a judgment.
It is still sickening (in my humble opinion) that many people straight out tell him that they want children to die, but only Palestinian children.
Well, them and Israeli far right who have been able to stay in power so far.
?????
I am generally not at all invested in this conflict and I cede that I have very little information about what is going on, and it's been like that for me for decades.
But the information that is available to me, in the current context, from looking at HN, is: pro-Palestine and anti-Israeli sentiments are the norm in comment sections here; comments resisting this viewpoint are routinely downvoted and flagged; news stories about the conflict that make it to the HN front page (including this one) overwhelmingly are taking Palestine's side; and on occasions where I've tried to flag submissions that I felt were grossly uncharitable (making claims beyond what their evidence supports, and/or using inflammatory language) they have not been taken down (and I've only seen anti-Israel examples of such to flag).
At any rate, your comment is a polemic that appears not to even consider reasons why other people might see the issue differently, and implicitly shames people for not coming to a conclusion you consider obvious. That is not up to the standard I understood HN political discussion to expect.
(And since I have showdead on, I can see the replies to you that were flagged and killed. They are really not any worse from what I can tell, but they apparently have the wrong political polarity — the one you claim is endorsed, directly counter to the evidence available to me.)
P.S. Whoever downvoted and flagged this, please explain your reasoning. I am happy to consider your point of view.
The vast majority of people across the world is in favour of the end of bombing and segregation, and against the regime that perpetuate it, if only because of empathy alone. And HN does indeed reflects this to some extent.
What the OP was alluding to when he said that pro palestinian view points were silenced is the more or less dissimulated support for the war and systematically misleading depiction of the situation in the mainstream news. To say nothing about the exceedingly harsh criminalization of dissent.
You might not be aware of it, if really you don't read anything beyond tech news, and I'm not going to blame you for that.
Should you not feel the need to evidence this?
> the more or less dissimulated support for the war and systematically misleading depiction of the situation in the mainstream news.
First, I don't see why I should conclude that that's what the comment was about. The part I quoted was:
> I, for one, am thankful this hasn't been taken down like any article remotely critical of Israel.
I understood this to mean "taken down from HN".
But I see nothing of the sort in mainstream news, either. The news coverage available to me is full of stories like the submission, and says rather little that would tend to justify Israel. If I search, for example, for coverage in the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) of the conflict, I find plenty of independent sources claiming that there is some kind of whitewashing going on (and none of the people making these claims seem to face any negative repercussions for doing so — as they shouldn't, since Canada is also pretty good on the freedom of speech thing), but then I look at the actual CBC articles I find and they're just... not as described.
The general sense I get is that people who characterize this as a genocide are upset that other people fail to accept this characterization by fiat.
> To say nothing about the exceedingly harsh criminalization of dissent.
Who has been imprisoned for merely expressing the view that this is a genocide, as opposed to being imprisoned for the usual disorderly, anti-social actions that typically get protesters (in general, whatever they're protesting for) imprisoned?
You are operating until a false premise that Palestinians/Hamas are some sort of children and bear no responsibility for anything at all.
Where in reality, the war could have been over in 5 minutes if they released the hostages at any time during the past 3 years. It still can be over in 5 minutes if they choose to do that. But no, they will put as many of their own people in harm's way as necessary to get to the world opinion to be what it is. And literally no one, including you, is questioning that. But please, do tell me that hostages have nothing to do with anything or Netanyahu bad or whatever else you can cook up.
> while Soviet citizens starved
As someone who grew up in the USSR, I can assure you - no one was starving.
> what killed the Soviet Union was disillusion. People at all levels realized that a system that couldn't provide its people the basics didn't deserve to exist.
That is such a simplistic view of what happened. I don't think that the system cared what its people thought at any time during the existence of the Soviet Union.
Where in reality, the war could have been over in 5 minutes if they released the hostages at any time during the past 3 years. It still can be over in 5 minutes if they choose to do that. But no, they will put as many of their own people in harm's way as necessary to get to the world opinion to be what it is. And literally no one, including you, is questioning that.
Palestinians and Hamas are 2 different groups of people. Which 1 are you referring to when you say "they"? Only the Hamas can legally be punished as a result of Hamas's actions. Punishing Palestinians because you're mad at Hamas is a war crime.
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Do people in the west today consciously consider Palestinians to be subhuman? I don’t think so? So this today is like much much worse actually IMO from a moral defensibility standpoint.
This is orthogonal to your point, I agree with your point.
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There will be no Palestine. Egypt doesn't want the refugees. Jordan doesn't want the refugees. Qatar doesn't want the refugees. UAE doesn't want the refugees. Syria doesn't want the refugees. Lebanon doesn't want the refugees. Iran and Iraq don't want the refugees. America doesn't want the refugees. Europe doesn't want the refugees. Russia & China don't want the refugees.
When the fortnite-circle closes in Gaza and West Bank, where do you think these people will go? To a gigantic concentration camp? They'll fight -and die- first. Israel, and all of the surrounding nations are counting on this fact.
Palestine is done. Over. Finished. They have nowhere to go. They won't accept permanent incarceration. That leaves rebellion unto death.
That is the option the world has given these people. Do we help them? Move them? No. We condemn Israel's actions and blah-blah-blah.
Humanity makes me nauseous.
Also, could you please point out where are they refugees from? '48 is 77 years ago, how is the 2nd and 3rd generation are still refugees? There are no other people in the world who claim to be refugees in the 2nd and 3rd generation.
Specifically it targeted the entire ruling party, the head of state, representatives, their spouses, and their businesses, and the military, including former officials.
This doesn't require Congress, it requires the stroke of a pen.
Hamas is already economically sanctioned so I feel immune from criticism here. If the exact same standard was applied to Israel as EO 14046 levied, then it would practically affect the entire population of the country given the participation in the IDF.
But since only anti-semites believe Jewish people are tightly integrated in global finance, and that's presumably not true then this should be no big deal right?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/clyj4gnzxgno
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl–Bingaman_Amendment
For reference, link to the AP's reporting including satellite photos with before/after sliders (2023<->2025):
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-destruction...
(Disclaimer: I'm out of my depth on satellites, photography, and international relations... & almost everything really)
I can see destroyed buildings on Google Maps. :(
Gazans still hold Israeli hostages, Hamas has publicly stated that more civilian deaths helps their cause [1], they're still fighting, the UN refused to distribute aid because they were getting attacked [2], and Israel unilaterally pulling out of Gaza and leaving them to govern themselves is literally what led to October 7th...
1 - https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/11/middleeast/sinwar-hamas-israe...
2 - https://www.wfp.org/news/un-food-agency-pauses-deliveries-no...
Edit - I love it. Down votes instead of responding to this comment's question. Again, what's your solution people?
Edit 2 - is this really a good use of the flagging tool? Is this what HN is about?
The fact that Israel has no problem creating these civilian deaths is part of the problem. If you claim "human shields" you lose all credibly when you shoot nonetheless. It genuinely horrifying that you accept "well they made us kill all those kids".
This would be easy to see if you accepted the Palestinian people as, well, people.
> Again, what's your solution people?
Two states, stop holding a people in a perpetual refugee camp and you might be surprised and how much less they fight you. And, if you really have two states, then there's a framework for retaliation if it comes to that.
This was Israel's solution, its the other side that keeps rejecting this solution and has been rejecting it for many generations now.
So after 70 years of that it makes sense Israel are fed up with trying to ask for two state solution, because the other side will never agree that wont work, they have to solve it in another way.
Arafat and the PLA/PLO, let's be clear, were responsible for many terrorist atrocities. But let's not forget, their softening, and efforts at the negotiation table, put the Israel far right in a tough spot. Questions were really starting to get awkward - "Arafat is negotiating and making concessions, so why isn't Israel?"
That's when Netanyahu and his buddies decided that Israel needed to start supporting Hamas, because Hamas was more hardline than the PLO. And their rise would make it easy to deflect blame away from Israel for being unwilling to explore the peace process.
Israel completely pulled out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. Allowed them work permits in Israel, didn't control the border with Egypt, etc...
Then October 7th happened...
The border with Egypt was controlled indirectly, Egypt is a puppet state of the US. For a moment it wasn't and suddenly they got a military coup and nobody stopped them in the name of democracy...
Hamas, not Gazans. Nice play with language.
> hostages,
The thousands of Palestinian "administrative detainees" held without charge in Israel, are not hostages?
Hamas claimed non-Hamas groups and some civilians held hostages. Some hostages were found in captivity guarded by "civilians". Groups like PIJ held hostages.
So what's a nice catch-all term for the above groups?
At a minimum stop funding them, stop selling weapons to them, at an absolute minimum repeal the rules against boycotting them. Yes that wouldn't be a complete solution but it would be a step in the right direction.
By the way, I don’t see criticism of Israel, but Israel’s current extremist government. I’d even argue that supporting Israel means opposing that administration.
So answer the question with your solution.
If you really believe that Gazans are being starved, then save them by coming up with a great solution for Israel. Let's hear what you think Israel should do.
"Not X!" is a copout.
Unfortunately for that perspective, finding a good solution means diving in and understanding the conflict from the Israeli perspective.
Everything else (hostage return, feelings of safety, etc) is:
1. Less important, and
2. Equally applicable to both israel and palestine
Finding a good solution means diving in and understanding the conflict beyond israel's perspective: There is simply no legal or moral justification for the atrocities we see here. None whatsoever.
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Although having way more food/distribution points might help reduce the violent mobs.
Also: It'd require infrastructure that did exist before the IDF destroyed it. To feed people that weren't hungry before Israel blocked humanitarian aid. Don't reverse the guilt.
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Return the refugees to their land and disband the settlements (west bank too). Cash payouts for palestinian refugees to rebuild their homes whether returned to previously occupied lands or just needing to rebuild gaza itself.
After reintegrating the civilian population they can go on an anti hamas witch hunt. And Hamas can be put on trial at the hague next to bibi and gvir. Easy.
You still answered with a negative, not a real answer.
Oh, you are going to say, "that's to prevent future fighters from capturing future hostages", I guess?
But wait, we know that today's bombings are making future fighters, so, really, what's the plan??
You know, the evening of the 9/11 I remember spending the whole night depressing, thinking "omg, now the US are going to wage war all around the globe, my son will grow up in a terrible place". Because how could the military behemoth answer in any other way? And sure enough, that's what happened.
After the 7th of October, I had similar thoughts: "omg, now Israel is going to act stupid and make Jews hated again".
I've lost friends who had to leave my country because of antisemitism. I've also had my life threatened by right wing extremist zionists. So at least take my words on this: The first and most natural answer to violence and hated is more violence and hatred, universally. If that's not what you want for the next generation make the first move to stop it.
I believe that capturing POWs is fairly common when at war.
The whole point of capturing soldiers is to keep them from returning to the field. You deny the other side fighters.
Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped civilians.
That seems like a massive exaggeration.
So don't do this "what's the solution??" while tens of thousands are being killed and starved.
One side will concede in a war if there are no gains to be had, and conceding will stem the losses. So at a minimum, the side that wants a victorious peace has to credibly promise not to kill the women and children of the other side. At the moment, Israel is unable to credibly promise that, and it's difficult to see how in the short term it can generate any such credibility. So external parties such as the US need to form part of the commitment mechanism. Under both Biden and Trump, the US has neglected it's responsibility to do that.
*Apart from implying that civilian Gazans are responsible for the hostages
> *Apart from implying that civilian Gazans are responsible for the hostages
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/middleeast/gaza-neighborhood-...
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/28/nx-s1-5482881/israel-gaza-gen...
EDIT: The BBC also reports on the same subject:
https://search.app/1LP8A
There's nearly 200 citations in their report, citing a wide variety of Israeli and international media, medical journals, statements by the IDF, etc.
https://www.phr.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Genocide-i...
I assume the person you're responding to is not Israeli and has not been following this conflict very closely if they've never heard of B'Tselem.
What's worse is I actually feel openly saying "I don't support this genocide and I'm critical of the state committing it" is a risky thing to say in public. I wouldn't say it not behind a pseudonymous account without some level of plausible deniability. Even peak cancel culture wasn't quite so chilling.
It's also the area with the most clear manipulation of information on social media. The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic", and the same pattern can be seen all over the web.
We've truly entered a dystopian age that seems completely unfamiliar from the exciting world of tech I wanted to be a part of decades ago.
FWIW the downvotes and flags in threads like this, including this thread, do seem largely organic to me, and well within the range of what one expects from a divisive and emotional topic.
People often use words like "clearly" in making such descriptions (I don't mean to pick on you personally! countless users do this, from all sides of all issues), but actually there's nothing so clear. Mostly what happens is that people have perceptions based on their strong feelings and then call those perceptions "clear" because their feelings are strong.
We do occasionally turn off flags in order to allow a discussion to happen because allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong. I've posted lots of explanations of how we approach this in the past (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
There's long precedent here, going back at least to 2008 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869). Here's a memorable (to me at least) case from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.
If you want to understand how we think about and approach moderation of political stories on HN, probably the best set of explanations is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourself with those explanations and then still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But do please read some of that stuff first because the questions (and therefore the answers) are nearly always the same.
p.s. All that said, I appreciate your watching out for the quality of HN and I understand the concern.
I will freely admit my view may be too dismissive and that I should change my ways, but these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze. In other words, that ratio I mentioned seems out of whack. Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead, not enough people vouch for 'em (I'm sometimes guilty of that), and the amount of invective and judgment they're met with just seems to depend on how fast they got downvoted or flagged to oblivion.
I realize I'm shouting into the wind, and you have no obligation to change any of this for me. But I really do not see how this sort of thing is good for the site long-term. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a certain set that needs to scream about something every month or they start vandalizing less controversial threads and it's net positive to let them have their moment. Maybe I'll go write something that auto-hides threads for me when there's been a certain proportion of flagging and downvoting.
Anyway, you've got a tough job and do it with grace. No reply necessary, but thanks for all you do.
I agree. The trouble is that not discussing it at all is not a solution either.
> it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right?
I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is.
> Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead
I don't think there's a "thread mainstream" here. I think the community is deeply divided.
If you (or anyone) see good-faith comments getting mistreated in this way, we'd appreciate links so we can take a look. Sometimes we restore those comments, other times we find that the comment broke the site guidelines and thus should stay flagged. But we always look, and usually also have enough time to reply.
> I realize I'm shouting into the wind
Not at all! We're interested. We just don't necessarily have good answers.
So, sending it to page 4 quick-like has too many downsides? I am not an expert in community management, I'm interested to understand why.
> I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is.
If you have the time, I'd love to read more about this.
> we'd appreciate links so we can take a look
I didn't delve deeply, but here's one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718264 In the future should I email?
> We're interested. We just don't necessarily have good answers.
Fair enough! Thank you for your patience and perseverance!
We're not experts either. It's not as if there's any foundation for this job other than just doing it, badly.
I'll try to explain how I personally think about this. One thing is clear: the core value of HN is intellectual curiosity so that's what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). I'd refine that one bit further by saying it's broad intellectual curiosity. There's also narrow intellectual curiosity, which has its place but isn't what we're trying for here. (And there are other forms of curiosity, e.g. social curiosity, which motivates things like celebrity news and gossip. Those also have their place but are less relevant here.)
What's the difference between broad and narrow intellectual curiosity? If you think of curiosity as desire and willingness to take in new information, then I'd say "broad" means wanting to take in new information about anything—whatever's going on in reality, the world, etc., because it's there; and "narrow" means wanting new information, but only about a restricted subset of things. That means there's an excluded set of topics—things about which one could take in new information, but for whatever reason, doesn't want to. Maybe it's too painful, for example.
What I'm saying is that the current topic is one of a few topics which are painful (and the pain shows up as anger in the comments), but which broad intellectual curiosity simply cannot exclude. If we exclude it, then we fail to optimize for what we're optimizing for. In that sense, not discussing it amounts to failing.
But discussing it also amounts to failing, because it's not realistically very possible for this community to discuss it while remaining within the site guidelines. It's too painful, too activating, and crosses too many of the red lines that past generations have left pulsating in all our bodies. That is why I said "I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is".
We can try to mitigate that through moderation ("please don't cross into personal attack", "please don't post flamebait", etc.), but those lines are particularly feeble in this case. There's little scope for those to land as neutral with commenters and readers. It too easily feels like we're adding to the conflict when we post that way.
Therefore this is a case where we can only fail, and all we can do is follow what Beckett said and fail better. Failing better is still failing and still feels like failing—there's no way out of that. I'm just pretty sure that the alternative in this case would be worse overall, even if it felt easier in the short term. It's always easier to go narrow in the short term. But we're in this for the long haul.
I strongly suspect that this "divisive" nature of the topic is precisely the illusion being created. That's exactly what I am challenging here.
In my non-online life I've known many vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, crypto enthusiasts, extreme right/left-wingers, people with complex view of trans issues, divisions on BLM topics, gun fanatics, gun abolitionists etc, etc.
But the opinion around what's happening in Gaza right now doesn't fit into this category. Regardless of political opinion, outside of Zionists, I have not met anyone who will not, in private of course (for the reasons mentioned previously), agree that what's happening in Gaza is genocide and is not in the interests of the United States. The strength of the opinion can vary, but the general direction of opinion is consistent.
Another reason I added "clearly" is because, compared to say climate change posts that are often filled with climate denial comments, there are typically very few commenters engaging in any controversial discussions. Nearly all the top level comments are in agreement, the majority of the replies are as well. Compared to genuinely controversial topics which often do quickly devolve into impossible arguments.
There's also the broader issue that silence is not always a neutral position. When one side benefits much, much more from silence than the other, you can't simply shrug your shoulders and say "well it's controversial so let's not talk about it". In this case, silencing conversations about the genocide in Gaza is very beneficial to the state perpetuating this genocide and likewise very harmful to the people suffering from it.
The strategy is simple: make the topic appear to be more divisive than it is, which makes it easy to silence as "divisive and emotional", which is essentially the most desirable outcome.
Do people around you think that the number of victims are manipulated? Or do they think that civilians were bombed and displaced, the infrastructure destroyed, the supplies stopped, but that's just fair game?
I believe this is the main factor that tricks readers into assuming that (legit) comments and votes on a story must be manipulated. It's hard to fathom how anyone could in good faith hold views so different from one's own, views that seem not just obviously wrong but monstrous.
Well that sure seems a bit tautological.
The pro Palestine side has also given themself a pretty bad image, so it will take some very compelling evidence(which this video is not as it doesn't show anything clearly), to make this issue higher priority.
Could it actually be right?
It's hard for me to feel like these political flagfests make the rest of the site any better, while the rest of the site is what I find value in. If I want to witness mobs possessing massive standard deviations in knowledge and experience with the subject matter flamewarring each other, there are already a whole lot of places on the Internet I can go for that. It's the tech-and-genuine-curiosity-not-yelling part of HN that's the value prop for me here, and FWIW, for a sample size of one, threads like this do little to improve on that.
Of course I can hide this story and move on. But it's hard for me to believe that all the stress hormones flowing in the people reading and participating don't have some kind of negative knock-on effects on other, more peaceful threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So… why were the flags on the article covering Hulk Hogan’s (tech-irrelevant) death turned off? The article was flagged, then inexplicably came back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672329
And it's not the first time I've seen this happen with various news fluff.
I’ll be frank: I’ve had faith in the mod team in the past, but the lack of consistency is becoming offensive to me. Celebrity gossip is OK, but not most things ICE or Musk related for example, even when there's direct involvement from SV elites? I'm finding it hard to see the throughline here. What am I missing?
Turning off the flags on a story doesn't mean we want to give it front page exposure (and in that case, we didn't give it front page exposure). It allows people who want to discuss that topic to do so whilst not taking up front page space and also not drawing complaints from people who feel strongly that they want to discuss it.
We do the same thing with some of the politics-related topics you're talking about too. The primary consideration is always whether the story contains "significant new information", and another significant consideration is whether the discussion thread is of a reasonably high standard.
It's worth recalling that confirmation bias, which we’re all prone to, kicks in hard on this topic. We are all subject to the tendency to notice and remember things that back up what we already believe, while tuning out anything that contradicts it.
With Israel, that often means people stick to sources and angles that reinforce their stance, whether pro- or anti-Israel, and dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their narrative.
It’d be a welcome change to see top comments or stories that challenge anti-Israel assumptions, not just confirm them.
One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians. It’s also reasonable at this point to believe that Israel - for the last year, at least - is pursuing military action without a strategic goal or a long-term plan other than “encouraging voluntary transfer” of the civilian population.
To you, does the above paragraph immediately strike you as pro- or anti-Israel?
And then extend that to believing Hamas are monsters, that whenever Palestine has--in modern times--had any power or leverage, it has used it to be a pest to its neighbors, and yet still believe that those people don't deserve to face starvation, bombing, economic ruin and forced displacement.
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I would love to understand what you mean by my lack of understanding of Israeli perspectives. I talk to Israelis regularly. What perspectives do you believe I'm missing? If you're think I don't care about the safety and wellbeing of Israelis (and, to be specific, Israeli Jews), you'd be incorrect. I believe in Israel being a strong and prosperous state. If you think that means I should blindly ignore the fact that Israeli polls show that the Israeli public is unconcerned about the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and that this consequently leads me to believe Israelis are shortsightedly reducing their own security in the long term, then I wouldn't be able to agree with you. If you think I should similarly ignore that - under Bibi and Likud - Israel has deliberately acted against US policy to encourage the formation of a Palestinian state, and has created a defacto one-state reality which again reduces the security of the Israeli state, I wouldn't be able to agree with you either.
Polls about Israeli indifference to Palestinians is a non-sequitur.
Israel tells us all daily what its goals are and why, and how it intends to achieve those goals. Its actions then match those statements.
However, it is very difficult for most people, apparently, to listen to Israel and falsify its statements. Too much history, propaganda, false consensus, confirmation bias, and, frankly, anti-Semitism. Much easier for everyone to agree with each other that Israel bad, to attribute motives, to assume the worst, to believe Israel's enemies. Those people think it's reasonable to say something like "while I agree that Israel has the right to exist, that does not give them the right to commit war crimes and genocide."
On university campuses, examples include Hasbara Fellowships (training students to advocate for Israel), pro-Israel student clubs (organizing events and campaigns), social media trainings, resource support from Jewish organizations, and counter-actions against pro-Palestinian movements.
Online, Israeli ministries and affiliated organizations operate official social media teams, develop advocacy platforms and tools (like the Act.IL app), and use influencer campaigns, bots, and coordinated digital actions to shape public opinion. After October 7, 2023, civilian Hasbara initiatives on social media expanded rapidly, ranging from individual efforts to coordinated campaigns with governmental support.
So how can you say that this is a controversial topic and the dovnvotes are organic?
How is it controversial when 2mil. peope are being starved? When thousands of children have been killed by a country whose prime minister is a wanted war criminal?
Edit: Corrected "not organic" => organic
Incidentally, I was talking about downvotes and flags from every side of the conflict, not just the side you're talking about. I don't see a lot of difference there either.
Even if literally no one agreed, I still feel that not this topic is not an option, and I still think that could be derived from the first principle of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), although I admit that the exact proof escapes me.
It's hard to respond without specific links. From my perspective, there are throngs of comments on both sides of this getting downvoted and flagged, mostly for good reason but not always.
FWIW, I think any "$large-group-bad" comment probably should be downvoted on HN. The world doesn't work that way, so any such comment is likely to be a pretty bad one (relative to what we're trying for here).
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China, Russia, Iran, etc would definitely benefit from pouring fuel on this topic.
Not sure why you think only one side does it.
Watching a redux of the Warsaw Ghetto being livestreamed, watching children starving to death because of state military decisions, watching 500 pounder bombs being dropped on seaside cafes and ambulance medics being murdered. Never again is right now and I'm doing this, bitching pseudonymously. It is truly dystopian as you say.
Further, state influence campaigns using social media are well known, it is absolutely happening on this forum and all forums as you say. What to do? I have no idea but I know that those who suffer the consequences of speaking out against this, such as the tens of people arrested in the UK, are truly brave.
Never again is right now. One day everyone will have been against this.
It’s disgusting, and it works to prevent people from saying anything publicly.
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I think we're well past that now, though.
I think this is an underrepresented factor in why Israel feels unilaterally emboldened in this conflict: there's no longer a statistically more liberal, secular, identifiably Jewish majority outside of the country that serves as a check on its actions.
Modern racial antisemitism and political Zionism were two modern political projects that grew from the same 19th century soil of nationalism and race theory. They did not agree with each other, but they converged, from opposite directions, on the same fundamental conclusion: that the Jewish people constituted a distinct, unassimilable national and racial body that could not coexist as equals within a European nation-state. Political Zionism did not adopt the idea of Jewish separateness from antisemites. It inherited this idea directly from traditional Judaism itself. The entire structure of Halakha (Jewish Law), with its dietary codes, Shabbat observance, and, most crucially, its powerful prohibition on intermarriage, was a system designed to maintain the Jewish people as a distinct, separate, and unassimilated nation in exile. This was the internal, self-defined jewish reality for millennia. Modern racial antisemitism took this existing reality of Jewish separatism and reframed it as a hostile, biological threat to the European nation-state.
The secular European Zionists looked at this situation and synthesized two ideas. Zionists accepted the traditional Jewish premise ("we are a separate people") and accepted the antisemite's practical diagnosis ("they will never accept us as equals"). They rejected both solutions, the religious passivity of waiting for a Messiah and the "liberal delusion"(as Zionists described it) of assimilation. Instead, they chose to take the existing identity of Jewish separateness and reforge it using the modern tools of European nationalism and colonialism. That's also why Zionists published scathing articles about assimilated jews whom they perceived as deluded, cowardly, and "self-hating" for trying to be part of a European society.
The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism, which they also documented themselves ("the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend"). Zionist actions and attitudes were thus the direct, confident expression of 19th Century European settler colonialism, as evident in the writings of Herzl, Jabotinsky and co. Zionism was born in the same intellectual environment as the "Scramble for Africa" and the "White Man's Burden."
Their argument was not: "We are traumatized victims who need a safe space.", because if that had been the case they wouldn't have rejected the ugandan land they were offered - it was: "You Europeans have successfully conquered and colonized vast territories inhabited by inferior natives. We, as a superior European people currently without a state, claim the right to do the same thing as you". It was the logical, confident, and systematic execution of a European colonial project by a group that chose to see itself as a superior people with the right to displace and subjugate an indigenous population it viewed as inferior (i.e. the 'kushim' of Palestine). Those secular European atheist jews who, despite rejecting religion as superstitious and irrational, still saw value in it as essential myth-making tool to justify the dispossession of natives and legitimize their colonial zionist project by weaponizing those myths ("our God [which they as atheists didn't even believe in] promised this land to us") .
You're conveniently ignoring the Eastern European pogroms during the late 19th and especially early 20th century. Jewish immigration, in both number and origin, to Palestine not-so-coincidentally tracks the severity of the pogroms. And actually, during this time many times more Jews immigrated to New York than to Palestine. Immigration to Palestine didn't explode until the rise of Nazi anti-semitism.
Collective punishment is wrong. Full stop. Global civil society largely internalized this ethic, after millennia of accepting collective punishment as legitimate, in large part because of the experience of Jews in Europe. It's ridiculous to deny the history of how this norm came about no less than it is to deny that collective punishment has become the facial justification for Israel's war in Gaza.
David Ben-Gurion was the founder of Israel and its first Prime Minister and he confirms that: "They are nearly all good-hearted, and are easily befriended. One might say that they are like big children." David Ben-Gurion in Igrot (Letters), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Tel Aviv University, Vol. I, 1971
And how come those pogroms didn't make those Zionist-Jews more empathetic to suffering and persecution? Instead they had the exact same racist and supremacist attitudes as the europeans they were complaining about.
"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
Ben-Gurion himself was witness to pogroms in Poland. Does one need to be murdered or violently attacked to "suffer antisemitism"?
Every group is capable of and, in fact, exhibits racist attitudes. Hannah Arendt observed and commented on the racial hierarchy among Jewish Israel's when attending the Eichmann trial, with the European immigrants having higher socio-economic status than the native, darker-skinned Jewish population. Jews are no different than any other group, ethnic or otherwise.
And, FWIW, Jews are hardly the only ethnic or religious (or mixed ethnic-religious) group which has maintained a distinct identity across millennia and within larger populations, or found itself displaced and then displacing others. In fact, the Middle East has many such groups. The insistence on distinguishing and rationalizing Jews as being peculiar in this and similar regards is a distinctively European cultural obsession, though many regions around the world have their own "Jews" that play this perpetual "other" cultural role.
Again, collective punishment is wrong[1]. Full stop. There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Jews, Israelis, or Zionists as the bad guy in the unfolding Gaza crisis. There's zero need to make recourse to centuries of history to deduce what's wrong with Gaza or even how it came about. The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Zionists emigrating from Europe to Palestine to flee persecution... bad. Salvadorians and other populations chain migrating to the US to flee persecution or economic hardship... good. But these assessments can and will flip on a dime.
[1] At least in the modern Westernized ethos, though it seems this judgment re the legitimacy of collective punishment or collective blame is sadly, demonstrably precarious.
I might be misreading you here, but it really sounds like you're claiming that antisemitism began and ended with the Third Reich. You're aware that's not the case, right?
I honestly don't get how one can read that sentence and come to that conclusion, but at least you already suspected yourself of misreading
You might want to provide the source for this. (The phrase is not directly googlable.)
"They are nearly all good-hearted, and are easily befriended. One might say that they are like big children." David Ben-Gurion in Igrot (Letters), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Tel Aviv University, Vol. I, 1971
"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
Interesting behavior. One would assume that those horrible pogroms would have thought those Zionist-Jews the value of empathy, but they just seem to have taken it as instruction manual and have been applying it themselves for almost a century now.
Incidentally, the idea that persecution or trauma necessarily makes a person (or a people!) better is flatly untrue; anyone familiar with psychology knows that. And, after all, we can find lots of examples of Palestinians doing bad things too.
In the world I can observe (especially social media), the opposite is true; characterizing the situation as a genocide is normal and accepted, disputing that will get you shunned, and depending on who your friends are you may find yourself subjected to purity testing of that opinion.
Consider, for example, who does and doesn't get banned on Twitch for the things they say about this issue, and what their positions are. Or have a look around Fosstodon, or among FOSS developers on other Mastodon instances; "Free Palestine" is at least as common in bios and screen names as BLM support, while opposed slogans don't even exist as far as I can tell or would be unconscionable to use if they do.
Or consider for example this thread, which is full of people who agree with you, at least among the live comments.
> A Columbia genocide scholar says she may leave over university’s new definition of antisemitism
> ... Hirsch, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom altogether.
https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-antisemitism-...
--
Tangentially related, I never understood how the anti-BDS laws square with the first amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...)
At my university, a portion of my dues went to funding BDS efforts (what expenses do they even have?) and I had no clear means to object to this. This was in Canada, but it seems to me perfectly fair to oppose that. That said:
> Most anti-BDS laws have taken one of two forms: contract-focused laws requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel; and investment-focused laws, mandating public investment funds to avoid entities boycotting Israel.
Substitute, for example, any domestic racial minority for "Israel"; does your opinion change?
Surely you can protest that at the university and it is not a government-enforced policy?
> Substitute, for example, any domestic racial minority for "Israel"
Is "Israel" a race or a country? Should a Canadian not be allowed to boycott the US?
The legislation described does not prevent boycotts, except by government contractors who have a duty to government policy and thus do not necessarily enjoy those protections (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47986):
> Speech restrictions imposed by private entities, and government limits on its own speech, usually do not implicate the First Amendment.
As for public investment funds: you'll need to explain to me how saying that X may not invest in Y because Y is refusing to buy things from Z, causes Y to stop being able to refuse to buy things from Z (i.e., compels Y to buy things from Z).
If you want to not buy things from Israel, then... just don't. You don't need my money, or a private investment firm's, in order to achieve that.
How does this apply to the matter at hand? The restrictions on doing business are being imposed on (not by) a private entity, by (not on) the government. The government is free to do business with Israel if it so chooses
As a private entity doing business with the government, why is it permissible to boycott other countries or entities, but not Israel?
Moreover, why is this a state matter? What relevance is it to Kansas whether one boycotts a foreign country?
>requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel
I don't really see any responses to any of the questions I have raised.
Even if that were present, why should "Congress said so" have any meaning?
I am aware the judiciary has occasionally upheld the legality of such laws--just as they have upheld Civil Asset Forfeiture, Qualified Immunity, given us Citizens United, ended the Voting Rights Act, and sundry other decisions that will surely be judged well by future history.
Appeal to authority is not a convincing argument.
The reality is that both sides have legitimate concerns, and likewise, are doing very bad things. Intelligent and caring people get sucked up into this and can only echo their hate for the other side.
The exciting world of tech is designed to amplify the opposition but not to find consensus.
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However, every colonial invader, occupier, genocidaire and war criminal of the last few hundred years has done their best to flip the blame.
Some of them have been really, really good at it, and each learns from the previous efforts.
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Unfortunately the techno optimism that we grew up with has given way to the stark reality that it is now easier than ever to manage the truth and squash dissent.
Which, btw, is the exact opposite of what we thought the Internet would be: the democratization of truth and voices. Instead we've allowed a handful of media oligarchs to own and distort the spin landscape.
I used to live right outside of Auschwitz. Been inside many times, and it's an absolutely harrowing experience - the scale of human suffering inflicted upon the people brought there exceeds almost any kind of scale. But similar to what you said, majority of that place is dedicated to "never again" messaging - so it must feel weird to go in, see the pictures of starving children inside the camp(those that weren't sent to the gas chambers straight away anyway), only to go outside and see images of equally starved Palestinian children and watch Natenyahu say "there's no starvation in Gaza". I feel personal discomfort knowing that the famous "those who don't remember history" quote is on a sign right there in Auschwitz, seen by millions of people every year, yet Israel is comitting genocide against the people of Gaza.
>> The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic", and the same pattern can be seen all over the web.
Any topic related to this gets flagged within few hours. No doubt this one will be too.
Auschwitz isn't in Germany, it's in Poland. Unless I'm misunderstanding your question?
Wait. What?
Are you trying to imply this was some kind of a real thing that happened?
Sarcasm on the internet doesn't always travel well, I can't tell if you're just using this fiction as a metaphor or trying to convince people it actually happened.
Not only did that end up being completely true, but the IDF killed Muhammad Sinwar in that strike.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/world/middleeast/gaza-hos...
Make no mistake, its 100% a war crime to use civilians as human shields. But that doesn't magically absolve the IDF of also committing a war crime. And if they can't meet their military objectives without committing war crimes, maybe that's a sign. In any case, bombing a hospital to kill a terrorist is a very efficient tactic if your goal is to create more terrorists. If you learn nothing else from the UK's administration of Mandatory Palestine, learn that.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/24/middleeast/palestinians-h...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/23/idf-in...
There is also no independent verification so it's debatable what the actual facts are. The IDF have long ago lost any right to be believed without that.
The doctrinal violence against civilian infrastructure (Dahiya doctrine) and the deliberate homicide of hostages (Hannibal directive) are inexcusable no matter how many military brass it kills.
> according to the Israeli military
> There are no known entrances to the tunnel within the hospital itself
> According to the World Health Organization, Israel has conducted at least 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the start of the war, damaging at least 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals
> In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to scour for traps.
... You read this article as proof vindicating the IDF's version of events? ... Huh.
If anyone wants to see the full story for themselves they can read it at https://archive.ph/giBjP#selection-1185.0-1189.43
The IDF's doctrinal destruction of civilian infrastructure and attacks on hostages are illegal under international law. If the target was entrenched personnel, then leveling a hospital reflects absolutely miserable trigger discipline on the IDF and their officer's behalf. It's not WWI anymore, if we can't agree on international accountability then we learn nothing from the horrors of our mistakes.
>Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in very rare cases. If one side uses the site for military purposes, that may make it a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack.
If you want to argue it's illegal, you have to make an argument that it's not proportional vis-a-vis the colocated military infrastructure, because otherwise international law says it's fair play in both letter and spirit. If they were completely off-limits then everybody would co-locate their military and humanitarian infrastructure without much thought - and the end result of that game would be worse for everyone. That's why international law is the way it is. Civilian infrastructure cannot be allowed to be used as a shield for military infrastructure.
On that point - you would have a difficult time making a legal argument that hitting the edge of the parking lot (deliberately avoiding a strike to the hospital itself, and without doing significant structural damage to the hospital) to kill the Hamas #1 (at that time) was not proportional. If you want to make that argument with some other strike (like the church one) then go ahead - I'm extremely open to the idea that the IDF is crossing the line with many of their strikes - but that's a different argument than falsely saying that any strike next to civilian infrastructure is a war crime by default.
Or when they bombed all the hospitals [0], or targeted pediatricians and oncologists, and their families [1] for assassination.
Or leaving preemie babies to rot and be eaten by wild dogs at Al Nasr [2].
Or when they dropped over 6 Hiroshimas worth of explosives [3] onto an area roughly equal to a 12 x 12 mile square, populated with over a million children - in Biden's term alone.
There's a lot more. Suffice to say that anyone paying attention has known that the US, Israel, Germany, England and more have been propping up a genocide for quite some time now.
0 - https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie...
1 - https://abcnews.go.com/International/gaza-pediatrician-mothe...
2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/abandoned-babies-found-de...
3 - https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...
apparently Hamas in control of convey ....
".... At the WCK Welcome Centre, locally-contracted security personnel got on and into the trucks and the convoy continued the journey to the warehouse. As the trucks moved away from the Welcome Centre, one locallycontracted security person on top of the trailer of the third truck fired his weapon into the air. This was clearly visible in the UAV video, observed by the UAV operator and assessed by the Brigade Fire Support Commander to be consistent with Hamas hijacking the aid convoy. During the aid convoy transit to the warehouse the Brigade Attack Cell contacted CLA with concerns there were armed individuals on the convoy. CLA attempted through various means to contact WCK, first directly to the convoy, then to international WCK contacts. CLA eventually made contact with the WCK Headquarters in the United States who, after multiple attempts, made text message contact via WhatsApp with a WCK member who had gone ahead of the convoy to the warehouse. They replied that the locally-contracted security personnel had ‘fake guns’. WCK Headquarters replied to CLA that they had made contact with WCK in Gaza and would address the gun issue when WCK completed the task. It was difficult to tie down the exact timing of this extended set of communications; however, they appear to have continued after the WCK vehicles had already been attacked, indicating a lack of awareness by CLA of real-time events. Once at the warehouse, the aid trucks entered and the WCK vehicles joined up and parked outside along with the locally-contracted security vehicle. At this point the UAV operator identified the original gunman dismounting from the truck and joining with another individual identified as a gunman. Over the next ten minutes approximately 15- 20 people, including two to four gunmen, moved around the escort vehicles. During this period, the gunmen were classified by the Brigade Fire Support Commander and Brigade Chief of Staff as Hamas. P ....
https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/special-advisers...
> It was inferred a number of times that not only had the gunmen associated with the WCK aid convoy exhibited tactics similar to Hamas, but that in fact ‘they were Hamas’.
> Head FFAM confirmed that only the video feed being used by the UAV operators was used to identify the gunmen as Hamas.
Admittedly blowing up the entire van was probably wrong in retrospect.
As far as I know this was the result of the IDF's own investigation so there's some conflict of interest
Here's the latest Wikipedia entry on the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Central_Kitchen_aid_conv...
Source?
Retired Maj Gen Yoav Har-Even described how the IDF's drone operators mistook an aid worker carrying a bag for a gunman, and then targeted one of the World Central Kitchen vehicles with a missile.
The IDF then described how two people escaped that vehicle and got into a second car, which was hit by another missile from a drone.
The military confirmed that there were survivors from the second explosion, who managed to get into the third vehicle - which was then also hit by a missile.
By the end, all the aid workers were dead.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68742572
Agreed that bombing the 1st vehicle of aid workers was a mistake. Then bombing the 2nd vehicle was a mistake, and the 3rd vehicle bombing was also a mistake.
In Dec 1 in 8 WCK workers were fired for Hamas ties
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/12/11/aid-group-fires-doze...
Even your link calls out that one of the vehicles that split from the convoy was carrying armed gunmen.
[1] https://x.com/IDF/status/1775290147426152931
Instead we're sending money and weapons to help.
Why are Palestinian refugees still in Gaza when the whole place is a war zone? Certainly some would stay, but mostly they are trapped.
Under the circumstances, for Gaza, having Israel as a neighbor is worse than having Russia as a neighbor. Even if enough food is shipped in to temporarily resolve the current crisis, people in Gaza won't be safe where they are.
So, here's a question that's rarely asked: which countries will accept refugees from Gaza? Obviously not the US with the current administration. Why not France, Germany, or other European countries?
According to Wikipedia, since 2022, Europe took over five million Ukrainian refugees due to the war. [1] This is more than twice the population of Gaza.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_refugee_crisis
True. But what's happening in Gaza is not an active war. Its oppression of a civilian population by a powerful military force.
But certainly we've let other genocidal atrocities go by without intervening, such as Rwanda in '94. So you have a point there.
> which countries will accept refugees from Gaza? Obviously not the US with the current administration. Why not France, Germany, or other European countries?
Good questions. At this point as far as I know they can't even get out because Israel has closed the borders, much less apply for asylum. Also, countries accepting them as asylum seekers would be acknowledging that Israel is the aggressor. AFAIK France is one of the few countries that has said that Palestinians can apply for asylum.
Consider
Several UNWRA staff accused of participating in Oct 7 Attack
also reported UNWRA staffer held Oct7 hostage in their building
There is literally a genocide in Sudan right now with 25 million in extreme hunger. At least half a million children are dead. Yet we hear hardly any mention of it.
But yeah, sadly, the world has never cared about Africa and the many who die there.
An example that came up a few months ago was a surgeon in a Gaza hospital making the honest statement to BBC journalists that he had seen dozens of children coming into the hospital near death with a "single shot" to a vital organ. He claimed they were purposefully "sniped" by IDF soldiers because in his mind it was "impossible" that they were all so accurately shot precisely once.
What he didn't see coming into his O/R were the children with multiple gunshot wounds... because they died. Conversely, a grazing wound from shrapnel is too minor to go to his well equipped hospital, because the hospital is overloaded and taking only the severely wounded. So he saw just the filtered subset of injuries that were very severe but just barely survivable, giving him the false impression that the IDF was going out of its way to snipe children with a single well-placed shot. (This isn't some random anecdote either, there were long articles circulating around the international media!)
From the surgeon's point of view, he saw only a subset of what's going on, and he drew a conclusion that wasn't actually supported by the evidence. The problem is that his point of view supported a popular narrative, was amplified, and nobody bothered to verify statistics because.. sss... that's hard in a war zone.
I'm not advocating for either side and support neither. I'm just recommending reading all articles related to the war with a critical eye.
Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis.
https://www.gazahealthcareletters.org/usa-letter-oct-2-2024
They’re not in the war zone taking an unbiased sample.
They’re in a hospital receiving critical but patients after triage
Inherently, their statistical sample of war injuries is biased. It’s a textbook example of the survivorship statical bias!
This is all I’m trying to say: not that their observations are false or that children aren’t being shot, but that they’re not in a position to draw accurate conclusions about what goes on outside the walls of their hospitals based on information they receive inside its walls. They certainly can’t draw conclusions about the motivations of IDF soldiers from the information available to them.
This logic applies to both sides, of course, and to all similar scenarios.
A random example are the Russian claims of having destroyed ‘X’ instances of ‘Y’ weapons system when Ukraine got less than ‘X’ delivered. The reason is simple — they’re not lying — they just counted the decoys they also blew up!
It’s war. It’s messy. Information is hard to interpret.
Do you have a source for this?
The logic underpinning my comment is the Survivorship Bias: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
The source for that is the “pretraining” we all share: children generally don’t survive multiple gunshot wounds from military battle rifles. One… maybe, but not two or three to the chest… or anywhere really.
I mean, you can debate that point if you choose, but you’d have to make a convincing argument that children are more likely to cling to life with more gunshot wounds.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group; - Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; - Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; - Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; - Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Note that to meet this definition, the following conditions must be met (among others): 1. Intent to destroy must be present. 2. The intent must be to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. 3. The destruction can be serious bodily or mental harm, or it can mean creating conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part.
This means that: - people that believe that genocide must be about a race is misguided (it can be about a nationality, and Palestinians identify as a nationality that is recognized by over 75% of the countries in the UN); - the fact that there are Palestinians elsewhere (the West Bank and Jordan, as two examples) isn't relevant to deciding whether this is a genocide (since genocide can be about destruction targeted at a part of a group); and, - there are many examples of Israeli ministers and government personnel stating goals that sound genocidal, which people interpret to affirm intent.
IANAL, and genocide is a legal term, so I am not weighing in on this with a personal opinion, but it seems reasonable that laypeople, at least, can read that definition and reach the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. The fact that various genocide scholars (including Omer Bartov at Brown); the Lemkin Institute (named after the Lemkin who coined the term genocide); HRW; Amnesty; MSF; and other institutions have called this a genocide is also probably helping laypeople believe the claim.
Finally, there is not just a moral imperative but a legal requirement under the Geneva Convention to feed people. Article 55 states that an occupying power is responsible for this.
And one could argue that Holodomor was less "intentional" than what is going on in Gaza now.
So, I don't think we'll get any official status on this anytime soon.
".... are no serious reasons for fearing:
(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,"
i.e. if the warring party believes the supplies will be diverted they have no obligation to supply them.
And that's what is going on here.
To state why I believe Israel is occupying Gaza, I'll point out that Israel’s continued status as an occupying power has been affirmed repeatedly by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and human rights groups. Do you believe all of these entities are incorrect?
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-finances-fighter...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...
From the article ...
Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-backed-aid-grou...
Israel has been provoked and attacked many times. The cautious hope seemed to be a rehash of the previous times there's been strife, that doesn't necessarily mean it was a prediction but it was unclear how long Israel would push this. After the completely kneecapping Hamas some thought they'd be wrapping up. From a self-defense standpoint there just isn't that much more to gain, and they're burning away all the global political goodwill they had.
If BDS didn't work, they wouldn't be trying to ban it.
Here's the thing, fighting this in court would be extremely politically inconvenient for a lot of people.
There's nothing more to it. Israel knows that with access to Western weapons, it will reliably win every confrontation with the Palestinians, just like in Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa. The only thing that did both regimes in was sanctions, or boycotts. I believe they literally studied these nations. So, they want to preempt any attempt at boycotting Israel, because it's the only way they'd ever face reckoning for all the unspeakable atrocities they've committed against the palestinians.
https://apnews.com/general-news-be7a3c77beeb4b95bfbdf0b27ff7...
I'm heartened to see that more people are coming to this same conclusion. Talk of a 'two state solution' has always been a convenient excuse for more of the same as far as I am concerned.
> Israel will not agree to a right to return
This government will not.
My view is that the Israeli state is failing through its own actions and at some point will experience regime change (i.e. a drastic change in government - possibly, or possibly not as a result of a democratic election). I expect that a new regime may not be Zionist (at least not in the exclusionary sense we are familiar with) and could well introduce something similar to South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission.
That type of government could very possibly recognise the right of return - possibly in some compromised form such as a willingness to pay compensation as has happened following other colonialist endeavours.
A global coordinated sanctions regime might work, like it did on South Africa, but that is pretty unlikely to ever happen because outside of Arab states, almost no country is opposed to Israel’s existence within its recognized borders. If Israel stopped actively oppressing/colonizing Gaza and the West Bank, opposition against them would evaporate, even if they remain an explicitly Jewish state and never grant right of return for the descendants of Nakba refugees.
Unfortunately Israel itself seems opposed to this. Part of the reason they are authoring their own demise in my opinion.
Even for Israelis that are against the current government and want to see equal rights for all peoples in the Middle East, there is an abundance of evidence to show that you don't get that without Israel.
Yes, the fact that many Middle Eastern countries are backwards on gay rights is bad! This doesn't remotely address the question of whether Israel bombing cities to dust and starving their population is also bad.
tmnvix was advocating for the collapse of the only democracy in the region--tantamount to advocating for worse outcomes for more people (and likely to an actual genocide of the Jewish people, who evacuated predominately Muslim countries and populated Israel at its re-formation). There are still 50 hostages in Gaza that have been held for 514 days and counting.
In Yemen 39.5% of the population is undernourished and 48.5% of children under five are stunted. Nearby, in East Africa, the South Sudan death toll and starvation numbers also dwarf this conflict. Mysteriously, and predictably, the world is silent. But, an opportunity to put down Israel, it seems is unfortunately very popular.
Quote:
Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement, made that perspective clear: “Good riddance! The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead. But someone has to issue an official death certificate before the rotting corpse is given a proper burial and we can all move on and explore the more just, moral and therefore enduring alternative for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Mandate Palestine: the one-state solution.”
Barghouti also opposed a bi-national Arab and Jewish state: “I am completely and categorically against binationalism … because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and, therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that.”
I mean saying he wants the end of peaceful coexistence is not enough for you?
And he claims the Jews will have zero rights, and that's also not enough?
If you need more, well, I gave you his name, he has said lots of stuff.
> saying he wants the end of peaceful coexistence
He does not say this. He says he wants the end of the two-state solution; that is, he wants the entire area to be one state (in which people coexist peacefully).
> he claims the Jews will have zero rights
No he doesn't. He says they will have no national right; that is, they will not have the right to claim the land as the exclusive home of the Jewish Nation. They will still have civil rights as normal citizens like everyone else. In fact, let me paste the full quote, since you left off the clarifying explanation that immediately follows it:
> I am completely and categorically against binationalism because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that, but it would take me too long to explain why, so I will stick to the model I support, which is a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote — regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on and so forth … Full equality under the law with the inclusion of the refugees — this must be based on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. In other words, a secular, democratic state that accommodates our inalienable rights as Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as settlers.
>> peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs
What is going on here?
The hypocrisy is stunning.
Basically that just means that they won't travel to or even be invited to countries that would arrest them.
The same goes for Putin.
A lot of pro-Israel people just think the ICC is just a tool used by countries that hold a grudge against Israel and don't take it seriously (e.g. the Biden administration released a statement condemning the ICC when they announced they were seeking the warrants), so having more first-hand witnesses stating clearly that war crimes are happening is relevant.
Ideally we'd have journalists reporting these things, but Israel blocks those from entering Gaza too.
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when both sides seem to be willing and eager to order, participate in, and cheer for atrocities from leadership to the common people... I don't want to take ideological sides or tally up crimes to decide who to root for in millennia old conflict mostly over a single city
it's a terrible shame for the people who want to live together in peace, clearly there are not enough of them
Turns out most law in western democracies was largely for show
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"Gaza Humanitarian Foundation chair Johnnie Moore accuses UN of 'playing politics' with Gazan lives, defends IDF and denies claims of mass casualties near aid sites, saying more people harmed in 24 hours of UN efforts than during weeks of GHF operations"
He also discusses the specific individual here: "How do you respond to the claim from a former special forces operative who worked with your foundation, alleging that IDF troops shot and massacred Gazans coming to the aid centers?
“That’s a personal matter, and I’m limited in what I can say. This is not a credible individual, and these are not credible accusations. I’m more than confident we have a great deal of evidence to refute them.”"
https://networkcontagion.us/reports/7-15-25-the-4th-estate-s...
"7/15/25 – The 4th Estate Sale: How American and European Media Became an Uncritical Mouthpiece for a Designated Foreign Terror Organization"
The report is from:
Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)
Rutgers University Social Perception Lab
Headlines of key findings:
- Mainstream media spread hostile, and often unverified, narratives delegitimizing U.S.-backed humanitarian aid efforts in Gaza.
- Major media headlines cited Hamas-linked officials more than any other source – making a foreign terrorist organization one of the leading voices shaping news about GHF
- Unverified headlines triggered viral, conspiratorial social media posts, often amplified by foreign state media.
- GHF-related media coverage undermined trust in America while shielding Hamas-linked actors by inducing bias.
- Narrative backlash closely tracked U.S. operational success on the ground.
- The GHF’s competitors amplified Hamas-sourced claims to undermine U.S.-led aid efforts.
- False Gaza Atrocity Narratives Trigger Left-Wing Violence and Right-Wing Amplification.
"NCRI assesses that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not merely the subject of criticism, but the target of a convergent narrative attack in which American and European media acted as a de facto mouthpiece for a foreign terrorist organization. This environment systematically elevated Hamas-linked claims, which were often unverified, uncontextualized, or outright false. Major headlines were repeatedly exaggerated or framed to imply atrocity, often without source transparency or sufficient evidentiary scrutiny."
The perspective you're not getting: https://ghf.org/updates/
- More than 79 million meals distributed to date (update from about a week ago, might be more recent ones)
Sources:
NYT: No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say
https://archive.is/1bllc
Reuters: USAID analysis found no evidence of massive Hamas theft of Gaza aid
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/usaid-analysis-fou...
Hamas didn't just steal all the aid and put it in its tunnels. Hamas exerted influence by controlling the aid and its distribution. It did also steal some of it. You are to some degree misrepresenting the Israeli concern. Israel isn't simply concerned about Hamas stealing all the aid, it is concerned both about stealing and reselling (which does happen) and about control of the aid as means of continuing to establish itself as the governing body of Gaza. The UN agencies have and do work with Hamas in Gaza since nobody can be in Gaza without working with Hamas.
The NYT article is doing some hair splitting: "Over the course of the war, the Israeli military released records and videos purporting to show how Hamas has been exploiting humanitarian aid. The army also shared what it described as internal Hamas documents found in a headquarters in Gaza, which discuss the percentage of aid taken by various Hamas wings and dated to early 2024. But those documents do not specifically refer to the theft of U.N. aid."
"Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid. A Hamas representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment." - I like that last bit.
Your Reuters article also says: "A State Department spokesperson disputed the findings, saying there is video evidence of Hamas looting aid, but provided no such videos. The spokesperson also accused traditional humanitarian groups of covering up "aid corruption.""
and: "The study noted a limitation: because Palestinians who receive aid cannot be vetted, it was possible that U.S.-funded supplies went to administrative officials of Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza."
Also:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-us-humanitarian-envoy-pans-...
"Satterfield said “there’s no question” that the terror group has worked to take “political advantage and certainly some physical substantive advantage out of the aid distribution process.”
Hamas operatives have made a point of “flaunting” their presence at aid sites in a message to Palestinians that the group has no intention of ceding its role in the distribution process.
However, Satterfield maintained that “the bulk of all assistance delivered by the UN and by the international organizations has gone to the population of Gaza and not to Hamas. Full stop.”"
These are not contradictory, Hamas controlled the aid, but still the bulk of it got delivered. The problem is the control they asserted. Israel has tried, via GHF, to take them out of the loop. Nobody is disputing that when aid was flowing in it did eventually end up reaching the people (who sometimes had to buy it).
Many details on the ground are hidden in a fog of war and propaganda from all sides. I just think a couple measures of success of food distribution are to step back and ask, "are people able to get food without being killed on a daily basis?" and "is the population generally receiving food and not starving to death?". And it seems pretty clear to most of the world the answers to these are emphatically "No" since the time the GHF was put in control of food distribution, and when all established aid groups were blocked from providing humanitarian assistance.
Cutting off food supply drives up the prices, both causing mass starvation and providing a great opportunity for Hamas and other entities to resell food at huge profits. If there was more than adequate food instead, then nobody would be starving to death, and Hamas would not gain much benefit from reselling food.
The argument has proven totally wrong, because as every single humanitarian organization that operates in Gaza has repeatedly warned in recent months, famine conditions are the direct result of Israel generally disallowing food and other aid into Gaza since March. Had Hamas actually diverted billions of dollars into their food storage tunnels, then logically they would've continued selling it at market price when demand is high now. But actually in reality, there's nothing to buy. [1]
The market solution to prevent Hamas from profiting off food is to first allow in enough food to Gaza such that babies are no longer starving to death, and to then bring in so much food supply that prices decrease until it's no longer economically profitable to resell food, because it's widely available. That solution is never brought up for some reason.
[1] ‘There is nothing to buy’: Gaza’s descent into mass starvation https://www.ft.com/content/e5d7bcbb-4c9d-47b8-b716-6bd58ad57...
https://abcnews.go.com/International/dozen-killed-stampede-g...
It's not clear what caused the stampede.
The IDF has used live fire for crowd control but there is zero evidence that it directly or intentionally attacked civilians. This is definitely a problematic practice but the exact causes and the number of casualties related to these events is unclear.
What has happened though is that Hamas attacks aid distribution centers, e.g.:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3kx9pwxwwo - "US aid workers wounded, says Gaza Humanitarian Foundation"
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-says-hamas-...
What's also true is that the UN and Hamas are doing their best to make sure the alternative efforts to distribute good to Gazans fail. Neither of these organizations actually care about Gazans. They care about their existence and power.
David Ben-Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel
Come to your senses and end this tragedy, give the Palestinians their own sovereign state, and then hope that they can forgive what you have done to them!
They don't want a state of their own; they want to conquer Israel.
I don't see a solution. Maybe establish a somewhat repressive non-democratic Palestinian state?
Virtually all Arabs want to fight a war against Israel and destroy it. They view that land as theirs. The only reason there haven't been more wars is due to repressive Arab governments that have been willing to compromise.
This cannot be reconciled with the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea". (Wikipedia claims that the slogan is used by both sides of the conflict, citing a JSTOR article I can't access; but I have only ever seen it used by Hamas and their supporters.)
Per Wikipedia, Hamas does not recognize Israel as of their most recent 2017 charter, and "called for a Palestinian state on all of Mandatory Palestine" in 1988.
While I'm sure that many Palestinians do not support Hamas and desire to co-exist with Israel, I see no good reason to suppose that this is any more common than the other way around.
> Israel is unwilling to have a two state solution, they always desired all of Mandatory Palestine
There is ample evidence to contradict this — enough that I can look it up on the fly. Were it true, for example, the Knesset would have had no need to pass a resolution declaring this to be their current position, barely a year ago. Netanyahu also claimed in 2015 to want a two-state solution, and of course there are other Israeli political parties with warmer attitudes towards Palestine.
The reason they might currently feel differently seems pretty obvious to me, even though this is a topic I rarely ever think about.
David Ben-Gurion, 1937
Which they tried in 2005 in Gaza. They evicted the remaining settlers in Gaza and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.
Hamas won the first and only election thereafter and ruled in Gaza from that point on.
In the years during and after the pandemic, Hamas deceived Israel in the way it presented itself. An IDF report assessing the massive intelligence failure on Oct 7 reported [0], "Israel saw Hamas as a pragmatic movement with whom it could do business." That was a tragic mistake.
The opinion of the Israeli public towards the desirability (and feasibility) of a two-state solution has tended to vary over the decades depending on the actions of external Palestinian and Arab actors. After the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings of buses and restaurants starting around the year 2000 it went down. Two years after the Gaza withdrawal it was back up, with 70% support for the two-state solution in 2007, when there were peace talks. [1]
The mass killings and kidnappings that Hamas did in 2023 pretty much eliminated any enthusiasm for two states at present. A recent poll put Israeli opinion at 70% opposition to a Palestinian state.
That could change again. Israel is a democracy, and people vote depending on what they see. The idea that a Palestinian nation will ever encompass "the river to the sea," is a complete delusion. The idea that Israel will ever see peace and security by annexing the entire area of the former British Mandate is likewise a complete delusion. If Hamas can be defeated, if the Palestinian Authority can get more effective, less corrupt leadership, if Israel can get a parliamentary majority that is no longer dependent on right-wing parties, if ordinary Israelis can get a hint that Oct 7 is not something that will happen again, then there might be hope for peace.
Y'all do want peace, don't you?
[0] https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bkd8rnrqkl
[1] https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/with-only-40-per...
It was literally Likud's electioneering slogan throughout the 70s. It's not just that it's been used by both sides - it was actually created by Israelis.
That is not true. Trivial to check on Wikipedia [1] and go to factual information.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Policies_towards_Israel_...
Israel really the invader according to UN and many other organization.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
and many other examples of how israel really ignored the internatinal law, the agreements it signed etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...
"Experts say that airdrops, another measure Israel announced, are insufficient for the immense need in Gaza and dangerous to people on the ground."[1]
"[T]he airdrops have an advantage over trucks because planes can move aid to a particular location very quickly. But in terms of volume, the airdrops will be 'a supplement to, not a replacement for moving things in by ground.'"[2]
The airdrops killed people when 1) the containers landed on occupied tents and, 2) containers landed in the water and people drowned attempting to retrieve the aid. Trucks can also delivery vastly larger quantities of aid substantially faster and cheaper than planes.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/gaza-starvation-israel-palestinia...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-airdrop-humanit...
Some non-profits (like Oxfam) are very against it as a purely anti-western reflex.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...
https://archive.is/1bllc
Xi, 2012 - (中华儿女) - Chinese Dream - https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/spee...
Netanyahu - 2015 - https://www.wsj.com/articles/netanyahu-makes-final-plea-for-...
These 3 guys have been saying the same thing for a long time now, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly... we should probably take better note.
This guy wanna make his country great again right now
oh I think I know why, everyone knows why...
Many aid agencies and other sources on the ground have also verified many of the claims, when journalists can't (considering they've been banned from entering). Are all the aid agencies lying too?
And sometimes, just sometimes, in this world of AI now, video evidence is accurate.
The world is imperfect, and so we go with the balance of probabilities.
And I'll confirm for you. There's a murderous genocide taking place.
Also a high percentage of the said 50,000 killed would have to be Hamas terrorists.
Also, Hamas would be working overtime to make this new way of food distribution to fail.
Gaza people would not want to blame Hamas at ALL, since Hamas kills people who criticize them. This has happened in Past
In fact it is reported Hamas told Gaza people not to get food from the new distrubution places.
Hamas would also have to be guilty of genocide. In fact they have previously stated this in writing. Hamas is prepared to sacrifice Gaza people. Also Hamas committed genocide on October 7th
On the other hand, if you just feel like this isn't the site you want HN to be, I hear that and, yeah, sorry. It's kind of been this way since forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869).
https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Democracies-and-Death-Cults-Au... ) should be required reading for anyone who wants to write about/speak about this extremely unfortunate situation. it's pretty "rich" (and telling) for Hamas to initiate an unfathomably brutal, unprovoked attack on Israelis during their "holy days" (Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah), and, perhaps bizarrely, the U.N. and other institutions to have not only failed to highlight/adequately emphasize that Hamas started the war, but to have both explicitly and implicitly condoned it by portraying the (undeniably innocent) civilian casualties as "victims of Israel's cruelty/"war crimes" when, in "fact" Hamas does things like hide weapons and supplies in civilian homes, Mosques, schools, hospitals, etc so that when the IDF is essentially forced to preemptively defend itself/protect innocent lives from murderous anti-Semitic terrorists, the public sees headlines like "Israel bombs hospital in Gaza" rather than "Hamas hides weapons in hospitals in Gaza". I highly recommend both "On Democracies and Death Cults" by Douglas Murray and "The Parasitic Mind" by Dr. Gad Saad:
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-parasiti...
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Parasitic-Mind-Audiobook/1799...*
We do occasionally turn off flags in order to allow a discussion to happen because allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong
Many people have different views on whether this and other topics should have significant exposure and discussion on HN, but in this case it seems enough of the community sees the topic as important to discuss, that we need to respect that sentiment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
No, they often get flagged off pretty quickly.