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.
While I agree it's very important to welcome people who changed their minds, there are a few things that still annoy me:
- the situation was actually very clear from the start
- Israel has been illegally occupying, enforcing apartheid, committing war crimes for decades. You always ignored it.
- I don't hear any apology about the above, nor any indication that these people won't return to their default stance of pretending all is well in Palestine as soon as the bulk of the killing stops.
Was it clear? Did we always ignore it? Not convinced at all. All was and is not well in Palestine, but one thing I know, it ain't cut-and-dry, and Israel going all Hamas on Palestine doesn't make it so either.
Yes, it's perfectly clear and always was. One country is illegally occupying territories outside its borders, illegally annexing them, transferring their civilian population there, ethnically cleansing the natives, enforcing apartheid against those who remain, using its soldiers to protect its citizens when they engage in pogroms against the natives, periodically bombing them, stealing their water, destroying their crops- all while enjoying full diplomatic and military support from the West. Those who resist are deemed "terrorists", condemned and vilified, and are "eliminated", together with any civilians, women and children who happen to be in the way.
This has been going on for decades while the Western media ignores most of it, reporting acts of resistance and terrorism from the oppressed side as if they were motivated by ideological hatred, and in general depicting the situation as "complicated"- a position you're now repeating without a second thought.
There are other facts on the ground which go the other way, you just choose to ignore them. Like the fact that one side has offered a two-state solution, the other has refused it. Or that one side is much more democratic than the other. That one side has been openly and proudly promoting exterminating the other side wholesale for much longer, and much more vocally than the other side. You could use an LLM to come up with more examples, then verify accuracy yourself. But then what would be left of your comfortable illusions of clarity?
> Like the fact that one side has offered a two-state solution,
True. Hamas has offered this since 2017 [1] but Israel has never honestly offered it. And it's practically impossible anyway at this point with all the illegal (under international law) settlements in the west bank, supported by the IDF. Something you wouldn't do if you were trying to move toward a "two state solution", but something you would do if that was just talk intended to delay any implementation of Palestinian human rights in Israeli occupied territory while finalizing a drawn out campaign of ethnic cleansing as fast as you think the US will allow.
Yeah, it's Israel which "never honestly offered it", while Hamas, who always maintained that Israel has no place in the middle east, does offer such a solution in this proposal, while curiously not mentioning Israel at all, only that they shall take the whole of Jerusalem. But the article helpfully infers that this elision means Hamas would clarly accept Israel's right to exist. It just reeks of honesty...
Wow that supposed "both sides" facade really vanished pretty quickly didn't it? Not even a performative condemnation of Israel's constant onslaught of home demolitions and illegal settlements.
How so? Since I made it clear that I see both sides as responsible for the mess, it should be evident that I don't agree with Israel's excesses any more that with those of Hamas. (And anyway, even if I would have spelled out the obvious, you just revealed you would have auto-magically labeled my admission as insincere). All I wanted to show is how much truth-twisting side-pickers have to engage in to maintain their comfortable illusion of clarity.
Btw. it's not any prettier with hard-core Israel supporters either. Fair is fair.
Most of the ones listed above. Basically abusing their power in the region. Like all powers have done since the dawn of time. (Let's not try to imagine what would happen if Hamas would somehow get the upper hand either - shudder). Does this mean I should start taking sides with those who have been chanting "Death to Israel, death to America" for generations and declare that they were right after all? Not at all.
And what about Israel's right to exist? Maybe this is what you were referring by "interesting choice of words" - to some, Israel is itself an excess which needs to be corrected. If the self-appointed "corrector" is American, I will remind them on how their country was founded, the genocide of the native peoples, and how maybe now's the time to return it all to their rightful owners and head back to wherever their ancestors have come from. Lemme tell you, they don't like this line of reasoning. Especially if they're that special kind of Israel-hating American Jew: where would they go to, Israel?!? Now we're back to square one!
And the same argument can be applied to pretty much any people. We all descend from migrants who elbowed their way into territories where others were already present, and who, in turn, forced their way into the lands of even more ancient populations, ad-infinitum. Sure, it happened a while ago, but who's to say where the line should be drawn? Usually, self-interest: "the statute of limitations applies to me, but not to the Jews of Israel"; or "yeah, I'll throw the first stone, I have no qualms with that, all is kosher in my corner of the world..."
> Let's not try to imagine what would happen if Hamas would somehow get the upper hand either - shudder
This level of cognitive dissonance here is absolutely bizarre to me.
We are watching israel perpetrate a genocide, ethnically cleansing Palestine and Palestinians. israel is cheering it all on, just like you said. The imagined thing you're shuddering at is happening to a different ethnic group and country than you imagined. How about a shudder for Palestinians? They are just as much people as israelis.
> And what about Israel's right to exist?
And what about Palestine's right to exist?
We have means of dealing with this sort of situation, but it requires israel realizing they are a party to the conflict, not the judge of it, and stepping back to let the established international bodies decide things. You know, like they did in order to get created in the first place? That would mean they had to stop the genocide, and they have refused to do so at every available opportunity (including right now).
Is this reply supposed to convince me that it's all Israel's fault and that the Palestinians are hapless and blameless victims? Because this is what I was disagreeing with. Yes, I agree that Israel should pull back, this is not going anywhere good for any of the parties involved. And yes, I shudder for the Palestinians caught in this - at least those who don't bear some of the responsibility, of which I'm convinced there are plenty. As I shudder for future Israelis who will pay a dear price for this continuous escalation. And I can sadly not see any likely solution to this impasse either.
Your convincing would be nice, but the judges in this matter are the relevant international bodies, not you or I or israel.
The relevant international bodies have decided that collective punishment is illegal, so regardless how much culpability israel personally feels innocent Palestinian civilians must bear, it is still a war crime. Any related complaints israel has ("human shields! this is hard!" etc) can be submitted, with evidence, to the same bodies for judgement, but that doesn't justify further war crimes.
The relevant international bodies have also decided that many of the other atrocities israel regularly perpetrates in Palestine should be criminal, and made them so. Thus, regardless of any justifications real or imagined, those further atrocities are still war crimes.
If there is to be sustainable peace in the region, it must start with the cessation of war crimes. Then the relevant international bodies can address Palestine's right to exist, which is equal in all ways to israel's, because Palestine is a country equal to israel, and Palestinians are people equal to israelis.
Do I foresee that this will happen? Of course not: every indication, including direct quotes from them, is that israel wants domination and ethnic cleansing, not equality and sustainable peace.
>If the self-appointed "corrector" is American, I will remind them on how their country was founded, the genocide of the native peoples, and how maybe now's the time to return it all to their rightful owners and head back to wherever their ancestors have come from. Lemme tell you, they don't like this line of reasoning.
Isn't this just a tacit admission that Israel is committing genocide like the American colonists did? Americans who are alive today at least have the excuse that they weren't around at the time and didn't actually commit the genocide, but the Israelis dont even have that excuse- they're doing it right now
This is the second time someone on HN has used this line as a "gotcha" to me and I honestly don't understand the mindset that leads to them thinking this is a good reply. Everyone should get to do genocide as a treat, and they haven't had theirs yet? Do they not realize that the genocide of indigenous Americans is widely seen as wrong and unacceptable? The genocide of American Indians inspired the Nazis; I guess it continues to inspire some Zionists to this day.
Flagging my post is just the resonance disaster caused by cognitive dissonance. They cannot stand being remembered of the fact that their poster boys would like to slaughter their friends (or themselves).
> Hamas advocates the liberation of all of Palestine but is ready to support the state on 1967 borders without recognising Israel or ceding any rights
In what way can this be read as 'honestly offering a two-state solution'? If one is not willing to recognise that there would be two (sovereign) states, it's not much of a two-state solution, is it?
I don't see Israel willing to recognize a Palestinian state, it's even threatening with consequences those who do. This doesn't prevent Israel from being recognized, does it?
Israel in 2025 is very hostile to a 2 state solution. However your original claim was "for decades", and decades ago the situation and politics were not the same
Forty years ago Israel had already annexed and settled East Jerusalem (Palestinian territory) and had started settling the West Bank. You cannot be in favour of the creation of a state and having good relations with your neighbour while annexing its territory at the same time. What has changed is that Israel is more of one mind and less afraid of saying what it really wants- which is everything, one way or another.
There have been MANY proposals for two state solutions, from Israel and from the UN and from other third parties that both sides were willing to listen to, going back to 1937. In each case, they've been rejected by Palestinian leaders. After 88 years of rejected proposals, relentless violence from the Palestinians with no sign of stopping, and generations of young people indoctrinated with hatred, it's no wonder the current government has no interest in concessions.
What's more interesting to me is that folks who support Israel often act as though their audience hasn't heard all these arguments before, and have't been passively absorbing pro-Israel propaganda for most of their lives. At least for those of us in the US, almost all we heard growing up about Israel was couched in sympathetic and positive terms. It's not as though there's a lack of Zionist perspective in a country where all the recent heads of state and political party leaders have been ideological Zionists.
How can we ever have a good faith argument if you believe anyone that says something supportive of Israel has been indoctrinated to do so "most of their lives"?
How can you have a good faith argument if you create strawman arguments instead of acknowledging the point the person was making?
Everyone in the US and Europe has been indoctrinated to support Israel for most of their lives. That’s those who support Israel and those who don’t.
If you went to literally any school, or watched any television, in the US or Europe any time in the last 7 decades, every lesson taught, every broadcast made, that could have involved Israel was pro-Israel and pro-Zionism.
Not a single program or teacher has been able to share the viewpoint that religious ethnostates should not exist, or that the native Palestinian people didn’t deserve to be genocided to make room for one. If you expressed such a view, you’d be prevented from teaching or broadcasting. For decades.
Are you suggesting that if you are from the US, you are unable to form an opinion of the facts that are presented from both sides?
I did have to go to school some time ago, but I also gained access to the internet during that time that allows anyone to research both sides of a topic. There are tons of books available that provide descriptions from both sides.
Why do I have to be on one side or the other? Is it because of my push back against a specific side, you assumed I aligned with the other?
Are you a troll? Why do you keep willfully misrepresenting or twisting what others are saying into something slightly different?
My point, that from the 1950s through the 2010s, no one in the US or Western Europe has been presented facts from both sides, and seeking out facts from the "wrong" side would result in social, financial, and possible criminal penalties, was incredibly clearly stated.
Because of the way you keep twisting others' words, it seems pretty safe to assume you would side with the fascist religious ethnostate that's been committing a genocide for decades with the financing and approval of the US and EU state, military, financial, media, and educational apparatuses.
People who oppose fascism don't communicate the way you have communicated in this thread.
Its interesting that you did not quote any of my reply while accusing me of "willfully misrepresenting or twisting what others are saying into something slightly different". The goal was for me to make sure I understood what you are communicating.
It seems we agree. The internet was much more available 15 years again in 2010 than it was prior. Since then, unlimited opportunity has opened to research each perspective, and even share those with people across the world.
At no point in this thread have a resorted to name calling, I hope your day is better.
Ah, diverting the argument whether killing innocents (hundreds of thousands and counting) is fine or not to an argument about what a word means... whatever helps you sleep at night.
Next you can argue that this number is wrong, and since you believe the number is lower, then... it's not a big deal.
Ironically, who introduced the phrase "good faith argument" in this yelling-at-each-other?
An acceptable number for me is 15027 civilian deaths.
A farcical answer for a farcical question (which is also deflecting from the actual issue).
You seem to want to have an argument about the borders of discussion, and are moaning that blah A, blah B, blah C, that some bored people on the Internet who are on "the other side" of the argument is doing is preventing you to have a discussion. You're having a "fight" but it's not even about the genocide ("Wait, what's a genocide!?! Define that!"), but about the terms of discussion.
If we can't agree on terms, how do we make sure we understand each other?
I want to understand what your expectations of Israel were after October 7th. I believe my questions have been very specific, but I realize you have no desire to have an actual discussion. Good day.
On October 9, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”
If that was not clear, Netanyahu said "remember what amalek did to you". If you know anything of what was done to the amalekites, you know this is a genocidal statement.
The statements of ministers in netanyahus cabinet and generals showed very well the intent going into this conflict. They are still adhering to it.
That was shortly after the Oct 7 massacres, and the total blockade was lifted shortly after.
"Remember what amalek did to you" is about remembering evil. The same statement appears at Yad Vashem, for example, yet no one has accused the Holocaust museum of calling for a genocide of the German people.
Except for under the ceasefire there has been no point in the conflict where enough supplies and food has gotten in. There is an acronym, SWEAT-MSO, Sewage, Water, electricity, academics, trash, medical, safety and other. It is a framework to assess the needs of the civilian population to, among other things, avoid having them join a resistance.
Israel has bombed all those things.
Your statement of Amalek is disingenuous. Netanyahu would not say anything that does not have plausible deniability. I think it is important to look at how his words were interpreted. Shortly afterwards there were at least two clips (one of which was use by south Africa in their ICJ deposition ) of Israeli soldiers (lots of them!) going to Gaza singing about destroying the seed of Amalek and "there are no uninvolved civilians".
The thing about genocidal statements is that most people committing genocide are not at outspoken av Gallant and Ben-Gvir.
Occam’s razor suggests that he probably just meant what he said: that Israelis should remember the atrocities committed by Hamas and other attackers.
There was nothing in Netanyahu’s speech, or even the Torah’s passages about Amalek, about “no uninvolved civilians”, so it seems like a stretch to say that Netanyahu deliberately conveyed that message as a subtext.
You say the chants occurred “shortly afterwards”, but wasn’t that in December? Whereas the speech you’re drawing a connection to was in October.
If we’re going to accuse people of the most heinous crimes, we should have much more solid evidence.
It would not be the first time palestinians have been called amalek. Considering other ministers hang out with people voicing those ideas, I am not sure it can be as easily dismissed. Ben Gvir had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his office who had those views.
There is about a month between the letter and the video clip being published, a little more from the speech. Someone even took the time to write a song.
Smotrich also invoked amalek, but he continued with "what Rafah needs is complete destruction". It is very clear what he meant.
Umm... it absolutely was cut and dry. 75 years ago a set of westerners came and occupied another country through massive, brutal and widespread violence all under the approval of western govt's that themselves felt massive guilt about the holocaust. The Israeli gov't pretended to give Palestinians rights all while calculatedly trying to suppress any legitimate form of gov't (read about Israels massive support of Hamas starting in the 80s because they believed they would have a tougher "negotiating position" against extremists... guess that backfired. They enforced apartheid, blockades, mass surveillance etc. naturally that resulted in resistance. Is resistance justified? Who cares. Is it a natural consequence of material conditions? Absolutely.
I have a friend who would say anytime someone brings up that "it's a complex issue": "They should just stop stealing peoples houses dude". This pretty much sums it up. Maybe if they stopped that a few decades ago this wouldn't have happened.
given that Israel expanded their borders repeatedly, poisoned village wells, and considers the genocidal periods of the Nakba (their "independence holiday") something that's illegal to mourn... yes. yes it was always clear. the playbook has been the same since 1948.
If that's your criteria this is equally true on the other side of this conflict. Even predating the Jewish exodus from many Arabic nations.
The primary difference between them is that the side which openly shouts for genocide doesn't have the means that the side that at least doesn't openly shout for genocide has. (By openly I mean the majority of the people, not select extreme individuals. Some of whom are in positions of power.)
I'm not going the route that it's okay to want to genocide a peoples because of things that were done to them by another group of people. Because if that's your way of viewing this conflict, then Israel has more than enough to point at to 'justify' their genocide.
And I'm not going to excuse calls for genocide with "well, they don't have the power to, so who cares". Because all these routes lead straight to hell. You can't even begin to resolve the conflicts between these peoples.
This conflict isn't nearly as cut-and-dry as say Russia-Ukraine, and it benefits no one to pretend it is. Ukraine never invaded Russia, nor did it commit any terrorism against them. This isn't the case between Israel and the Palestinians.
Between 1968-2023 over 3500 acts of terrorism were committed by the Palestinians against Israel. Of which the vast majority (Between 70-78% depending on if you count purely civilian targets), targeted civilians.
You can argue for a long time which side committed the most heinous acts, but neither side is anywhere close to "clean".
So who are those people with guns in between Egypt and Gaza for the past decades? Or blocking Gazan fisherman from fishing for decades?
The Zionists leave a settlement in northern Gaza and call that "leaving Gaza".
The Zionists brought this on themselves when they decided to take over Gaza in 1967. 33 of the victims of the Zionist aggressions in 1967 were those brave US Navy sailors on the USS Liberty that the Zionists killed then.
Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater.
I just dont understand what chomsky's solution is. The palestinians have proven themselves to be just as bad as the israelis, or at least close. Giving them complete sovereignty would end with israel invading them again in all likelihood when they continue to lob rockets at tel aviv. How is that better? Just seems so clear to me that both two and one state solutions are off the table so Im not really sure where things can go.
Besides this, notice how they're implying that having left a region of Palestine (even if that were true, which isn't) means that no Palestinian from that specific region has a right to attack them.
As if no Ukrainian had a right to attack Russia besides those in the occupied regions.
As if no American except Californians would have a right to fight if California were occupied by a foreign power.
> - the situation was actually very clear from the start
Which start? There are so many in that conflict.
> - Israel has been illegally occupying, enforcing apartheid, committing war crimes for decades.
So did the other sides. For outsiders, it's very hard to know what's really going on in that region; so many history, so many details, so many emotions, so many abuse and killing... It's a chain of reactions and counter-reactions which is going for over a century. Don't assume that everyone can know everything.
Israel was also very good at manipulating the Western World and building on their collective guilt. Even if a politician knew what was going on, it would have been political suicide to speak out too much about this. Even now, it's a delicate topic. And people still blindly spreading hate against all Jews, while it's mainly the fault of some factions, is also not really helping the cause here.
> - I don't hear any apology about the above
Apologize for what? At the end of the day, there are all trapped in a situation where they have very little control.
"Both sides, X and Y, are bad" requires as a prerequisite that X is in the set of "bad". Doesn't matter which of X and Y are government policies in Israel or Palestine.
Now, if the comment you'd replied to was saying "it's all X's fault, Y is innocent", then "we've all seen Israel's true face now" would be a reasonable response.
Fair enough, I'm getting into the weeds a bit and left some things unsaid.
What I'm referring to is a rhetorical technique deployed to get people to simmer down and accept the status quo. Folks who support Israel know they can't get people to be 100% behind Israel anymore, so the fallback position is "it's complicated, the Palestinians don't seem like great people either so I'm not going to go out of my way to support them". That leaves the ruling class foreign policy establishment to run the horror show the way they like without any troublesome democratic meddling.
If you want to see an example from a historical genocide, just look at what the Turkish government writes about the Armenian genocide.
> "it's complicated, the Palestinians don't seem like great people either so I'm not going to go out of my way to support them"
People are complicated, anyone saying otherwise is also selling you propaganda.
Hamas in this case (and I do mean Hamas not Palestinians in general) were explicitly genocidal, mellowed a bit, and are currently back using explicitly genocidal goals.
Hamas were just fine with targeting civilians, have been for ages. Hamas are also weak, which is the biggest difference between them and the IDF. That power disparity makes it easy and obviously necessary to condemn the big strong force that's damaged or destroyed approximately all buildings in Gaza, and killed 2-14% of the population depending on whose estimate you follow. Some governments (e.g. Germany) do still find they need to say "well Hamas started it!", but overwhelmingly the international consensus is "I don't care who started it, we need to stop it".
This "complication" or messiness is real, but the implication is the opposite it is claimed to have. That it makes further civilian violence on either side more understandable, or less easy to judge.
Both countries fomented war for decades. On civilians.
Israel by tacitly/actively letting Israeli citizens illegally "settle" land that was not theirs, and the violence, theft and worse those settlers imposed on Palestinian civilians.
Those actions would be considered acts of war, if done against any stronger actor.
And Hamas fomented war with its responses and atrocities against Israeli civilians.
But this "complication" is of a kind that makes it even more egregious for either side to claim any moral high ground for continued harm to the other side's civilians. Making genocidal type starvation of an entire territory's civilian population even less acceptable. If that is even possible.
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.
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.
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?
If we want to use Gaza as a political tool to achieve some political aim (ie get my guy elected), that will be in conflict with doing something to help Gaza. Because in most countries, doing something meaningful is likely going to require cooperation between politicians from different parties. And it’s hard to get people to cooperate if you don’t plan on sharing the credit.
I do think cooperation and letting bygones be bygones for the sake of progress are important.
But I don't think it's right to frame it as "get my guy elected" vs "help Gaza". Does decrying them on social media mean they will flip flop again and be pro-gaza massacre? Even if that's the case, it's "get someone elected who will avoid Gaza-like tragedies in the future" vs "help Gaza now" which isn't black and white. Also, these people cooperated to enable the massacre in the first place...
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.
There are subfactions, both among the Jewish and the Muslims, that do better if the problem isn't solved and goes on forever, but there is very little in-faction policing: If anything, atrocities make them stronger. There is no peace while the criticism to the other side quiet in-faction criticism. You need people that want peace to be in charge, but what leadership wants is victory. Nobody that believes in human rights is going to like the costs of victory
> 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.
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.
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.
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
>why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead?
How's an organization supposed to surrender when all of its leaders have been assassinated? Who's going to walk up to an IDF emplacement while claiming to lead Hamas? How would such a death-defying individual prove that they had any actual significance to Hamas?
the recent talks in qatar suggested that even though disorganized, enough of a hierarchy still exists within hamas to negotiate. the main complaints from the american side was that hamas seemed to be inconsistent / fractured in their demands, outside of forcing the israelis to return to pre-war status-quo via a ceasefire that protects hamas rule
It's entirely possible there's no longer any single person in charge in practice, but rather a bunch of more or less individually operating cells - each with their own leader.
Imagine you are a 19 year old in charge of some Hamas survivors. Let’s say you want to surrender.
1. Would it even mean anything? It’s not like you or anyone else has the control to stop everyone else. And Israel will use any attack as a sign of bad faith and ignore the surrender.
2. Would it improve anything for your people? If Israelis are intentionally starving babies, there is no reason to think they will stop the genocide just because the militarized part has given up. Have you even heard any news of Hamas even fighting back recently or has it all just been killing civilians?
All a surrender would do is get you tortured for information and executed for no gain.
ironically only indian and pakistani news really report on the IDF casualties / hamas attacks, make of that what you will (IDF journalism blackout backfiring, news bias, maybe south asians love telegram war footage, etc)
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.
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?
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—in internet jargon, 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.
---
Edit: reading this the next day, I think the word 'dance' could have trivializing associations (e.g. let's just dance rather than deal with violence and tragedy). I don't mean it that way. I mean something like moving and changing in response to each other. If anyone can do that in response to the other, even just a little, then one's self becomes a place for at least a modicum of change.
As someone who abandoned rightness/wrongness 9+ years ago (except in the idea of alignment with the cosmos), I can say that "genocidal rhetoric" doesn't necessarily imply rightness or wrongness. There exist language patterns that indicate a perspective that, when culturally carried and compounded for years, has the effect of cultivating behaviors that lead to extinguishing a people, whether intentional or not. This is genocidal rhetoric.
As for options as to what to do with it, I find this useful for finding more.
> "genocidal rhetoric" doesn't necessarily imply rightness or wrongness
I believe you when you describe your perspective this way, but it's so far beyond conventional usage that it may be misleading to express it in this way. Certainly I didn't understand your GP comment as being anywhere near what you're saying here, and I doubt others would.
It's true...conventional usage is rooted in addiction to violence, which includes dualistic myths of right/wrong, life/death, like/dislike, belief/disbelief.
Perhaps a site-wide call for curiosity when encountering such myths could help spur people to pull themselves out of such ways of "killing" nondual animist views of experience.
I appreciate you dang and the culture you are trying to cultivate, but I think in a genocide civility politics are inappropriate. I'm jewish, and I am certain that "raising questions" about whether jews should live or die or are intrinsically evil terrorists would not be allowed on this site. For balance, this should be accorded equally to palestinians, who are in fact being killed mercilessly in line for food by Israeli forces and US mercenaries. pg in fact has been loudly talking about the genocide, which I appreciate.
I will try to be less flippant in my comments. Nonetheless, it is a lot of work to cut through genocidal lies that are often supported (at least in editorials if not in actual reporting) by the mainstream media. The north of Gaza has been nearly obliterated and still these guys get to cast aspersions justifying the annihilation of a people.
> "raising questions" about whether jews should live or die or are intrinsically evil terrorists would not be allowed on this site. For balance, this should be accorded equally to palestinians
What are examples of such comments not being flagged and/or moderated? I'd appreciate links. Such comments are unacceptable by any interpretation of HN's guidelines, and the only reason we wouldn't crack down on them (same as with antisemitic comments of course) is if we didn't see them.
> I think in a genocide civility politics are inappropriate
I'm not talking about civility and stopped using that word years ago. Shallow words like civility or politeness don't reflect how we think about moderation. (I listed a few past explanations about that below*, if anyone wants them.)
What are we looking for? Not sure I can answer that better than I did in the GP comment. We want people to listen to each other, because of the two available options—listening and killing—only listening is compatible with the core value of the site.
I know it's a provocation to use the word "killing" in this context, and obviously I mean it metaphorically, but I think it's accurate. When people stop listening and seek to destroy the other's argument/position/view, killing energy is the quality that shows up. I don't think it takes too much emotional self-awareness to feel this, nor too much self-honesty to admit it.
That is the dynamic behind weaponized internet comments. It's easy to deny, because the genre itself is so trivial, and so are the weapons (snark, tropes, etc.). But one need only sense into the feeling level and it's no longer so trivial—in fact, it's all there.
This explains the distinctive mix of rage and pain that flares up when one reads a comment fired against one's position, and also the distinctive mix of...let's call it righteousness and triumph that flares up when a comment is fired in favor of one's position.
Perhaps it would be less provocative to use the word "war" rather than "killing" for the non-listening option, but I'm not sure that abstraction is beneficial in describing this. It creates distance from the reality inside ourselves, and room for denial and evasion.
Regardless of what the best names are, we want the listening option, because the alternative is just more destruction.
(Needless to say, I'm not talking about you here, I'm talking about all of us.)
---
* Here are a few posts touching on how we stopped thinking in terms of 'civility'...lots more can be found in HN Search if anyone cares...
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.
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.
In reality, the challenge remains, what is a better solution from the Israeli perspective? If the proposed alternative is they all pack up and leave or dissolve their government, there is 0% chance that will happen.
It may be in the interests of someone to kill a witness to a murder, but it's up to law and society to stop them. Likewise I am sure plenty of genocides have been in the interests of the victors, but it is up to law and civlization to stop them. What I am not sure about is that it is truly in Israel's interest to be known forevermore as one of the racial exterminators in mankind's long and fraught history.
It seems like you are dodging the question by claiming it doesnt matter what Israel wants or will accept (like a murderer). Do you actually think that is true in reality, or do you simply wish that it did not matter?
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.
Apartheid South Africa’s real enemy—the ANC, the liberation movements, the “terrorists”—wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t surrender until white minority rule and its entire system didn’t exist. They had taken the innocent Black civilians of South Africa hostage. They were also so ingrained into the townships that resources were literally siphoned from humanitarian sites like churches and schools into hidden safehouses and underground networks; as just one example of reporting that many at the time were inclined to believe was credible, even with the mutual atrocities both sides were carrying out.
What would “winning” look like from a moral and ethical standpoint? Liberating the people of that region from the violence and suffering. Returning them to a “functioning society” with social and civic infrastructure. Fully denying major resistance and insurgency in the region for lifetimes—to the point that the hate and anger finally cooled off enough for people to “move on.”
Winning would require a multi-generational investment in humanity by humanity. It would require the buy-in of the people on the ground. It would require a United Nations coalition and boots on the ground from “responsible” countries who wanted to raise everyone above the hate. And of course, South Africa would need to be an absolute DMZ for that entire time—no armed liberation movements allowed, only peacekeeping forces sanctioned by the “international community.”
Getting from here to there? Even less popular than the hugely unpopular interventions elsewhere in the world. Don’t ask me how anyone could do it—those skilled in the art of diplomacy had tried for longer than my lifetime and probably longer than yours, and NOTHING had stuck.
———
wait; that’s not what it took.
It took the abolishment of apartheid; colonisation and oppression, peace was achieved. Your framing is flawed , it is framed as equal sides. Not the reality a colonial apartheid state.
south africa is not a good analogue since it's fate is different from that of palestine, and you are making this obtuse analogue to stir up feelings of decolonisation as a sort of nationalism
Think you are missing the point. This wasn’t an analogy about the actors , but rather the framing.
During apartheid , and towards the end plenty were making arguments for gradual control ; gradual processes which just would have further perpetuated oppression. I was highlighting the similarities to that. We also had people saying the ‘blacks’ just want to ‘kill the whites’ and it would result in violence.
Your mapping of roles is completely incorrect, Indians cannot be the Zionist since they were an oppressed minority and did not have power. Equating Afrikaners to ottomans / British is incoherent.
You, and the original comment completely ignores the power imbalance as was the case in apartheid South Africa. This framing further perpetuates oppression and is a way to prop up the apartheid state.
I won’t post all of the evidence here confirming that Israel functions as an apartheid state. Numerous reports exist that describe and draw the comparison.
> During apartheid , and towards the end plenty were making arguments for gradual control ; gradual processes which just would have further perpetuated oppression. I was highlighting the similarities to that. We also had people saying the ‘blacks’ just want to ‘kill the whites’ and it would result in violence.
If you are then making comparison to modern times instead of colonialism, then still not really applicable to gaza since gaza was not occupied Oct 7th. Therefore, Israel (colonization conspiracies aside) had no interest in gaza except for security.
I do believe the apartheid example / comparison makes sense when thinking of the west bank, and I do believe myself the west bank is experiencing settler colonization and apartheid conditions along that settler boundary.
If you do not believe that zionists in palestine were an oppressed minority until the mass immigration in the 1930s and the failed arab revolts, I suggest you restudy the history. Palestine would have easily ended up like Uganda if the Palestinians hadn't made strategic errors / failed their invasion of the newly declared state of Israel.
The Orwell link is a great read, and part of it suggests that both decolonization and underdog-centered pacifism are forms of nationalism. Here is a quote that I love, heavily relates to the troubles in ireland and some reactions to the current gazan war:
"But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough."
My concern is the politicians are suddenly flip flopping because they realize in the short term Israel is close to exterminating the entire population of Gaza. Perhaps they will let a pittance of food aid through to prolong the genocide so Netanyahu can stay in power. I have little confidence in US leadership actually having a change of heart now.
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.
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.
But in the scenario above, is this necessarily flip-flopping? Saying "Israel deserved a chance to protect itself, but now that they are going way overboard, it's time for some tough love instead" seems reasonable to me, and doesn't imply any kind of changing one's mind.
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.
I know this is a trivial thing to point out in the context of such a discussion but the expression you want is "carrot and stick". A cane is a kind of stick that you can also hit with, the verb "to cane" means to hit someone with a stick.
Thanks for the correction. English is not my first language, in German the equivalent is "Zuckerbrot und Peitsche" (sugar-bread and whip) I must have somehow made the mental leap from "sugar" via "sugarcane" to "cane" and completely forgot about the carrot.
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.
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.
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.
So let's make the assumption that all politicians flip-flop in their opinions, depending on what the popular opinion is these days.
Given that assumption: If our goal is to get politics to take a tougher stance on a foreign government does it really matter that much how they arrived there?
I get it, I too would love my politicians to hold principled humanitarian values and I know it doesn't feel good and it is certainly not ideologically pure, but those are the politicians we got now, if they come over at our side we could just welcome them with a knife hidden behind our back. We can always vote them out of office next time anyways, what we 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.
Reread what you're responding to. The point is that there will be only lipservice and exploitation of voters. No tougher stances will be taken, except in public rhetoric, which is meaningless.
How can you expect your politicians to “lead” if they have such an inability to not only see the actual facts on the ground, but lack the elementary foresight to see what’s going to happen?
This shit wasn’t something that’s been kept a secret, it’s been widely widely documented for nearly 20 months. The base the politicians claim to represent have been literally screeching about this for over a year, and yet nothing?
If a politician can’t even denounce genocide, how can someone expect them to fight for them?
So lets say you have twi buttons and you can only press one:
A) Your movement gains the support
of a politician who flip-flopped
and now would vote in laws that
help ending the conflict and/or
easing the humanitarian situation
The price is literally just doing
nothing and you can talk bad
about the politician once they
were useful for the movement
B) You don't get that vote, but you
pretend to keep the movement pure
from an ideological standpoint.
The price is potentially not
passing needed legislation.
Don't get me wrong, I like neither option and whether I personally would chose A or B depends a lot on the specifics. But purely from a "we want to achieve tangible political goals"-position the former is superior.
If this is a false dichotomy (it might be), tell me.
It’s not about someone changing their mind when there’s new evidence. The evidence was already there, it was being live-streamed and talked about since the beginning.
The vast majority of the politicians in America receive funding from AIPAC. They know what happens when they deviate from their supplied talking points, and right now the public outcry has grown to the point where those same politicians who would say they “want Palestinians free of Hamas” while those same Palestinians were being wholesale slaughtered for nearly two years, are now suddenly changing their tune.
They are not trustworthy full stop. And they should not be granted the forgiveness while they consistently either openly endorsed the actions of Israel by either words or voting to send more weapons to kill Palestinians
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.
You are framing it as if the problem is Hamas and the existence of Hamas.
Isn't the existence of Hamas only strengthened by the war, by the actions of Israel ?
I would argue that the October 7 attack was highly beneficial for the expansionist plans of Israel. Highly beneficial for Netanyahu, who now can stay in power under martial law instead of fearing prosecution for his previous crimes.
Hamas will not magically cease to exist when Palestinians are treated like that.
Imagine the amount of hate that is brewed against Israel again right now. Would you ever forget or forgive if as a child you were starved, and witnessed endless horrors ? Your city in shambles, rubble and blood everywhere, death and misery wherever you look at ?
Let's quote Netanyahu himself in 2019, at a party meeting:
> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
I think the argument that the use of violence to defeat an enemy only serves to create more enemy doesn't hold water. There are plenty of historical examples where brute force was used to bring an enemy to submission and that was more or less the end. We can go WW-II or we can look at more recent examples like Al Qaeda or ISIS or Chechnya. There are many more.
No argument that the extreme right in Israel benefited from the Oct 7th attack. So far anyways. What exactly that means in terms of "expansion" remains to be seen. Isn't annexing the west bank and giving Palestinians Israeli citizenship the real solution anyways? Modulo trying to "convince" them to leave that's more or less the plan of the Israeli right.
There was plenty of hate towards Israel before Oct 7th. The hate that manifested in Oct 7th was more or less unprecedented. I can't say there is more hate now. Check out some Gaza school textbooks from before Oct 7th. They raise their kids on hate (in UN funded schools).
I also can't predict where things go from here. I think the shift that happened in Israel on Oct 7th is that Israel should not try to control or predict the intent of their enemies. Israel needs to take away the capacity of those opponents to attack Israel. You can see this in Lebanon where Israel is still hitting Hezbollah wherever they can. In the past Israel would worry about retaliation, now Israel is more worried about capabilities and is willing to deter retaliation through use of more force. Deterrence + removing capabilities.
In Lebanon you could argue Lebanese would object to Israel bombing their country but some are happy that Hezbollah is getting decimated. The Palestinian authority and some Palestinians are happy that Israel is going after Hamas and PIJ militants aggressively in the west bank.
Gaza is a very different story but they were also terrorized by Hamas. What things look like after the war - who knows. Hard to even say when this war ends and what that looks like. I would like to hope there is some better lives for everyone and peace but that seems very unrealistic. The western countries talking about a two state solution are smoking some good stuff.
How do you not see this as circular reinforcement?
Hamas justifies it's attacks by pointing to Israel, and Israel justifies it by pointing to Hamas.
Things like Hamas still holding 50 hostages, rockets still being fired into Israel etc.
Israel will not magically stop when Hamas still exists.
> Imagine the amount of hate that is brewed against Israel again right now. Would you ever forget or forgive if as a child you were starved, and witnessed endless horrors ? Your city in shambles, rubble and blood everywhere, death and misery wherever you look at ?
And so do attacks like October 7th. Of course Israelis want to get rid of Hamas. The majority of Israelis don't want to genocide the Gazans, but like you pointed out, Netanyahu and his goons do.
> The majority of Israelis don't want to genocide the Gazans.
According to a recent poll:
Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."
82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents
56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel
These are very, very different situations. You are comparing nations and cultures that have be living side by side for thousands of years to a 77 year old state (Israel) occupying territory that has been Palestinean for thousands of years.
Israel and Ozzy Osbourne were born on the same year. People that were born after Ozzy, can no longer return to their birthplace, because it is now Israel and they are besieged in Gaza.
Not really Palestinian to be fair. Jewish, Greek, Roman, Islamic, Ottoman, and finally British, in that order. Palestinians then started a war of aggression to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, and then lost that war. You can not lose what you never had. If you want to talk about occupying, why is the al-aqsa mosque built where it was, if not for trying to erase native ties to the land?
Native ties? Who the do you think the Palestinians are? Did they just appear one day and occupied Palestine?
The Palestinians are the natives of Palestine. They literally have direct ancetrial ties all the way back to the original Hebrew occupants.
Like many people, they've been occupied, mixed, and they've adopted the religions and customs of their occupiers. That doesn't mean they've not been inhabiting the land for centuries.
Are they less deserving of their ancetrial homes simply because European colonists decided they wanted a religious ethnostate?
My family has ancetrial ties to Britain, do I get to go there and kick out someone from their home because of my ancetrial ties?
Heck I likely have Roman ties, do I get to go to Italy to reclaim my birthright?
Some Palestinians have direct ties to ancient Israelites as well. But the Hebrew occupants were expelled by force, hence the spread out Jewish population. The story is not one of the Jewish people remaining in the region and converting to Islam. At least not for the most part.
The Palestinians are not less worthy because the Jewish people, refugees, returned to their historic homeland. They are less worthy because they chose to wage war against them and lost.
- The site of Tell Mulabbis is usually identified with the Casale Bulbus, which the Count
of Jaffa handed over to the Hospitaller Order in 1133 CE together with the 'des moulins
des trois ponts' (the mills of the three-bridges
- villagers from hills of Samaria repopulated Mulabbis during the 18th century (Yaʿari 1947, 244). Mulabbis figures on Pierre Jacotin's map, which was surveyed in 1799 (Karmon 1960, 168-170) Avraham Yaʿari claims that malaria and disputes with neighbouring nomadic tribes led
to the abandonment of the village (Yaʿari 1947, 243-244)
- Both Jewish and Arab sources ascertain that Mulabbis was settled again by the Abu Hamed al-Masri clan, of Egyptian origins at some point before the middle of the 19th century.
- "Following Ibrahim Pasha’s campaign, Egyptian immigrants, headed by Abu Hamed
al-Masri, settled in Mulabbis. It was a part of a larger wave of Egyptian migration to
Palestine’s coastal plain.21 Ottoman cadestral (tapu) registers mention common Egyptian
names, like ‘Abed b. ‘Abd al-‘Al and Musa b. Muhammad Bardawil, indicating that the
village was mainly, if not solely, inhabited by Egyptian immigrants"
- In 1878, Mulabbis became the first village in Palestine to be acquired by Jews with the intention of establishing an agricultural colony in 1878, establishing the moshava (colony) of Petah Tikva on its lands
So you are telling me that the Jewish people that legally immigrated to the region, bought land from people of Egyptian descent that lived there, almost 200 years ago, don't have rights?
The Jews in Israel didn't kick anyone out of their homes before the 1948 war on them started.
Where do you live? What's your right to the land? If you are persecuted everywhere and in your tradition there is a strong and proven connection to Rome then yes, you can go back to Rome. Do you pray to go back to Rome? Was your family evicted by force from Rome? If I go digging in Rome am I going to find historical artifacts linking you to Rome? If you immigrated to Rome and bought property should we consider you to be a colonialist?
EDIT:
I don't look at my neighbor and say that because he's an immigrant he has no rights. I don't say Palestinians that lived in the region have no rights either. I do stand by the Jewish people being the indigenous people of the region. The only reason they were not there is that they were expelled by force and prevented from returning. They never left, in spirit, and they never gave up on wanting to return.
The height of hypocrisy is that European colonizers of the new world, with zero connection to it, who massacred the local populations wherever they arrived, cause them suffering to date, and who stole the land and resources they live on, are calling the Jewish people who have one of the clearest and strongest connections to their land, supported by rich historical and archeological accounts, who once they could, as refugees themselves with almost nowhere to go, immigrated legally to their land and bought it back, colonizers. That the Arabs who attacked the Jews and ethnically cleansed them from the region even before Zionism was a thing (In Tsfat, in Hebron, in Jerusalem), who attacked Israel on the day it was established even though it offered its Arab/Palestinian residents to become equal citizens ( https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp ), who like the Hussein's in Jordan are often themselves colonizers, are somehow the ones wronged in this story and who deserve the sort of self determination as countries they never had before WW-I and WW-II.
> Some Palestinians have direct ties to ancient Israelites as well. But the Hebrew occupants were expelled by force, hence the spread out Jewish population.
But dude, this is the only paragraph that matters. Israel is persecuting and stealing land from the descendants of the Hebrews all because they aren't the right race and religion.
The 47 partition and 48 war didn't happen because the Israeli settlers were behaving like doves.
And no, just having the same religion as ancient inhabitants does not magically grant you land. That's insanity as I pointed out.
Exactly the same as if a native American came to my home and demanded that I leave because this was their ancetrial land.
What happened in the 1800s was horrific, just like what's currently happening in Israel. It's not hypocrisy to see past genocides as wrong and identify a current genocide. You don't "get one" just because my ancestors did one. Nor do you "get one" just because your parents/grandparents/or great grandparents were subject to one.
You are always the villain when you murder people to steal their land.
At some point I'll give up on this thread but you're wrong.
The only reason I'm arguing the historical context is to counter the ridiculous argument of colonialism or the equally ridiculous revisionism about the connection of the Jewish people (ethnically and religiously) to the land.
Go back and check the history prior to 47-48. The migrants, and the native Jewish population, were under constant attack by Arabs. Not because the Jews "stole" anything. Simply because they are Jews. The "Yeshuv" back then, and now, acted in self defense. The security organizations that were formed were formed as a result of attacks on Jewish people. Attacks (read as massacres and ethnic cleansing) on Jews (native Jews who lives there forever, and migrants) predate Zionism. Jewish people either have been there forever, or were migrants that bought property, often developing areas nobody wanted to live in (due to swamps, Malaria etc.). The area was not as desirable as it is now, it was a disease ridden sh*thole which the Jewish people turned into an amazing modern country (compare to the surrounding countries).
The story of the peaceful native Arabs that somehow got forcibly displaced through some "occupation" is bogus. Never happened. The Arabs that got displaced got displaced during a war they started after they rejected the partition plan (that gave them like 98% of the land in the middle east and like 75% of the original "British Mandate" land that included Jordan). Because Jews and Arabs apparently can't live together (not because of the Jews) then the reasonable solution at the time was to create different political entities for those groups. The partition plan left a tiny sliver of the Levant to be a primarily Jewish state (that guaranteed the rights of minorities, and still does, unlike any Arab country) and a vast middle east to the Arabs. The Arabs wouldn't have that and decided they were going to just kill the Jews and take all the land. This is how we got here. Now the people that ended up as refugees in that war (and their descendant) still want to kill the Jews and take the land.
So sure, some Palestinian, who maybe has ancient Israelite blood in his veins, needs to live somewhere else because of this. If his people actually wanted to make this a win/win and cared about things like human rights and freedom maybe this wouldn't be the outcome. But he's not "rejected" from Israel because of his faith or ethnicity.
Re: Genocide. The word has become meaningless. According to the anti-Israeli killing a single Palestinian can constitute a "genocide" as per their interpretation of the legal definition. The simple truth is that Israel is not killing all Palestinians because of them being Palestinians. Or all Gazans for any reason. I.e. there is no genocide. There might be war crimes in Gaza but those are not comparable to what most people would consider genocide and particularly not comparable to the Nazis systemic murder of six million Jews in Europe. There was no war in Europe between the Jews and the Germans. There were no military targets. There were no Jews that were not a target because they lived somewhere else. If you seriously can not see the difference then you need to read more about the Holocaust. Assuming 60,000 Gazans have been killed (which we don't know but that's the number Hamas publishes more or less) that number is perfectly in line with what you would expect in this kind of war, about half or 30% being combatants is also expected. If we didn't have a war, there wouldn't be civilian casualties. If we didn't have a war we wouldn't see the scale of destruction we see in Gaza. A war has two parties and Israeli soldiers are dying and getting wounded every day and Israel proper is still occasionally getting attacked by mortars and rockets.
Take a look at what Russia did to Checnya, or to Mariupol, or with Assad to Aleppo and other Syrian cities. Take a look at what western countries did in places like Mosul. In terms of brutality and impact to population Gaza is far from the worse war we've seen even in recent decades. It's certainly the war with the most media focus though. Never has a terrorist organization gotten so much positive media in the west. Uninvolved civilians shouldn't need to suffer like this, but it's a reality of war, a war that the Palestinians decided to start on Oct 7th and are still insisting on continuing to fight. There is a fine line- If Israel does change course towards murdering the entire population of Gaza then that's a different story. So far this has not been the story - far from it. Israel is mostly applying the same standard of care as any other western nation, and way above that of non-western nations. Russia leveled Grozny to the ground and 80k people were killed in that war ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War#Siege_of_Gr... ) and nobody said the g word.
EDIT: Also worth adding the word genocide was being thrown around from about Oct 8th without much relationship to Israel's actions. The dilution of this word is doing a disservice to humanity. It is weaponized as part the war as a tool for Palestinians against Israel. I have to admit this is working very well. The various forces here that are pushing narratives seem to have been very well prepared for the Oct 7th attack. I'm not sure if the word genocide has been used previously in the conflict - that's also possible. Using the word is a lot more effective than trying to have a more nuanced debate ratios between civilians and combatants and what is legal use of force in war and what isn't and comparing to other conflicts. Hamas must have known Israel would respond with a heavy hand and that would result in large scale destruction and civilian casualties. They obviously understood the consequences of using civilian infrastructure and tunneling under civilians.
> If you want to talk about occupying, why is the al-aqsa mosque built where it was, if not for trying to erase native ties to the land?
The second temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the first Al Aqsa mosque was likely built in 600s. What is your argument here? Both religions share a common lineage so it's not unusual that Islam would revere the same location as an older religion with the same origin story.
You are forgetting the Natufians, residing in the Levant from 15,000 to 11,000 BC. Should we revive the Natufian identity and claim the land ? They are the OG Levantians after all.
Can you see how this makes no sense ? Why create so much pain and suffering ?
They just had a working state with working institutions that carried on, prussian, protestant bureaucracy carrying on even after the die hard nazis had died out.
Islamic culture is unable to produce these institutions .
I mean I was trying to show that the Germans don't suicide bomb busses in Kaliningrad even after their own much worse version of the Nakba. In general, most losers of wars, especially of wars of aggression that they themselves started, don't spend then next century suicide bombing and turning down deals that they deem beneath them. They take what they can get and get on with their lives, being productive and improving the future for their children.
> 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.
Yeah no, that's wrong on multiple levels.
It's not legal if there is no intention to ever let the civilians return - then you have forced displacement and ethnic cleansing.
But even just assuming it were - we can agree that "leaving" would mean actually leaving the besieged area and get out of danger, right? The IDF is laying siege to the entire strip, not just Gaza city. No one is leaving when they are being pushed - or "concentrated" as your defense minister lovingly put it - into ever-smaller areas inside the combat zone.
Israel is operating three food distribution centers in the southern part of the strip but only one in the north.
"The IDF has been directing civilians towards the “expanded humanitarian area” in al-Mawasi, a narrow coastal strip of agricultural land that was first designated as a “humanitarian zone” in October.
The expanded zone now measures 60 sq km.
The IDF said the area includes “field hospitals, tents and increased amounts of food, water, medication and additional supplies”.
A satellite image captured on 8 May shows what appears to be a new field hospital which has been constructed in Deir al-Balah."
Clearly life in the "humanitarian zone" sucks. But a lot less than in northern Gaza. Despite the often repeated mantra that "nowhere is safe in Gaza" that designated humanitarian zone is significantly safer (and there's data that shows that).
The IDF is not laying siege to the entire strip. It's not even laying siege to Northern Gaza. It's air dropping food in northern Gaza (following pressure - but still). There are three food distribution centers in southern Gaza (and I think they've also seen less violence but I'm not sure). In the south there are armed Palestinian factions that are collaborating with Israel.
Anyways, I'm appointing you to the general in charge of the war from the Israeli side. Your goal is to return the hostage and defeat Hamas. I'm interested in what your plan looks like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a straightforward conclusion from research on the dynamics of grievance-fueled violence. Basically, unlike Nazi Germany, the strength of Hamas is proportional to how many aggrieved civilians there are. Every airstrike that kills one fighter creates two more down the road, out of the aggrieved survivors. I'm pretty sure Hamas understood this and launched the Oct 7th attack with the goal of provoking the harshest possible reaction, and Israel played right into their hands.
Their strength in armaments almost doesn't matter; even if every tunnel is collapsed and every rocket launch site obliterated, even if a ceasefire is reached and the hostages returned, even if Hamas leadership capitulates, you still end up with two million angry people swearing revenge for the injustices they've suffered.
There are two stable equilibria that this can settle into: no grievances, or no surviving civilians. I think the former is the only hope although Israel is making all the wrong moves. I am sure there are right-wing hardliners who would push for the ethnic cleansing route, but most Israelis are peace-minded moderates who would never forgive that option, and so I really think that result would eventually collapse the state of Israel from the inside out, doing more damage than any Hamas rockets ever could.
The Nazis' rise to power was fueled by German grievances, in particular, with their opponents of long-standing, the French. How is it that research on the dynamics of grievance-fueled violence would not apply to Nazi Germany and lead to the same conclusion, that there are two stable equilibria that World War Two could have settled into: no grievances, or no surviving civilians?
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.
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.
This is a widespread misunderstanding; there is no border anymore between Gaza and Egypt, as it was occupied by the IDF in the first year of this war.
So unless Egypt went to war, there was nothing they could do.
And even before this war, the peace treaty gave Israel big control over the Rafa crossing. They have a camera and watch everything going in and out, and can ask for extra searches if they don't like what they see.
And in all, it's just for individuals, not cargo. Whatever cargo goes through, there is just a limited amount that requires prior approval from Israel.
So Egypt really doesn't have any power over the situation unless they are willing to risk a war, which they can't win.
> 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.
That would normally be a great plan, however, that doesn’t work with an enemy like Hamas. It doesn’t work with a people so thoroughly indoctrinated by Islamist extremists for decades. It’s something that us westerners just don’t comprehend readily.
It’s challenging to know what solution would work that doesn’t end up being as brutal as the Islamic countries often are to their own citizenry.
The wars in Yemen and Somalia are just as terrible as in Gaza but with 10’s of times the number of people and a fraction of the world aid Gaza gets. It shows what happens when those governments aren’t in strict control.
It’s also why almost every non-Islamic state in the Muslim world ends up being brutal military dictatorship. Hussein’s Ba’athist (atheist) party survived by being more brutal than the religious extremists. But in the west we think we can bring democracy or prosperity to such cultures and that it’ll flourish. The US spent trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan and decisively lost. Hundreds of thousands of people died and nothing changed.
Hamas literally kills and tortures any dissenters to gain power and to retain it.
Hamas infiltrated every Mosque in Gaza and installed their own clerics where they indoctrinate children from the youngest age that destroying Israel, killing Jews, and being a jihadist martyr is the loftiest goal.
Hamas isn’t shy about this either. Their original charter reads:
> The Motto of the Islamic Resistance Movement Article Eight
> "Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model to be followed, the Koran its constitution, Jihad its way, and death for the sake of Allah its loftiest desire."
It states its goal is to not rest until the Quranic prophecy is fulfilled:
> the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes.
> The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: 'The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.' (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim)."
I watch videos from Gaza and hope and pray that the Palestinians there will realize that Hamas cares nothing for the lives of their children or them. Only for their ideology. Then perhaps Israel can do what you suggest.
Israel is in a tough place. The easiest option for them would to become what many people claim they already are and become right wing religious extremists on par with the Arab dictators. However, even now most Israelis don’t want that I believe. They’ve returned the Sinai to Egypt in the past. They withdrew from Gaza. What they got was Oct 7th.
> however, that doesn’t work with an enemy like Hamas
Except that it was the currently Israeli government to prop up Hamas power in the Gaza strip in order to de-legitimize the other (non terrorist) Palestinian political authority the PLO.
It's very convenient to have a terror organization as your counter party when you want to crush any hope for a two state solution.
In fact, the current Israeli government and intelligence helped Hamas fund and arm itself. And they knew about a huge terror attack coming and did very little to prevent it or defend their own people.
Even if Netanyahu illicitly provided some support to Hamas as a counter to the PLO, Hamas still was voted in with a majority vote and then took over complete control of Gaza and indoctrinated the people to their extremist views.
I agree the current Israeli government should have continued working with the PLO. Netanyahu has been a terrible leader for Israel. However they didn’t create Hamas either.
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan also indoctrinated children like crazy, but fortunately it only took a few years of friendly exposure to American occupiers (and lots of chocolate) to undo the damage, and by the 50s they were waving American flags and wearing blue jeans. Israel will have a lot more work to do with almost 80 years of grievances piled up against it, but as they say, the second best time to plant a tree is today.
Some people accuse Israel of being a colonizer. I disagree. The proof that Israel is not a colonizer power is that every colonial power understood much better than Israel how to control a hostile foreign population. The trick is that no society is truly homogeneous, so you find a dividing line and split them along it, and richly reward the side that sides with you.
Israel needs to provide as much help as possible to Hamas' opposition, and undermine their state power. It can do that relatively easily because it can shelter dissidents and their families out of reach of Hamas, amplify their stories, and make Palestinian voices the most prominent ones that denounce Hamas. It can sponsor a government in exile and work to grow their legitimacy. It had a perfect chance to do so with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank but so far Israel has almost completely blown it.
I don’t know what to say to you. For everyone else, please look up the settlement videos pre Oct 7. They are made by Vox, Vice, probably even more credible outlets like the BBC. Basically they build suburbs literally inside the West Bank, and connect them through super highways so Israelis don’t even feel the difference between living in Israel or knee-deep inside Palestine (20-30min drive from Jerusalem to an illegal suburb in the West Bank).
Israeli government is relentless with this. Those suburbs are incentivized with subsidies for the settlers, more so than people inside Israel itself.
Oct 7 was horrifying, but for a nation that wants to expand out and build suburbs inside Palestine, it was a lose-win situation. Oct 7 was a loss, but now they don’t have to pretend about building those suburbs anymore. They can just say “each home is on top of a Hamas tunnel”, and boom (literally), clear lot for new housing.
Anyway, the deed is done. All other discourse on this thread is between Israeli apologists and just about everyone else that is not morally bankrupt.
Last but not least, everyone apologizing for Israeli, please save your faces. Please. IDF does not even allow foreign journalists into Gaza. That’s all you need to know. But again, I believe the apologists are no longer trying to save face. It’s an insidious “well, what needed to be done, needed to be done”. Beyond immoral.
——
Prayer is in order, as I don’t know what else anyone can do (it’s all be done).
My hope is the Israeli people at the very least prosecute war crimes internally just for the purity of their own soul, and educate their future generations on a modest truth, that being - “we Israelis in 2025 could not find a better solution, and may you never seek a solution we sought in those dark times. May you be better, for we sinned on a scale the bathroom mirror in the morning won’t allow us to forget”.
Before my words are twisted, let me make it clear I am pacifist. I have to literally turn away whenever scenes from Gaza are shown. I don’t support Hamas or the IDF. I believe Hamas commits child abuse by indoctrinating young Palestinians into terrorism. It’s literally a carbon copy situation of black gang violence that’s perpetuated by gang culture (Chiraq, Chicago gang violence). Yeah, believe it or not, teenagers are impressionable and vulnerable everywhere in the world, stop radicalizing them. Hell, we can’t even stop the kids from entering the manosphere here in America, they’ll gravitate right to Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.
The children cannot fight an endless fucking war, and that is what both the Israelis and Palestinians are doing to these children. It’s child abuse on an epic scale.
Now, in America, we’ve got some sense not to virtually nuke Chiraq, but over there in the Middle East, they have no qualms about bull-dozing the problem.
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.
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.)
Fair enough. Personally I don't believe taking life is ever moral, but I accepted that the world doesn't share my morality and I don't anticipate it's going to in my lifetime.
> Most Israelis do not hate Palestinians. There might be some.
There are enough incidents of needless cruelty or provocations, such as [1] or [2] - and in turn hatred against Israeli pro-peace groups that want to break the cycle [3]. I think those are hard to explain if there wasn't widespread, systemic hatred and dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society.
They also feature the only national-league soccer club where racism is official policy [4]
Also: The IDF prides itself to be a "citizens' army" that is deeply embedded into Israeli society. Yet at the same time, a substantial part of the IDF's activities is protecting the settlers in the West Bank, and generally maintaining the occupation there. If the settlers were really a fringe minority with no support in wider society, I'd expect to see some form of protest against that kind of duty. Yet, there isn't any.
E.g. 56 percent of Israeli Jews polloed favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants.
Interesting that you link to gazawood.com - the site is very cagey about who runs it, at least in its About Us page. However on its donation page aimed at Israelis it proudly advertises itself as a hasbara site. If you're trying to do hasbara here, at least have the decency to cite somewhat credible sources.
> 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.
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
I see what you're saying, IDF soldiers were trigger happy to kill surrendering Semites that were the hostages they were looking for, because their mom said its not cowardly to avoid unnecessary danger.
Thanks for redefining that term, its the substantive comment we needed. I apologize for my chauvinistic idea that avoiding masculine altruism during an actual war to accomplish the actual stated goal might be internationally seen as cowardly.
It’s near impossible to explain to some that 50k dead is equivalent to nuking a place. See, everyone is like “well it’s not like we’re nuking the place” … well actually, that’s … actually what it is.
Hiroshima was 80k dead? How do you achieve a Hiroshima without the blowback of using a Nuke? Heh. You can get the same causality count minus the Nuke fan-fare, IDF lunch special (a bomb sandwich).
Absolute cult-like blindness. “I’m sure the journalists and hospital directors who are starving to death are just unwilling to fight hard enough for food for their families”. The truth is not likely to be anywhere in the middle, because you are swallowing IDF propaganda wholesale.
If “Israel” didn’t benefit from starvation in Gaza then “they” wouldn’t be directly causing starvation in Gaza. You’re going to say “but because hamas blah blah”, but it doesn’t matter. Israel is the one holding trucks of food outside a starvation zone, because they (and you, apparently) think that the benefits of doing so are worth the costs of perpetrating genocide.
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."
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.
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.
>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.
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":
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)).
In March 2019, during a meeting with his Likud party's Knesset members, Benjamin Netanyahu said, "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas." He added, "This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank".
The underlying strategy was to weaken the Palestinian Authority and prevent a two-state solution by treating Hamas as an asset. The logic, according to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, was that it would be "easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to make a deal with"
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.
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!
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 an order of magnitude more 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.
>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.
It has been classified by israeli holocaust scholars as Genocide, by israeli human rights groups as Genocide, by the United Nations as Genocide:
but one still has to painstakingly debunk Nazi style propaganda every single time? It's much easier to spread lies than it is to debunk them. Often such posts contain some half truths filled with a bunch of lies, the debunking of which requires knowledge and effort while the fabrication of lies requires zero effort. By the time you debunked the obvious lies, the propagandist has already spammed 10 more comments denying or justifying Genocide with the exact same rhetoric and arguments that Nazis use to deny or justify the holocaust. That's a losing game.
Something also tells me that this won't be equally applied as it's claimed to be applied. I just can't imagine that ycombinator would allow the exact same rhetoric from literal Nazis to justify or deny the holocaust ever happened or that jews inflated or made up the number of victims of the holocaust.
Take the exact same scenario for which that comment got nuked:
A: "Some lazy and evident Nazi lies to justify a Genocide/Holocaust - The problem aren't the Nazis, the problem is the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto who refuse to be subjugated by our glorious German Reich"
B: " *Here some evidence with sources that debunks your narrative with quotes from your own people.* You Nazis don't even put any effort into your propaganda anymore"*.
Strangely B is treated as the ultimate sin because of one mild line despite being a small fraction among concrete evidence, but somehow that still justifies the nuking of the comment. And it's not just that interaction, but the overall obvious pattern of quick and dirty lies that are spammed with low effort but don't result in any disciplinary actions, while others report that they have been throttled for arguing against Genocide.
I'm not accusing you personally by the way, I'm sure it's brutal keeping up with all of this, but many people have observed these and similar patterns and it's a terrible look. Some people seem to forget that incitement to Genocide is an actual crime.
"Incitement to genocide is a crime in the USA primarily due to its adherence to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This international treaty, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, defines genocide and related acts, including "direct and public incitement to commit genocide," as punishable crimes.
The United States ratified this Convention in 1988 and subsequently enacted the Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 (also known as the Proxmire Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1091). This act incorporates the provisions of the Convention into U.S. federal law, making it a federal crime to commit, attempt to commit, conspire to commit, or directly and publicly incite the commission of genocide.
Therefore, under U.S. law, anyone found guilty of direct and public incitement to genocide can face severe penalties, including imprisonment."
"Whoever directly and publicly incites another to violate subsection (a) [the genocide offense] shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
”I just can't imagine that ycombinator would allow the exact same rhetoric from literal Nazis to justify or deny the holocaust ever happened or that jews inflated or made up the number of victims of the holocaust.”
They allow it because they are human. Not everyone can actually believe a genocide is happening whilst also being defended by what many would consider educated professional peers. See, it’s unbelievable, so have to forgive people who are truly bewildered (”this can’t really be happening, can it?”). It’s really happening , and HN is suffering from the fog of war that an ongoing atrocity creates. If I punch you hard enough, you may not actually perceive what just happened in the contemporaneous. It’s intellectual and moral shell-shock.
Reality check:
Your world is not just software and a first world country with a nice economy, and neighbors and countrymen that would neeever do anything wrong. Your world is full of a lot more sin, believe it.
When they allow the journalists to finally enter Gaza, where reporters will fly a simple $500 drone over Gaza, we’ll see all of our world.
HN calls outa lot of bullshit, and there’s no way that virtue should be put aside for this obvious genocide.
Those are good arguments. I'm not sure what to tell you that won't repeat what I already said. (Btw, I'm confused by your A and B examples because I couldn't find any language like A in this thread.)
I've been trying to describe how we (try to) operate this community. I think the lesson I'm drawing from exchanges like this (not just this one, but many others) is that this can't work and is therefore a mistake in this context. All that hits the reader is the ghastly discrepancy between the two layers (moderation minutiae vs. starvation and slaughter). It comes across as dissociative, like responding to tragedy with trivia. This is so built in to the situation that communication becomes impossible. That's why people respond by repeating claims about the much more important topic, as if I had been arguing with them about that.
> It's much easier to spread lies than it is to debunk them. Often such posts contain some half truths filled with a bunch of lies, the debunking of which requires knowledge and effort while the fabrication of lies requires zero effort. By the time you debunked the obvious lies, the propagandist has already spammed 10 more comments denying or justifying Genocide with the exact same rhetoric and arguments that Nazis use to deny or justify the holocaust. That's a losing game
Yes, I know. A lot of what we do here is to try to maintain a space where something other than that becomes possible. Unfortunately, what most people want is for the mods to enforce their view and ban the opposing side. This is related to the certainty that the opposing view is so wrong and bad that it could only be held in bad faith by bad people.
No one seems to notice—or rather, everyone is under so much pressure that there's no room to care—that to actually do this would be to stop all discussion. A corollary is that, when we don't do it, people feel like we are complicit in the crimes of the other side.
> Something also tells me [...] the overall obvious pattern [...] many people have observed [...] others report
Phrases like this come up often. I can tell you from long experience that they invariably describe an image of HN and/or HN moderation that is profoundly inaccurate. They don't match how the community really functions nor how we really moderate it, nor what we're trying to achieve. What they do match is a subset of datapoints (often a rather small subset) that happen to match the image. (I don't mean this in any way personally either btw! It's super common, from every side of every topic.)
These images seem impervious to change. It makes no difference to show someone datapoints that contradict their image; and I'm pretty sure that any statistical study of the entire dataset, however it turned out, wouldn't change anyone's mind either. This makes me think that these images come from people's pre-existing beliefs about the world (society, power, one's group, oneself, etc.), such that we notice the datapoints which confirm and reconstitute our image. I'm sure that no one does this consciously, but it's a strikingly consistent phenomenon.
To pick just one example from what you listed, there's no way that we would throttle anyone for "arguing against genocide". That's absurd. We might moderate them for breaking HN's rules while they were doing it, but you won't ever find that interpretation circulating in any of these claims.
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.
>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.
Why would the Israelis support Hamas if they were the faction that was attacking them? Wouldn't it have made more sense to support the PA even more?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
All your arguments and justifications sound so hollow in the face of starving palestinians in Gaza being shot while lining up for humanitarian aid.
The thing being stuck in the past seem to be your arguments.
But this is happening right now and the majority underage population starving to death right now is on Israel‘s watch.
"Malnutrition has been rising rapidly in the first half of July and has reached the Famine
threshold in Gaza City. Over 20,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute
malnutrition between April and mid-July, with more than 3,000 severely malnourished.11
Hospitals have reported a rapid increase in hunger-related deaths of children under five
years of age, with at least 16 reported deaths since 17 July"
This is not good but it's a far cry from the entire population starving to death. I'm not even gonna go into the Hamas runs the hospitals (which is true) angle here, let's just accept this at face value.
"Reductions in international aid funding to fight severe malnutrition in children under 5 could lead to 369,000 additional deaths each year, a consortium of experts in nutrition and food systems has warned."
...
"shrinking budgets could cut off treatment for 2.3 million severely malnourished young children worldwide. Nearly half of the projected additional deaths stem from the loss of support from the United States, which has axed thousands of grants worth tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid since President Donald Trump took office."
Famine in Sudan and Yemen, nobody cares. Who is taking to the streets and posting daily to Hacker News about the 369,000 people who are really starving to death due to actions of the United States (in this example)? No. The interesting story is how Israel has to provide for the polity that attacked it and murdered, raped, and took hostage its citizens and keeps fighting and not surrendering. It's the 16 children that Hamas reports died from starvation that are more deserving of people's anger than the 369,000 preventable deaths. It's the 20,000 cases of malnutrition Hamas reports and not the 2.3 million.
Israel should do better but the attacks on Israel are not about that. This is why I'm arguing here. The point is not that Israel doesn't have responsibilities - it does. The point is that Israel is being singled out. The western countries that are pressuring Israel now have never met the bar they try to hold Israel to or even cared about meeting it in their own actions. Not to even mention the non-western players like Russia or China where the bar is set significantly lower.
Israel is, as it should be, accelerating aid delivery to Gaza given the objectively worsening conditions. The difference in Gaza vs other people starving all over the world is that it is at war with Israel and the populated areas are controlled by Hamas.
An interesting by the way is that Egypt has refused to allow aid trucks through Rafah once Israel took the Gazan side of the border, now they've changed their minds:
Throughout the war Egypt was partly responsible for not allowing aid into Gaza.
Gazans are in a terrible condition. They are in this condition partly due to their ongoing war on Israel. Israel is still responsible but it can't be held solely responsible. The UN sabotaging the efforts to provide aid via the GHF. Hamas attacking aid centers and aid convoys while trying to maximize and use their own civilians suffering. All those have a fair bit of responsibility. Israel has a right to defend itself by defeating Hamas. Hamas is using their own people's suffering as a tactic to survive this war.
Gazans were also shot by Hamas while lining up for aid.
"While Hamas promotes a campaign of so-called “starving Gaza,” its terrorists are feasting underground."
I would much prefer that the war ends in Gaza. But the war is not ending with Hamas in power. All those people attacking Israel should offer some alternative course of action that ensures that Hamas can not retake Gaza, re-arm itself, and keep attacking Israel. Israel can not "separate" the civilians from Hamas because Hamas won't allow that. What is really happening is that the international and media attacks on Israel are fueling Hamas' determination to hold on and prolonging the war.
>Who is taking to the streets and posting daily to Hacker News about the 369,000 people
Whataboutism
>Israel is being singled out.
Finally
>Israel is, as it should be, accelerating aid delivery to Gaza given the objectively worsening conditions.
International pressure has forced Israel to alleviate conditions somewhat. The only pressure being responded to is that of recognising a Palestinian state. And thats only threatening as it would conclude or at best pause the project of genocide.
>Israel is still responsible but it can't be held solely responsible.
Israel could immediately return Rafah, leave Gaza, remove settlers from the west bank, repatriate the refugees, return them to their land and investigate (civilly) the population for Hamas.
Much like how Russia could simply turn around and leave Ukraine today.
>What is really happening is that the international and media attacks on Israel are fueling Hamas' determination to hold on and prolonging the war.
"If only people would stop complaining about our ongoing genocide, we could hurry up and complete the genocide"
Taking in those refugees, or having them leave and go anywhere is deeply unpopular everywhere. Because those refugees, have a right to return. They have land to go to, it might currently be illegally occupied, but their claim is valid.
Letting Israel force those refugees into another country just guarantees the completion of their racist genocidal settlement project.
Its weird to imply that refusing to help force them from their land is somehow inhumane, when the inhumanity is being driven by the force that drove them off their land and will shoot them if they try and return.
"The clock is never turning back". I really don't care which state controls the land, the people have a right to return. Really the 2 state solution is a distraction from Israels obligations to these people.
When the Nazis were driven out? I hope you mean when the USSR fell, because Poland was under their control for about 45 years. The Red Army entered Poland in 1944.
How many Jewish refugees did the allies take in WW2? This was literally a talking point used by antisemites to demonize Jews (the refugees nobody wanted) in the 1930s. And now the same talking points are being used in the same way by Jewish supremacists (most of whom are Christian by the way) to demonize Palestinians in 2025.
First of all, most of the Palestinian families in Gaza come from Israel. They lived in what is now southern Israel until 1948, when they were driven out in an extremely brutal Israeli military operation (Operation Barak).
Secondly, comparing the Palestinians to Nazi Germany is absurd and grotesque. The Palestinians are an oppressed people who were driven out of their homeland by an invading force in 1947-48, and who have lived in squalid refugee camps ever since. Since 1967, they have lived under direct military occupation by the very people who originally expelled them from their homeland, and are subjected to a racist regime in which their land is slowly taken away, piece by piece. The Palestinians have no country, no passport, no sovereignty, no rights.
Comparing them to the citizens of an industrialized power that tried to conquer Europe is insane.
In 1947, arabs refused the UN partition plan and decided to wage war against jews ( which accepted that plan) to remove them from the map. They were 100% certain to be able to do so, and nobody bet a penny on the jews winning at 1 vs 10.
They never stopped trying to do so since that dat, with the latest example being 2 years ago, on october 7.
Now you can try to blame it on the jews on X, but HN is an educated forum. Those kinds of arguments won't fly here.
"In 1675, the native tribes of New England refused to accept a partition of the land, and decided to wage war against Christians (who accepted the plan) to remove them from the map. They were 100% certain to be able to do so, and nobody bet a penny on the Christians winning at 1 vs. 10. They never stopped trying to do so since that date. Now you can try to blame it on the Christians on X, but HN is an educated forum. Those kinds of arguments won't fly here."
I'm sure you can find ten reasons why my above little story is wrong. They're the exact same reasons your little story is wrong. To name a few:
1. The Zionists / Europeans were trying to colonize Arab / Native American land. They were the aggressors in a very fundamental sense. Asking for the native population to "partition" the land amounts to demanding that they cede part of their homeland to you.
2. The conflict has nothing to do with Judaism or antisemitism. By framing it in that way, you're trying to draw a connection to the Holocaust and the history of persecution of Jews in Europe. But in this situation, the Zionists just happened to be Jewish, but that was totally irrelevant for the Arab population of Palestine. What the native population cared about was that an outside group - it didn't matter who - was trying to come in and take over the land.
3. And contrary to your framing, the Zionists were the group that held the upper hand, for a whole number of reasons that apply across the colonial world. In Palestine, they weren't some little oppressed minority. They had more resources, better education, were better organized, and had the backing of the imperial rulers of Palestine, the British.
4. The Arabs were the underdogs in the 1948 war. This runs completely counter to Israeli national mythology, but the fact is that the Israelis had a larger, better trained and better equipped army. They had military training from the British. They had funding from a significant foreign base of donors. They were able to purchase large amounts of weaponry from Czechoslovakia. The Palestinians themselves never stood a chance against the Zionists / Israelis. The Arab states only intervened after the Zionists had begun carrying out mass expulsions and other atrocities against the Palestinian civilian population. From the point of view of the Arab world, they were attempting to save their brothers from vicious foreign colonizers. You present it as if "the Jews," by which you actually mean the Zionists in Palestine, were in a fight for survival. But that's like saying that a guy who walks into a bar and starts punching people wildly is in a fight for his own survival. It might be true, but he got himself into that situation.
I don't think you know much about jewish history. Not even the very beginning, as in "where does this name come from".
All the rest follows. Really, you should start from the very beginning.
About israel, you're probably reading the pov of a fringe minority that only sounds plausible because people analyze the past in today's context. Israel was many times on the brinks of defeat in the multiple wars that followed. Only since the fall of the soviet union did it become clear they were here to stay and started to build unmatched military superiority.
I know a fair bit about Jewish history, given that I'm generally interested in history and am Jewish myself.
The "fringe minority" POV that I'm reading is the mainstream historiography on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the standard works by Israeli historian Benny Morris.
> Israel was many times on the brinks of defeat in the multiple wars that followed. Only since the fall of the soviet union did it become clear they were here to stay and started to build unmatched military superiority.
This is a completely false and indefensible take on the history. Israel showed massive military superiority over the Arab states in 1967, when it defeated them in a matter of days, and it has been backed by the world's top superpower since then. Israel has been the only nuclear power in the Middle East since the 1960s. Its closest brush with defeat was in 1973, but it still managed to turn that around (with massive American aid), and has never faced any serious military threat since. Israel walked all over Lebanon in the 1980s, and nearly every Israeli war since then has had the same character: they've almost all been wars against small militant groups, not even other states. The only exception was the recent war Israel initiated against Iran, but even there, all Iran could do was lob missiles from a distance while Israel pummeled Iran from the air almost unchecked.
As I said, a major part of Israeli mythology is the idea that Israel is the scrappy underdog that manages to pull off miracles. But that is really just mythology. The reality is quite different, and Israel has had a distinct military advantage in every conflict it has ever fought, going back to its founding.
the "new historians" movement isn't standard by any mean, and their work is tainted by ideology and ubris in every step.
It's easy now to say that israel had "distinct advantages". But in the context of the cold war, with a tenth of the soldier, fighting against 4 countries, completely surrounded, you'd have to be crazy to consider yourself having a clear advantage.
Jews that lived through the 1960s/70s period distinctly remember how every war had everybody wonder if israel would survive any longer.
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.
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.
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.
How about this response: "Denying Israel the right to protect themselves can't help but strengthen Hamas and won't bring anything other than more suffering to all parties. Israel will do what they need to do, all we can do is hope they will stop short of sinking to the same levels as Oct 7 perpetrators, even though historically it's unlikely, and even though Israel being dragged deeper into that murderous rage pit is exactly what Hamas aims for."
I don’t recall many people denying Israel’s right to protect themselves against Hamas (I’m sure some did). The concern was them using it as an excuse to perpetrate the Palestinian genocide they wanted all along. That is what we now see. Your comment seems to use the familiar playbook of equating Palestinians and Hamas to muddy the waters.
It is a pretty clear echo of the US’s response to 9/11. People were considered traitors if they didn’t support a full military invasion and occupation. In the end, that was clearly the wrong move.
Why not go the extra step and accuse Israel of false-flagging Oct 7th attacks themselves? It's a widely encountered trope and by now a lot of supporting evidence has been "unearthed". That would make you feel even more righteous in your separation of the good from the evil. And wouldn't that feel sweet?
After all, your magic mirror tells you what "they" wanted all along. The biggest proof? The fact that the IDF would always announce in before when they would make a strike. The fact that they did this proves that they were pretending that they don't want to make more victims than necessary among the Palestinians. Which shows that they were trying to hide something else - that they wanted to eliminate all of them. It all makes sense, yes.
In this comment, you invent a conspiracy and apply it to me in order to have something to attack. You even used scare quotes to make it extra bad.
These performances kind of prove that you know the facts aren’t in your corner. The BBC video you are commenting on refutes your point about IDF always warning civilians before strikes:
==“I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians," Anthony Aguilar told the BBC. He added that in his entire career he has never witnessed such a level of "brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population".==
But still, why did they usually do it (if not always), if all they wanted really is to eliminate all Palestinians? I guess it will remain a mystery for the ages...
Really, nothing we see now is inconsistent with the most obvious explanation: which is the spiral of violence. None of it, as far as I can see, requires your conspiratorial belief that "all Israelis really wanted is to eliminate all Palestinians".
I'm not entirely sure, maybe they did it to give people a narrative to distribute? I just know what they are doing now, which is forced starvation and violence without warning. The exact thing people warned about before the conflict started.
Why would you forcibly starve a population of civilians if your goal wasn't to eliminate them? Why have they blocked outside journalists from entering Gaza for over 600 days if they weren't trying to hide their actions? Starving civilians in an area where you control the airspace and coastline isn't a "spiral of violence," it is a war crime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you genuinely believe he wasn't appealing to genocide, then here's a sampling of the rest of the Israeli leadership - who generally speak more directly.
---
President of Israel: "It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved. It’s absolutely not true. … and we will fight until we break their backbone."
Minister of Defense: "[We are] imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."
Minister of National Security: "To be clear, when we say that Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who hand out candy — they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed."
Minister of Energy and Infrastructure: "All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world."
Minister of Heritage: "We wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid”, and "there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza."
---
This is also far from the most extreme. See the "motivational speech" sponsored by the Israeli Army on page 64. [1] I will not quote it because it makes the above seem like softball. And these were things all said more than a year ago - they have only become more radical with time. Their rhetoric isn't ambiguous and neither are their actions. So many people don't realize how the West will be seen when the future judges us, though I think more are starting to realize.
1. There’s no quantifier for “civilians”, so this is just a vague statement that some number of civilians support Hamas.
2. There have been many sieges throughout history, surely they weren’t all genocides? It was also lifted shortly thereafter. Or are you interpreting “human animals” as all Gazans rather than Hamas/PIJ/etc? If so why?
3. This is problematic but still not genocidal, since Hamas supporters are not a group of the sort that genocide can apply to.
4. Context was removed to make it sound as if “they” might mean Gazans. The preceding sentence was “We will fight the terrorist organization Hamas and destroy it.”
5. Not involved in the military.
6. Not any sort of leader.
We do see explicitly genocidal rhetoric from leaders of Hamas and other enemies of Israel, though.
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.
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...
That would be correct if Israel didn't routinely do the exact same war crimes they are committing right now in Gaza for the past 20 years. It's depressing to say, but what Israel is doing right now is nothing new. It's par for the course and each 2 to 3 years you see the same war crimes in gaza, like clockwork.
So yes, those world leaders are as guilty as Israel, they enabled this for years.
Tens of thousands of people have been murdered because the justice latency of Western politicians is too damned high.
The justice latency won't ever be what it needs to be until we jail our own war criminals, and that is never going to happen if we congratulate them when we should be prosecuting them.
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.
There are IDF troops on the Egypt side and a Egypt was forced under military threat to a sign a treaty allowing Israel to veto what comes and goes from the Egyptian side.
In the West Bank, whose Palestinian population is administered by an organization that fully collaborates with the Israeli occupation and does not engage in armed struggle, Israeli repression continues unabated (statelessness, restriction on freedom of movement, expansion of Jewish-only colonial settlements, arbitrary detention under Israeli military law, etc.)
Sure, maybe if Hamas surrendered there wouldn’t be a blockade, specifically, but given the example of the West Bank right next door it’s hard to imagine that repression wouldn’t continue in some form.
Ah yes, the west bank, where they have a leader who's graduate thesis is in holocaust denial[0] and where they incentivize murdering innocent civilians[1].
Until these things lose popular support among the west bank, I don't have a ton of sympathy. Yes we can get into tracing back the chain of causation -- these people grew up in an echo chamber and they had no outside source of information, and Israeli soldiers likely killed family members of theirs unfairly when they were little, so of course they're going to say things like Death to Israel [2] and have a countdown timer until when they want to genocide the entire country [3]
(These examples actually stem from Iran, where most of the funding for Hamas comes from)
But don't you think it's a little unfair to only defend one side with fatalistic determinism? Israelis are treated as humans who are making horrible decisions. Mahmoud Abbas is treated as a poor innocent bystander who is just the product of his environment, so of course he's going to think those things. I think he's a human too, and he has made very bad decisions too.
Somehow western people always forget this stuff, but luckily the religious fanatics just love to do religious fanatical things, so it makes it easy to point to examples.
That’s a pretty salient fact when you have the might of such a military on your side.
I find it funny how I am at the same time supposed to accept that Palestinian (leaders) are all terrorists and also that Israel justifiably act equally terrible.
The whole point of being a respectable state is to not commit crimes (and kill family members „unfairly“).
Indeed. Israel is free to act as barbaric as (or if we do the simplistic math of "the conflict started October 7 2023", 633x more barbaric than) Hamas butchers, but when they do so, they can't go around claiming the moral high ground...
Or, they can go around and do so, but their claim would be as valid as Hamas' claim to morality...
>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!
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.
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 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.
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.
Israel definitely wants the West Bank (and the Golan Heights), it didn't demonstrate the same interest in Gaza. Which isn't that strange considering there's very little value in the land itself.
They were content with the Palestinians keeping to themselves in that corner of the land. At least that's what it looked like between 2005 and 2023. That isn't to say they had no designs on it further in the future, they might have had plans to annex it after fully claiming the West Bank. (Or at least certain groups within Israel)
If Israel, the state, had interest in the West Bank it'd have annexed it already. There is a group, admittedly growing as a result of the processes happening in the Israeli society, which is very interested in the West Bank. But it was never the official position of the state.
West Bank should have went to the Palestinians following the Oslo accords, and it partly did, but that all came to a halt with the deadly suicide attacks led by Hamas on Israel.
Another opportunity was in 2000 Camp David accords, but that too ended with the second Intifada.
A third opportunity came in the form of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza. Had it been a success story - the Palestinians building their own little Singapore in there, as the world was willing to pour in infinite capital - it would have pushed forward another such a move in the West Bank. But alas it ended with Hamas swiftly coming to power, years of rocket attacks on Israel, then October 7th and the rest is history.
I doubt the Israeli public will ever give the Palestinians anything, at this point; any time a concession was made, Israel found itself in a worse and worse security situation. The great Israeli-Palestinian peace attempt over the past three decades failed miserably.
These populations simply will not coexist, for great many reasons - religious, cultural, historical, tribal, and external.
This description of Israel’s interest in Gaza does not match their behavior. They have spent millions even billions of dollars terrorizing the population that lives there. They wouldn’t do that if “[t]hey were content with the Palestinians keeping to themselves in that corner of the land”. At the very least Israel saw that land valuable as a place to keep a population oppressed and terrorized, in other words, as a concentration camp or a ghetto.
Their behavior post October 7th, 2023 - the deadliest day for Jews since the holocaust - is very different than before that date. You couldn't expect Israel to keep its hands off approach, could you?
Expect or not, I think it would have made all the difference.
It seemed like a historical, Nelson Mandela scale opportunity with all international, regional and domestic & Palestinian winds in Israels back.
And then they used it to one up everything the world has seen in that region in recent past.
The way I see it is that Palestinians have been fighting for civil rights since 1948 with dismal results. This fight has included violent and non-violent tactics, and the verdict on the non-violent tactics is pretty clear, that it only results in more violence and less civil rights for Palestinians.
Oct. 7 was not only the most deadly day for Jews since the holocaust, it was also the most deadly day for Zionists since the conception of Zionism. Whatever Israel did after Oct. 7 was not to protect Jews, but to protect Zionism. The very same ideology which has stripped Palestinians of their civil rights. And because Zionism is a foundational ideology of Israel, I would expect them to behave exactly the way they did. But I also see Zionism as a fundamentally immoral ideology which should not be a policy of any state. So from a human rights perspective, the right thing for Israel to do since Oct. 7 (as well as much earlier) was to admit defeat, grant Palestinians civil rights (including the right of return and reparations for past wrongs), and abandon Zionism as a policy. Later they could file criminal charges, or have a special tribunal punishing the perpetrators of oct. 7, maybe even as a part of a peace treaty which also grants Palestinians civil rights.
I am not naïve, and I know Israel was never going to do that. That is where international laws should have kicked in which were supposed to pressure Israel into doing the right thing, by doing stuff like sanctions and boycotts. International law, however, failed spectacularly.
EDIT: to prevent misunderstanding, when I say Zionism I mean the belief that Israel should be a Jewish supremacy state on Palestinian lands, like I explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718838
The Palestinians are largely looking for the destruction of Israel, not "civil rights". The "right of return" (meaning the inflow of millions of third, fourth and fifth Palestinian descendants from neighbour Arab countries) is their - and the Arab's world - tool to dismantle Israel (there's a reason Arab countries don't grant citizenship to those Palestinians despite residing there for over 50-70 years).
There are no civil rights in Gaza, but that's not because of Israel - that's because Hamas is a fundamental, radical and totalitarian Muslim organization which is right next to ISIS in their methods and beliefs.
The suggestion that Jews admit defeat, hand their heads to Hamas and the likes and ask for forgiveness does not resonate as sane. It's like suggesting a rape victim to move in with the family of the perpetrator and look for reconciliation. The Palestinian and Jewish populations are not compatible with each other and I see no path to coexistence under the same governing body. These populations are too far apart on any conceivable metric.
Luckily Israel took the opportunity to do just about the opposite of what you suggested and aggressively dismantled the Iranian ring of fire that surrounded it. Lebanon and Syria have been transformed, Iran caught a massive blow and any dreams of breaking Israel by force must be a distant past now. The Middle East will have to accept Israel, and by the looks of things this is where it's going. If you haven't been to the region you'll never understand the collective Middle Eastern mentality that despises weakness and worships victors.
I really don‘t like the tone and implication of your post. When you say stuff like “the collective Middle Eastern mentality that despises weakness and worships victors”, “The Palestinians are largely looking for the destruction of Israel”, and “The Palestinian and Jewish populations are not compatible with each other”. You are generalizing over a large population with varying views, and makes you look like a bigot and a racist.
I‘m gonna answer your strongest points on material grounds though, and ignore your more racist stuff.
> The "right of return" (meaning the inflow of millions of third, fourth and fifth Palestinian descendants from neighbour Arab countries) is their - and the Arab's world - tool to dismantle Israel.
That is a) just your opinion, and b) irrelevant in the context of human rights. The Palestinian were unjustly expelled and they have a right of return under international law. Israel had no right to expel them in the first place, the expulsion was a historic wrong, and for justice to resume they are owed the right of return as well as reperation. Whatever that does to Israel’s demographics is a non-concern in the context of international humanitarian law. If such a right were granted and it would result in Israel no longer being a majority Jewish state, that would simply be a new reality we would have to deal with. Minority rights are a thing that international law also guarantees, and surely Jewish Israelis should be happy living is a minority in a land which guarantees their rights as such.
> The suggestion that Jews admit defeat, hand their heads to Hamas and the likes and ask for forgiveness does not resonate as sane.
We have been here before, and yes, this is the sane option. Rhodesia admitted defeat to the terrorist organizations ZANU and ZAPU, South Africa to the ANC, The French Algerians to the FLN (which was probably more brutal than Hamas). And outside of settler colonies we have South Vietnam admitting defeat to the Viet Cong. Brutal regimes which owe their existence to the oppression of others like Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, French Algeria, and South Vietnam are frequent targets of terrorists, those same terrorists often become the ruling power post liberation, and the settler (or otherwise the beneficiaries of the past oppression) most of the time are able to live just fine under their new rule without the systemic oppression. In all likelyhood, even if Hamas were to rise to power in a post-apartheid Israel state (which honestly is rather unlikely) chances are they would not be able (nor even willing) to exert the kind of oppression onto a hypothetical Jewish minority in such a state.
IMHO discounting the cultural differences at the core of Arab societies compared to Western societies is racist, but to each his own. See how Alawits and Druze are faring now under the new Syrian regime - made of former ISIS members, no less. Imagine what they'd do to Jews if they just had the chance (indeed, Arabs mass expelled Jews from their countries after the formation of Israel; what do you expect those to do?).
I think your other, bigger mistake is to equate Israel to the colonialist adventures of Africa's past. That's complete misunderstanding of Israeli psyche and source of strength (and indeed you are talking about Israel in an overriding manner, as if it's not their choice on how to solve this).
While colonialists in Africa could always turn back to Europe and the white world (and many did), Jews in Israel don't feel nearly the same. Colonialists didn't flee anything, they just came looking for a better future or an adventure. Jews came to Israel to form a homeland. Jews have an undisputed connection to the land through countless artefacts and written history, while colonialists never had that in relation to Africa. Jews have nowhere to return to; where would they go, back to Auschwitz? To the pogroms of Russia, Ukraine and Poland?
Jews are ready, willing and able to fight to the end and currently possess the strongest military in the Middle East (and probably in Europe) by far.
The combination of technology, economy, psychology and resilience means Israel could easily outlast any other Middle Eastern country (which are artificial entities to begin it, a result of Sykes-Picot agreements).
And, indeed, look: Syria is out, Lebanon is hanging on the brink of another civil war, Jordan is there just thanks to monarchical oppression (where are their civil rights?), Iraq is a failed state, Saudis want Israeli technology and good favors, the GCC are all in bed with Israel (other than Qatar and Kuwait), Iran is on its knees, Egypt is thirsty and illiterate. Who's left, other than perhaps Turkey (but then they have their business with the Greek which are very close to Israel)?
I've had many such discussions on the internet but not even once did I encounter someone offering that Israel disposes of its F35, nukes and security apparatus and hand the keys to ISIS/Hamas terrorists. There's a first time for anything.
> IMHO discounting the cultural differences at the core of Arab societies compared to Western societies is racist, but to each his own.
We're not discounting cultural differences. We're just discounting your claims regarding cultural differences.
> ...you'll never understand the collective Middle Eastern mentality that despises weakness and worships victors.
From the content of your arguments, I get the feeling that this statement is pure projection.
> I think your other, bigger mistake is to equate Israel to the colonialist adventures of Africa's past. [...] Jews have nowhere to return to; where would they go, back to Auschwitz? To the pogroms of Russia, Ukraine and Poland?
GP never said that the Jews should leave. In reference to Africa, he said "those same terrorists often become the ruling power post liberation, and the settler (or otherwise the beneficiaries of the past oppression) most of the time are able to live just fine under their new rule without the systemic oppression."
> I've had many such discussions on the internet but not even once did I encounter someone offering that Israel disposes of its F35, nukes and security apparatus and hand the keys to ISIS/Hamas terrorists.
GP said Israel should surrender their oppressive political system, not their weapons.
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.
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 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.
Yeah. "Weird." Kinda like how it was weird that a music festival was moved to be next to a military base that was the target of an operation that one of the greatest signals intelligence powers in the world "didn't know about" over a couple of years of planning.
Weird that the IDF moved into the crowd instead of evacuating the festival. Weird that there were photos of massive numbers of bombed out cars that were disposed of before any forensics could happen. Kinda weird that IDF copters and tanks opened fire indiscriminately (or, sometimes, targeting Israelis due to Hannibal doctrine).
Really "weird" operation all around. Seems like it really didn't have to happen the way it did.
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'm having trouble understanding the notion of "permanent military occupation of Gaza before 2005". Just out of interest, who occupied Gaza before 1967? And who before 1948? And who before 1920?
It's very doubtful the US will bomb Egypt over that, it didn't even bomb Egypt when it was directly involved in wars with Israel. Currently the Egyptians are in violations of the peace agreements with Israel over stationing military forces in Sinai, yet no bombs are falling.
Generally I think they targeted the US because of Islamist Ideology.
Islamism links conquest and imperialism to a proof of the religious validity of Islam.
Once the West has begun its control over Arab countries the idea in the 1920s has emerged where the reason why Islam lost its prominence is because they lost the "true" islam. Therefore the solution is to return to medieval Islam, similarly to fascism nostalgia to the Roman/German empires.
In that context, even the fact that the United States exists as a cultural force and influences arab teens to wear jeans is a major threat. Don't be naive that it is all over Palestine, Islamism started prior to the existence of Israel.
>Generally I think they targeted the US because of Islamist Ideology. Islamism links conquest and imperialism to a proof of the religious validity of Islam.
You don't have to speculate. You can actually just look at what the bombers stated the purpose of their attack was. It wasn't part of a conquest; it was an attempt to punish us for our history in that region, with a very specific policy of ours mentioned explicitly by many of the masterminds of 9/11.
The only Islamist movement seeking conquest in recent history was ISIS, which is why a lot of their attention was spent expanding their caliphate into their neighbors' territories rather than launching quixotic attacks at the US on our soil. I'm not including ISIS-K in this assessment, as they glow more than Langley.
I don't need to speculate, I can read the ideological foundations behind the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafism, the Islamic Republic etc.
One part is rejection of modernism and romanticism of a fantastic past similar to fascist movements. Other is anti-colonialism, but only in the context of european colonialism, not muslim colonialism, which is fine. Because of the aforementioned romanticism to the middle ages, part of any Islamist project is creating a Caliphate, and it is easy to see in Islamic history that these were boundless.
The reason Palestine may be important for them is that according to their perception, while european colonialism is a humiliation, there is no greater shame than the existence of Israel, as it is no some vast British Empire, but rather a nation built by refugees and therefore weak by definition, thereby enhancing their defeat, which in their mind has religious implications. As Islam is a conquering religion, and their conquests are a proof of Allah's power.
When I said they did 9/11 over US support of Israel, I didn't mean that they did it because of Israel's occupation of Palestine. They did it because Israel is the inventor of modern terrorism (Lehi and Irgun, the head of the latter was even an Israel PM!) and has terrorized every single surrounding nation since its invention by the British over a century 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.
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.
Both China and Russia have claimed parts of other countries using the tactic of moving in their people to then use that as an excuse to annex or overtake those parts.
Crimea for Russia as an example, but this is also true for other former Soviet states.
With China it's been Bhutan, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Japan. In addition to their claims over Taiwan or their excuse to (culturally) genocide the Uighur in China).
That is ignoring Africa as a whole, where conflicts are far more common. To name a recent example, over 50,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed by Islamists in the past 16 years. The world is far more bloody than most people seem to realize. The world peace has only been a peace in a relative sense.
>Both China and Russia have claimed parts of other countries using the tactic of moving in their people to then use that as an excuse to annex or overtake those parts.
>Crimea for Russia as an example, but this is also true for other former Soviet states.
In Crimea, the proportion was 3 Russians for every Ukrainian for most of the time since at least 1897:
Before 1954, Crimea was officially part of Russia, so it makes sense (Khrushev transferred it to Ukraine for infrastructure reasons).
Not sure what happened when the number of Ukrainians dropped from 24% to 15% between 2001 and 2014, I'm not aware of any mass migration during that period (independent Ukraine). On the contrary, the total population contracted from 2.4 mil to 2.2 mil (both Russians and Ukrainians).
I guess my advocacy is to identify it as a social pattern and then come up with some kind of global treaty against it similar to the geneva conventions. It'd take years, there'd be lots of negotiations, people way smarter than me would opine. I certainly don't have all the answers.
I can entertain the plausibility of this form of nationalism not being a catastrophe but I can't think of any times it worked out well.
On a personal note, I harbor particularly harsh judgement on my own nation, the USA, on this front. Unfortunately there's no way to unroll hundreds of years
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.
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.
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.
> Jewish people occupied the entire region long before Islam existed or Islamic Arabs took it over?
And other peoples occupied the region long before judaism was an idea in some shepherd's preaching.
The problem with this logic is, where do you stop. At what point do you declare "these people were the special first ones and anyone before them doesn't matter"?
Much less the mental gymnastics required to believe that which human owned which land in 500bce is relevant to how to deal with things in 2025.
It's not that we should ignore history, it's absolutely worth understanding how we got to the current position, but we shouldn't privilege it over the lives and wellbeing of actual people living right now.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What both ways are you talking about? GP is arguing on behalf of those who were called antisemites because they stated “international community should rein in Israel to prevent them to commit atrocities because of rage”, and your response seems to be “well atrocities were given because Hamas”.
This is exactly why this “mea culpa” rings hollow. People who apparently condemn the reaction will tumble on their own arguments to excuse the same actions.
The "mea culpa" you're looking for rings hollow because I - and others - aren't sorry.
As I said, what do I have to be sorry for? For not condemning Israel after Hamas murdered and kidnapped hundreds of their civilians? Should I have condemned them for doing everything they could to bring their kidnapped people home?
Its lazy and incredibly selfish to condemn others for making hard choices when you don't know how you would have acted yourself. Me? I still can't answer the question of how I would have acted differently if I were in charge of Israel when October 7 happened. If I was president, and a bunch of armed militants came into my country, murdered our children and kidnapped hundreds of people, I can see myself sending my soldiers out with orders to bring them home.
Would you have done any different, if you were Israel's president? If so, what?
If you would have done the same thing and sent soldiers in, your condemnation rings pretty hollow.
On your hypothetical, do I woke up as Israeli president on Oct 7 2023? Because if that’s the case, then yes, maybe I would do the same, although most likely I would be ousted for not being bloodthirsty enough.
But in a less unrealistic scenario, if I were by chance, to be president of Israel, I would try first to dismantle illegal settlements and defuse conflict to avoid, for example, 2023 being the deadliest year for children in west bank way before Oct 7.
Any hypothetical scenario that doesn’t engage on what the Israeli government can do before Oct 7, is pretty much a scenario where you are representing an occupying and murderous regime, so likely you will behave as those who represent murderous regimes do.
> Its lazy and incredibly selfish to condemn others for making hard choices when you don't know how you would have acted yourself
No, it's how our world improves.
I, personally, do not have to be a perfect paragon of morality and justice and righteousness in order to condemn other people for doing immoral and evil things.
Also there's a huge difference between "a week after the attacks" and "12 months after the attacks". Humans, pretty much universally, will justify/excuse reactions based on immediate rage and anger and hurt and forgive people who did it... assuming they, you know, stop doing it.
Would I personally have sent soldiers in or done any of the other things? No idea. I certainly hope not, but there's no way to prove that. It's like asking if I would have bought a slave if I lived in 1800s texas or 150 ce rome. There's no real way to answer the question, but the important part is that it would still be wrong if I did it.
We can quibble about how wrong it would be, and more usefully, what the punishment should be for doing so, but none of that changes the fact that it's wrong.
And as a general take on the whole israel-palestine thing, yes, hamas has done any number of awful immortal crimes. So has israel. The difference is that israel has a lot more power over palestine than hamas has over israel.
Sure, maybe the 8 year old did in fact kick you in the shin and spit on you. I still expect the adult to act with a higher moral standard.
Yep, I agree that they should have stopped by now.
> Sure, maybe the 8 year old did in fact kick you in the shin and spit on you. I still expect the adult to act with a higher moral standard.
Nah. Morality isn’t just for when it’s convenient. I find it kind of racist to liken Palestine to children. They know what they were doing when they went on a killing spree on October 7. Just like Israel did when they bombed peoples homes.
They're not a child in this analogy because they lack the knowledge of right and wrong, but because they lack power.
To relitigate this analogy, it is morally wrong for the child to kick you in the shin, but it's far more useful to worry about the actions the adults are taking because, again, they have most of the power.
Hamas had more than enough power on October 7 to murder and kidnap a whole lot of people. They also have the funding and power to build a network of tunnels under Gaza which has so far thwarted the IDF's capacity to find the kidnapped civilians and bring them home.
They're not all-powerful. But thats cold comfort to everyone who lost loved ones in the attack. They sure kicked Israel in the teeth.
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)?
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.
If I could invent a time machine to be in charge of Israel on Oct 7, I'd try to make the time machine travel further to the past...
If somehow I quantum-leapt into Netanyahu (shudder) on Oct 7, I'd tell the military to not bomb civilians indiscriminately. The bloodthirsty barbaric hardliners of the Israeli government/society would've called me/him a pussy and done a coup d'etat, either real or de facto, and I/he would've ended up in prison for the corruption.
At least if it was Quantum Leap, I could leap out.
Yeah its a horrible situation, and I too am grateful I wasn't Netanyahu on Oct 7.
> If somehow I quantum-leapt into Netanyahu (shudder) on Oct 7, I'd tell the military to not bomb civilians indiscriminately.
They didn't bomb civilians indiscriminately. But they also didn't hold back when Hamas used civilians as human shields. (Eg Hamas put military bases underneath hospitals).
Would you have held back, even if meant more of your soldiers dying? Even if it meant you might not be able to behead Hamas, or bring your people home? (Leaving Hamas alive means risking October 7 happening again.)
FWIW, I don't think there's any right answer here. Just lots of wrong answers. Its weirdly symmetrical - the Palestinians also - only - had lots of wrong answers in reaction to the encroachment of Israeli settlers. The whole situation is horrible.
> Leaving Hamas alive means risking October 7 happening again.
If someone killed your family members (especially the innocent ones) and walked around with impunity and an air of moral superiority, how much revenge would be in you?
> But they also didn't hold back when Hamas used civilians as human shields.
No they didn't, so in my view they lose any right to claim that they're any better than the barbaric butchers they're fighting.
> They didn't bomb civilians indiscriminately.
Oh please, wake up, and finally admit you're accepting their lies and are lying to yourself. Oh wait, I apologize, you're right, they didn't bomb civilians "indiscriminately", they used an algorithm to figure out whom to bomb: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
> B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”
> He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is.
> If someone killed your family members (especially the innocent ones) and walked around with impunity and an air of moral superiority, how much revenge would be in you?
Oh I’m sure a lot. But I’d like to think I wouldn’t take that anger out by gunning down innocent civilians in the street like Hamas did.
> any better than the barbaric butchers they’re fighting
I never said they were. Why do we have to pick a team here? Israel put Palestine in an untenable situation and they reacted with an evil act of terrorism. And then Israel reacted to that with a brutal bombing campaign that’s left tens of thousands dead, cold and hungry. We probably both agree more than we disagree here - it’s all barbaric butchery. Both sides have acted with reckless indifference to the death and destruction they’ve caused. And sadly I don’t see any path out.
The only “team” I’m on is that of the civilians on both sides of this conflict, who have bled and died for no good reason. Especially that of the civilians in Gaza who have paid a heavier price in bloodshed, rubble and hunger. It’s horrible all round.
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.
So if a rapist “changed” their mind on consent do we just let them go because we need more feminists?
Please do not confuse changing your mind with innocence. It’s all well and good to change your mind but accountability is still required.
Remember the movement grew despite them and will certainly flourish without them. Nothing will strengthen the movement more than to see these leaders brought to justice.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
I would not talk about state leaders and governments as "changing their minds". Maybe they respond to pressure; maybe the state interests change. But whatever the case, what matters is actually stopping the genocide. If their "change in mind" helps that, that's enough for me right now.
However I would rather see and applaud actions than words. Words are easy. I can also do words, but a president or government have power. In the meantime, has anything changed in Israel being supplied weapons to commit said genocide? That matters more imo than what a president or prime minister says. Hopefully things go that direction and actions do follow.
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
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.
Dropping 500+ lbs indiscriminately on civilian populations does not need new data.
War crimes have been perpetrated from extremely early on. What's happening now is just a continuation of what was happening at the start. It's better that there is some change but lots of groups, politicians and countries cannot expect genocide to be forgotten.
Realistically we are nowhere close to any of this being resolved or even stopped so I'm not even sure there is anything yet changed.
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.
Israel should have captured terrorists without destroying the whole city and killing random people. Don't know if it was possible though but it is the obvious answer.
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”!
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.
How does this country claim to be any better than Hamas butchers, when they can't conduct a war where their bullets and bombs hit defenseless children? They've been saying "oops, that was a mistake" so many times that it's obvious their operating procedure is "drop the bomb here and we don't care about civilian deaths".
Or they use the excuse that terrorists are hiding under hospitals and schools, so dropping bombs on these things are perfectly acceptable. In my book that's morally indefensible and makes them not very different to Hamas butchers.
Or if you can accept that, maybe crashing planes into the WTC towers is acceptable too (and what about a military target like the Pentagon)...
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.
What? Outside of like maybe WW2 Germany, no serious country does official press run where they say "The only good x is a dead x". Especially so about private citizens of the enemy country. It constantly feels like Palestine is never held responsible for their actions because theyre getting pummeled so badly on the field.
Defeating your enemy before they can launch another deadly attack is a lot different than genocide or ethnic cleansing. Jesus was talking about personal relationships in that saying, he wasn't running a government or military. Presumably he had a different view on what should happen to the Roman occupiers when the Kingdom of God came, as can be seen in other parts of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
The problem is Israel treated the entire Gaza population as indiscriminately sheltering Hamas, partly because Netanyahu retains power by keeping conflicts going, and party because the right-wing Jewish extremists want to claim all the land.
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.
I agree. That doesn't make the bombing of Tokyo and Dresden moral acts. War is atrocious by definition.
What is different this time is that most of the west has forgotten what it actually means to be at war and they pontificate from their armchair.
Combine that with the fact that it is generally easier to have empathy for the side that you perceive to be the victim or on the side of justice, and most people truly cannot comprehend how so many Israelis would support their right wing war policies.
I don't think one has to justify the killing of innocent civilians in order to at least try to put themselves in the shoes of people who have been born in Israel and have lived their lives punctuated by the fear of their family or friend being blown up in a bus bombing.
Most people in the west will just not entertain the thought exercise. They'll just dismiss it as "well they invaded Palestine and stole their land", as if this is a justification for suicide bomb attacks or raining rockets over Israeli cities.
I think our collective inability to accept the situation on the ground and push for a compromise is fueling the violence.
Hamas has a strategy where they can leverage their population acceptance of martyrdom in order to gain more and more victim points in their master PR strategy.
Israel feels more and more isolated internationally and they react by giving everybody a big F U and doubling down on their own extremism.
I often hear "Jews should just go back to Europe" as if that is an actual solution.
I believe that if this was any other conflict that didn't involve Jews (e.g. Turks and Kurds) most people would be cheering for peace or they'd be indifferent.
But this conflict has the right mix of inflaming ingredients. There is white colonial guilt and guilt of racism, there is the association of Jews with global capitalism, and associating Jews as "being white".
To be clear, my take is not that since there are other wars like in Sudan, Israel can do whatever they want. All wars should end and every day they continue is a tragedy.
My point is that if one wants to help bring this conflict to an end, one should not put Israel in an impossible position and demand that they simply cease to exist because they "are not native to the land" or similar arguments that people make nowadays.
It's much more effective to pressure Israel to avoid war atrocities if one understands their point of view, their condition and what it means to be under existential threat.
In order to do that you don't have to deny the same to Palestinians.
For some reason most people seem to only reason by taking one side
There are numerous reports that IDF does what it can to root out Hamas among the general pop. They call people before strikes, they distribute leaflets
Their actions shows a general disrespect for human life and human rights.
"Numerous reports" might claim what you say, but actual reports of countless genocidal atrocities contradicts them I guess. It is my belief that they don't care and never cared.
This statement and the most of the ones above are the same canned response.
My numerous reports are more numerous than your numerous reports and some version of the solution is stop being evil.
Its disappointing, given even with a direct ask for a considered answer everyone confidently gives one that dosent even respect there is a two sided problem.
>> This, but further more, there are 100s of comments about "the genocide" here, but almost none about what Israel should do.
They should do what all other countries do when they are attacked: defend themselves and not seek to take the attack as an opportunity to invade their neighbours.
You want an example? Look at the recent India and Pakistan crisis, and the Thailand and Cambodia crisis that is only now being resolved. In both cases there was fire exchanged, war was on the brink, then it was held back and reason and peace prevailed. The countries in question won't be best friends, they won't like each other, but they're not bombing the shit out of each other, levelling each other's cities to the ground and ethnically cleansing their populations.
The difference in Israel-Palestine of course is that Israel has the upper hand militarily and by many orders of magnitude so it doesn't have to make peace. It can afford to bomb the Palestinians for as long as it likes, it can afford to ethnically clanse them even at the risk of ethnic cleansing turning into genocide, it can afford to impose a medieval-style siege on Gaza where no food goes in and no Palestinians come out, it can afford to do anything it likes and nobody can stop it, certainly not Hamas with its risible military ... I can't even say "strength"; weakness is more appropriate. The redoubtable Islamist terrorists fight with their grandfathers' hand-me down AK-47's from "terror" tunnels (that have to be called that to sound even vaguely threatening).
The maddening thing is that exactly because Israel has such overwhelming military superiority -and not just against Hamas, but also against Lebanon, Syria, Iran sorta, everyone around it- they can absolutely make peace if they wanted. Its enemies would surely prefer that to having to fight Israel. Even Hamas' founders once resolved to make peace with Israel and what did Israel do? It assassinated them [1].
It is clear that Israel has convinced itself, as a nation, over multiple governments and generations, that its best interests are served by making constant, total war on its neighbours. Israel doesn't want peace.
But, to answer your question: that's exactly what it "should" do; make peace. That's the only way to not make war.
Yassin on several occasions proposed long-term ceasefire agreements, or truces, so called hudnas, in exchange for Israeli concessions. All such offers were rejected by Israel. Following his release from Israeli prison in 1997, he proposed a ten-year truce in exchange for total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza and a stop to Israeli attacks on civilians. In 1999, in an interview with an Egyptian newspaper, he again offered a truce:[41]
We have to be realistic. We are talking about a homeland that was stolen a long time ago in 1948 and again in 1967. My generation today is telling the Israelis, 'Let's solve this problem now, on the basis of the 1967 borders. Let's end this conflict by declaring a temporary ceasefire. Let's leave the bigger issue for future generations to decide.' The Palestinians will decide in the future about the nature of relations with Israel, but it must be a democratic decision.[41]
It was shortly after once such truce offer, in January 2004, that Yassin was assassinated.[42]
His second in command was also assassinated for the same reason. Can't find the article now.
The Cambodia - Thailand conflict is more like Gaza pre-10/7. Cambodia shot some rockets, killed some innocent Thai, and Thailand responded with overwhelming firepower. Same as when Gaza used to shoot rockets and kill civilians, then get destructive counter attacks from Israel.
The equivalent of the current Israeli-Palestine war would be Cambodia breaking a ceasefire to kill, torture and rape 1,000 civilians, and took hundreds back as hostages.
I'm sorry but your argument is defeated by the reality that there was a Hudna on October 7th, and Hamas broke it with a brutal attack killing and kidnapping hundreds of civilians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks)
...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.
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.
I think you are putting too much weight on the organization rather than the idea and collective it represents. From a very westernized idealized perspective.
Hamas is not this all encompassing high communication stable organization able to surrender tomorrow.
Hamas, or rather the idea, is instead made up of everyone who had a family member, relative or friend killed by Israel wanting to live a good life without the threat or pain of past actions.
One group of a loosely connected collective surrendering won’t materially change the situation on the ground.
Right. Anyone with basic empathy, the ability to read past the coordinated consent manufacturing media machine & actually listen to what the Israeli and Western governments were saying, and an understanding of what Israel really thinks of Palestinians, would have almost immediately realized a genocide is in the works.
The people who didn't realize it had many chances to do so over the past 2 years. First, the ICJ motion by South Africa: why would they have gone through the effort to even bring a case to the ICJ if nothing was amiss? Second, the ICC warrants.
In the US specifically, the biggest chance/wake up call of note was the coordinated wave of college protests. I mean, if you had sat down and seriously considered why so many colleges decided to protest across the nation, and expended just a tiny bit of effort to read past US gov statements and Western media pundits, you would have quickly realized that something was truly wrong.
If after all of this you still didn't see what was happening, then you can be proud to know that you'd likely have reacted to any other genocide the exact same way. At best, know that the skin color or "otherness" of the victim most likely contributes to your lack of empathy - so it would be good to take this as an opportunity to do some self-reflection :)
I think we should give credit where credit it due in that the people in power in Israel is using the old holocaust as an excuse to commit another. The people in power do not 100% represent the people of a nation.
Except these politicians weren't sharing their opinion, they were making a calculated statement and deliberately refusing to acknowledge all evidence to the contrary for years. As an example, selling weapons to a country that will use them to commit war crimes violates US law. So the Biden administration claimed they had seen "no evidence" of Israel committing any war crimes. A ludicrous statement to anyone bothering to pay any attention at the time. Now we know that was a lie (actually we knew it then)
So is someone like Matt Miller who spent more than a year repeating genocide propaganda redeemed now? Of course not. These people have no principles at all, and their words are meaningless. Ww must be mindful of their actions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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
Which Palestinians has Israel been a racist project to? The Israeli Palestinians that make up 20% of the population? Or the ones living on the other side of the border? I'm not sure it's only about race.
And that kind of myopic, self indulgent, genocidal/racist/apartheid -apologist tone, trying to obfuscate plain truths...
that pretty much sums up much of the responses on this forum, and the US tech sector (or at least its managers) in general.
Leaving aside the moral bankruptcy, it also displays a stunning and fundamental ignorance of the flow of history. How many of you will end up having to pretend, 5 years from now, that this wasn't your online username, just to be allowed to function in "polite society".
It also shows how much of a self-deluded echo chamber you live in, not realizing how completely such genocidal apologist propaganda has been debunked & discarded amongst the wider population - even within the US.
It all smacks of the apocryphal saying of Marie Antoinette of "let them eat cake", weeks before she has a load taken off her shoulders
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.
In 1961, South Africa defended its use of apartheid by using Israel as an example of acceptable apartheid state. In 2022 (and 2024), South Africa again called Israel an apartheid state. They're kind of the authority on it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_apartheid
If the distinction you're making is only that the apartheid is applied mostly in Gaza and the West Bank, I'd say that misses the forest for the trees.
If you talk to any Muslim that lives in Israel (which I have), you will realise that they only have full rights in theory.
Arabs with Israeli passports are routinely searched and investigated by intelligence agencies, and in the occupied areas Arabs WITH Israeli passports are not allowed to visit certain areas (multiple sources online, including the recent Louis Theroux documentary). This is the very definition of an apartheid state.
I'm not sure what you mean. I'm saying that the reason that Arabs with Israeli passports are not allowed to enter certain areas of the West Bank is because no one with an Israeli passport is allowed to enter those areas.
> What I pointed out is that there are areas within Israel where Arabs with an Israeli passport cannot enter.
Actually you said
> in the occupied areas Arabs WITH Israeli passports are not allowed to visit certain areas
But in any case, since you also said "multiple sources online" perhaps you can link one so we're talking about something concrete and not just vague insinuations.
By occupied areas I did not mean Area A of the West Bank, I meant settlements considered "Israel".
It is trivial to find more sources than the one I already mentioned, there is a very very long wikipedia article as a starting point. I'm afraid you do not care about seeing what is going on, you care about dismissing opposing opinions.
You did not link to a Wikipedia article. Unfortunately I do not have the resources to watch Louis Theroux's documentary, which I'm sure is full of his characteristic dry takes.
"I'm not inclined to continue to try to drag it out of you." and "I don't welcome your assumptions about [me]" are personally abrasive. The site guidelines don't explicitly say "please don't be personally abrasive" but they cover that kind of thing with more general statements like "Be kind", "Edit out swipes", and so on.
Of course the GP post was outright aggressive, not just abrasive, and that is considerably worse. But we need users to stick to the guidelines regardless of what other commenters do. Not insisting on that just leads to a downward spiral, especially since it's human nature to underestimate the provocation in one's own comments.
Oh Dan, come on, really?! OP has been making all sorts of claims and failed to justify them with any more than "just look it up", and also making all sorts of assumptions about me. Saying what I said was about the most kind I could be in response. I guess I could just simply not contribute, as I had planned, but tomhow did explicitly ask me to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44720318
Continue dragging it out of me ? You said that you are too busy to watch a documentary which portrays how the actual situation is there and the mentality of the settlers. I guess you're too busy arguing on hackernews.
Okay then, read a few sentences of the wikipedia article. Or should I spoonfeed them to you ? Okay, sure:
In a 2007 report, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine John Dugard said, "elements of the Israeli occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law"
On 21 March 2022, Michael Lynk, the UN's Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, submitted a report[180] to the UN Human Rights Council stating that Israel's control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip amounts to apartheid, an "institutionalised regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination."
In 2020, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din said that Israeli treatment of the West Bank's Palestinian population meets the definition of apartheid under both Article 7 of the 2002 Rome Statute
On 1 February 2022, Amnesty International published a report, Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity,[203] which stated that Israeli practices in Israel and the occupied territories amount to apartheid
Want more ? Read the damn article and the sources yourself. And not random reddit or quora posts. I'm done here.
Your proof of apartheid was supposedly "in the occupied areas Arabs WITH Israeli passports are not allowed to visit certain areas". That's the claim that I'm challenging. Sorry if you thought I was discussing something else. If so then I can understand why you'd be confused.
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?
Israeli apartheid is a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination
in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and to a lesser extent in Israel proper.[a]
("Israel proper" refers to the borders of Israel as recognized by the majority of the international community,
which excludes East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip.)
This system is characterized by near-total physical separation between
the Palestinian and the Israeli settler population of the West Bank,
as well as the judicial separation that governs both communities,
which discriminates against the Palestinians in a wide range of ways.
Israel also discriminates against Palestinian refugees in the diaspora
and against its own Palestinian citizens.[2][3][4][5][6]
I see. So people who call it apartheid basically believe that places like Gaza are parts of Israel despite Israel having no administrative power there nor effective police presence.
Let's skip those places for a moment. What are the signs of apartheid in Israel proper? I don't have access to the sources listed. Just one or two things off the top of your head would be a lot for me.
Through illegal military occupation of a foreign territory. Was WWII Germnau also an apartheid state because of their occupation of Poland and other territories?
if it can be an occupation with no troops on the ground, a genocide with no meaningful way to destroy a people, colonialism by the original inhabitants and not motivated by capitalism, it surely could be apartheid without racism and with equal rights
Not a massive fan of Israel, but I can't see any other country reacting in a different way to Oct 7th. The Hamas attack has to be one of the dumbest strategic moves ever made.
You mean reacting with war crimes, crimes against humanity, attempted genocide? This without even mentioning the fact that, given Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine, a military attack to Israel was entirely justified.
Ok, by this logic you're justifying whatever Hamas did, since many, many daughters of Palestinians and Gazans have been killed (and in some cases, raped) by Israel and Israeli soldiers for decades.
And by the same proportion, what would be the justified reaction of Palestinians to Israel now if they had the means? Complete nuclear annihilation?
I think if Palestinians had nukes (or Iran), they would have already done this.
Israel exists. That bell can't be un-rung. Palestinians could have got used to that fact and tried to build a nation, instead they want to kill Jews (and it is Jews, not just Israelis).
Israel doesn't have clean hands in this, and could have done better as well. I've not heard of mass rapes by Israeli soldiers, though.
> During the ongoing Gaza war, Israeli male and female soldiers, guards, medical staff have reportedly committed wartime sexual violence against Palestinian women, children and men[1][2][3][4] including rape, gang-rape, sexualized torture and genital mutilation.[5][6][7][8][9]
You escaped my question. I've asked you if by your own logic the October 7 attack was justified, and what would be the proportionate reaction to the ongoing genocide.
IF (and If is carrying a lot of weight in this statement) there is a genocide going on, then the victims should fight back by whatever means possible. This applies to any genocide - Jews in WW2, Rwanda etc,
And "if" there is only occupation, progressive annexation, pogroms, apartheid (in the occupied territories), destruction of houses and villages, of crops, periodic bombardments with thousands of civilian deaths, total blockade- and this goes on for decades with absolutely no recourse to justice (as we see, Western governments have troubles condemning Israel even for the total destruction of Gaza)? Then how do you think the victims should be allowed to fight back? How would you fight back if that were happening to you?
We could argue about who started (certainly it didn't start on October 7, if that's what you mean), but that's beside the point, I think. We can assume the the cycle of violence has been going on forever, with no clear initiator (or with an initiator on the losing side, for what matters).
Would you be relieved to know that they're taking your home and killing your innocent family because someone on your side did something bad before? Or would the sense of injustice push you to more violence against the other side? And how would you deal with the knowledge that the other side is actually gaining ground at each further round of violence, unilaterally deciding what's fair for them to take, and that even if you can swallow your pride and stay put, someone else from your side eventually break and provide more reasons for the next persecution?
Oct 7th wasnt justified because there was no way it could work. It was 100% doomed to make the lives worse for everyone in gaza. If it had a chance of working it would be justified. Alls fair in love and war after all, but just terrorism against an enemy as resolute as israel isnt war, its suicide. Palestine has every right to attack israel, their problem is that they cant.
True, Palestine can't win against Israel with its own forces. No military can, in fact, as the world's sole superpower is ready to defend it unconditionally and at all costs.
So the only way out is to force the West to change their mind and break their ties with Israel. I don't know if those who planned October 7 had in mind only to use the hostages to keep the West's attention on Palestine, or if they had already taken in account Israel's barbaric reaction. Somehow though, at an absurd price, it's working. The public image of Israel is compromised for decades, people are horrified, Israeli lobbies are exposed, the ICC has issued arrest warrants against the Israeli PM, the call for sanctions is louder every day, the images of a new genocide are on everyone's screens.
What is incredible is the straitjacket that the Israeli lobbies have put the Western leaders in: two years into a televised genocide the Western powers have barely started to condemn it in words, but still have failed to take any meaningful action. Of this, too, the people are taking notice.
> The public image of Israel is compromised for decades, people are horrified, Israeli lobbies are exposed, the ICC has issued arrest warrants against the Israeli PM, the call for sanctions is louder every day, the images of a new genocide are on everyone's screens.
Frankly, so what? The west cant abandon Israel because the second they do israel just turns to china and begins the actual final solution to their palestinian problem. If you think the israelis are mistreating the palestinians now just wait until you see what they do when theyre a full pariah state. End of the day geopolitical reality for western leaders is still probably that backing israel is better than the alternatives for them.
You think? I don't think so. On one hand because Israel considers itself a Western country and its people have deep ties with the West and care a lot about their place in it; on the other, because the pillars of the unconditional support Israel has enjoyed so far (deep historical ties, antisemitism and holocaust guilt, powerful political lobbies, religion) are difficult or impossible to replicate with China. Finally, China is not eager to pick military fights with the West- look at how useful they've been in helping Iran face a military attack from Western powers.
I know that you were probably exaggerating, but when you say: "just wait until you see what they do when they're a full pariah state", I need to remind you that full pariah states are routinely sanctioned, embargoed and bombed by the US and NATO allies for much less than Israel has been doing so far. So no, they don't want to go that way. If that were the way to have a free hand with Palestine, they might have abandoned the West long ago.
The US is not a moral standard worth an ounce of spit when it comes to war crimes, crimes against humanity and massive violations of human rights at scale.
It literally murdered 5% of Iraq's population in cold blood on the basis of outright lies.
Yes, I think we all realise that nation-building and intervening in foreign countries for regime change is a mistake, and what comes after is usually worse (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan etc).
Unfortunately the citizens of these countries don't want to live in functioning democracies.
>Unfortunately the citizens of these countries don't want to live in functioning democracies.
That is utterly incorrect. They want to live in sovereign democracies with control over their own nations resources.
The USA and its allies do not want that, as they have - as a whole - designated themselves the "shepherds" of the "lesser cultures of the world". A viewpoint you have propagated.
