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So twitter is back on our good side?
It is a platform. Whether it enforces rules consistently is important.
It's not as important as maximizing revenue, though. Depending on whom you ask...
"After widespread condemnation from online users"...

This is unfortunately what it still takes ...

He used "them" in regards to the killing of armed Palestinians exchanging fire. Now, you can choose to interpret it as calling to kill all Palestinians, but that is very ungracious. Maliciously so I'd say. So in short, this is ridicules and completely biased. Bummer to be an Israeli (and a jew) in that regard, we're treated unfairly.
I strongly disagree. When somebody says the phrase "keep killing them", they are expressing hatred for that side of the conflict. This is exceedingly clear-cut colloquial semantics. Is "kill all Palestinians" explicitly stated? Of course not, but it's ungracious of you to frame this as a binary, where either he is saying we should kill all Palestinians, or this whole thing is ridiculous. It's nowhere near a binary. He obviously understands what those words conjure. It seems pretty clear he is at least implying, "I hate Palestinians and enjoy violence against them".
This was said in Hebrew to an Israeli audience, and we quite simply know exactly what he meant. If he called to the killing of Palestinians in general there would be lots of outrage in Israel, such an opinion is not part of the Israeli public discourse. This is part of a known argument in Israel regarding the IDFs existing policy to minimize casualties among Palestinian combatants, which many argue puts the lives of our soldiers at risk. Anyway, Israelis know what he meant. I'm sorry to use my cultural and linguistical familiarity as an argument, but it is what it is.
Maybe if israel didn't have a robust and consistent decades long history of killing palestinians and calling them terrorists to justify it. Given they do have that though, you're asking for a lot of grace here.
The tweet in question:

> Nice and professional work by the fighters in Jenin, keep killing them.

This was in response to an attack on what seems to be terrorists hiding in a refugee camp. The guy has only been part of parliament since November too so this was pretty fast lol

It is sort of interesting to consider the implications of this. Like Ukrainians are able to endorse killing russian solders, so at what point do wars become complex enough we don't give one side leeway? If he had been more clear about killing terrorists would this have been ok? Seems interesting to consider the implications

Ye was banned for showing an image of a swastica intertwined with a star of david. Did I love the image? No. Was it far less of a call for violence than literally saying "keep killing them"? Most certainly.

End of the day all that really matters is whether Twitter thinks advertisers want to have their creative appear next to the content in question. Anything else is ancillary.

Call me capitalist, but I actually believe this is how it should be. Want to post what you want without worrying about what advertisers will think? Pay for the hosting.

Wouldn't a more apt analogy be a Russian politician congratulating their soldiers for killing "Ukrainian nazis"?
The war between Ukraine and Russia is an old-fashioned war between sovereign states. The ethical frameworks for determining acceptable behavior in such wars have been well established, at least in the West.

In contrast, the situation around "anti-terrorist operations" is ambiguous, largely because people use ambiguous language to describe them. They fail to distinguish between police operations where the suspected terrorists are civilians, non-international armed conflicts (according to the Geneva Conventions) between privileged combatants, and situations where privileged combatants become unprivileged due to their actions. And sometimes people just want to pretend that branding your opponents "terrorists" is enough to strip them (and sometimes also people around them) of their rights.

This, of course, ignores the incredible amount of arms, money and direct personal support flowing into these groups from state actors, namely Iran, Qatar and to a lesser extent Turkey. Beyond that, every few years is another incident of a Hamas funded children's show or school book calling for the killing of all Jews. It does but recognize Israel's right to exist.

What could it possibly be called other than a state sponsored terrorist group?

> What could it possibly be called other than a state sponsored terrorist group?

But what does that mean?

Is terrorism a crime? If so, anti-terrorist operations are police operations, with the usual consequences. Suspects are innocent until proven guilty, and the people involved in the operations may face criminal charges for unnecessary violence.

Or are terrorists involved in an armed conflict? Then individual combatants are not liable for their actions, unless a court finds they have breached the rules of war.

Those are the established frameworks we have. There is no widespread agreement on how to deal with the use of armed force against a group that does not follow the rules of war.

They use violence against random targets; their rockets fall on schools as much as military positions. They use civilians as human shields.

They're no freedom fighters; they would be an iron boot upon the necks of the Palestinian people.

They're not proper soldiers or mercenaries, as they kill without discrimination on their own behalf, not as part of a sovereign government under the rules of war.

They have a Martyr's fund that pays families of people killed setting off explosive vests at temples and markets.

Whatever you call them, "terrorist" is a perfectly fitting label.

There may not be a classic framework for how to define the conflict, but that's just moving the goalpost.

The closest thing we have would be for Israel to declare war on their international backers. It would certainly bring the issue to a head, but I doubt it would yield a long term resolution or be an option that causes the least amount of life lost.

> Is terrorism a crime?

Usually it is a crime, possibly many simultaneous crimes under multiple kinds of law.

> If so, anti-terrorist operations are police operations

That…doesn’t follow, legally. For a non-terrorism example, insurrection against the US is a crime, but under US law actions against insurrection may be police actions under normal criminal process, or may be internal armed conflict outside of police process (see 10 USC ch. 13, generally.)

Espionage is a crime (and doesn't stop being one when it is conducted by agents of a hostile belligerent, whether or not they are citizens.) But while action against such espionage may be a police action, sometimes it is very much not; see, for an example in US law, ex parte Quirin, 317 US 1 (1942).

> Or are terrorists involved in an armed conflict?

Almost invariably, whether or not it is a crime, terrorists are engaged in an armed conflict, either of an international character or not, but (where the laws of war apply) engaged in outside of the laws of war.

> Then individual combatants are not liable for their actions

Individual combatants are, in fact, liable for their actions, except in armed conflict that is of an international character (before parties to the applicable treaties by treaty, and between other states, in most views, by customary international law) and where those actions are within the laws of war.

The clean dichotomy you propose between crime and “armed conflict”, where the two are non-overlapping categories and all response to the former are police matters, all those to the latter or not, and personal accountability exists only in the former is wrong on basically every level. It’s abstractly a very neat, clean, model but it has nothing to do with reality, domestic or international law, or, anything else other than being a very tidy ivory-tower abstraction.

I was talking about ethical frameworks, not laws. There are established ways of thinking about civilians and police officers, and about armed conflicts between legitimate groups of combatants who generally respect the rules of war. When you are dealing with a situation that is not a good fit in either framework, things become ambiguous and political in an ugly way.
> I was talking about ethical frameworks, not laws.

The broad structure of the laws we have reflect a (very rough) consensus reification of ethical frameworks. You might prefer to the ethical framework you are describing, but it is by no means a common one when it comes to the subject matter, and it is, I would argue, one that for all its abstract cleanliness at a 30,000’ foot view (e.g., without any definition of what is criminal vs. armed conflict, only the idea that those are the two exclusive and non-overlapping categories of bad behavior) not one which admits of any reasonable application to reality.

Laws are temporary opinions that vary arbitrarily across jurisdictional boundaries. As an international service, Twitter needs a more universal basis for acceptable behavior than the laws of any single country.

Such a basis exists for old-fashioned wars between sovereign states, and for crime and police activity. At least as far as Western countries are concerned. With "terrorists", "heathens", and "heretics", things become ambiguous. Whatever Twitter chooses to do, it becomes political in an ugly way.

The problem is every side has state and non state actors funneling arms and money into the conflict. Which means each side has a vested interest in keeping the conflict going. And so it won't stop until that stops.

Ask anyone who's actually from there that isn't a zealot, the above is what they'll tell you.

Get these hate provoking articles and sources out of HN!
I prefer any given platform remove such blatant statements akin to, "I like that these people are getting killed", but it does beg the question about how we categorize calls for violence (not what Twitter's rules say - I mean the generalized question). If I say any version of "I support my side's rationale in choosing to fight against X people", during a shooting war, I am pretty clearly supporting the killing of X people despite not saying it. But it seems unreasonable to moderate that kind of statement. It's hard to say where the line is between simple support for one side in a conflict, and repugnant support for violence. I am absolutely not of the mind that there must be some way to objectively measure something in order to base content moderation policy on it - sometimes that's just not realistic. War is a really good example where the ability to make reasonable, clear, consistent rules really goes out the window.