No it's not tell me why you can't sleep when 18600 people get killed but you can sleep like a baby when you know there is a lot more suffering in places without the limelight.
You writing about Palestine but not other conflicts says more about you than you want to admit. Hybris.
Because he (and many others) are more invested in this war? That's why I care more, I didn't care about Russia/Ukraine but have far more knowledge and understanding of this one, and personal relationships.
For me, Ukraine and Palestine are the same team: the oppressed fighting a powerful oppressor. Plus, I'm Irish - we're always on the side of the colonized.
Though in this one, I live in the country oppressing (that being the US), and I'm part of the movement doing the oppressing (that being tech). So there's duty to speak up.
I think it’s interesting to equate Ukraine and Palestine, given that there are massive differences between the two.
For one thing, Ukraine hadn’t spent the last few decades shooting dozens or hundreds of rocket into Russia every day.
Putin’s war was precipitated by exactly nothing.
Israel’s war was precipitated by the worst terror attack Israel has ever seen, along with hostages taken back to what is clearly an enemy state (from their perspective).
Sure, both are wars. But that’s roughly where the similarities end.
It's really bizarre that to speak out against any atrocity you must first speak out about all other atrocities of equal or greater measure.
The funny thing is, the illegal occupation and oppression of Palestine and Palestinians is approaching a century, millions have been permanently displaced over generations, and Israel continues to illegally steal land that is internationally recognized as illegally occupied. The only "peace" deals that Israel has ever offered were ones that cemented and legalized their theft of the majority of Palestine's original land.
So, yeah, when you put it that way, the Palestinian cause against the Zionists in Israel is really close to being, if not the most, one of the most outrageous perpetual atrocities of our time.
Paul, tell me how to get Hamas (the terror group) out of Palestine. They killed 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, wounded 3400, took 100+ hostages including 30 children. What would you do?
How can the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip, involving groups like Hamas and the state of Israel, be approached to reduce violence and improve safety for all parties involved?
What strategies could be considered to address the challenges of urban and underground warfare, the protection of civilians, and the preservation of soldiers' lives, while seeking a path towards peace and stability in the region?
I'm not an expert on terrorism, obviously. I just believe that it's immoral to drop bombs on civilians.
Like any other conflict, for a positive end result there has to be a meeting of the minds on both sides, committed to peace.
So this is going to seem very one sided, but if you look prior to Oct 7, you can't have peace where one side controls everything, has all the resources, and uses them to keep the other population "occupied". That is always going to breed resistance.
Very simply, for peace Israel should pull all the settlements out of the West Bank, pull back 50 miles from Gaza for a number of years, remove all checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza, invest in the development of both areas, rebuild the airport they destroyed, stop and sign definitive peace accords allowing free movement and Right of Return for Palestinians, pay reparations for the destruction of Gaza and the damage to the West Bank (plus many other things that I won't list here), and finally on top of that invest in Palestine's future.
> So this is going to seem very one sided, but if you look prior to Oct 7, you can't have peace where one side controls everything, has all the resources, and uses them to keep the other population "occupied". That is always going to breed resistance.
Except that that's not quite true. Gaza could have continued maintenance of the existing water treatment plant (for example) that was working when Israel pulled out in 2005. Instead, they elected Hamas a year or two later and began firing rockets at Israel.
It's not as simple as you're making it out to be.
> Very simply, for peace Israel should pull all the settlements out of the West Bank, pull back 50 miles from Gaza for a number of years, remove all checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza, invest in the development of both areas, rebuild the airport they destroyed, stop and sign definitive peace accords allowing free movement and Right of Return for Palestinians, pay reparations for the destruction of Gaza and the damage to the West Bank (plus many other things that I won't list here), and finally on top of that invest in Palestine's future.
They pulled out completely, including removing every single settler, in 2005. Rebuilding is important, I agree, but if Gaza is going to run its own government, they need to, I don't know, not elect Hamas as perhaps a first-order approximation to "reasonable discourse."
Israel isn't going anywhere, no matter what hopes and dreams anyone has. That means they need someone to negotiate with, and Hamas ain't it.
In addition, the current government of Israel is garbage and I'm not sure has much interest in a two-state solution at all - but that is a separate (and important!) issue; there have been plenty of years and decades where Israel was committed to a two-state solution, and Gaza... wasn't.
Even if Israel did rebuild the airport, allow freedom of movement and right of return, and all that - what guarantees do you have that Hamas would not then just flood into Israel and partake in the destruction of every Jew? None.
And that, my friend, is the problem. It is complicated. It is not simple. You are not the first person to have suddenly found the 'secret' to this problem. To think you are, or to think that it is immensely simple, is honestly a bit arrogant, but more importantly, it's also incorrect.
The current situation is awful and absolutely terrible; but sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that only Israel is the aggressor, and that suddenly if they pulled out the problem wouldn't exist anymore, is naive at best, and misguided on avaerage.
You can give the Israeli part any moral excuse for their barbarity in Gaza.
We will just turn on the screen on any live Israeli TV channel and any propagandist excuse you gave here will be deemed completely irrelevant, overriden by the sick society that arrogance and impunity have fostered.
I have no problem with people speaking up just with people that want to be edgy and write a sob story when a opportunity arises. As I said you deciding to speak up now but not about other conflicts says more about you than you think. Do you really not sleep?
I don't usually post this sort of "dear diary" thing either, but when there's a US ally doing a genocide, and we in the west have the opportunity to do something about it, I figured it was better to post. Not sure what I can do about the Congo, but if I get some small set of folks in tech to feel like they can criticize this genocide, we have the ability to change US policy.
But yeah, I'm not being facetious. I haven't slept properly since Oct 7.
You've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously in this thread. I understand how inflammatory and painful this topic is, but please don't do any more of that, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. I don't want to ban you, but we have no choice but to ban accounts that keep posting this aggressively.
At the very least call it Israel vs Gaza, calling it just "Hamas" when many gazan civilians are involved does not fit what is happening. Language matters, and in fact I wouldn't even call it Israel vs Gaza, but Zionist Terrorists vs Palestine, because I don't recognize the settler colony "Israel".
I think by "involved" you mean victims, right? I read that wrong the first time and thought you were making the opposite point.
Completely agree that the framing is deliberate and bullshit. When you see what's actually happening, it's hard to believe that they're not actually trying to push Gazans into the sea (or Egypt).
The zionists have been trying to ethnically cleanse the palestinians and their leadership has made that very clear.
Gazans are involved as victims, but they also support Hamas since that is the only group that stands up for their rights and dares to fight back. You may not agree with them, but I do and completely understand the mindset. The only reason we even talk about Palestine now instead of allowing a slow genocide to happen, is because of the bravery of those men from the resistance who dared to fight back against the oppression.
You would be surprised how controversial this is. Try saying all civilians should be protected, or should have equal rights. The racist will come and tell you how one side is more important than the other to have the same rights to life, dignity and safety.
I would say your post is the false propaganda, pretending everything is one sided and extremely complex, and that people should not be emotional when emotion is the root of ethics. Whatever your thoughts on how this war started, what's currently happening is clearly a massacre of the civilians of Gaza.
Again, how can you be perfectly "objective" writing about something when morality is subjective and based on emotion at its core. We can write about the facts and attempt to convince the audience based on appealing to their moral values, which is what OP is doing.
The problem is that people like you who are overthrown by their own emotions talk about objectivity. The only thing you champion with a view like yours is moral relativism.
As long as the only solution is a one sided ceasefire there is no solution. That's what you people have to understand. You can be biased as much as you want to just pondering on one solution doesn't help anyone. The people in the region should understand that from experience.
A ceasefire is no solution and no one is calling it that. It’s a moral imperative that anyone with a shred of humanity can support given all key observers, including Biden, has called the Likud campaign indiscriminate bombing.
The bombing is not going to do anything. Hamas is not a regular army, there are 30k+ Hamas, when IDF tells people to clear an area, do you not think the Hamas clears it as well? Then what will all this bombing achieve?
Hamas will perform these attacks again, so long as Israel keeps closing millions of people in a box, in the world’s largest starvation camp, this cycle will come continue.
The only rational solution is a two state solution. Right now, Israel is pushing more people into Hamas, you can’t kill people’s children with your bombs and then even attempt to shift responsibility.
With nearly 20,000 people killed, Israel conducts an Oct 7, every 4 days, does so with impunity and cruelty.
Than put whatever you want on the table and don't go for the tiniest of denominators a ceasefire will change nothing it will probably worsen the situation for civilians because every side will have real breaches and even more propaganda ones. If not now when is the point to find a permanent solution if it's two states or whatever. Wasting time on a useless solution like it is done now will help no one except virtue signalling and everyone knows it.
> ...it's a fucking soap opera and trying to manipulate your readers with one sided sob stories...
In other words, all display of Palestinian suffering is "Pallywood", correct? Only if they had a Spielberg or a Bob Dylan for their narratives, then perhaps we'd relate and rally behind. Btw, are posts on Holocaust too one-sided for you? Is the Nanking massacre a sob story? I hope you see how severe your views really are.
Besides, Paul isn't Wikipedia or a WaPo/NYT journalist sworn to some arbitrary Bible of neutrality. These are his views where he relates with Palestinians and their plight as humanly as one can (imo), which for some strange reason has invoked a vile and vicious comment from you.
I fully agree with you. There are more founders, engineers, designers and product people out there who do as well. I will not work with anyone who supports genocide going forward in my career.
People use the word "censor" to mean so many things that it's hard to track, but in this case was HN working the way it always does and has for many years. It works the same way regardless of topic, and there was no moderator intervention. We sometimes intervene to turn off flags, but this wasn't the right thread for that, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527.
Re transparency, we don't publish a complete moderation log (I've written about why over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but we're happy to answer questions when people ask them, and believe it's in HN's long-term interest to err on the side of openness. I spend half my days these days answering this sort of question through email. Even when we can't answer a question completely, we can usually at least say why (e.g.: some of HN's anti-abuse software would stop working if we published how it works, so we can't answer that question completely).
I think that marking the actual post as "flagged" or "censored" would make it clear what is happening.
A big banner across the top so that everyone on the post knows that their comments don't matter and they have been essentially cut off from the rest of the community.
Hacker news however prefers doing things on the sly and that makes people feel bad.
It is the opposite of open and transparent.
Users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags, but I didn't do so in this case for multiple reasons. The primary reason is that HN just had two enormous threads about this topic:
There are other reasons why we didn't turn off flags in this case. I'll describe two.
(1) The votes and comments on this thread didn't look organic to our software, nor to me. My guess is that someone was trying to promote this article on HN. If so, I'm sure it was for deeply felt reasons, but it's still not a good thing to do (not to mention against HN's rules, both in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and in practice it leads to a lesser quality of discussion.
(2) If we're going to have further threads about this painful and divisive topic, it's better that the foundation not be an outright advocacy piece. This is not a criticism of the article, nor of the intention behind the article—it's a question of the impact on the thread. You can already see, in some of the angriest comments in this thread, what sort of hell the entire discussion would likely have turned into (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645665 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646617). That is not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and I don't see how it helps anyone.
Those who feel strongly in favor of a piece like this need to understand that there are also many users on whom it would have the opposite intense effect. It gets harder to communicate under such conditions, and HN threads are supposed to be meaningful communication, not battle.
All of this was happening in two recent threads I linked to—including controversies about article choice. That is inevitable, but it's also a matter of degree.
Do you think there are any cases where expressions of anger are necessary or correct? Or are you only able to see things in terms of "quality discussion" and "meaningful communication." Do you measure that only in terms of apparently calmness of the participants.
Do you see how this favors the party doing harm over the one being harmed? After all it's much easier to remain calm while you're transgressing than while you are being transgressed upon.
Have you ever read that mlk speech about the white moderates. Do you view yourself as being more devoted to order than justice? From here this is explicitly the choice you're making, but I wonder if you understand it that way.
It's partly a matter of venue - union members reduce their demands to easily chantable slogans on the picket line. That's not what they do when negotiating with management.
I assume you are talking about MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail. He wasn't criticizing the moderation of their language but the moderation of their ideas. He was famously a practitioner of a kind of radical moderation himself - the notion that a pervasive system of oppression supported by state-sponsored violence can be successfully resisted and overcome by nonviolent means. If one can accept that (despite the fact it clearly 'favors the party doing harm'), expressing one's views on a random nerd messageboard without bombast and fulmination hardly seems like an unreasonable burden.
Of course expressions of anger can be necessary and correct. (I don't think I'd use the word "correct" for this—I don't think of feelings as correct or incorrect, because if a feeling exists, it's always for a good reason—but I suppose that's a tangent.) It's not clear to me why you'd ask this, since the answer is obvious and I don't think I implied otherwise. Perhaps it is the frequency with which I ask people not to engage in flamewar on HN? But internet flamewar is something different from expression of anger in general.
As for your other questions: I do not view myself as being "more devoted to order than justice", and no I don't understand it that way—not at all. Does that answer your questions?
These things can look totally different from different positions and it's easy to arrive at inaccurate perceptions when all we have to go on are tiny blobs of text online. I'm happy to try to clarify my perspective as best I can, as long as I can feel that the questions are coming in good faith and not as a cross-examination. I confess to wavering a bit on that latter point when I read your comment.
It really just seems like your position here, on this specific issue, is that we already talked about this. We just had a discussion about it the other day, and people were worked up about it, and so we don't need to and in fact should not have a discussion about it today.
The thing is it is still happening, and so people should be worked up about it every day until it stops. And our industry is specifically involved implicated and complicit at the very core of the matter, and so action is necessary from us. From you, even.
Like do you understand that you're not going to be judged on the "tiny blobs of text online" you're going to be judged by the consequences of our collective actions and your role in influencing them? And that your role, specifically dan, is one of power and influence? People are going to write books about the relationship between the american tech industry and the genocide of palestinians and you are going to be in them. I'm not cross examining you but you should reckon with the fact that people will.
By that logic, HN should be a current affairs site, dedicated to talking about the most important things in the world—of which this war certainly is one.
But that's not the kind of site HN is or ever has been, so the question becomes: does a site like HN, with its particular mandate, have a right to exist? or should it be replaced by something more important? This question has been around for a good 15 years. Our answer is: we're trying to have a specific kind of website, and it's ok for it to exist, even though it's not the most important.
People with strong views (perhaps entirely justified) on a topic don't like it when that topic doesn't get as much coverage as they think it should. Often they think it should dominate HN's front page completely and anything less than that is a deplorable failure on the part of the admins, who obviously lack any morals or humanity. If I answer that yes, this topic is important, deserves discussion, and has indeed been receiving it—more than any other topic of its kind—well, one quickly learns that such demands can never be satisfied, short of replacing the site with an entirely different one, and even then probably not. Moreover such demands come in from multiple angles about multiple topics and the people making the demands not only disagree amongst themselves but are even at war with each other.
This dynamic has been playing out for many years, and if we had done as you say, HN would have ceased to exist a long time ago. I think it's a good thing that HN still exists, even though many of the things on its front page are trivial and of so much less importance than the suffering, violence, and cruelty going on in the world that it's grotesque to even compare them.
I'm not arguing for it to be a general current affairs site. But it should certainly be able to address current affairs that emerge from or have a strong influence on technology. Especially the technology that is made and shaped by a significant portion of its userbase, the shaping of which it has a significant influence on.
It's not just that the palestinian genocide is impactful to the world, it is that american tech companies are impactful to the palestinian genocide. This article was specifically a discussion about our role in this atrocity and a call to action to us as creators and users of technology to end it.
Within that context your editorial decision to shut down this conversation, and your invoking your mandate to keep HN functioning in this specific way, is explicitly coming out on the side of order vs justice. I am not exaggerating when I say you are going to be in history books for this one. We are all going to regret this.
> Unable to think of any way to help. All I can do is retweet and protest and write a stupid blog post. I feel so stupid.
By writing this blog post, you have already done something extremely significant and noble. You are giving a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves because they are running from bombs with their children and doing what they can to increase their chances of being able to feed them tomorrow. Very few have internet access, and fewer still have the time and energy to spend writing about their experiences. If people like you and others who share your empathy (a huge shout out to Jewish Voice for Peace who are spearheading the protests and spreading awareness of war crimes that are being done in their name; showing the world that this is not a religious war) did not speak about this, they would have no one to represent them.
This is precisely how I, and many in tech, feel. It's as if my own internal monologue wrote a blog post itself.
You might be asking why I can claim many on tech feel this way. It's because I've seen similar repression from Saudi Arabia (powered by Israeli cyber weapons).
In Saudi, a lot of really loud people barking are able to do so because that is the establishment line.
Everybody else who is silenced have, usually the diametrically exact opposite opinion (or even unacceptable tame variations of the establishment line).
In Saudi they use Israeli cyber weapons to hack, monitor then jail (even mild) dissent.
In tech there are many establishment lemmings who don't think for themselves who essentially act the same as establishment propagandists and their pernicious weapon against dissent is being iced out from opportunities.
Tech is meant to be decentralized, meritocratic, (somewhat) contrarian.
Yet we've seen in these last two months all that goes thrown out the window when it comes to narratively protecting a genocidal project because unfortunately there is a well oiled Israeli Extermination Force to Tech pipeline that people don't like to talk about (aka Affirmative action for extreme Zionists).
Most of the few founders I know will be raising with BDS in mind - that hopefully includes LPs where possible.
Don't support right of return? You don't deserve right to my returns.
I'm interested in knowing more about both sides. OP has given a bunch of links in the article (almost in every sentence). Could you point out which assertions of OP are biased?
The entire article seems quite biased. Using footnotes after every sentence doesn't necessarily indicate a well-researched piece. I won't delve into recent events due to the challenges posed by the fog of war effect. A clearer example of Paul's bias is his choice of quotes regarding past events.
In reference [19], discussing the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, Paul presents the following quote:
"Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities. Those who were taken prisoners were treated with degrading brutality."
This quote originates from a UN report just 11 days after the event, posing two critical issues: firstly, insufficient time for a thorough investigation; secondly, an erroneous casualty count of 250, later revised through subsequent investigations to a total of 107, inclusive of non-civilian casualties.
Furthermore, there's a significant omission. The Deir Yassin events didn't occur in isolation; they were part of a broader context — a battle during the Arab-Jewish civil war, where Jewish militias aimed to break the blockade of Jerusalem enforced by Arab militias.
The Deir Yassin incident has undergone extensive scrutiny, exemplified in Eliezer Tauber's book.
> This quote originates from a UN report just 11 days after the event, posing two critical issues: firstly, insufficient time for a thorough investigation
There is no reason to not trust first-hand testimonies (see also: believe all women). Of course, investigations did happen, which are a matter of public record, but the circumstances were such that it is hard to prove one way or the other definitively. So, the denials will happen regardless.
> The Deir Yassin events didn't occur in isolation; they were part of a broader context
It is almost like you're defending 7 Oct.
Israeli historian Benny Morris said the militias "ransacked unscrupulously, stole money and jewels from the survivors and burned the bodies. Even dismemberment and rape occurred."
Btw, the perpetrators of the massacre (Lehi & Irgun) you seem eager to defend were abhorred as fascists by the very people they were sworn to protect. Even those who took part in the massacre, like Amos Kenan, couldn't come to terms with it: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/lover-of-the-coun...
I am defending no one. Grandparent comment was asking for OP assertions that I find biased. Deir Yassin quote was a one such assertion. Extremely well researched - books have been written about it - but presented in a very biased manner. Paul cherry-picked the worst description of the events.
> Paul cherry-picked the worst description of the events.
IDF has never declassified its report on the massacre? If anything we don't know whats biased and whats not.
Apparently, Benny Morris (who I quote above) had access once, and doesn't appear to disagree that much with the UN report, despite his pro-Israel bias. I mean, Benny Morris is the kind of guy who thinks ethnic cleansing of Pals would have been moral and just answer to the Question of Palestine.
I will reply mainly to your point (2) first, as I see it often repeated.
> Israel for years had the means to completely exterminate Gaza many times over, but they never did
In a theoretical sense that Israel had the means to, sure. But in practice, Israel couldn't really do that without disastrous consequences to itself, could it? Having protection and support from major powers, like the UK and USA, has been a lifeline for Israel ever since its creation. If US stopped using its veto power to protect Israel within the UN Security Council, it would have been under heavy sanctions for a very long time now, and its prosperity and perhaps even existence would be under serious question (see [1] and [2]). If US stopped providing military funding and arms support to Israel, it would seriously impede its ability to wage war. If those same powers were not helping its defenses (either directly or via deterrence) against the many enemies it has historically had in the region (it has basically no neighbouring country that it is in good relations with), it is doubtful that it would still have existed to this day. The governments of the countries protecting Israel would not be able to keep doing that if Israel made a move so radical such as large-scale extermination of Palestinians in a post-WW2 world that does not look fondly on genocide. So no, they do not have the means to completely exterminate citizens of Gaza in practice.
And even if Israel had both the means and the freedom to completely exterminate Gazans yet chose not to do it, does NOT committing something so obviously atrocious provide any justification for doing other kinds of atrocities that most people would categorize as less severe? I strongly argue that it does not. To use a silly analogy, someone who stole a significant chunk of your money from you does not deserve praise for not stealing all of it just because they theoretically had the means to. They have still done you injustice, inflicted harm, and deserve condemnation. No one should be free from criticism when they commit acts that deserve criticism.
About your point (1), the reactionary expulsion of jewish citizens of the neighbouring states in the post-Palestinian-ethnic-cleansing-of-48 world [3] is also a tragedy that also deserves condemnation. It is not the current burning issue, however, while Gazans are being bombed and starved to death as we speak, which is why there are so many people talking about Gaza right now and not about that. Nevertheless, I would not want to stop anyone from talking about it, as again, no one should be free from criticism when they commit acts that deserve criticism, and I welcome anyone with time and motivation to open topics about it. This current topic here, however, deserves full attention of its own without whataboutism.
Point (2) provides a helpful framework for evaluating various assertions about the war. It doesn't exempt Israel from criticism. However, the original post extends far beyond mere criticism; it seems more aligned with a propaganda narrative, unfortunately.
Point (1) aims to highlight a counterpoint to a comparable yet opposing claim - the expulsion of Arabs in 1948. The claim from 1948 continues to fuel hostilities to this day.
> 2. Israel for years had the means to completely exterminate Gaza many times over, but they never did.
- Russia had the means to nuke Ukraine, but they never did
- North Korea had the means to bomb and start the war with South Korea, but they are not doing
- Iran had the means to bombard Israel, but they are not doing
- USA had the means to nuke Iraq/Vietnam/Afghanistan, but didn't do (even though made a lot of destruction)
Can do, doesn't mean should do. Why did you bring this topic?
> 1. There are very few Jews living in Arab states or in Gaza. Often exactly zero.
They have migrated to the USA, also they lived fine until 1948, right? what happened in 1948? People are not migrating to the USA and claiming that it is their country, they are getting integrated into the country. Can't say same about Israel
> Iran had the means to bombard Israel, but they are not doing
I was not talking about bombardment. I was talking about means for genocide and extermination. Out of your examples, only USA and Russia have the means. Iran is not there yet.
> Can do, doesn't mean should do.
This is ridiculous, I never claimed Israel should exterminate Gaza. I claimed the opposite - Israel never did, thus it will not do that now either. Contrast that with official Hamas 1988 Charter [1] arguing for exterminations of all Jews.
> Why did you bring this topic?
I've brought the topic to demonstrate a way to judge various claims about the war.
> People ... are getting integrated into [USA]. Can't say same about Israel
This is incorrect. 2 million Arabs [2] are living in Israel proper: 20% of the whole population. They are perfectly integrated. For example, Knesset has 10 Arab members. Compare with Gaza before October 2023: 0.0% Jews. Iran: 0.009% Jews.
supporters of Israel's conduct love talking about anything except the thing that is happening right in front of our eyes: mass deprivation and slaughter of Gazan civilians. The reason that you want to talk about something else, like how many Jews live in Arab states, is because Israel's conduct is indefensible and we all know it, including you.
I hate wars, and I would love to see peaceful resolution. But we have a war already, most recently started by Hamas in October 7th. The sad reality is that civilian casualties are unavoidable in a war. Horrendous civilian casualties during American and British bombardment of Nazi Germany didn’t stop Allies during WW2. Israel conduct is nowhere near what Allies had done.
The point of Jew/Arab comparison is to contrast the consequences of two theoretical extremes: Israel victory and Gaza victory. Gaza victory would lead to extermination of Israeli Jews. Israel victory would lead to peace for Gaza’s Arabs.
Thank you for writing this. It’s somewhat sad that we in US have been divided. I don’t stand for Israel, or Palestinians but for a deeper value of protecting life.
It makes me sad and mad that our tax payer money is used to build missiles and bombs that are dropped onto civilians.
Department of defense is a thin veil on Department of war.
You're an extremely brave man, Paul, and we applaud you and support you. There aren't many people brave enough like you in this world. Hopefully this motivates more people to speak out.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadYou talk about those wars, I'll support you. I'll talk about this one
[1] https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information
You writing about Palestine but not other conflicts says more about you than you want to admit. Hybris.
Though in this one, I live in the country oppressing (that being the US), and I'm part of the movement doing the oppressing (that being tech). So there's duty to speak up.
For one thing, Ukraine hadn’t spent the last few decades shooting dozens or hundreds of rocket into Russia every day.
Putin’s war was precipitated by exactly nothing.
Israel’s war was precipitated by the worst terror attack Israel has ever seen, along with hostages taken back to what is clearly an enemy state (from their perspective).
Sure, both are wars. But that’s roughly where the similarities end.
The funny thing is, the illegal occupation and oppression of Palestine and Palestinians is approaching a century, millions have been permanently displaced over generations, and Israel continues to illegally steal land that is internationally recognized as illegally occupied. The only "peace" deals that Israel has ever offered were ones that cemented and legalized their theft of the majority of Palestine's original land.
So, yeah, when you put it that way, the Palestinian cause against the Zionists in Israel is really close to being, if not the most, one of the most outrageous perpetual atrocities of our time.
How can the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip, involving groups like Hamas and the state of Israel, be approached to reduce violence and improve safety for all parties involved?
What strategies could be considered to address the challenges of urban and underground warfare, the protection of civilians, and the preservation of soldiers' lives, while seeking a path towards peace and stability in the region?
Like any other conflict, for a positive end result there has to be a meeting of the minds on both sides, committed to peace.
So this is going to seem very one sided, but if you look prior to Oct 7, you can't have peace where one side controls everything, has all the resources, and uses them to keep the other population "occupied". That is always going to breed resistance.
Very simply, for peace Israel should pull all the settlements out of the West Bank, pull back 50 miles from Gaza for a number of years, remove all checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza, invest in the development of both areas, rebuild the airport they destroyed, stop and sign definitive peace accords allowing free movement and Right of Return for Palestinians, pay reparations for the destruction of Gaza and the damage to the West Bank (plus many other things that I won't list here), and finally on top of that invest in Palestine's future.
The only good neighbour is a prosperous one.
Except that that's not quite true. Gaza could have continued maintenance of the existing water treatment plant (for example) that was working when Israel pulled out in 2005. Instead, they elected Hamas a year or two later and began firing rockets at Israel.
It's not as simple as you're making it out to be.
> Very simply, for peace Israel should pull all the settlements out of the West Bank, pull back 50 miles from Gaza for a number of years, remove all checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza, invest in the development of both areas, rebuild the airport they destroyed, stop and sign definitive peace accords allowing free movement and Right of Return for Palestinians, pay reparations for the destruction of Gaza and the damage to the West Bank (plus many other things that I won't list here), and finally on top of that invest in Palestine's future.
They pulled out completely, including removing every single settler, in 2005. Rebuilding is important, I agree, but if Gaza is going to run its own government, they need to, I don't know, not elect Hamas as perhaps a first-order approximation to "reasonable discourse."
Israel isn't going anywhere, no matter what hopes and dreams anyone has. That means they need someone to negotiate with, and Hamas ain't it.
In addition, the current government of Israel is garbage and I'm not sure has much interest in a two-state solution at all - but that is a separate (and important!) issue; there have been plenty of years and decades where Israel was committed to a two-state solution, and Gaza... wasn't.
Even if Israel did rebuild the airport, allow freedom of movement and right of return, and all that - what guarantees do you have that Hamas would not then just flood into Israel and partake in the destruction of every Jew? None.
And that, my friend, is the problem. It is complicated. It is not simple. You are not the first person to have suddenly found the 'secret' to this problem. To think you are, or to think that it is immensely simple, is honestly a bit arrogant, but more importantly, it's also incorrect.
The current situation is awful and absolutely terrible; but sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that only Israel is the aggressor, and that suddenly if they pulled out the problem wouldn't exist anymore, is naive at best, and misguided on avaerage.
But yeah, I'm not being facetious. I haven't slept properly since Oct 7.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Completely agree that the framing is deliberate and bullshit. When you see what's actually happening, it's hard to believe that they're not actually trying to push Gazans into the sea (or Egypt).
Gazans are involved as victims, but they also support Hamas since that is the only group that stands up for their rights and dares to fight back. You may not agree with them, but I do and completely understand the mindset. The only reason we even talk about Palestine now instead of allowing a slow genocide to happen, is because of the bravery of those men from the resistance who dared to fight back against the oppression.
https://johnmenadue.com/the-october-7-hamas-assault-on-israe...
The bombing is not going to do anything. Hamas is not a regular army, there are 30k+ Hamas, when IDF tells people to clear an area, do you not think the Hamas clears it as well? Then what will all this bombing achieve?
Hamas will perform these attacks again, so long as Israel keeps closing millions of people in a box, in the world’s largest starvation camp, this cycle will come continue.
The only rational solution is a two state solution. Right now, Israel is pushing more people into Hamas, you can’t kill people’s children with your bombs and then even attempt to shift responsibility.
With nearly 20,000 people killed, Israel conducts an Oct 7, every 4 days, does so with impunity and cruelty.
In other words, all display of Palestinian suffering is "Pallywood", correct? Only if they had a Spielberg or a Bob Dylan for their narratives, then perhaps we'd relate and rally behind. Btw, are posts on Holocaust too one-sided for you? Is the Nanking massacre a sob story? I hope you see how severe your views really are.
Besides, Paul isn't Wikipedia or a WaPo/NYT journalist sworn to some arbitrary Bible of neutrality. These are his views where he relates with Palestinians and their plight as humanly as one can (imo), which for some strange reason has invoked a vile and vicious comment from you.
The only way I found this page was by attempting to post the url.
It's been essentially banished from the site, without even a comment on this thread about what happened or why.
If we are going to censor things, this should be a transparent process not a covert activity where people don't even know they have been censored.
The topic itself just had two massive threads on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675), so I don't think it's correct to call the topic censored.
Re transparency, we don't publish a complete moderation log (I've written about why over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but we're happy to answer questions when people ask them, and believe it's in HN's long-term interest to err on the side of openness. I spend half my days these days answering this sort of question through email. Even when we can't answer a question completely, we can usually at least say why (e.g.: some of HN's anti-abuse software would stop working if we published how it works, so we can't answer that question completely).
If you or anyone still has a question that I haven't answered here or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Hacker news however prefers doing things on the sly and that makes people feel bad. It is the opposite of open and transparent.
'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1266 comments)
The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1669 comments)
There are other reasons why we didn't turn off flags in this case. I'll describe two.
(1) The votes and comments on this thread didn't look organic to our software, nor to me. My guess is that someone was trying to promote this article on HN. If so, I'm sure it was for deeply felt reasons, but it's still not a good thing to do (not to mention against HN's rules, both in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and in practice it leads to a lesser quality of discussion.
(2) If we're going to have further threads about this painful and divisive topic, it's better that the foundation not be an outright advocacy piece. This is not a criticism of the article, nor of the intention behind the article—it's a question of the impact on the thread. You can already see, in some of the angriest comments in this thread, what sort of hell the entire discussion would likely have turned into (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645665 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646617). That is not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and I don't see how it helps anyone.
Those who feel strongly in favor of a piece like this need to understand that there are also many users on whom it would have the opposite intense effect. It gets harder to communicate under such conditions, and HN threads are supposed to be meaningful communication, not battle.
All of this was happening in two recent threads I linked to—including controversies about article choice. That is inevitable, but it's also a matter of degree.
Do you see how this favors the party doing harm over the one being harmed? After all it's much easier to remain calm while you're transgressing than while you are being transgressed upon.
Have you ever read that mlk speech about the white moderates. Do you view yourself as being more devoted to order than justice? From here this is explicitly the choice you're making, but I wonder if you understand it that way.
I assume you are talking about MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail. He wasn't criticizing the moderation of their language but the moderation of their ideas. He was famously a practitioner of a kind of radical moderation himself - the notion that a pervasive system of oppression supported by state-sponsored violence can be successfully resisted and overcome by nonviolent means. If one can accept that (despite the fact it clearly 'favors the party doing harm'), expressing one's views on a random nerd messageboard without bombast and fulmination hardly seems like an unreasonable burden.
As for your other questions: I do not view myself as being "more devoted to order than justice", and no I don't understand it that way—not at all. Does that answer your questions?
These things can look totally different from different positions and it's easy to arrive at inaccurate perceptions when all we have to go on are tiny blobs of text online. I'm happy to try to clarify my perspective as best I can, as long as I can feel that the questions are coming in good faith and not as a cross-examination. I confess to wavering a bit on that latter point when I read your comment.
The thing is it is still happening, and so people should be worked up about it every day until it stops. And our industry is specifically involved implicated and complicit at the very core of the matter, and so action is necessary from us. From you, even.
Like do you understand that you're not going to be judged on the "tiny blobs of text online" you're going to be judged by the consequences of our collective actions and your role in influencing them? And that your role, specifically dan, is one of power and influence? People are going to write books about the relationship between the american tech industry and the genocide of palestinians and you are going to be in them. I'm not cross examining you but you should reckon with the fact that people will.
But that's not the kind of site HN is or ever has been, so the question becomes: does a site like HN, with its particular mandate, have a right to exist? or should it be replaced by something more important? This question has been around for a good 15 years. Our answer is: we're trying to have a specific kind of website, and it's ok for it to exist, even though it's not the most important.
People with strong views (perhaps entirely justified) on a topic don't like it when that topic doesn't get as much coverage as they think it should. Often they think it should dominate HN's front page completely and anything less than that is a deplorable failure on the part of the admins, who obviously lack any morals or humanity. If I answer that yes, this topic is important, deserves discussion, and has indeed been receiving it—more than any other topic of its kind—well, one quickly learns that such demands can never be satisfied, short of replacing the site with an entirely different one, and even then probably not. Moreover such demands come in from multiple angles about multiple topics and the people making the demands not only disagree amongst themselves but are even at war with each other.
This dynamic has been playing out for many years, and if we had done as you say, HN would have ceased to exist a long time ago. I think it's a good thing that HN still exists, even though many of the things on its front page are trivial and of so much less importance than the suffering, violence, and cruelty going on in the world that it's grotesque to even compare them.
It's not just that the palestinian genocide is impactful to the world, it is that american tech companies are impactful to the palestinian genocide. This article was specifically a discussion about our role in this atrocity and a call to action to us as creators and users of technology to end it.
Within that context your editorial decision to shut down this conversation, and your invoking your mandate to keep HN functioning in this specific way, is explicitly coming out on the side of order vs justice. I am not exaggerating when I say you are going to be in history books for this one. We are all going to regret this.
By writing this blog post, you have already done something extremely significant and noble. You are giving a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves because they are running from bombs with their children and doing what they can to increase their chances of being able to feed them tomorrow. Very few have internet access, and fewer still have the time and energy to spend writing about their experiences. If people like you and others who share your empathy (a huge shout out to Jewish Voice for Peace who are spearheading the protests and spreading awareness of war crimes that are being done in their name; showing the world that this is not a religious war) did not speak about this, they would have no one to represent them.
Thank you.
You might be asking why I can claim many on tech feel this way. It's because I've seen similar repression from Saudi Arabia (powered by Israeli cyber weapons).
In Saudi, a lot of really loud people barking are able to do so because that is the establishment line.
Everybody else who is silenced have, usually the diametrically exact opposite opinion (or even unacceptable tame variations of the establishment line).
In Saudi they use Israeli cyber weapons to hack, monitor then jail (even mild) dissent.
In tech there are many establishment lemmings who don't think for themselves who essentially act the same as establishment propagandists and their pernicious weapon against dissent is being iced out from opportunities.
Tech is meant to be decentralized, meritocratic, (somewhat) contrarian.
Yet we've seen in these last two months all that goes thrown out the window when it comes to narratively protecting a genocidal project because unfortunately there is a well oiled Israeli Extermination Force to Tech pipeline that people don't like to talk about (aka Affirmative action for extreme Zionists).
Most of the few founders I know will be raising with BDS in mind - that hopefully includes LPs where possible.
Don't support right of return? You don't deserve right to my returns.
In reference [19], discussing the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, Paul presents the following quote:
"Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities. Those who were taken prisoners were treated with degrading brutality."
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-211346/
This quote originates from a UN report just 11 days after the event, posing two critical issues: firstly, insufficient time for a thorough investigation; secondly, an erroneous casualty count of 250, later revised through subsequent investigations to a total of 107, inclusive of non-civilian casualties.
Furthermore, there's a significant omission. The Deir Yassin events didn't occur in isolation; they were part of a broader context — a battle during the Arab-Jewish civil war, where Jewish militias aimed to break the blockade of Jerusalem enforced by Arab militias.
The Deir Yassin incident has undergone extensive scrutiny, exemplified in Eliezer Tauber's book.
https://www.amazon.com/Massacre-That-Never-Was/dp/1592645437
There is no reason to not trust first-hand testimonies (see also: believe all women). Of course, investigations did happen, which are a matter of public record, but the circumstances were such that it is hard to prove one way or the other definitively. So, the denials will happen regardless.
> The Deir Yassin events didn't occur in isolation; they were part of a broader context
It is almost like you're defending 7 Oct.
Btw, the perpetrators of the massacre (Lehi & Irgun) you seem eager to defend were abhorred as fascists by the very people they were sworn to protect. Even those who took part in the massacre, like Amos Kenan, couldn't come to terms with it: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/lover-of-the-coun...Careful then with words like "broader context".
> Paul cherry-picked the worst description of the events.
IDF has never declassified its report on the massacre? If anything we don't know whats biased and whats not.
Apparently, Benny Morris (who I quote above) had access once, and doesn't appear to disagree that much with the UN report, despite his pro-Israel bias. I mean, Benny Morris is the kind of guy who thinks ethnic cleansing of Pals would have been moral and just answer to the Question of Palestine.
> Israel for years had the means to completely exterminate Gaza many times over, but they never did
In a theoretical sense that Israel had the means to, sure. But in practice, Israel couldn't really do that without disastrous consequences to itself, could it? Having protection and support from major powers, like the UK and USA, has been a lifeline for Israel ever since its creation. If US stopped using its veto power to protect Israel within the UN Security Council, it would have been under heavy sanctions for a very long time now, and its prosperity and perhaps even existence would be under serious question (see [1] and [2]). If US stopped providing military funding and arms support to Israel, it would seriously impede its ability to wage war. If those same powers were not helping its defenses (either directly or via deterrence) against the many enemies it has historically had in the region (it has basically no neighbouring country that it is in good relations with), it is doubtful that it would still have existed to this day. The governments of the countries protecting Israel would not be able to keep doing that if Israel made a move so radical such as large-scale extermination of Palestinians in a post-WW2 world that does not look fondly on genocide. So no, they do not have the means to completely exterminate citizens of Gaza in practice.
And even if Israel had both the means and the freedom to completely exterminate Gazans yet chose not to do it, does NOT committing something so obviously atrocious provide any justification for doing other kinds of atrocities that most people would categorize as less severe? I strongly argue that it does not. To use a silly analogy, someone who stole a significant chunk of your money from you does not deserve praise for not stealing all of it just because they theoretically had the means to. They have still done you injustice, inflicted harm, and deserve condemnation. No one should be free from criticism when they commit acts that deserve criticism.
About your point (1), the reactionary expulsion of jewish citizens of the neighbouring states in the post-Palestinian-ethnic-cleansing-of-48 world [3] is also a tragedy that also deserves condemnation. It is not the current burning issue, however, while Gazans are being bombed and starved to death as we speak, which is why there are so many people talking about Gaza right now and not about that. Nevertheless, I would not want to stop anyone from talking about it, as again, no one should be free from criticism when they commit acts that deserve criticism, and I welcome anyone with time and motivation to open topics about it. This current topic here, however, deserves full attention of its own without whataboutism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolut...
[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/43-times-us-has-used-veto...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
Point (1) aims to highlight a counterpoint to a comparable yet opposing claim - the expulsion of Arabs in 1948. The claim from 1948 continues to fuel hostilities to this day.
> 1. There are very few Jews living in Arab states or in Gaza. Often exactly zero.
They have migrated to the USA, also they lived fine until 1948, right? what happened in 1948? People are not migrating to the USA and claiming that it is their country, they are getting integrated into the country. Can't say same about Israel
I was not talking about bombardment. I was talking about means for genocide and extermination. Out of your examples, only USA and Russia have the means. Iran is not there yet.
> Can do, doesn't mean should do.
This is ridiculous, I never claimed Israel should exterminate Gaza. I claimed the opposite - Israel never did, thus it will not do that now either. Contrast that with official Hamas 1988 Charter [1] arguing for exterminations of all Jews.
> Why did you bring this topic?
I've brought the topic to demonstrate a way to judge various claims about the war.
> People ... are getting integrated into [USA]. Can't say same about Israel
This is incorrect. 2 million Arabs [2] are living in Israel proper: 20% of the whole population. They are perfectly integrated. For example, Knesset has 10 Arab members. Compare with Gaza before October 2023: 0.0% Jews. Iran: 0.009% Jews.
[1]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
The point of Jew/Arab comparison is to contrast the consequences of two theoretical extremes: Israel victory and Gaza victory. Gaza victory would lead to extermination of Israeli Jews. Israel victory would lead to peace for Gaza’s Arabs.
For those who think that we should "keep out of politics", that has clearly never been our way before and shouldn't be our way now.
It makes me sad and mad that our tax payer money is used to build missiles and bombs that are dropped onto civilians.
Department of defense is a thin veil on Department of war.
A lot of my colleagues in the US object to it, but are on H1 visas and can’t easily quit.