This isn't ambiguous. This is really clear evidence of (at minimum) an atrocious and continuing war crime with full intentionality. Realistically, it is more likely explicitly genocidal in intent.
They are also firing SHELLS for warning. Direct article quote:
> In one incident, the soldier was instructed to fire a shell toward a crowd gathered near the coastline. "Technically, it's supposed to be warning fire – either to push people back or stop them from advancing," he said. "But lately, firing shells has just become standard practice. Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there's never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders."
It's "separation between church and state". As in: the institution of The Church. "separation between religion and state" doesn't really exist anywhere, and can't really exist, because it would basically be a thought-crime. For example Joe Biden is a Catholic and I'm some of his actions have almost certainly been inspired in part of fully by his Catholic beliefs. It couldn't be otherwise as being Catholic is part of Joe Biden.
I respect your judgment, so I've edited out the first bit, but honestly I feel it's not an unreasonable thing to say in response to genocide denial - it was said about the claim, not about the person, and in my opinion it's an accurate description of that claim. /my two cents
From a moderation point of view, it's a question of the effect that these bits have on other people in the community, and therefore the quality of the discussion. It's obviously near-impossible to have a thoughtful conversation about a topic like this across the vast differences (ideological, national, emotional) that separate people. In such a context, even provocations that feel small and justified can set the neighborhood on fire.
If the discussion devolves into just another internet screaming match where people hurl pre-existing talking points and just get even more riled up in rage, then the HN thread is a failure. Maybe it's too much to hope for anything better on this topic, which is probably the most divisive and emotional one we've ever seen, but I think we have to try. That's we allow the topic to appear on the HN front page from time to time. Not to allow it would be easier, at least in the short term, but inconsistent with the intended spirit of the site.
The bulk of your post wasn't doing anything like flamewar at all, so the swipey bits were particularly unfortunate.
p.s. I don't mean to pile on, but "please stop pretending" is also a swipe. You can't know whether someone else is pretending, and there's no reason to suppose that people aren't sincere in their convictions about a highly-charged topic (separately from whether their beliefs are true or false). If you lead by denying that, the rest of what you have to say will have little chance of being heard.
If you try to define that in a way that detaches from larger human concerns, you make it smaller. Curiosity doesn't benefit from that.
I agree with you that there are many reasons to be unhappy with threads like this and how the topic lands on HN generally. I am by no means happy with it—I just don't think that the alternative is better. Curiosity ultimately has to do with relating to what's real and what's true. You can't impose a narrow view of on- and off-topcicness on that.
The problem of how to run a site like HN in accordance with a value like that is subject to a thousand constraints, some obvious, many not. That makes the problem interesting, but also means that it can never be solved—not to everyone's satisfaction, nor even to anyone's satisfaction. Therefore we all have a certain amount of dissatisfaction to tolerate.
Have you seen any comments on this submission that demonstrate intellectual curiosity? It's just flamewarring and complaints as far as I can see, at this point.
I agree that the wrong call was made. I'm also curious why this particular post is the one which was chosen as the poster child on which to set aside the rules and allow "thoughtful" discussion.
I have no idea which side you think we're favoring, but I can tell you two things for sure: (1) it's whichever side you personally disagree with; and (2) they think we're favoring you. Of everything I've learned about how HN functions (and internet dynamics generally), this is by far the most invariant.
With the risk of being moderated myself, why is it the case that is always the not pro-israel comments that get moderated? The original comment seems quite reasonable but the guy even kind of apologized, for no reason! That's pure coercion to conform, if I may be allowed (lol) to have an opinion.
> why is it the case that is always the not pro-israel comments that get moderated
That is far from the case, as you can see for yourself if you look more closely.
People (I don't mean you personally, but all of us—it seems to be basic human bias) are far too quick to jump to "always". I call this the notice-dislike bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), which is a terrible name I'm hoping someone can improve on.
That's about frequency per se, whereas I'm talking about experiences with negative emotional valence.
Thanks for the reply though—I hope someday someone will come up with a good name for it; or better, still, point out that it's a known bias in the standard repertoire and tell me what it's called.
It's very relevant, the hacker ethos is not just about technology and VC funding, it's also about curiosity, honesty, skepticism, and in a way, also about distrust of the powerful. This revelation is perfectly on topic.
The comments are actually better than expected given the sensitivity of the topic at hand.
We must be reading different comments. What do you reckon is the ratio of thoughtful comments expressing curiosity, honesty, etc. to the mindless bleatings of the uninformed?
We've asked you several times to stop breaking the site guidelines. You've continued to do it anyway. That's not cool.
Moreover, your account has been using HN primarily for political/nationalistic battle, which is also a line at which we ban accounts, quite separately from individual violations.
But given Israels behaviour on the West Bank and Gaza over the last decades there is no reason to belive that it would make them stop their human rights violations.
The biggest problem with this isn’t the horror of the actual war crime. The far more serious concern are the lengths the government will go to avoid holding anyone accountable. That is so much worse because it unintentionally endorses future crimes and challenges the offenders to take ever more offensive actions without fear of consequences.
Until corrective actions with criminal penalties occur incidents like these almost certainly continue with possible increases of frequency and severity. More importantly though when this becomes a matter of conduct and military discipline is that it will spread to other areas even outside Gaza.
This isn’t just a matter of vague speculation as there are historical cases outside of Israel on which to see how things like this develop and what the consequences are both for the victims and the soldiers. These historical accounts also indicate soldiers committing these sorts of actions become victims themselves with catastrophic mental health disorders.
The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
Israel got in trouble with ICJ court, because of quotes from top government officials. Government of Israel was very specific what they will do to Gaza! This was even full scale bombing started!
Trying to reinterpret this as a problem of "military discipline", and "soldiers are victim as well" is just another level of cynicism!
> The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
It's happened, many times. Usually this doesn't make front-page news, but soldiers that break the law are sometimes held accountable. Not nearly enough, and I think it should be far more publicized as a deterrent effect (the fact that it isn't is a pretty big indictment of the current government). But it's certainly not laughable.
Well, he is on trial. So he could be arrested. Prime Ministers have been arrested (and jailed!) before.
A part of what the Isareli opposition has been pushing for in the last few years has been removing Netanyahu from power and presumably jailing him because of the corruption charges.
For each of their "operations" on Gaza they usually had one or two soldiers in trouble for something like stealing and using a civilians credit card. When there were many more serious crimes like deliberately targeting the disabled.
They can take out nuclear scientists thousands of kilometers away by either planting bombs in their cars in traffic or firing accurate munitions through their windows when they sleep.
Thousands of kilometers away.
The IDF can be highly sophisticated in their plans and methods when they want to.
I think the point is that if Israel can do pinpoint decapitation strikes anywhere in Iran they sure as hell can do so in Gaza, but they choose to bomb hospitals and flatten every single building in the Gaza Strip instead.
This. Israel demonstrably has the capability for precision warfare.
That they chose to level infrastructure across Gaza instead is indicative.
And it'd be real stretch to assume they did so even for military-economic reasons.
They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
To wit, the elimination of anything resembling a Palestinian state: politically, economically, and demographically.
Which is cynical and evil as fuck, given they're smart enough to realize they eventually either have to (a) kill every Palestinian or (b) make a deal.
Instead, they decided killing 50,000+ Palestinians was worth improving their negotiation position and kicking the can down the road.
> They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
That’s my read as well. I was strongly pro-Israel for decades and while I was never comfortable with the plight of Palestinians Hamas had a lot of the blame, too, but the last year really moved me over to thinking that the people who said most of the “accidents” over the years were intentional were correct. They can pull off these amazingly accurate strikes when they want to, it’s implausible that they suddenly have the precision of a drunken 18th century musketeer around aid workers and civilians. Their leadership clearly do not care and collective punishment is a war crime no matter who does it.
The term ”mowing the lawn”[1] has been used to describe their long term strategy, so I can ”excuse” someone for thinking that they can’t control the situation, but it’s been a tactic for a long time.
HN readers can recognize the tactic in other parts of our world too. It’s the strategy of people in power who believe they can control the chaos. When chaos in one group is a benefit to the other, chaos becomes a worthy status quo. When your military is infinitely more powerful, any uprising can eventually be exhausted, and you get automatic casus belli. The Cold War was full of this destabilizing politics, where superpowers tried their best to turn functioning socities into hellholes, in the hopes that it would spread in the enemy’s region. The same works for Israel. The less legitimacy Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians have, the longer they can keep building settlements. If they ever gain independence, it will cause another war, which has been planned for, because settlements have been overwhelmingly built on higher ground. Illegal settlers will not give up easily, and will likely gain military assistance.
To be fair, the Iranian state is a proper military. I’m not sure if there is a way to fight a guerilla force without massive civilian casualties. (Which is why one generally shouldn’t.)
A better analog might be Hezbollah. Surgically dispatched. Resolved with minimal follow-on nonsense from both sides.
No, it’s war. Targeted killing of a military scientist is war. Gunning down civilians trying to get food is a war crime. If we start labelling all war as criminal, the term loses all meaning.
> war crimes are just a label for anyone in opposition to Western domination
Eh, there is a broad consensus on what constitutes a war crime. But there is also broad precedent for these rules not applying to major powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951.)
I’d also argue that recent history has almost rendered the term worthless, as activists label practically every civilian death as a war crime.
How about killing a scientist that they claim is trying to make a bomb with 15 members of his family and several neighbors including children under age 10.
This claim is not proved. In Europe there is no capital punishment for mass murders but Israel can kill anyone they want with their family without trial or even conclusive evidence and no one can condemn it.
If you do it with a crude hand made bomb it is called terrorism but if you do it with F35 it is called self-defense.
I‘m sorry, but you’re comparing apples to bedrooms. Israel vs. Iran is a war/conflict between two proper countries‘ militaries - which means that both belligerents stick to certain agreed upon rules and military traditions, such as trying to separate the civilian from the military world/infrastructure. In lack of another word (haven’t slept, please forgive me for the choice of word), there’s “honor“ and a notion of equality and respect (somewhat) between the foes, even if Iran has declared it wants to wipe Israel off the map.
All of this does not apply to the conflict with Hamas. With them muddling the lines, it’s extremely hard to fight a “clean“ war. You’re between a rock and a hard place - either you lose but with your head held high and your moral compass intact, or you stoop to their level thereby slowly losing your values but win in the end. If that win is worth it or not, is heavily debated in the rest of the world, but only debated in the fringes of Israeli society. But no military expert is able to suggest a real alternative of fighting Hamas without inflicting heavy losses on one’s own army.
I find the committed war crimes abhorrent and wish they’d be heavily prosecuted at least.
For as long as countries like Israel stand against giving Palestinians a legitimate state, militias and terror groups will continue to rise. The US showed that it was possible to fight an insurgency as an occupying force without resorting to literally levelling cities. It was not easy, it took more lives than they hoped, but they did it anyway, because they at least acted like war crimes out in the open was off limits.
On the flip side, this is not as controversial (or even at all in western media) when done by the Ukraine military (not specifically nuclear scientists). This is not a justification, but I think some characteristics of conflict are less interesting/important to focus on when trying to formalise critique against an assailant. This would be more important if contrasted with for example a conflicting ideological narrative.
Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions? Let’s not pretend that this is just some random soldiers doing this, this is exactly what the Israeli government wants.
Well, there is actually a reasonable reason. Typically you'd want the government to hold people accountable so you could have the thin veneer of operating by the rules of warfare and not committing war crimes. That's usually been a popular strategy of the US for when someone goes a little too far (or gets caught).
As far as I can tell Israel doesn't particularly care for even looking like it's trying to behave responsibly. I don't think they've held anyone responsible for even some of the most obvious war crimes we have evidence of being committed.
Soldiers shooting at civilians is a war crime. It does not matter what the intentions of the soldiers are. It doesn’t even matter if the civilians are also armed up until the point they display violent intent according to a common person standard. Shooting at a crowd is a crime.
That said the soldiers pulling the trigger are committing crimes. These are patently illegal actions to a common person standard which eliminates any defense of following military orders. That being said the soldiers, at least, are committing crimes. Accountability starts at the source of the crime.
If the government is ordering these actions then those are illegal orders, according to international standards of military conduct. The soldiers on the ground must ignore those orders on the basis of patently illegal conduct according to a common person standard and the officials facilitating those orders can be investigated for issuing war crimes.
NATO was conducting defensive operations against Yugoslavia around that time. It isn't clear that war crimes can be committed so easily by US allies. It'd be nice if they can be recognised though.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding here. War crimes are not judged by what a diligent investigation after the fact might find. It hinges on the information and judgement by those acting in the moment. You are a soldier told these armed people a click out are the insurgent group you are fighting? Of course you can engage them. And there is a similar lenient standard applied to whoever got that information in the first place. War by any other standard of course would be entirely unworkable.
That is not correct. If you are a uninformed soldier operating in a designated combat area here are the scenarios:
* Patently illegal conduct, according to common person principle, is always illegal. There are no legal exceptions.
* If you are fired upon you must return fire. Uniformed militaries are obligated to defend themselves. There are no exceptions to this, except the prior point. When these two points are in conflict the prior point always wins.
* Uniformed service members are required, by law, to follow orders given to them except for the prior two points.
That is the law. It does not matter what specific scenario finds tenable or practical, because combat is inherently challenging. In most cases this is highly impractical, which is why urban warfare is so challenging.
Because "the govahment" is not a singular entity. In functioning democracies, by popular definition in large parts of the field, legislative and executive powers are kept separated from the judicial powers. So the executive power can not interfere with being held accountable. That's not fullt implemented everywhere, but that is the general idea how it is supposed to work.
Well, the civilian leadership is obviously in favour of massacring civilians, the military leadership orders civilians to be massacred, and the soldiers on the ground revel in the opportunity to massacre civilians. And the courts are happy to allow the massacre of civilians.
In functioning democracies in general, sure, you have to be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush. But in the specific case of Israel in 2015, it's not realistic to argue that the government isn't a single entity, so some parts of it may not be responsible (or even in favour of) crimes against humanity.
> Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions?
Because that is what keeps the ICC off of their backs. The ICC only has authority to step in in cases where national jurisdiction is unable or unwilling to prevent and prosecute war crimes.
Even ignoring primary crimes, under Israeli law, even incitement to genocide is punishable by death. But so many members of the political and media elite have made inciting statements, that the rubicon is crossed; the political class cannot allow any serious, independent consideration of war crimes to ever occur, because that would risk them all facing the firing squad. This in turn signals to individual soldiers that there will be no accountability, even in the absence of directives.
Regarding the risk to Israelis facing the firing squad, you do know that Israel only executed Eichmann (and one other person in a field court) since the founding of the country?
When it comes to the list of things that Israelis fear, being sentenced to a firing squad is very low down.
Fair enough, but I don't think that makes the incentive much different. If you are convicted of a crime punishable by death, your actual punishment is not likely to be trivial.
Government and regime can always change. Post socialist countries convinced border guards, for shooting unarmed civilians, who were trying to escape across country borders. That was a crime even under socialist laws.
If Israel had regime change, new regime and majority of voters would be pro Arab... New government could actually enforce existing laws!
> even incitement to genocide is punishable by death
For that to happen, the government, and the overall population, would need to consider what's being done in Gaza and on the West Bank to actually be a genocide. I don't think popular support for that actually exists in Israel. Last time I checked, most of the population supported the annexation of Gaza and the forced eviction of the local population to neighboring countries.
I don't think I'll live to see a two-state solution.
You may be missing a legal wrinkle: the crime of incitement usually does not require the underlying primary crime to actually occur. (Admittedly I'm not sure if that is the definition in Israel, but they inherited a lot of British law so it is likely). So this does not require the Israeli population to accept that this was a genocide, only that some war crimes occurred and that they should be prosecuted. Right now they are not there, but the point is that the government has an incentive to keep the population in that state.
There isn't popular support for it when you factor in the Israeli-Palestian but in opinion polling it has now gone beyond 50% among the rest of the Israeli population.
Where I hope this comes back, after the conflict and a new Israel government, is human culpability for automated systems.
AI being whitewashing for IP is disruptive and troubling.
It being whitewashing for war crimes is a much more serious problem.
If Israel/IDF put in place a automated system that gave effectively caused war crimes to be committed, some humans in positions of power need to be held responsible and face consequences.
The world should not allow cases where (a) it's undisputed that war crimes occurred but (b) authority was interwoven in an automated system in such a way that humans escape consequences.
Sadly, it'll probably take the fall of right-wing Israeli and current Russian governments to have a hope of passing through.
As with most international law, the two most likely originations are either (a) mutual self-interest (e.g. chemical weapons) or (b) horrendous and inhumane abuse.
I expect with the first first-world drone war on a third-world country, there might be pressure at the UN to put something in place. At least for the automating genocide case.
Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully, without snark or flamebait? It's not hard if you choose to, and the site guidelines ask people to do so, regardless of how charged or divisive the topic is.
Ok. The parent is the same kind of rhetorical question, whose counter-argument is so evident that it shouldn’t have existed, and it’s disappointing that one side gets the right of way on HN and the other is downvoted, one camp is making use of flaws in your rules to win without merit, aka bullying.
Yes, the parent was the same kind of question; in fact I almost included that observation in my reply to you. However, it's all a matter of degree, and your comment was significantly worse in the degree of snark and flamebait that you were posting. That's why I replied to you and not the other comment. It had nothing to do with which side either of you are on, although I understand how it ends up feeling that way. (I've posted quite a bit about that elsewhere in this thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403947.)
It's even worse: Awful lot of people die for the careers of politicians and it's not limited to Israel. If someone needs political tension for weathering a scandal or economic turmoil, it can be created artificially by killing certain people and they do it all the time.
I have distaste for Trump but something I appreciate about him is his abilities to stage a theatre with his "fake" bombings. The more mainstream politicians have much more sociopathic tendencies.
If you think about it, %100 of modern wars are about who is going to be the administrator and doesn't feel like can win an election. We live in a world of abundance, there's no reason for a group of people to kill other group for their resources. If it wasn't for the careers of some people with huge egos all this can be sorted out through civil matters. After the wars it gets sorted out anyway, we don't see mass exterminations anymore.
For anyone else, who for some reason, feels compelled to comment without reading the article:
> Haaretz has learned that the Military Advocate General has instructed the IDF General Staff's Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism – a body tasked with reviewing incidents involving potential violations of the laws of war – to investigate suspected war crimes at these sites.
Now what will come from this (a proper investigation, etc.), who knows.
Or maybe because this isn't happening at all could be the reason why because there is actually no one to hold accountable because this is just some hysterical anti semitic conspiracy theory.
What is the conspiracy here? Who is the perpetrator? Haaretz is Israeli owned and operated. The sources are Israeli soldiers and officers. The war is definitely real and gazans definitely died while receiving food aid.
We already knew this was happening from testimony from Gazans, it was obvious that the new US-Israeli monopolized "aid" organization was running the Hunger Games, with dozens killed by Israelis (+ US contractors) every time there was a distribution day, and horrific pictures and video of it. Entirely predictable too when the genocidaires are controlling the aid. It is good there is now proof from the inside as well.
> ...the new US-Israeli monopolized "aid" organization was running the Hunger Games, with dozens killed by Israelis (+ US contractors) every time there was a distribution day ... the genocidaires are controlling the aid.
It was apparently 2 VCs and not the military that came up with GHF (and if I recall, there even was a brief flare up between the ruling Cabinet and the Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, who did not want the IDF to be responsible for aid).
Even though the early planning was led by the Israeli military, two Israeli technology investors played an influential role in shaping discussions as they progressed, according to six Israeli and American individuals familiar with the GHF’s origins. One was Liran Tancman, an entrepreneur and reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution hubs to vet Palestinian civilians. Another was Michael Eisenberg, an American Israeli venture capitalist who argued that existing U.N. aid distribution networks were sustaining Hamas and needed to be overhauled.
> One was Liran Tancman, an entrepreneur and reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution hubs to vet Palestinian civilians.
Gives the feeling of the serial number tattoos the Germans used, with tech "fixing" the bad optics of doing that, but the biometric ID serves as one.
Doubting everything you hear from Palestinians is a key part of continuing to disbelieve that genocide is happening. Ignoring victims voices always props up the abuser.
I see new videos everyday of massacres. Saw one yesterday of a baby burned to a crisp. What is your email? I can send it to you if you’d like so you can discern if the Palestinians are lying.
Stories like this often get flagged because they devolve into political/religious flamewars. I think many people might have a knee-jerk reaction to posts about the Israel/Gaza war and flag them, because support for Israel vs. support for Palestine can be quite polarizing and emotional.
Not saying it's right or wrong, or that this sort of article is or isn't interesting to HN readers. But a reasonable reason for flagging an article is a belief that the topic at hand doesn't lend itself to thoughtful, interesting discussion.
People are constantly implying the Russians invaded Ukraine for no reason, or that Iran is the aggressor in the recent war, or that a genocide isn't actially happening.
I wouldn't say it's thoroughly off-topic because not only do a lot of tech companies directly enable or produce the stuff that's enabling Israel but a fair number of major figures have also directly involved themselves politically with Israel.
That said it's the kind of topic I don't expect HN to be able to particularly handle in an interesting or insightful way. It's mostly just going to be a mix of horrified people and then users trying to gaslight others into how this is a good thing.
Haaretz is generally a liberal Zionist Israeli newspaper. As such, I find it easy to trust that it is not lying when it reports sensitive testimony from multiple IDF soldiers.
Edit: yikes—quite apart from the current topic, you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot with flamewar posts and personal attacks. We ban accounts that post like this:
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted good things, but if you want to keep participating in this community, it would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
Wait, my message was obviously intended as a bit sarcastic (which isn't very smart, I'll admit). But are you actually saying that I'm now allowed two racist comments without risking a ban? (three, counting this guideline-abiding comment?)
Then I don't understand what you were saying by "this is how HN moderation has worked for over a decade", wasn't that a response to my previous comment that said exactly that?
It's not the case that "for each post that doesn't break the guidelines, you're allowed one that does", and that's not what I was doing. When I said HN moderation has worked the same way for over a decade, I didn't mean that the description you gave was accurate—it isn't. (Nor, I assume, did you mean it to be, since you were being sarcastic.)
We try to persuade users to follow the site guidelines, and tend to give warnings and make requests before banning accounts, especially if they are active participants who have been around for a while. We don't rush to banning such users; we try to explain the intended use of the site and convince them to honor it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
Thank you for clarifying and sorry about the sarcasm.
I am absolutely no one, but I'd like to highlight that this kind of policy is (indirectly) why I don't use HN. Tolerating intolerance to the extent you do (which isn't 100% but still a lot) allows people like the one you responded to originally to drive hackers like me, my loved ones, my colleagues and my students away, while attracting other hateful people, as they see that they are tolerated here. In a possibly too extreme comparison, this the same dynamic as the "nazi bar problem" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar). I hope you know what kind of community these policies has made of HN.
I don't agree with that characterization of HN. In my experience, people who make this complaint are usually coming from a place of political passion. That's understandable, and we might have more common ground on that level than you'd expect. But it's no basis for operating a community, assuming you don't want to just exclude people with different views and backgrounds to your own.
It's easy to invoke strong pejoratives like "hateful" when describing people who have opposing viewpoints and passions to one's own—in fact, it's hard not to. But it leads to a rapid escalation. A bad comment turns into a "hateful view", "hateful view" turns into "a hateful person", and soon that leaps to "how can you tolerate hateful people on your site". (The next logical step would be to suspect the mods of being "hateful people" themselves.) This escalation is, in my view, bad for community. It leads to uniformity within one's own group and rage and enmity towards difference.
Having banned countless accounts for breaking the site guidelines over the years, I can't accept that "hateful people" are tolerated here for very long. When accounts are posting abusively, we may give them more warnings than you (or a lot of other users) would prefer, but we ban them in the end. A good example is this very subthread. I ended up banning that account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403629). (Not, I should probably add, because of this or any other conversation about moderation, but just out of standard practice.)
p.s. You are not no one! I appreciate your comments and I wish I could write a better reply—I know a better one is possible, that expresses more precisely how I think about this. Alas it would take me hours, so I'm making do with one I don't much care for.
I have trouble seeing it your way. The person you were originally responding to, and originally wanted to tolerate because they also did good posts, was saying blatantly racist things about "the arabs in palestine" and that they essentially deserved the war crimes they're suffering, or that they brought it on themselves or whatever. To me this sounds like pretty straightforward political and ideological hate.
But anyway, this is only one case and we should not base our thinking just on it. The problem is the policy (or the way it's systematically enforced) and its broader results. I don't know the details of how the moderation works here nor have I any statistics. I only know that I saw too much racism and hate towards whole groups of people because of their identity here in the past, and that when I occasionally stumble across a HN link, I usually can still see that hate being a lot more represented than in other spaces I frequent, and that the kind of policy you described to me has never worked at building diverse and interesting communities.
We appreciate your biased comment, aimed at portraying Palestinians as terrorists and non-indigenous to the area, cherry-picking history as it suits your narrative. We're not interested, though. Thank you.
Not sure if I would lump all those up together, these examples are overly broad and have little in common. There's more than a thousand years and basically no causal link between Roman persecution of early Christians and Crusades, let alone European imperialism, especially if you take Ethiopian, Greek, Georgian, and Armenian Christians into account. Same for Russians and Mongols, there's a pretty large gap with a ton of events in between, and Mongol Empire was humongous to begin with, it wasn't about Rus' in particular. And communists that became ruthless oppressors were already radicalized during the persecution, it was literally the radical wing of a militant faction of a huge umbrella party that included people that would have felt right at home in modern EU (e.g. Kollontai and her early activism).
The better explanation is simple and banal - power concentration makes people abuse it.
I wouldn't consider this "lumping the groups together", or that they must exist together in time... its likely a group may require many generations before they can "oppress" another group.
My list of examples is very similar to this one and the ven diagram here is "was oppressed became oppressor"... in most cases it appears that only if the oppressed are destroyed or I would argue in the case of America- controlled at the margins... then they don't circle back around to abuse their newly acquired power.
> There's more than a thousand years and basically no causal link between Roman persecution of early Christians and Crusades
You don't need to go that far forward, though. It took Christians <400 years to promulgate the Edict of Thessalonica that made Christianity (and of a very particular kind at that!) to be the only legal religion. And one can argue that it's no coincidence that it happened pretty much as soon as they have gained the political upper hand in the Roman Empire.
> Same for Russians and Mongols, there's a pretty large gap with a ton of events in between
Not really. Muscovy was still paying tribute to the Golden Horde and recognizing their supreme authority under Ivan III. His grandson Ivan IV ("the Terrible") conquered the Tatar state, making its lands such as Kazan part of his empire, and sent an expedition to start the conquest of Siberia.
The inaccuracies here are not so much with timing, more so with lack of precision wrt the groups involved. In general, though, I think it's fair to say that, for most part of human history, the oppressed become the oppressors pretty much as soon as they are capable of it.
I think that a lot of monotheistic religions, including Christianity, are generally intolerant to other branches and religions, especially when the faith is supposed to represent absolute truth, so it's probably unrelated to the history of persecution. And Muscovy wasn't the only land opressed by Mongols.
>In general, though, I think it's fair to say that, for most part of human history, the oppressed become the oppressors pretty much as soon as they are capable of it.
Doesn't this also hold for non-oppressed that have the opportunity? Although I suppose it'd be hard to find any examples of non-oppressed groups. Pillaging or conquering neighbors was pretty much the norm throughout the history. Rus' was converted to Christianity in part to stop raids such as Siege of Constantinople of 860.
I'd say it's very hard for a powerful nation to not suppress somebody in the long run.
Just think of any powerful nation (or group of people, or whatever), and try to think of somebody they have oppressed, or are still oppressing. It's typically not hard to come up with examples.
Agreed. Its possible that the group survived their oppression and becomes powerful enough to oppress, they loose their identify, in the sense that their culture evolves, along the way. Resulting in oppression along some axis.
I don't know if it's always the case, but it's true if given the opportunity. In the end all people are the same. Cultures may be different, but our lizard brains are the same. Us vs them, and dehumanizing others into something less than humans, whose suffering does not concern us.
Why though, what does it achieve? Do they want to make sure that there will be terrorists / freedom fighters in the future so that they have a reason not to negotiate? Because they expect to "win" if violence continues?
If that is true, Israel would now actually, literally be persuing the exact same politics Nazi Germany did until they escalated their attempted genocide by making it intolerable to genocide by industrial scale murder. Not a good look for Israel, at all.
Please don't take HN threads into hard-core ideological and/or nationalistic flamewar. I realize this topic tends strongly in that direction, but that's not a reason to go there, it's a reason not to go there.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Other commenters are doing it too, but it's a matter of degree, and the rhetoric in your post here is a degree worse. You can make your substantive points without resorting to "cult", "stamped out", "criminal ideology" and so on. Fortunately it doesn't look like your account has a habit of doing this, so it should be easy to fix.
When asked, in an representative online, poll, 47% percent of Israeli agreed that the IDF should kill all the inhabitants of cities it conquered[1].
So sure, workers at Haarez probably don't, but when the extermination feeling is widespread enough that 47% feel they can openly agree to a question proscribing the killing women and children, then insisting on the insistence on precision comes across mostly as an attempt at distraction.
There's a palestinian guy living in the US making the rounds on tiktok, talking to random israeli people on something like omegle. The amount of hate he gets is nothing short of depressing. Children cursing at him, IDF soldiers saying they want to kill every single person in Gaza, calling them sub-humans... sounds like the fourth reich is here already.
All this to say you're right, but the government is indocrinating more and more people for these views.
People seem to use the down-vote on my comment, why? I pasted it for discoverability. It is exactly what the parent is talking about, and it indeed is sickening, go check out some videos where many people say disgusting shit. If you do not think it is disgusting, then please imagine they are talking about your children?
And if you disagree with the guy, go dislike his videos.
Be very wary of any such weaponized truth: you don't know how much selection bias is at play, how much confirmation bias is requested, you don't even know if the interviewees are what they say they are.
You raise a very valid point, which i will take in consideration. I don't believe it to be the case, since the person in question also shares positive interactions, and i believe some of the worst "contacts" have been doxxed. But your point still stands.
I disagree: when anything is obviously meaning what someone obviously thinks it means, then others will apply their own obvious understanding of it to justify very non-obvious behaviours.
If Israel wanted to kill all Palestinians, wouldn't it be easier to start with the millions of Palestinians living in Israel, unarmed, instead of going into Gaza?
There is something so deeply disturbing about how casually inhumane Israelis can be. They then drop “Hamas” like it’s a full sentence that magically cleanses whatever depravity they just spewed.
Netanyahu has privately expressed preference for terrorist Hamas over political Fatah, and Israel has propped up those terrorist groups in the past (this is well documented not a conspiracy theory).
Why? Because Netanyahu and a good chunk of the Israeli population want the Palestinians to cease to exist and its territory to be part of Israel. An opponent that wants to achieve its goals through political action and appeals to the international community meant that there was a risk of Israel being dragged into a two-state commitment. A terrorist group attacking civilians gives those hardliners a perpetual excuse to go to war.
In short: the answer is yes, that appears to be precisely the point: to prevent any possibility of peaceful reconciliation and drive the Palestinians to eventual expulsion or eradication.
And when allied countries got too uneasy about them just blocking all aid trucks at the border, they set up their own aid organization to trickle out nominal amounts of food while they take pot shots at people desperate enough to show up: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74ne108e4vo
They didn't just make this up as they go, presumably the plans have been sitting around for a long time waiting for a suitable moment.
My point was that the comment I was commenting on was false, and that many people who express that sentiment wouldn't be expressing it if the powers were flipped. I'm personally very glad that the powers aren't flipped because I think that if Hamas had F-16s there would many more deaths.
Do you really genuinely believe that typical american liberal types would ignore a genocide committed against Jewish people by anyone, particularly arabs? In the American liberal mind "genocide" is, essentially, synonymous with The Holocaust, and I think your average liberal is, if anything, sensitive to Jewish discrimination, over and above random people out there in the world. There are definitely anti-semetic Americans and they should be launched into the sun, but I think your sense that people wouldn't care if Jews were being killed in the tens of thousands is extremely off point.
I'm sorry, I live in Europe and I was referring more to the kind of protests and protesters I see around me. The aren't many liberal Americans there. I completely agree that the situation could be different elsewhere.
Where do you live in Europe that you believe those opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza would support a genocide of Jewish people anywhere? Because that is an outrageously delusional view.
I don't think that my exact location is very relevant here, but I urge you to ask protesters around you how they see "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" turning into reality, and let me know what happens with the Jews according to their plans.
Jewish groups have been supporting those protests in the US, Europe and Israel.
I have no idea what crowd composition at European protests looks like, but the vast majority of the people upset about the ongoing genocide are not antisemetic.
There is a propaganda campaign in the US trying to conflate being against genocide with being antisemetic. I'm sure similar tactics are being used in Europe.
I am myself supporting many of these protests, and it's exactly from this perspective that I say that many of them are antisemitic. But this is a bit of a useless discussion because neither you nor I can bring any evidence into how antisemitic they are, or how and if they would react if (or when) Palestinians are slaughtering Jews.
If you think it's nonsense, try to go into a anti-war protest with a t-shirt saying that Jews too should be able to live in Middle East. If this thought makes you slightly concerned, you got my point.
If the Israeli administration could get away with fire bombing the strip, it'd have done so a long time ago. The whole world is screaming at them to stop the genocide and you think it's them just not "caring about civilians" that's responsible for this. There's no war in Gaza, there's only a genocide. A holocaust.
I'm not Arab, I'm not Muslim. I've never met a Jewish person. I've no reason to have any prejudice against people of Jewish heritage or ethnicity. But it's still a genocide by any definitions of the word. A lot of Jewish people even agree with this. And the reason that you and most Israeli people seem to struggle to grasp it is because they've been drinking on this exact extremist rhetoric that the "other" side only wants to see them slaughtered. By the same measure, you're saying Hamas can justify it's actions since there will always be ultra-Zionist factions of Israeli societies that wants to see Palestinians slaughtered. I implore you to wake up to what is being done in the name of your people.
I am an Arab Jew, and I actually have many friends in Gaza. I don't disagree about the usage of the words Genocide, though I think the terms is a little too easy to apply. I think a Holocaust is a completely different thing. There are Palestinians in the Israeli parliament, in the Supreme Court. No one is gathering Palestinians in gas chambers, and in general the Palestinian population only grew since the establishment of Israel. If there were more Jews in Europe after WW2 than before it, no one would remember it as a Holocaust.
There is war in Gaza in the simple sense that rockets from Gaza still shoot into Israel, that Israeli hostages are still being held, and that Hamas itself (the elected goverenement) says it would attack again. It's a very unbalanced conflict, and in it terrible crimes are committed that you can call genocidal. But Jews in the ghettos weren't bombing Berlin - not during WW2 and not after it.
I suspect that it's you who have undergone deep mental conditioning if you think that I am justifying this war. One can hold a complex opinion, and nowhere have I said that I think this war is justified.
Not only I do not belittler their suffering, I personally helped some of them out. I also ran an organization that provided thousands of Gazan with electricity, and I was arrested by the Israeli police when encouraging Palestinians in Israel to vote. At the same time I have family members who were killed (and kidnapped) on the first day of this war. Life isn't black and white.
I am completely OK with being conditioned against siding with a 20 month long genocidal onslaught committed by an apartheid ethnostate against a blockaded territory with no sovereignty and no actual defenses of its own.
I completely agree that life isn’t always black and white. But right now it is, just like it was in countless other situations in the past. You can think it’s “complicated” all you like, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against such a framing, which is where the conditioning comes into the picture.
It is great that you volunteered in Gaza, but it’s also tragic that you fail to see what is happening even after directly interacting with Gazans.
Some day in the future, when free Palestinians can build museums and monuments and make movies to mourn those lost in this genocide, everyone will always have been against this.
That's an interpretation of events that I've heard from a lot of Israeli folks that are in some way horrified what's happening in Gaza. I think it's very naive and I don't even think most folks saying this believe in it themselves. What actions from the IDF, what imbalance of power, what civilian casualty rates will you need to see to believe that it's no longer a war? Are you really waiting for the actual mass starvation to take place before accept there's intent? Does it have to be gas chambers? Does the death toll have to pass 1 million? 6 million? Do you really think that the Israeli government wants to brings the hostages back? What do you think would happen after they did bring them back? Will you rescind your support then?
Jews in the Ghetto didn't get the chance to shoot rockets at Berlin but had they been able to fight back, I'd have given them the same understanding that I currently extends to Palestinians that grew up in the concentration camp that is Gaza. Hamas is the direct results of Israeli policies of the past decades. Even if the IDF manages to somehow invent some purity test for Gazans that it can use to confirm there are no longer any Hamas members left and it finally declares it's operations concluded, you'll have people shooting rockets at Israel if they keep their policies with the Gaza strip and the West Bank. But long term solutions come later, right now, Israelis need to wake up and say no to what is unfolding in the name of their security.
I will stop thinking that this conflict is a war when there will be a side in it that doesn't have the motivation to take over all the land, and acts towards it by attempting to kill the other. As long as there are two parties that are constantly trying to kill each other, I call that a war. As I wrote elsewhere - that doesn't mean I disagree with the idea that genocidal actions are being taken during this war.
Your comment about Jews in Ghetto is wrong at every possible level. Jews were killed in the Holocaust _without_ a conflict, _without_ attempting to kill Germans, _without_ fighting with anyone over the land and _without_ having any aspirations to control the other. That is an example of a situation where there is no war, and no, it has nothing to do with the situation between Israelis and Palestinians.
Going through your criteria in order: Of course they defended themselves, including attempts to kill Nazis. They also attempted to keep their homes, and certainly would have rather Germany have different leadership
Does that somehow mean the concentration camps were a "war"?
> While somebody from Palestine side did fire the opening salvo on oct7.
Now, that's a re-writing of history if I've ever seen one.
> Israeli and Palestinian deaths preceding the 2023 Gaza war. Of the Palestinian deaths 5,360 were in Gaza, 1,007 in the West Bank, 37 in Israel. Most were
civilians on both sides.
Stop telling lies about Gaza conflict being "war". Israeli military has absolute superiority over Palestinians. What it is is a genocidal campaign meant to wipe them off the face of the Earth.
Also, stop using the Holocaust as a propaganda tool. My grandfather happened to be a Buchenwald concentration camp survival. It didn't give him or anybody else any right to violate Geneva convention.
First, I don't recall you set the rules for discussion here. Now, to your points:
1. Genocidal actions can take place in a war, and no definition of a war ever said that the parties have to be of equal strength. Every war that was ever won by one side or another had some sort of power supremacy. Go read the legal definition for genocide and you'll learn that the question of imbalance of power plays absolutely no role in it.
2. I haven't used it as a propaganda tool, and in fact it wasn't me who brought it up at all. I was only commenting that the current situation in Gaza is not comparable to the Holocaust, and I fully stand behind it. To make it clear, I am very happy that it isn't comparable, and I wouldn't want to see any Palestinian suffering like my ancestors did. Not once in my life have I used it to justify crimes committed by Jews, so please learn to read before commenting on my posts. If anything, I always believed that what Jews went through should serve as a reminder for us to never allow things like that from happening again, and I still see the Holocaust as perhaps one of the main driving forces in my opposition to this war.
I think I got so upset by people needlessly dying in Gaza that maybe I went too far in this discussion. Obviously, the war and genocide don't necessarily exclude each other.
> You definitely can kill 2.1 million people by bombing them. It's actually way easier than doing it with a gun
Only if you have enough bombs, which they need to constantly purchase from the US using aid money given to them by the US.
They don't have the stockpiles to eradicate without using their (not so) secret nukes. If they were to do that, there'd be a lot worse follow on effects for Israel. If they simply trickle the deaths over time, people get tired of the horror and need to look away for their own sanity.
Genuinely wondering what terrible effects would there be for Israel if they used nukes? Not morally, internationally. IMO it's perhaps one of the few conflicts in the world where one side could theoretically use nuclear weapons and essentially no one will shoot back. "Trickle the deaths over time" doesn't make any sense - there are probably more births in Gaza than deaths now, and that's not including the general Palestinian population.
Well officially Israel doesn't have nukes. They are widely believed to have them ofc but that's something they have to consider. Breaking the ambiguity by using them could spark a lot of 'we told you they were super dangerous' responses(with action) possibly. You might be right tho.
No one will shoot back now. But it is a signal to other countries that using nukes might not be that bad. Even other banned chemical and biological weapons. So either there is complete chaos or the whole world will have to make sure Israel can not profit from this action.
From Israel's perspective, Palestinians are a problem. Long term, they have a few options:
1) Give them their own state. This is difficult for quite many reasons, and Israel (by which I mean the current government) doesn't want that
2) Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation, and let them participate in the regular political processes. The current government certainly doesn't want that, and I have no idea what part of the Palestinians would want that.
3) Continue to treat them as sub-human, and deal with the consequences of the hatred that fosters. That seems to have been the "strategy" before October last year.
4) Try to exterminate or exile them, or at least decimating them to such an extend that the problem becomes smaller.
Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.
I think it's the contrary. "Never again" means by any means necessary we will prevent another genocide of our people, even if it means committing genocide unto others. That much has become clear.
I don't think there's much overlapping between those who experienced the holocaust and whoever is in charge in Israel right now.
Speaking for experience from some relatives, the immigration laws for people of jewish faith and ancestry were nigh insurmountable if you came from african, arab or middle east countries and pretty much just nominal even in recent times for those who had even a remote connection but came from the US and the UK.
I have the feeling they are jewish the same way Henry IV was a Catholic when he said "Paris is well worth a Mass".
Many of the Zionists viewed the Holocaust as teaching that the Jewish people need a state of their own, no matter what it takes or how many people they have to kill. They viewed the European Jews who had died in the Holocaust as weak, passive cowards who had "allowed" the Holocaust to happen, and went like sheep to their slaughter (ignoring the Warsaw Uprising, and all of the underground Jewish resistance movements). I think Israel's current actions reflect this viewpoint.
I suggest reading this 1923 essay by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, one of the early figures in the history of Israel and the Zionist movement, before Israel became a state.
> There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. ...
> The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. ... Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine , in return for cultural and economic advantages. ...
> We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel." ... Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim.
> We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached.
Now, Jabotinsky was arguably naive in that he thought that after the inevitable forcing of the Arabs to accept Jewish colonization of their homeland, once they have "given up on all hopes", they could be negotiated with on the terms of settlement:
> In the second place, this does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall. Not till then will they drop their extremist leaders, whose watchword is "Never!" And the leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizen, or Arab national integrity.
The problem, of course, is that once you have that amount of upper hand over someone, you don't actually have to negotiate. You can just keep taking everything you want, by force. And that is exactly where Israel found itself in the long term.
>Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation
As the Palestinians are the majority, the Jewish Israelis would become a minority in terms of citizens and votes. This is very much akin to Apartheid South Africa, where a minority ethnic group rules over the rest of the population.
The White minority in South Africa were around 15% of the population, while Jews and Palestinians in Israel & Palestine seem to be much more around a 50%-50% split.
Yes, and I should have clarified that the Palestinian majority is a lot slimmer than was the case in South Africa.
Although there remains the case of 700,000 Palestinian refugees who (in the hypothetical scenario of a unified state) would tilt the balance further if allowed to return to their/their parents homes or given property as compensation for repossessed homes.
Or exile is probably the key word. There are more historical examples of exoduses than genocides.
The problem with understanding this situation is that it probably has more to do with Israel's internal politics than what the situation looks like on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere. Just a quick read from the wikipedia page should give an idea just how corrupt the situation really is.
There's also the fact that Palestinians aren't a homogenous group in any sense of the word. That makes it hard for them to unite under any political flag. It also doesn't help that the borders are all closed, from both sides, and no neighboring country are willing to accept them.
From the outside the situation certainly looks very bleak.
> I didn't particularly like Israeli policy towards Palestinians for the last 15 years, but they were certainly not treated as "sub-human".
Garbage. Gaza had its only airport bombed to oblivion 20 years ago and was told any attempt to repair it would result in the same. Its port has been blockaded by the Israeli navy for 15 years. Its only land exits have been heavily locked down.
Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack, or teens throwing stones. They’ve even turned off water for days too.
That’s treating people as subhuman, imprison them and do things like that to them for decades.
The Gazan government is a declared enemy of Israel, wanting its destruction. It has used hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to build its militant group to fight Israel.
Given the circumstances, Gaza's neighbors blockade it to keep it from building an even bigger fighting force.
> Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack,
You mean, when occasionally Hamas will try to kill random Israeli civilians using rocket fire? Which is basically a declaration of war and causes Israel to fight back?
> or teens throwing stones.
I don't think that's actually true.
> That’s treating people as subhuman,
Israel is treating Hamas-controlled Gaza as a hostile enemy that is intent on destroying it. Given that Hamas, even under the blockade and with all the restrictions in place, still managed to invade Israel and kill a thousand citizens, while kidnapping and holding hostage 250 civilians, and still, a year and a half later, is holding these people hostage and torturing them daily... given that, I think it's hard to say blockading them was a bad idea.
If you think the blockade is the reason for their actions, then you're quite simply wrong - they were founded many years before and always had the same goal of destroying Israel, including working hard against the peace process that was forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority.
> You mean, when occasionally Hamas will try to kill random Israeli civilians using rocket fire? Which is basically a declaration of war and causes Israel to fight back?
Changing the goalposts, are we?
Yes, that happens.
How is Israel turning off electricity and fresh water to the entire country as a result not considered treating the population as sub-human (as in not deserving of basic human needs), the original point of this discussion ?
> If you think the blockade is the reason for their actions, then you're quite simply wrong - they were founded many years before and always had the same goal of destroying Israel, including working hard against the peace process that was forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority.
Oh, you're so close to the point! "The peace process forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority" is exactly why Netanyuhu and his ilk started supporting Hamas. Because when your explicitly stated goal is to evict Palestinians (and Netanyuhu has said as much, in as many words), global sympathy starts to wane when the PLA is looking for peaceful solutions (yes, admittedly, after periods of violence and terrorism) and now Israel looks like the bad guy. So let's prop up Hamas, because they are more extremist, and make a more convenient bad guy.
> How is Israel turning off electricity and fresh water to the entire country as a result not considered treating the population as sub-human (as in not deserving of basic human needs), the original point of this discussion ?
I think that temporarily not supplying a semi-state with electricity while fighting a war they started, does not fit the definition most people would have of "treating them as sub-human". If you do - fine.
> Oh, you're so close to the point! "The peace process forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority" is exactly why Netanyuhu and his ilk started supporting Hamas.
No, you're getting the chronology very wrong here.
Hamas was founded in the 1980s ('88 I think). The main peace talks started in the 1990s, with Oslo getting signed in '93. The terror campaign Hamas started to wage was around that time, trying to derail the peace talks.
In '95, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist, and Netanyahu was elected for the first time as opposed to Rabin's "successor" Peres. A major Hamas terror attack right around that election is largely attributed to tipping the election in favor of Netanahu, who won by the thinnest majority in Israeli history to this day (iirc around 10k votes).
Another PM, Barak, was elected to pursue peace and had talks with the PA in 2000 and 2001. This is when the second intifada was launched, unclear how much from Hamas and how much from the PA. Later, a different PM (Sharon), actually considered a right-wing hawk, was elected and initiated the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Olmert, his successor, was elected on a platform of disengaging from the West Bank. In the meantime, Hamas was elected to rule Gaza, the blockade was started, and Hamas began shooting rockets at Israel. Peace negotiations were again held in 2008/2009 between Olmert and Abbas.
Only in 2009 did Netanyahu even get back into power.
So the idea that Netanyahu somehow started supporting Hamas - which is a somewhat of a mischaractirization in any case - is only really relevant several years after the blockade started and rockets were fired, which is many years after Hamas worked to shut down the peace process.
> I think that temporarily not supplying a semi-state with electricity while fighting a war they started, does not fit the definition most people would have of "treating them as sub-human". If you do - fine.
And water. For days or more. And well, most of the world considers it a war crime, but hey, if you think it's NBD...
You make it seem like these things all happen like clockwork, with concrete black and white dates.
And well:
> The Hamas movement was founded by Palestinian Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987, after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation. It emerged from his 1973 Mujama al-Islamiya Islamic charity affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Initially, Hamas was discreetly supported by Israel, as a counter-balance to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Netanyahu was formative in Likud. That whole statement used to "prove" Hamas (look, since we're talking about Hamas - let me be unequivocally clear - is a terrorist organization who do despicable things) has goals of excision/extermination... "From the River (Jordan) to the (Red) Sea"... misses the irony that that was Likud's election slogan for a decade or more.
> Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.
The Israeli govt and people would be very supportive of (2). After all, there are more Arabs living in Israel than in Palestine. The Palestineans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly reject this option.
Ongoing war has been a crucial component of the current government's re-election campaigns for decades, so any option that ends the war is a non-starter.
I fear their plan is to expand military operations into additional countries until they can get back into a pseudo-stalemate scenario. That'd explain the bombings in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
So HN flat out ignores history. Posts misinformation and propaganda. And HN sucks it up cos it’s anti Israel pro terrorist. Really shows the mental decline of HN over the years.
Palestine has had many opportunities for statehood. Current President of Israel is not completely opposed to statehood, citing security concerns which are clearly valid considering Palestine has repeatedly broken cease fire agreements and Hamas entire goal is to eradicate Israel. They are not being treated as sub-human. Remember Israel warns Palestine of air strikes. There have been many reports of Hamas refusing to allow people to leave sites that are targeted for the sole purpose of of martyrdom. The only people being exterminated is the terrorist Organization Hamas.
All 4 bullet points are either completely false or misleading.
Clearly there is disagreement in Israel to some limited degree about the reality and appeal of a two state solution, but it’s hard to see that as a realistic or desired outcome when Netanyahu keeps saying things like “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-boasts-of-thwarting-...
Certainly it’s the stated position and goal of the current government, which is what the initial post said.
If your neighbour keeps throwing stones at you and you agree to not throw stones, they continue to throw stones. You would probably not support any of their wishes.
And why are they Israel’s problem to solve? What about Jordan who expelled EVERY Palestinian in 1970? What about Qatar? What about Egypt? Lebanon? Any Arab country???
Why is it Israel’s problem? There was a legal agreement in 1948. It could have been so simple.
Palestinian militants have destabilized every host country they’ve inhabited. I say this with sympathy for the displaced. Who wouldn’t consider taking up arms if forced from home, stripped of citizenship, corralled into camps, condemned to generations of refugee status.
But it is also obvious, historically, why Arab countries aren’t welcoming masses of Palestinians into their countries even in these dire moments.
The perpetual fight is mutually beneficial to all. The extremist right would not have been able to claim large swaths of land had they not had the air cover to raze Gaza. Now there is serious talk of going back into Gaza. And talk by Trump to turn it into a seaside resort has the settler movement giddy.
If you can't see how obvious it is, then you can't accept the truth. Racist, ethno-nationalist supremacy attitude inexorably leads to genocide. The hasbara cognitive dissonance and reality distortion fields hide behind a DARVO mythology.
There has been so much disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda from so many nations and interested parties that I find it impossible to believe any claims anymore without seeing a video for myself. In this case, there are none. Even according to the article, the soldiers were ordered to fire on looters, which seems reasonable in the context of this war.
This genocide has, for many people, burst any illusions of a "rules based world order".
There multiple EU signatory countries of the Rome Statute (pledging to cooperate with ICC) that have welcomed these war criminals... who have warrants out by the ICC.
And the same war criminals are invited to give a speech at the U.S Congress to near unanimous applause. It really makes you wonder if we're the "good guys".
-- edit -- If you're curious how much your congressperson receives from AIPAC (Israeli lobby) this website is a great resource:
https://www.trackaipac.com/congress
Indeed, the leading countries of so-called "free world" are willing to commit and support war crimes and break the intl law as well as DPRK or Iran when it serves their intrests, all while signaling virtue and progressiveness.
If you're still wondering if you're the good guys, you haven't been paying attention. I don't think there are any "good guys" when it comes to nations, but for the US it's not even close.
In the world outside the West, 'rules based world order' does not mean what you think it does. To them 'rules based world order' means that the UK/USA/Israel/NATO/EU do whatever they want rather than go through the UN. Going through the UN would be 'international law', which is not to be confused with 'rules based world order'.
With 'rules based world order', there is one rule for the West and one rule for everyone else. Hence it is okay to have a referendum in Kosovo for Kosovo to split away from Serbia, but not okay for a region of the Ukraine to have a referendum, to break away from Ukraine. So Crimea, where everyone speaks Russian and identifies as Russian, with no interest in the Ukraine or the EU, can't get the treatment that was afforded Kosovo. This is because 'rules based world order', and how the global majority sees it.
Almost no-one[1] recognizes Crimea as part of Russia because it was entirely manufactured. Unmarked foreign soldiers invaded a country, pretended to be local rebels, staged a referendum and immediately asked to join the invading country to give the shameless land grab a veneer of legitimacy. It's a total joke that has nothing in common with genuine ethnic conflicts. The referendums in Crimea and elsewhere had to be staged because even internal polling leaked from the Russian military admin showed that nowhere did the local population support the invasion; speaking German doesn't mean that you want to live in the Third Reich.
You missed my point. People outside the West have a different idea of what 'riles based order' means. This does not mean they are right or that you have to agree with them. However, the fact is that they see the world differently to you. You like the West and people outside the West see the West as parasites that have used constructs such as 'rules based order' to get away with colonial exploration and whatnot.
As mentioned, you don't have to agree with them, however, it has to be acknowledged that not everyone thinks like you, and that 'rules based order' means different things to different people.
Incidentally, the global majority are not blue and yellow fanatics. China, India, Africa and South America are not on team blue and yellow.
Idk, i quite like the West, doesn’t mean that i can’t see the rule based order and the UN as instruments of American imperialism etc. People that just realize this now seem to never have bothered imho. The same politicians that can lie to you about trickle down economics and social reforms can also lie about foreign policy and good vs evil.
> Crimea, where everyone speaks Russian and identifies as Russian
Blatant falsehood. In 2014 it was about 65% (ethnicity) and 80% (language).
In addition the referendum happened after the invasion and de-facto annexation, without the option of "keep the current situation with Ukraine". If you ask me "do you want to be punched or stabbed?" then I'll choose a punch. Doesn't mean I want to be punched.
My point is that the 'rules based order' means different things to different people. In the West it means one thing and in the rest of the world it means something else.
My point still stands and must be acknowledged even if you are waving the blue and yellow flag, the rainbow flag and the stars and stripes. In any country that the West has brought war to, they know exactly what 'rules based order' means. You don't have to agree with them, they are just on a different team to you.
Watching Blinken say "rules based international order" on camera about Ukraine was one of the few times I felt good about American foreign policy, then watching Blinken talk about Israel made it clear that it's rules for our enemies only, and loyalty for our "friends" which is the precise opposite of a rules based international order.
Hearing democrats decry Russian foreign influence was also something I was on board with, but much like Nancy Pelosi saying it's not corrupt when she trades on stock with private information, apparently it's not corrupt when the democratic party accepts foreign aid in the form of AIPAC donations, or just as likely threats of the use of Pegasus against them.
It is quite sad to be an American of good conscience right now. It's hard to respect our country in any way when it shows such little moral fiber and such little backbone.
I really don't think that it's a coincidence that just as this news was starting to gain traction a few weeks ago, Isreal started bombing Iran. It was the perfect distraction.
If neither side can agree on peace, if neither side has objectives which the other will accept, if neither side is willing to compromise; What other outcome is possible in terms of realpolitik?
It is upsetting to observe. We all want better for humanity.
There have been cases in the past where an external strong power has been able to suppress both sides but it has to be done for generations until the reasons are lost to time.
Depending on who you ask, there have been a variety of external powers stirring the pot. Most people are horrified by the violence. Beyond the territorial, religious and cultural disputes there are opposing geopolitical factions.
Of course it is understandable to be outraged by the violence and atrocities. The human suffering is real, but arguments focusing on these points can miss the larger picture. The underlying incentives dictate outcomes. Atrocities are often marketed as rationalizations for further violence.
We want to prescribe an outcome without atrocities. Yet discussions fall into recrimination before they can describe the conflict coherently.
Spoken by the Athenians and resulting in a war that, as Thucydides's audience knew quite well, Athens lost big-time.
Which actually holds up quite well for everybody who loves to bring up that quote: realism aka "we shouldn't face the consequences of our actions" is the obvious rallying cry for people facing the consequences of their actions.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadNot to mention that Israel is openly using starvation as a weapon of war.
Israel is committing a deliberate genocide in Gaza.
The vast majority barely make the global news.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
> In one incident, the soldier was instructed to fire a shell toward a crowd gathered near the coastline. "Technically, it's supposed to be warning fire – either to push people back or stop them from advancing," he said. "But lately, firing shells has just become standard practice. Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there's never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders."
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only makes things worse.
Your comment would be just fine without those bits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From a moderation point of view, it's a question of the effect that these bits have on other people in the community, and therefore the quality of the discussion. It's obviously near-impossible to have a thoughtful conversation about a topic like this across the vast differences (ideological, national, emotional) that separate people. In such a context, even provocations that feel small and justified can set the neighborhood on fire.
If the discussion devolves into just another internet screaming match where people hurl pre-existing talking points and just get even more riled up in rage, then the HN thread is a failure. Maybe it's too much to hope for anything better on this topic, which is probably the most divisive and emotional one we've ever seen, but I think we have to try. That's we allow the topic to appear on the HN front page from time to time. Not to allow it would be easier, at least in the short term, but inconsistent with the intended spirit of the site.
The bulk of your post wasn't doing anything like flamewar at all, so the swipey bits were particularly unfortunate.
p.s. I don't mean to pile on, but "please stop pretending" is also a swipe. You can't know whether someone else is pretending, and there's no reason to suppose that people aren't sincere in their convictions about a highly-charged topic (separately from whether their beliefs are true or false). If you lead by denying that, the rest of what you have to say will have little chance of being heard.
I don't agree that it isn't relevant to HN. The central value of this site is intellectual curiosity, construed broadly (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
If you try to define that in a way that detaches from larger human concerns, you make it smaller. Curiosity doesn't benefit from that.
I agree with you that there are many reasons to be unhappy with threads like this and how the topic lands on HN generally. I am by no means happy with it—I just don't think that the alternative is better. Curiosity ultimately has to do with relating to what's real and what's true. You can't impose a narrow view of on- and off-topcicness on that.
The problem of how to run a site like HN in accordance with a value like that is subject to a thousand constraints, some obvious, many not. That makes the problem interesting, but also means that it can never be solved—not to everyone's satisfaction, nor even to anyone's satisfaction. Therefore we all have a certain amount of dissatisfaction to tolerate.
Sorry but I think you made the wrong call here.
That is far from the case, as you can see for yourself if you look more closely.
People (I don't mean you personally, but all of us—it seems to be basic human bias) are far too quick to jump to "always". I call this the notice-dislike bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), which is a terrible name I'm hoping someone can improve on.
It seems to be very similar to Baader-Meinhoff. I guess it’s called “frequency illusion” now, which is much more descriptive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
Thanks for the reply though—I hope someday someone will come up with a good name for it; or better, still, point out that it's a known bias in the standard repertoire and tell me what it's called.
The comments are actually better than expected given the sensitivity of the topic at hand.
Moreover, your account has been using HN primarily for political/nationalistic battle, which is also a line at which we ban accounts, quite separately from individual violations.
If you keep doing this, we're going to ban you. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended going forward, we'd appreciate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177567 (Nov 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39151611 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36472783 (June 2023)
Can we stop the genocide now?
But given Israels behaviour on the West Bank and Gaza over the last decades there is no reason to belive that it would make them stop their human rights violations.
This isn’t just a matter of vague speculation as there are historical cases outside of Israel on which to see how things like this develop and what the consequences are both for the victims and the soldiers. These historical accounts also indicate soldiers committing these sorts of actions become victims themselves with catastrophic mental health disorders.
Israel got in trouble with ICJ court, because of quotes from top government officials. Government of Israel was very specific what they will do to Gaza! This was even full scale bombing started!
Trying to reinterpret this as a problem of "military discipline", and "soldiers are victim as well" is just another level of cynicism!
It's happened, many times. Usually this doesn't make front-page news, but soldiers that break the law are sometimes held accountable. Not nearly enough, and I think it should be far more publicized as a deterrent effect (the fact that it isn't is a pretty big indictment of the current government). But it's certainly not laughable.
A part of what the Isareli opposition has been pushing for in the last few years has been removing Netanyahu from power and presumably jailing him because of the corruption charges.
"prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes".
Thousands of kilometers away.
The IDF can be highly sophisticated in their plans and methods when they want to.
Calling it sophisticated does not change that fact.
That they chose to level infrastructure across Gaza instead is indicative.
And it'd be real stretch to assume they did so even for military-economic reasons.
They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
To wit, the elimination of anything resembling a Palestinian state: politically, economically, and demographically.
Which is cynical and evil as fuck, given they're smart enough to realize they eventually either have to (a) kill every Palestinian or (b) make a deal.
Instead, they decided killing 50,000+ Palestinians was worth improving their negotiation position and kicking the can down the road.
That’s my read as well. I was strongly pro-Israel for decades and while I was never comfortable with the plight of Palestinians Hamas had a lot of the blame, too, but the last year really moved me over to thinking that the people who said most of the “accidents” over the years were intentional were correct. They can pull off these amazingly accurate strikes when they want to, it’s implausible that they suddenly have the precision of a drunken 18th century musketeer around aid workers and civilians. Their leadership clearly do not care and collective punishment is a war crime no matter who does it.
HN readers can recognize the tactic in other parts of our world too. It’s the strategy of people in power who believe they can control the chaos. When chaos in one group is a benefit to the other, chaos becomes a worthy status quo. When your military is infinitely more powerful, any uprising can eventually be exhausted, and you get automatic casus belli. The Cold War was full of this destabilizing politics, where superpowers tried their best to turn functioning socities into hellholes, in the hopes that it would spread in the enemy’s region. The same works for Israel. The less legitimacy Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians have, the longer they can keep building settlements. If they ever gain independence, it will cause another war, which has been planned for, because settlements have been overwhelmingly built on higher ground. Illegal settlers will not give up easily, and will likely gain military assistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
A better analog might be Hezbollah. Surgically dispatched. Resolved with minimal follow-on nonsense from both sides.
No, it’s war. Targeted killing of a military scientist is war. Gunning down civilians trying to get food is a war crime. If we start labelling all war as criminal, the term loses all meaning.
Eh, there is a broad consensus on what constitutes a war crime. But there is also broad precedent for these rules not applying to major powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951.)
I’d also argue that recent history has almost rendered the term worthless, as activists label practically every civilian death as a war crime.
This claim is not proved. In Europe there is no capital punishment for mass murders but Israel can kill anyone they want with their family without trial or even conclusive evidence and no one can condemn it.
If you do it with a crude hand made bomb it is called terrorism but if you do it with F35 it is called self-defense.
All of this does not apply to the conflict with Hamas. With them muddling the lines, it’s extremely hard to fight a “clean“ war. You’re between a rock and a hard place - either you lose but with your head held high and your moral compass intact, or you stoop to their level thereby slowly losing your values but win in the end. If that win is worth it or not, is heavily debated in the rest of the world, but only debated in the fringes of Israeli society. But no military expert is able to suggest a real alternative of fighting Hamas without inflicting heavy losses on one’s own army.
I find the committed war crimes abhorrent and wish they’d be heavily prosecuted at least.
As far as I can tell Israel doesn't particularly care for even looking like it's trying to behave responsibly. I don't think they've held anyone responsible for even some of the most obvious war crimes we have evidence of being committed.
That said the soldiers pulling the trigger are committing crimes. These are patently illegal actions to a common person standard which eliminates any defense of following military orders. That being said the soldiers, at least, are committing crimes. Accountability starts at the source of the crime.
If the government is ordering these actions then those are illegal orders, according to international standards of military conduct. The soldiers on the ground must ignore those orders on the basis of patently illegal conduct according to a common person standard and the officials facilitating those orders can be investigated for issuing war crimes.
As an example read about Slobodan Milošević
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87
* Patently illegal conduct, according to common person principle, is always illegal. There are no legal exceptions.
* If you are fired upon you must return fire. Uniformed militaries are obligated to defend themselves. There are no exceptions to this, except the prior point. When these two points are in conflict the prior point always wins.
* Uniformed service members are required, by law, to follow orders given to them except for the prior two points.
That is the law. It does not matter what specific scenario finds tenable or practical, because combat is inherently challenging. In most cases this is highly impractical, which is why urban warfare is so challenging.
In functioning democracies in general, sure, you have to be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush. But in the specific case of Israel in 2015, it's not realistic to argue that the government isn't a single entity, so some parts of it may not be responsible (or even in favour of) crimes against humanity.
Because that is what keeps the ICC off of their backs. The ICC only has authority to step in in cases where national jurisdiction is unable or unwilling to prevent and prosecute war crimes.
When it comes to the list of things that Israelis fear, being sentenced to a firing squad is very low down.
If Israel had regime change, new regime and majority of voters would be pro Arab... New government could actually enforce existing laws!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes_in_the_Gaza...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240104213949/https://www.middl...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240424005326/https://news.un.o...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240409122432/https://thehill.c...
https://archive.is/UJb6g
For that to happen, the government, and the overall population, would need to consider what's being done in Gaza and on the West Bank to actually be a genocide. I don't think popular support for that actually exists in Israel. Last time I checked, most of the population supported the annexation of Gaza and the forced eviction of the local population to neighboring countries.
I don't think I'll live to see a two-state solution.
AI being whitewashing for IP is disruptive and troubling.
It being whitewashing for war crimes is a much more serious problem.
If Israel/IDF put in place a automated system that gave effectively caused war crimes to be committed, some humans in positions of power need to be held responsible and face consequences.
The world should not allow cases where (a) it's undisputed that war crimes occurred but (b) authority was interwoven in an automated system in such a way that humans escape consequences.
Sadly, it'll probably take the fall of right-wing Israeli and current Russian governments to have a hope of passing through.
Human culpability for crimes committed by large human systems isn't ever going to happen. I wouldn't hold my breath for the automated ones.
I expect with the first first-world drone war on a third-world country, there might be pressure at the UN to put something in place. At least for the automating genocide case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But yes. I’ll speak without snarkiness.
Thank you for maintaining this community.
I have distaste for Trump but something I appreciate about him is his abilities to stage a theatre with his "fake" bombings. The more mainstream politicians have much more sociopathic tendencies.
If you think about it, %100 of modern wars are about who is going to be the administrator and doesn't feel like can win an election. We live in a world of abundance, there's no reason for a group of people to kill other group for their resources. If it wasn't for the careers of some people with huge egos all this can be sorted out through civil matters. After the wars it gets sorted out anyway, we don't see mass exterminations anymore.
> Haaretz has learned that the Military Advocate General has instructed the IDF General Staff's Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism – a body tasked with reviewing incidents involving potential violations of the laws of war – to investigate suspected war crimes at these sites.
Now what will come from this (a proper investigation, etc.), who knows.
It was apparently 2 VCs and not the military that came up with GHF (and if I recall, there even was a brief flare up between the ruling Cabinet and the Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, who did not want the IDF to be responsible for aid).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/24/gaza-humanit... / https://archive.vn/TugwRGives the feeling of the serial number tattoos the Germans used, with tech "fixing" the bad optics of doing that, but the biometric ID serves as one.
Losing a war you started doesn't make you a victim.
Not saying it's right or wrong, or that this sort of article is or isn't interesting to HN readers. But a reasonable reason for flagging an article is a belief that the topic at hand doesn't lend itself to thoughtful, interesting discussion.
C'mon, you can't just go around implying that the Jews only "claimed" to have a genocide against them.
And this shit is happening now.
That said it's the kind of topic I don't expect HN to be able to particularly handle in an interesting or insightful way. It's mostly just going to be a mix of horrified people and then users trying to gaslight others into how this is a good thing.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: yikes—quite apart from the current topic, you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot with flamewar posts and personal attacks. We ban accounts that post like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43604429 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43604394 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596070 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596065 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593235 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593219 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43322414 (March 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43251495 (March 2025)
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted good things, but if you want to keep participating in this community, it would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
Edit: I did end up banning you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403629. We simply can't have people posting like that to HN.
It's not the case that "for each post that doesn't break the guidelines, you're allowed one that does", and that's not what I was doing. When I said HN moderation has worked the same way for over a decade, I didn't mean that the description you gave was accurate—it isn't. (Nor, I assume, did you mean it to be, since you were being sarcastic.)
I meant that what I was doing in the GP comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403362) was standard practice. As you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it goes back a long time.
We try to persuade users to follow the site guidelines, and tend to give warnings and make requests before banning accounts, especially if they are active participants who have been around for a while. We don't rush to banning such users; we try to explain the intended use of the site and convince them to honor it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
I am absolutely no one, but I'd like to highlight that this kind of policy is (indirectly) why I don't use HN. Tolerating intolerance to the extent you do (which isn't 100% but still a lot) allows people like the one you responded to originally to drive hackers like me, my loved ones, my colleagues and my students away, while attracting other hateful people, as they see that they are tolerated here. In a possibly too extreme comparison, this the same dynamic as the "nazi bar problem" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar). I hope you know what kind of community these policies has made of HN.
It's easy to invoke strong pejoratives like "hateful" when describing people who have opposing viewpoints and passions to one's own—in fact, it's hard not to. But it leads to a rapid escalation. A bad comment turns into a "hateful view", "hateful view" turns into "a hateful person", and soon that leaps to "how can you tolerate hateful people on your site". (The next logical step would be to suspect the mods of being "hateful people" themselves.) This escalation is, in my view, bad for community. It leads to uniformity within one's own group and rage and enmity towards difference.
Having banned countless accounts for breaking the site guidelines over the years, I can't accept that "hateful people" are tolerated here for very long. When accounts are posting abusively, we may give them more warnings than you (or a lot of other users) would prefer, but we ban them in the end. A good example is this very subthread. I ended up banning that account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403629). (Not, I should probably add, because of this or any other conversation about moderation, but just out of standard practice.)
p.s. You are not no one! I appreciate your comments and I wish I could write a better reply—I know a better one is possible, that expresses more precisely how I think about this. Alas it would take me hours, so I'm making do with one I don't much care for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 is one time that I got closer to it, and maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31812293. I still like the phrase "supported communication across differences". Unsupported communication across differences just leads to Hobbesian flamewar.
But anyway, this is only one case and we should not base our thinking just on it. The problem is the policy (or the way it's systematically enforced) and its broader results. I don't know the details of how the moderation works here nor have I any statistics. I only know that I saw too much racism and hate towards whole groups of people because of their identity here in the past, and that when I occasionally stumble across a HN link, I usually can still see that hate being a lot more represented than in other spaces I frequent, and that the kind of policy you described to me has never worked at building diverse and interesting communities.
Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire, then became conquerors of the world.
Russians were oppressed by the Mongols, then became conquerors of Eurasia.
Communists were oppressed by Tsarists, then became ruthless oppressors themselves.
Protestants were oppressed in Europe, so they set sail to America and became oppressors of the natives.
The better explanation is simple and banal - power concentration makes people abuse it.
My list of examples is very similar to this one and the ven diagram here is "was oppressed became oppressor"... in most cases it appears that only if the oppressed are destroyed or I would argue in the case of America- controlled at the margins... then they don't circle back around to abuse their newly acquired power.
You don't need to go that far forward, though. It took Christians <400 years to promulgate the Edict of Thessalonica that made Christianity (and of a very particular kind at that!) to be the only legal religion. And one can argue that it's no coincidence that it happened pretty much as soon as they have gained the political upper hand in the Roman Empire.
> Same for Russians and Mongols, there's a pretty large gap with a ton of events in between
Not really. Muscovy was still paying tribute to the Golden Horde and recognizing their supreme authority under Ivan III. His grandson Ivan IV ("the Terrible") conquered the Tatar state, making its lands such as Kazan part of his empire, and sent an expedition to start the conquest of Siberia.
The inaccuracies here are not so much with timing, more so with lack of precision wrt the groups involved. In general, though, I think it's fair to say that, for most part of human history, the oppressed become the oppressors pretty much as soon as they are capable of it.
>In general, though, I think it's fair to say that, for most part of human history, the oppressed become the oppressors pretty much as soon as they are capable of it.
Doesn't this also hold for non-oppressed that have the opportunity? Although I suppose it'd be hard to find any examples of non-oppressed groups. Pillaging or conquering neighbors was pretty much the norm throughout the history. Rus' was converted to Christianity in part to stop raids such as Siege of Constantinople of 860.
Just think of any powerful nation (or group of people, or whatever), and try to think of somebody they have oppressed, or are still oppressing. It's typically not hard to come up with examples.
Neanderthals aren’t going to become oppressors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Other commenters are doing it too, but it's a matter of degree, and the rhetoric in your post here is a degree worse. You can make your substantive points without resorting to "cult", "stamped out", "criminal ideology" and so on. Fortunately it doesn't look like your account has a habit of doing this, so it should be easy to fix.
If Israel wanted them to leave, wouldn't they seek cooperation with a nation that is willing to have them, and organize mass transports there?
At least I haven't heard of any such thing.
There is no such nation. Iirc Israeli politicians have more than once responded to critique with "you take them, then". But there aren't any takers.
So sure, workers at Haarez probably don't, but when the extermination feeling is widespread enough that 47% feel they can openly agree to a question proscribing the killing women and children, then insisting on the insistence on precision comes across mostly as an attempt at distraction.
[1] https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-hav...
Fortunately many Israelis are against the ongoing genocide, but powerless to stop it.
All this to say you're right, but the government is indocrinating more and more people for these views.
It is indeed sickening. They straight out tell you how they want all Palestinian children to die.
And if you disagree with the guy, go dislike his videos.
That's a wild phrase to use in the context of killing indiscriminate civilians after luring them to the food they're desperate for.
And it’s all so casual and self righteous.
Why? Because Netanyahu and a good chunk of the Israeli population want the Palestinians to cease to exist and its territory to be part of Israel. An opponent that wants to achieve its goals through political action and appeals to the international community meant that there was a risk of Israel being dragged into a two-state commitment. A terrorist group attacking civilians gives those hardliners a perpetual excuse to go to war.
In short: the answer is yes, that appears to be precisely the point: to prevent any possibility of peaceful reconciliation and drive the Palestinians to eventual expulsion or eradication.
This seems like a feasible goal.
> and drive the Palestinians to eventual expulsion or eradication.
That strategy haven't worked for what 50 years, what makes anyone think it'll work anytime ever?
The Palestinians don't exactly have anywhere to go.
That's why Israel has systematically taken out every hospital in Gaza: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdd25d9vp2qo
Has blocked and sabotaged aid at every turn, including bombing UN food trucks: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158746
And when allied countries got too uneasy about them just blocking all aid trucks at the border, they set up their own aid organization to trickle out nominal amounts of food while they take pot shots at people desperate enough to show up: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74ne108e4vo
They didn't just make this up as they go, presumably the plans have been sitting around for a long time waiting for a suitable moment.
That is definitely not true.
I have no idea what crowd composition at European protests looks like, but the vast majority of the people upset about the ongoing genocide are not antisemetic.
There is a propaganda campaign in the US trying to conflate being against genocide with being antisemetic. I'm sure similar tactics are being used in Europe.
If you think it's nonsense, try to go into a anti-war protest with a t-shirt saying that Jews too should be able to live in Middle East. If this thought makes you slightly concerned, you got my point.
Try the same, but opposite argument.
Something like: Would you wear a t-shirt saying “Palestine is treated unfairly” to oct7 memorial or airport/border crossing?
I'm not Arab, I'm not Muslim. I've never met a Jewish person. I've no reason to have any prejudice against people of Jewish heritage or ethnicity. But it's still a genocide by any definitions of the word. A lot of Jewish people even agree with this. And the reason that you and most Israeli people seem to struggle to grasp it is because they've been drinking on this exact extremist rhetoric that the "other" side only wants to see them slaughtered. By the same measure, you're saying Hamas can justify it's actions since there will always be ultra-Zionist factions of Israeli societies that wants to see Palestinians slaughtered. I implore you to wake up to what is being done in the name of your people.
There is war in Gaza in the simple sense that rockets from Gaza still shoot into Israel, that Israeli hostages are still being held, and that Hamas itself (the elected goverenement) says it would attack again. It's a very unbalanced conflict, and in it terrible crimes are committed that you can call genocidal. But Jews in the ghettos weren't bombing Berlin - not during WW2 and not after it.
Not only I do not belittler their suffering, I personally helped some of them out. I also ran an organization that provided thousands of Gazan with electricity, and I was arrested by the Israeli police when encouraging Palestinians in Israel to vote. At the same time I have family members who were killed (and kidnapped) on the first day of this war. Life isn't black and white.
I completely agree that life isn’t always black and white. But right now it is, just like it was in countless other situations in the past. You can think it’s “complicated” all you like, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against such a framing, which is where the conditioning comes into the picture.
It is great that you volunteered in Gaza, but it’s also tragic that you fail to see what is happening even after directly interacting with Gazans.
Some day in the future, when free Palestinians can build museums and monuments and make movies to mourn those lost in this genocide, everyone will always have been against this.
Jews in the Ghetto didn't get the chance to shoot rockets at Berlin but had they been able to fight back, I'd have given them the same understanding that I currently extends to Palestinians that grew up in the concentration camp that is Gaza. Hamas is the direct results of Israeli policies of the past decades. Even if the IDF manages to somehow invent some purity test for Gazans that it can use to confirm there are no longer any Hamas members left and it finally declares it's operations concluded, you'll have people shooting rockets at Israel if they keep their policies with the Gaza strip and the West Bank. But long term solutions come later, right now, Israelis need to wake up and say no to what is unfolding in the name of their security.
Your comment about Jews in Ghetto is wrong at every possible level. Jews were killed in the Holocaust _without_ a conflict, _without_ attempting to kill Germans, _without_ fighting with anyone over the land and _without_ having any aspirations to control the other. That is an example of a situation where there is no war, and no, it has nothing to do with the situation between Israelis and Palestinians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_resistance_in_German-oc...
Going through your criteria in order: Of course they defended themselves, including attempts to kill Nazis. They also attempted to keep their homes, and certainly would have rather Germany have different leadership
Does that somehow mean the concentration camps were a "war"?
I.e. there was not even a possibility that nazis were defending. While somebody from Palestine side did fire the opening salvo on oct7.
Now, that's a re-writing of history if I've ever seen one.
> Israeli and Palestinian deaths preceding the 2023 Gaza war. Of the Palestinian deaths 5,360 were in Gaza, 1,007 in the West Bank, 37 in Israel. Most were civilians on both sides.
Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli%E2%80%...
See the chart on the top right with the orange bars
And that blockading policy and financing of anything but fatah and bunch of other stuff influenced today situation.
But you must admit that oct 7 was unusual escalation. Which now are used as the reason for current idf actions.
Also, stop using the Holocaust as a propaganda tool. My grandfather happened to be a Buchenwald concentration camp survival. It didn't give him or anybody else any right to violate Geneva convention.
1. Genocidal actions can take place in a war, and no definition of a war ever said that the parties have to be of equal strength. Every war that was ever won by one side or another had some sort of power supremacy. Go read the legal definition for genocide and you'll learn that the question of imbalance of power plays absolutely no role in it.
2. I haven't used it as a propaganda tool, and in fact it wasn't me who brought it up at all. I was only commenting that the current situation in Gaza is not comparable to the Holocaust, and I fully stand behind it. To make it clear, I am very happy that it isn't comparable, and I wouldn't want to see any Palestinian suffering like my ancestors did. Not once in my life have I used it to justify crimes committed by Jews, so please learn to read before commenting on my posts. If anything, I always believed that what Jews went through should serve as a reminder for us to never allow things like that from happening again, and I still see the Holocaust as perhaps one of the main driving forces in my opposition to this war.
Shooting at mothers trying to get humanitarian aid for their starving children does not fulfil any definition of war I am aware of.
Read history books yourself. Once one side of a war becomes dominant, it just ends.
Unless it is not really a war but a hideous genocide campaign cynically carried out by Israeli government under the pretext of self-defensive war.
Sorry for being pedanto, but other side must stop resisting for war to end. Guerrilla warfare is quite usual when there is great power imbalance.
Only if you have enough bombs, which they need to constantly purchase from the US using aid money given to them by the US.
They don't have the stockpiles to eradicate without using their (not so) secret nukes. If they were to do that, there'd be a lot worse follow on effects for Israel. If they simply trickle the deaths over time, people get tired of the horror and need to look away for their own sanity.
1) Give them their own state. This is difficult for quite many reasons, and Israel (by which I mean the current government) doesn't want that
2) Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation, and let them participate in the regular political processes. The current government certainly doesn't want that, and I have no idea what part of the Palestinians would want that.
3) Continue to treat them as sub-human, and deal with the consequences of the hatred that fosters. That seems to have been the "strategy" before October last year.
4) Try to exterminate or exile them, or at least decimating them to such an extend that the problem becomes smaller.
Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.
For a commonplace example, look at a soccer match, fans screaming at the referee whenever a decision doesn't go their team's way.
Speaking for experience from some relatives, the immigration laws for people of jewish faith and ancestry were nigh insurmountable if you came from african, arab or middle east countries and pretty much just nominal even in recent times for those who had even a remote connection but came from the US and the UK.
I have the feeling they are jewish the same way Henry IV was a Catholic when he said "Paris is well worth a Mass".
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot
> There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. ...
> The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. ... Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine , in return for cultural and economic advantages. ...
> We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel." ... Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim.
> We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached.
Now, Jabotinsky was arguably naive in that he thought that after the inevitable forcing of the Arabs to accept Jewish colonization of their homeland, once they have "given up on all hopes", they could be negotiated with on the terms of settlement:
> In the second place, this does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall. Not till then will they drop their extremist leaders, whose watchword is "Never!" And the leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizen, or Arab national integrity.
The problem, of course, is that once you have that amount of upper hand over someone, you don't actually have to negotiate. You can just keep taking everything you want, by force. And that is exactly where Israel found itself in the long term.
As the Palestinians are the majority, the Jewish Israelis would become a minority in terms of citizens and votes. This is very much akin to Apartheid South Africa, where a minority ethnic group rules over the rest of the population.
Although there remains the case of 700,000 Palestinian refugees who (in the hypothetical scenario of a unified state) would tilt the balance further if allowed to return to their/their parents homes or given property as compensation for repossessed homes.
The problem with understanding this situation is that it probably has more to do with Israel's internal politics than what the situation looks like on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere. Just a quick read from the wikipedia page should give an idea just how corrupt the situation really is.
There's also the fact that Palestinians aren't a homogenous group in any sense of the word. That makes it hard for them to unite under any political flag. It also doesn't help that the borders are all closed, from both sides, and no neighboring country are willing to accept them.
From the outside the situation certainly looks very bleak.
Yes, I do think it had an effect, but less of one than their governing body did, hence my saying so.
Either way, unless you think the blockade itself is "Israel treating Gazans as sub-human", then my point still stands.
Garbage. Gaza had its only airport bombed to oblivion 20 years ago and was told any attempt to repair it would result in the same. Its port has been blockaded by the Israeli navy for 15 years. Its only land exits have been heavily locked down.
Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack, or teens throwing stones. They’ve even turned off water for days too.
That’s treating people as subhuman, imprison them and do things like that to them for decades.
Given the circumstances, Gaza's neighbors blockade it to keep it from building an even bigger fighting force.
> Israel will routinely turn electricity off to the country for days to punish for something, be it a rocket attack,
You mean, when occasionally Hamas will try to kill random Israeli civilians using rocket fire? Which is basically a declaration of war and causes Israel to fight back?
> or teens throwing stones.
I don't think that's actually true.
> That’s treating people as subhuman,
Israel is treating Hamas-controlled Gaza as a hostile enemy that is intent on destroying it. Given that Hamas, even under the blockade and with all the restrictions in place, still managed to invade Israel and kill a thousand citizens, while kidnapping and holding hostage 250 civilians, and still, a year and a half later, is holding these people hostage and torturing them daily... given that, I think it's hard to say blockading them was a bad idea.
If you think the blockade is the reason for their actions, then you're quite simply wrong - they were founded many years before and always had the same goal of destroying Israel, including working hard against the peace process that was forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority.
Changing the goalposts, are we?
Yes, that happens.
How is Israel turning off electricity and fresh water to the entire country as a result not considered treating the population as sub-human (as in not deserving of basic human needs), the original point of this discussion ?
> If you think the blockade is the reason for their actions, then you're quite simply wrong - they were founded many years before and always had the same goal of destroying Israel, including working hard against the peace process that was forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority.
Oh, you're so close to the point! "The peace process forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority" is exactly why Netanyuhu and his ilk started supporting Hamas. Because when your explicitly stated goal is to evict Palestinians (and Netanyuhu has said as much, in as many words), global sympathy starts to wane when the PLA is looking for peaceful solutions (yes, admittedly, after periods of violence and terrorism) and now Israel looks like the bad guy. So let's prop up Hamas, because they are more extremist, and make a more convenient bad guy.
I think that temporarily not supplying a semi-state with electricity while fighting a war they started, does not fit the definition most people would have of "treating them as sub-human". If you do - fine.
> Oh, you're so close to the point! "The peace process forming between Israel and the eventual Palestinian Authority" is exactly why Netanyuhu and his ilk started supporting Hamas.
No, you're getting the chronology very wrong here.
Hamas was founded in the 1980s ('88 I think). The main peace talks started in the 1990s, with Oslo getting signed in '93. The terror campaign Hamas started to wage was around that time, trying to derail the peace talks.
In '95, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist, and Netanyahu was elected for the first time as opposed to Rabin's "successor" Peres. A major Hamas terror attack right around that election is largely attributed to tipping the election in favor of Netanahu, who won by the thinnest majority in Israeli history to this day (iirc around 10k votes).
Another PM, Barak, was elected to pursue peace and had talks with the PA in 2000 and 2001. This is when the second intifada was launched, unclear how much from Hamas and how much from the PA. Later, a different PM (Sharon), actually considered a right-wing hawk, was elected and initiated the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Olmert, his successor, was elected on a platform of disengaging from the West Bank. In the meantime, Hamas was elected to rule Gaza, the blockade was started, and Hamas began shooting rockets at Israel. Peace negotiations were again held in 2008/2009 between Olmert and Abbas.
Only in 2009 did Netanyahu even get back into power.
So the idea that Netanyahu somehow started supporting Hamas - which is a somewhat of a mischaractirization in any case - is only really relevant several years after the blockade started and rockets were fired, which is many years after Hamas worked to shut down the peace process.
And water. For days or more. And well, most of the world considers it a war crime, but hey, if you think it's NBD...
You make it seem like these things all happen like clockwork, with concrete black and white dates.
And well:
> The Hamas movement was founded by Palestinian Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987, after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation. It emerged from his 1973 Mujama al-Islamiya Islamic charity affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Initially, Hamas was discreetly supported by Israel, as a counter-balance to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Netanyahu was formative in Likud. That whole statement used to "prove" Hamas (look, since we're talking about Hamas - let me be unequivocally clear - is a terrorist organization who do despicable things) has goals of excision/extermination... "From the River (Jordan) to the (Red) Sea"... misses the irony that that was Likud's election slogan for a decade or more.
The Israeli govt and people would be very supportive of (2). After all, there are more Arabs living in Israel than in Palestine. The Palestineans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly reject this option.
I fear their plan is to expand military operations into additional countries until they can get back into a pseudo-stalemate scenario. That'd explain the bombings in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
All 4 bullet points are either completely false or misleading.
Certainly it’s the stated position and goal of the current government, which is what the initial post said.
> citing security concerns
If your neighbour keeps throwing stones at you and you agree to not throw stones, they continue to throw stones. You would probably not support any of their wishes.
Why is it Israel’s problem? There was a legal agreement in 1948. It could have been so simple.
But it is also obvious, historically, why Arab countries aren’t welcoming masses of Palestinians into their countries even in these dire moments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Notice how israel (the country currently committing the genocide) is not even mentioned in your reply.
There multiple EU signatory countries of the Rome Statute (pledging to cooperate with ICC) that have welcomed these war criminals... who have warrants out by the ICC.
And the same war criminals are invited to give a speech at the U.S Congress to near unanimous applause. It really makes you wonder if we're the "good guys".
-- edit -- If you're curious how much your congressperson receives from AIPAC (Israeli lobby) this website is a great resource: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress
With 'rules based world order', there is one rule for the West and one rule for everyone else. Hence it is okay to have a referendum in Kosovo for Kosovo to split away from Serbia, but not okay for a region of the Ukraine to have a referendum, to break away from Ukraine. So Crimea, where everyone speaks Russian and identifies as Russian, with no interest in the Ukraine or the EU, can't get the treatment that was afforded Kosovo. This is because 'rules based world order', and how the global majority sees it.
Your comment would be fine without that bit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
As mentioned, you don't have to agree with them, however, it has to be acknowledged that not everyone thinks like you, and that 'rules based order' means different things to different people.
Incidentally, the global majority are not blue and yellow fanatics. China, India, Africa and South America are not on team blue and yellow.
You have your truth, they have theirs.
Blatant falsehood. In 2014 it was about 65% (ethnicity) and 80% (language).
In addition the referendum happened after the invasion and de-facto annexation, without the option of "keep the current situation with Ukraine". If you ask me "do you want to be punched or stabbed?" then I'll choose a punch. Doesn't mean I want to be punched.
My point is that the 'rules based order' means different things to different people. In the West it means one thing and in the rest of the world it means something else.
My point still stands and must be acknowledged even if you are waving the blue and yellow flag, the rainbow flag and the stars and stripes. In any country that the West has brought war to, they know exactly what 'rules based order' means. You don't have to agree with them, they are just on a different team to you.
Hearing democrats decry Russian foreign influence was also something I was on board with, but much like Nancy Pelosi saying it's not corrupt when she trades on stock with private information, apparently it's not corrupt when the democratic party accepts foreign aid in the form of AIPAC donations, or just as likely threats of the use of Pegasus against them.
It is quite sad to be an American of good conscience right now. It's hard to respect our country in any way when it shows such little moral fiber and such little backbone.
I am glad it is visible. And hope for some more civic debate about the topic.
If neither side can agree on peace, if neither side has objectives which the other will accept, if neither side is willing to compromise; What other outcome is possible in terms of realpolitik?
It is upsetting to observe. We all want better for humanity.
Of course it is understandable to be outraged by the violence and atrocities. The human suffering is real, but arguments focusing on these points can miss the larger picture. The underlying incentives dictate outcomes. Atrocities are often marketed as rationalizations for further violence.
We want to prescribe an outcome without atrocities. Yet discussions fall into recrimination before they can describe the conflict coherently.
Which actually holds up quite well for everybody who loves to bring up that quote: realism aka "we shouldn't face the consequences of our actions" is the obvious rallying cry for people facing the consequences of their actions.