zlacker

>>ilamon+(OP)
You can see this happen out in the open when Paul Graham (or anyone else) posts statistics about who's been killed, raw footage... he's immediately swarmed by people, some major players in the industry, accusing him of "antisemitism", which it most definitely is not.

>>smooth+Fw
It was certainly interesting to see Paul Graham, famous for his skepticism of China's COVID numbers, immediately embrace the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll, without understanding how they themselves generate it.

>>richar+wB1
...is there any reason to doubt these figures? Is there any reason to suspect that Hamas is any less trustworthy than the Israeli government is?

>>JeffSn+MF1
Yes, of course there is reason to suspect Hamas is untrustworthy. I'm not trying to argue one should take Israel's word at face value (of course you should subject it to scrutiny as well), but yes, Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley, is far more trustworthy than Hamas, a repressive, fundamentalist, authoritarian regime with no free press. This doesn't mean they always tell the truth, but there is no equivalence between them and Hamas.

In terms of specific reasons to doubt the Gaza Health Ministry numbers specifically, I could go on forever about that, but I don't see the point of doing so on HN. It's not a tech-related question.

>>richar+QG1
A liberal democratic state? You consider likkud a liberal party? I suppose Irgun was liberal too.

>>IOT_Ap+TV1
That's like saying America isn't a liberal democratic state because of Trump and the republican party. Israel is a liberal democracy, far more liberal than America, and there were hundreds of thousands of people who marched against Netanyahu.

>>richar+BH3
Israel has a parliamentary system, no? It seems appropriate to blame the parties that forms the coalition for the behavior of the state, and there's certainly no shortage of illiberal actions Israel has done against their own citizens in the last three months to point to.

Regardless, our (USA) parties are in fact the biggest blockers to our functioning correctly as a liberal democracy. One is desperate for votes from anyone, the other party is terrified to pass anything or imagine any kind of future that isn't a slightly less grim version of what the republicans offer. Just by our ability to come to a consensus and do things as a country, we seem to have ground to a complete halt. So yea, people should be a lot more critical of whether or not we're actually espousing the democratic ideals we claim.

>>JeffSn+ky4
Friend, Israel has a shitty party in power and a shitty prime minister in power, but that doesn't mean it's not a liberal democratic state. It's pretty obvious that you don't know much about Israel. Do you know that the kibbutzim that were attacked on october 7 were full of people who used to go to Gaza to drive gazans to Israeli hospitals? I myself have donated to gazans and marched with palestinians for decades. I will not stand silent as people who know much less than they think they do make overconfident statements maligning Israel.

>>richar+TS4
I agree that having Likud in power is not in and of it self a reason to cast doubt over democracy in Israel. However I do think that the occupation over the West Bank, the Blockade of Gaza, the double judicial system for Palestinians vs. Israeli, the apartheid, the unequal paths to citizenship, etc. together makes Israel no more democratic then Apartheid era South Africa or pre-civil rights era USA. Neither of which constitute a liberal democracy be modern standards.

>>runarb+SZ4
2 million Palestinians live in Israel as equal citizens. They're called Israeli arabs. They disagree with you that Israel is an apartheid state. There are arab supreme court justices in Israel. Those Palestinians love Israel. There is no separate judicial system for them. There is no apartheid. There is a separate judicial system for foreigners, like people living in Gaza, just as there is in the United States.

I do not agree with Israel's policies on the West Bank, but the issue is more complicated than I suspect you think and I encourage you to read Israeli perspectives on it.

>>richar+Th9
So there is no apartheid if we ignore those living under apartheid?

>>runarb+Nm9
Gaza is not part of Israel. They have their own government (Hamas), their own military (Hamas) and their own administrative functions. Israel withdrew in 2005, forcibly pulling out every Jewish person that lived there (and Jewish people have lived there for thousands of years).

>>richar+Qma
Gaza is and has been effectively occupied by Israel since 1967. It's independent from Israel in the same way that Xinjiang is independent from China. Sovereignty and autonomy in Gaza have been aspirational ideas since Sharon's 2005 disengagement. Meanwhile: only a small fraction of the population of Gaza has ever voted (they're too young to have, in the last election, wherein Hamas threw supporters of the PA off rooftops), so it's deeply misleading to describe Hamas as "their own government".

Pro-Palestinian rhetoric on this site goes off the rails in so many directions, and because it seems to be the majority opinion on the site, there are many more examples of off-the-rails comments from that side. But this assertion of Gaza's independence from Israel is one of the reliable off-the-rails pro-Israel sentiments I see here.

>>tptace+sib
To me "occupied" means there is control enforced by troops on the ground. Israel didn't have any control of what went on inside Gaza.

Gaza was blockaded. Israel tried to control who and what goes in and out of Gaza (to try to limit the weapons Hamas has). But Israel had no control over what the Hamas Gaza government did in Gaza, how they spent their budget, what they built, what they taught in schools, what their military was planning.

>>wolf55+jmb
A common pattern for state autonomous zones seems to be devolved local governance, but no foreign policy or inter-state security, which seems to describe Gaza pretty well.

>>tptace+Xtb
The national / federal government is able to send agents and enforce its will on states / provinces. Israel was not able to send anyone into Gaza.

It would be a "breakaway province" situation, except that:

a. Israel intentionally got all its citizens out of that place and

b. Israel had no intention of taking control and forcing Gaza to join back into Israel.

Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.

Gaza was mostly an independent country at war with Israel and not even a little bit an autonomous province of Israel. The war could not be resolved and so it was stuck in a state where Israel thought it prevented Hamas from bringing in heavy weapons but did not want to commit to conquering a city.

I think some people thought that after Israel pulled out in 2005, and Gaza became autonomous, it would become a normal independent country, and people still treat Gaza of 2023 as if it's the Gaza of 2005.