Indeed that understanding is corroborated by several human rights organizations, like HRW and Amnesty international:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
> Leading propaganda machine and former Member of Knesset Einat Wilf suggests that the Israeli government should allow aid into Gaza officially, but unofficially let "protesters" to block all aid from entering the Strip. I think that's actually kinda what happened today.
-- https://twitter.com/ireallyhateyou/status/175021647115263591...
> The Gaon Rabbi Dov Lior Shalita in a halachic ruling: Citizens must prevent the entry of Hamas trucks even on Shabbat, because equipping and supplying the enemy is a war act that must be stopped from the point of view of human control.
-- https://twitter.com/Torat_IDF/status/1750600997745959279
Probably a terrible translation but the point is clear, incitement and impunity, and the results are predictable.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/protesters-prev...
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/eye-on-palestine/gaza/prote...
Yesterday, 0 trucks could enter Gaza, the day before that 9 out of 60, don't know about today. Note that under the convention against genocide, Israel is required to prosecute genocidal speech, much less such genocidal acts (apart from not committing them of course). Instead, as Yoav Gallant just posted this on Twitter:
> The State of Israel does not need need to be lectured on morality in order to distinguish between terrorists and the civilian population in Gaza. The ICJ went above and beyond, when it granted South Africa's antisemitic request to discuss the claim of genocide in Gaza.
... which is as good a summary as any for what you find at every corner with this: not just the unwillingness to learn, but the inability to even comprehend any of this. When Gideon Levy talks about the incredible depth of Israeli indoctrination, he isn't kidding, and he's not exaggerating.
That especially means two things here: being kind, and not using the thread to do battle. If you're not able to stick to that, that's fine, but in that case please don't post.
What does be kind mean in a context like this? Many things, but here's one in my view: it means finding a place in your heart for the humanity of the other—whoever the other happens to be for you.
That isn't easy but it's the spirit we want here. If you can't find it in yourself, that's understandable, but on this topic, please only post if you can.
What's inaccurate about it?
(Btw - thank you for posting the links in >>39146163 . We need those.)
and a summary is: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
Dissents etc can be found in the case page: https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192 - in particular the opinion of Judge Aharon Barak, the Israeli ad-hoc Judge (a peculiarity of the ICJ is that each side gets to add a judge, but it doesn't have much effect since there are 17 other judges). But interestingly Judge Barak ruled against Israel in the case of two measures, enforcement against Incitement and ensuring humanitarian aid.
I believe it's also available in French, for those more familiar with that language.
If you read some of those past explanations and still have a question about our general approach, let me know what it is. As for this particular story, I turned off the flags on it because it clearly counts as SNI (significant new information - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
* as has the question "how is this hackernews", of course: >>17014869
The measures to be taken are specified in paragraphs 78–82 on page 23.
Well, there is already discussion of the meaning of Measure 1) "take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular" part a) "killing members of the group", at >>39143094 , so perhaps the confusion can be worked out there. I don't think it's as simple as "limit deaths" but perhaps I'm wrong, not being a lawyer.
The blog has articles on the topic from both sides from numerous lawyers
I changed it to "indoctrination". Which is a more polite word that doesn't really do it justice, but it's not really important because the result, the inability to even meaningfully interact with the charges, is a constant.
As George Orwell put it, from the totalitarian perspective history is something to be created, rather than learned. Or as Robert Antelme described a concentration camp guard: "trapped in the machinery of his own myth". I just cannot find a flattering way to describe these things, there just is no material to work with for that.
Or you can switch to https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-braces-worl... if you want the title to match the HTML title.
Gaza has a sizable coastline, and China has a large number of amphibious assault ships available. They can defend themselves against Israel air attacks. If China decides to send humanitarian relief to Gaza, China can do it, and Israel can't stop them.[3] China would look like the good guys. Which their leadership knows.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-game-gaza
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-wa...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/china-amphibious-assault-ship-type-...
On other hand, Palestinians living in Gaza have elected a terrorist group[1] to govern them nearly two decades ago and have been subject to UN-sponsored education that teaches kids to hate Jews[2] for decades.
A single democratic state of Palestine with Palestinians and Israelis co-existing is impossible with current Palestinian leadership and the generations taught hatred.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
[2] https://unwatch.org/un-teachers-call-to-murder-jews-reveals-...
The fascist behavior I see coming from Israelis is completely repulsive and against everything I thought my religion stood for.
From the Hamas charter (2017).
"6. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."
My reading is that the court is basically saying “You are presently running the risk of committing genocide, please take all measures in your power to prevent that.”
[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/china-...
Obviously most of what gets discussed on HN is relatively unimportant in the world. If that weren't the case, HN would simply be a current affairs site, which it isn't. At the same time, that doesn't mean every political story is off topic here—the guidelines already make that clear by their use of the word "most": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There's a long and pretty consistent history to how HN handles the question of political topics.
So you have to realise that Israelis are not thinking normally right now. Even though the Hamas attack has in military terms "culminated", and Israel's military is many times more powerful, their trauma leads them to believe that there is a real, present threat of extinction of the Israeli state and their own nation and families. Under such conditions, it is very hard for them to see the suffering of 'the enemy' as relevent.
It also doesn't help that basically everyone else is just piling responsibility for a solution on the Israelis, despite the US, UK and Europe having enormous historic responsibility for setting up the situation.
[please note, this is explanation, not justification]
[1] https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/statemen...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
There have been Chinese navy visits to the Mediterranean. You can sail in on international water. (Edit: Nope, it's to narrow)
"Chinese naval ships visit Morocco"
http://eng.chinamil.com.cn/CHINA_209163/Exchanges/News_20918...
The line of thinking is that if Israel is subject to international courts/laws regarding genocide for its action, then China will be too. China's participation in judging Israel opens itself to the same judgement.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So...
In terms of non-homicidal genocide (i.e. genocide in the sense of dismantling the group without killing its members), certainly a lot more people are fine with something like a Transfer plan (for example, I've heard a proposal that Egypt will take Gazan Palestinians as refugees/civilians and similarly have Jordan absorb the Palestinians in Yehuda and Shomron) and don't see it as much of an atrocity, merely taking back the land those Arabs conquered and colonized starting at around 640AD, without actual harm to those individuals (in fact, their lives could be much improved!). There's also the fact that Israel is very tiny; Even from just the southern part of Gaza, Hamas already fires rockets at Israel's most populated cities, giving them the mountains of Shomron (incidentally, the capital of the Israeli kingdom), simple mortars could rain down on Israeli civilians without warning and could easily lead to an actual genocide of all Israeli Jews, so moving the people a few tens of kilometers east sounds like a peaceful resolution in comparison.
Naturally, there's also the element of a long conflict. Arabs have been killing Jews in Israel during the British Mandate as well as the Ottoman rule of the region (in fact the IDF traces its roots to what are essentially local militias the Jews had to create to defend themselves). Israel's scroll of independence (a document that is considered that closest thing Israel has to a constitution) actually includes two paragraphs calling for the Arab nations surrounding Israel to work together in peaceful cooperation, so literally the very first action Israel took as a state was to call for peace, and literally the first thing that happened in response was an attempt to destroy Israel. After 76 years of war, certainly there's lowered sympathy for the enemy, especially one that elected Hamas (see above) and rejected peace (I've somewhat recently learned that outside of Israel almost no one knows that the Annapolis Conference very nearly resulted in peace via a two-state solution that was refused by Mahmoud Abbas [which I've heard he has later come to regret, not sure how reliable that is]).
Rising anti-semitism around the world (especially how popular it is to call for a genocide against Israeli Jews is in the form of the "From the river to the sea" phrase) also creates a backlash - Israel must act strongly to defend itself since it is the only place in the world where Jews can be in charge of their own fate and their own defense. If the BBC publishes lies about what happens in Israel, and protesters in England are calling for a genocide unopposed, not only should we not listen to what the English want us to do, we should prioritize ourselves even further. This is why IMO something like BDS is counter-productive, it only causes further resentment and defiance in Israelis; If you want peace between Israel and Palestine you should instead work to make sure Israel feels safe enough to be able to relinquish territory to the Palestinians without having another October 7th instead of working to undermine Israel (unless your goal is the destruction of Israel of course).
This is not an accurate representation. Jewish people were given the legal ability to purchase land in Mandatory Palestine. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs were tenant farmers or landless labourers. Jewish land purchases inevitably led to the displacement of these tenants, but this was the lawful outcome of a lawful land sale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_land_purchase_in_Palest...
The issues surrounding occupation of land after the 1948 and 1967 wars are significantly more complex and arguably do involve violations of international law by Israel.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2YY1E6/
SA does not really present itself as an earnest or true actor in the sphere oh human rights.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/27/israeli-protests-ca...
This is a huge one too:
Israel is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the western world. In particular, it is more ethnically diverse than almost every single country in Europe. What ethnostate?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/was-hamas-electe...
Compare culpability with Israel's, which IS a functioning democracy, has had regular elections, a free press, a large population participating in the war and actively in favour of it - and blaming the average Gazan is even less fair.
Feeling like revenge isn't good enough.
More public denouncement of what Israel is doing.
Get the Department of State to start sanctioning heads of state of Israel that are actively calling for a genocide.
He's effectively done nothing other than "handling it in private."
> we have no choice but to kill them too, but we do not specifically target them
> we have no choice but to kill them too
bruh...
Those are war crimes according to the UN
Absolutely zero, and the people proposing this know that. That tells you all you need to know, really.
[1] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/images/maps/jew...
At least as much as Ronald Regan: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/12/A-shocked-and-outrag...
They've had wars with all their immediate neighbours since the modern state was created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab–Israeli_conflict#Notable_...
Some of those countries are more friendly now, but loss of USA support would be huge. Such a removal of support would IMO be extremely unlikely due to how USA internal politics looks like from outside.
American foreign policy wasn't parodied as "world police" for nothing.
> I certainly think we could stop funding their military while still pledging to support them if someone actually tries to invade.
Subtly and nuance? Oh how I wish any politics cared about that.
I'm assuming, from the PoV of Israel and the Jewish diaspora in the USA, that because the specific attack that set this in motion was much much worse (proportionally speaking) than the 9/11 attacks were to the USA, anything less than 100% uncritical total support will look like "a betrayal" or "giving in to terrorism", to enough of the Jewish electorate in the USA, as to make that kind of talk unviable for at least a decade.
Real people aren't Vulcans. Emotions are raw, and will remain that way for a long time. And so the cycle will continue until either one side or the other is dead, or some absolute negotiating genius steps in and manages something even more impressive than the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.
(Makes me wish for Mo Mowlam to be reincarnated; good luck to you if she was an inspiration!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/was-hamas-electe...
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palesti...
Seeing how they literally took hostages, in addition to targeting and killing civilians, I'm honestly not sure how you can argue it wasn't a terrorist attack.
Grabbing for straws: "Chinese naval escort taskforce visits Tunisia"
http://eng.chinamil.com.cn/CHINA_209163/TopStories_209189/79...
Ironically this can be applied on isreal which declare itself Jewish state and have law of return [1] which allow any Jewish a right to "come" to isreal but does not extend the same to arab who were kicked during establishment of isreal
> About three-quarters (73%) of American Jews say remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of being Jewish
that's above any other option.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/08/13/70-years-...
Zionists even false flag attacked Iraqi Jews to help spur immigration to Israel:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-jews-attacks-zionist...
Here's a piece on it:
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/one-democratic-state-pale...
Edit: I guess my basic response is that I'm skeptical of approaching these questions from that level of abstraction. None of us can say what we would have done in those horrible situations. We can only answer out of our own imagination about ourselves, which is likely to be completely unreliable.
What I do think is that on this site, we can and should be working with our own responses in a way that is more than just venting them onto a perceived other. That's in keeping with what HN is supposed to be for.
>The PCPSR poll found that 44% of Gazans say they have enough food and water for a day or two, and 56% say that they do not. Almost two-thirds of Gazan respondents - 64% - said a member of their family had been killed or injured in the war.
>Fifty-two percent of Gazans and 85% of West Bank respondents - or 72% of Palestinian respondents overall - voiced satisfaction with the role of Hamas in the war. Only 11% of Palestinian voiced satisfaction with PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
I would wager that actually means they're satisfied that there's "someone fighting for their rights" rather than they're satisfied with terrorism.
From another article[1]: "Israelis reject U.S. pressure to shift the war in Gaza to a phase with less heavy bombing in populated areas by a ratio of 2-1...Only 23 percent answered that Israel should agree to the U.S. demand "that Israel shifts to a different phase of the war in Gaza, with an emphasis on reducing the heavy bombing of densely populated areas...A full 75 percent of Jewish respondents said Israel should ignore the U.S. pressure"
So it seems the same number of Jewish respondents are ok with the genocide occurring right now. Like I said in another comment, both Hamas and Israel seem to have genocidal intentions but only one side is actively pursuing it at the moment.
[1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-02/ty-article/75...
Translated here: https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1718201487132885246
Viewed from the angle of the West, I think the message it needs to avoid isolating itself from the world is very unusual for Western media and important.
Quote:
"Westerners must open their eyes to the extent of the historical drama unfolding before us to find the right answers."
And
"This Palestinian question will not fade. And so we must address it and find an answer. This is where we need courage. The use of force is a dead end. The moral condemnation of what Hamas did - and there's no "but" in my words regarding the moral condemnation of this horror - must not prevent us from moving forward politically and diplomatically in an enlightened manner. The law of retaliation is a never-ending cycle."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-i-thought-israelis-would....
Apparently, those still supporting Biden will throw human lives under the bus for a more comfortable home life.
Additionally, they have not shown "a reckless disregard for Palestinian people" and they would argue that unlike other conflicts in the region (Syria, Yemen, Kurdistan) they've been incredibly efficient in trying to avoid or limit civilian death.
Still, Gazan's have been dealt a pretty raw deal in that they have been ruled by a terrorist organization which has repeatedly stolen their aid to push their own agenda, and living amongst neighboring countries Egypt, Jordan, that are afraid to take them in lest they bring instability to those governments. Note that in the beginning of this conflict the Egyptians wouldn't open the Rafah border to allow refugees.
Rather, many of the holocaust survivors would instead say that the Israelis are being too nice and not defending the people living in the country from a government in Gaza that has the following in it's charter: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" and "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees."(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp)
[1]https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
I'd need to see links to specific comments, but certainly the flags aren't working any differently than they usually do. The only difference between [flagged][dead] and just [flagged] is the number of flags relative to upvotes; in the former case it would be higher than in the latter case.
Your several comments in this thread seem to be coming from a place of battling for one side against the other. I'm sure you have very good reasons for it, but it's not the intended spirit of discussion here, as I tried to explain at the top of the thread. In such cases, where people have (legitimately) strong feelings on a topic, the temptation to see the mods as biased in favor of the opposite side is almost irresistible. It happens from every perspective on every divisive topic, and this topic is one of the most divisive we've ever seen.
Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-says-it-will...
Killing of white flag wavers: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-palestinian-israel-w...
To make it even more obvious, toggle the "street view" layer over one of these areas and see what gets highlighted.
There is a clear apartness between the neatly-planned Israeli settlements, often built on demolished Palestinian villages, and the organic scattering of indigenous, primarily Arab Palestinian villages. With militarized checkpoints in between. Anyone can see it, if they have the will and a web browser.
[1] - https://earth.google.com/web/search/Hizma+checkpoint,+Sderot...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/16/israeli-authorities-cutt...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_the_British_Mandate_for...
The majority of land purchases were made by the Jewish National Fund. Their aspiration to form a state was explicit and overt.
Or when Israel bombed Gaza two months after the previous cease fire: https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-bombs-gaza-city-...
Judges in England and Wales (including supreme court judges) are selected entirely by unelected officials; The government is explicitly prohibited from interfering with their decision. Given the influential nature of English law, I would be very surprised if this was unique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Appointments_Commissi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_of_the_Supreme_Court_o...
Nobody, including Israelis, will argue about the status of Palestinians living outside of Israel's border, in areas that are occupied (a terminology of international law that Israel also agrees to, https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/occupation ) do not enjoy equal rights to Israelis (Arabs, Jews, Christians and other) living within Israel's borders. During the US occupation of Japan or Germany post WW-II could the Japanese or Germans travel freely to the US? Vote in the US elections? It's true that Americans didn't settle those regions (they built military bases they still maintain so maybe a little).
"often built on demolished Palestinian villages" - I think this isn't generally true in the west bank, if that was what this statement was about. There are certainly demolished villages within Israel's borders (going back to the 1948 war).
White flag: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-palestinian-israel-w... (there is more than one instance of this)
Poison gas is a claim from the family of a dead hostage. They said the pathology report of the death indicated poison gas was being used to clear tunnels. So not confirmed. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-01-22/ty-arti...
Destroying schools: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/24/how-israel-has-dest...
Everything else, including these, are pretty easily searchable if you desire to learn more. I’m phone posting so sorry if this is messy.
> Hamas has previously claimed they would abide by any ruling of the court
No, Hamas previously claimed that they would observe a ceasefire if the court imposed one on Israel, conditioned on Israeli compliance with the same. They didn't say they would do anything related to anything other than an ceasefire order.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolste...
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/14/hamas-israel-palestinian...
- Judge Barak's numbers on civilian deaths on 7th october are simply wrong and could've been easily checked. 766 civilians were killed, 1200 was the total number of deaths (including armed forces).
- Israel's own numbers say "2 civilians killed for every one militant"[1], that's 66% in the Gaza offensive.
- 766 / 1200 = 63.8%
- 63.8% and 66% are indeed close numbers, don't see why would it be flagged.
Of course, the numbers claimed by other NGOs / UN make it worse. But Israel's numbers are sufficient to make that claim.
[1] - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-m...
I absolutely 100% can imagine it. I would go so far as to characterise him as:
1) Pro-Israel:
> On December 6, 2017, the United States of America officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital city of the State of Israel. American president Donald Trump, who signed the presidential proclamation, also ordered the relocation of the American diplomatic mission to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv [...]. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the decision and praised the announcement by the Trump administration.
> Trump's decision was rejected by the vast majority of world leaders; the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on December 7, where 14 out of 15 members condemned it, but the motion was overturned by U.S. veto power.
2) Non-cooperative with Congress:
> The United States federal government shutdown from midnight EST on December 22, 2018, until January 25, 2019 (35 days) was the longest government shutdown in history.
> The shutdown stemmed from an impasse over Trump's demand for $5.7 billion in federal funds for a U.S.–Mexico border wall.
3) Loving to go behind backs:
> Trump reportedly keeps finding a way to meet the Russian leader privately.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_recognition_of_J...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_United_State...
[3] https://www.vox.com/2019/1/29/18202515/trump-putin-russia-g2...
In terms of "colonialism" I don't think it quite fits the strict definition of the word. Again it's a bit of a unique situation. If we compare to Europe many of the borders were drawn as a result of war, and this would be no different. The difference is that in Europe the population might have been expelled (e.g. like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czec... ) and the area annexed. Another interesting history to look at is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_border_change...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protest...
Less recent examples include the violence surrounding the AIM movement in the early 60s and 70s. Protesters have been unjustly imprisoned for decades. There was violence from federal agencies on multiple occasions throughout the time period when AIM was most unified and active.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Movement
Shockingly to many people forced sterilization continued well into the 70s as well, which fits the definition of attempted genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...
There are more examples but these are the most documented and high profile.
It is a social war more than a material one. Residential school policy is an example of this. You may have heard the phrase "kill the indian, save the man". This is a policy of longterm cultural genocide and erasure.
Edit: I also forgot to mention another example which is the passive acceptance of the very high rates of missing and murdered indigenous women. The lack of investigation from federal authorities who are supposed to have jurisdiction over these things implies tacit acceptance of the systematic murder of vulnerable indigenous people.
Can you link some credible references for this?
The OHCHR, as of October 2023, listed 10,000 killed and 18,000 wounded.
https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-civilian-casual...
For that estimate to be off by AT LEAST an order of magnitude as you are claiming requires quite a bit of evidence.
Not Jewish people, a very select subset of that group: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2784649
People are saying that what Israel is doing right now is a genocide. You have seen nothing yet: With either of them at the helm, there would either be an unconditional surrender by Hamas or no Palestinian alive anymore - and by November 15, last year.
We don't do such things anymore, and for good reason, but that means that these past situations are unsuitable as example for the present.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1696896000&dateRange=custom&...
Additional, yes there are discriminatory laws within Israel, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_citizenship_law
And https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/27/israeli-protests-ca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice
> For example, the United States had previously accepted the court's compulsory jurisdiction upon its creation in 1946 but in 1984, after Nicaragua v. United States, withdrew its acceptance following the court's judgment that called on the US to "cease and to refrain" from the "unlawful use of force" against the government of Nicaragua. The court ruled (with only the American judge dissenting) that the United States was "in breach of its obligation under the Treaty of Friendship with Nicaragua not to use force against Nicaragua" and ordered the United States to pay war reparations.[21]
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/is...
Archive version: https://archive.ph/GV14c
> Would 9/11 not be covered because it would be too "reflexive"?
Probably? I'd prefer not to discuss counterfactuals because it's impossible to know.
I've explained at length on many occasions how we approach the question of which political topics to allow or turn off flags on - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I know it's unsatisfying, but moderation of these things is never going to be (and certainly never going to feel) completely consistent. We try our best, but it's not possible, and especially not in hindsight, because moderation is guesswork.
Lost me there, because this is not the framing that matches reality. There were several instances where Hamas was willing to form unity government with Fatah/PLO, to share power, negotiate, to do things like that. It's first and foremost a national liberation movement. The movement itself would not even exist had not been for the occupation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_reconcilia...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full
I didn't read further, because assuming lack of negotiation, lack of pragmatism, of being able to participate in politics semi-normally, etc. is just a crucial point.
Especially while not recognizing intense pressure by the West for this political process to not exist, to suppress it, for it to fail. If you suppress politics, you get violent conflict eventually.
You can find anything from driving tanks over families with children, crushing them to death, and surviving children describing the ordeal, to videos of 9 year old being executed by a shot to the head in the street, to teenagers throwing fireworks and being shot and then finished off while laying on the ground. (in the west bank, even)
As for shooting people holding white flags, even CNN did a feature on that.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/middleeast/hala-khreis-white-...
Or the story of the church lady:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/family-remembers-cheris...
And there's an interview with the son somewhere (the person that is seen running to the woman in the end). I lost the link already, since there's a constant stream of new attrocities on Telegram, and there's no point keeping up.
The ICJ ruled that Hamas return the hostages unconditionally, but everyone knows that won't happen — Hamas is simply unaccountable. "Everyone who wants peace" can't even get the Red Cross access to the hostages, let alone get them returned. Vague calls for diplomacy with terrorist groups doesn't solve much, which is why people are asking you for specific solutions — it's easy to say Israel should stop fighting, but then: what should it do? How would you actually ensure it doesn't keep getting attacked, repeatedly, as Hamas continues to insist they plan to do?
1: Mosul alone had ~10,000 civilian casualties and that was less densely populated than Gaza City and didn't have tunnels: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/thousands-more-civilia...
And it similarly had about 1MM civilians displaced: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/middleeast/mosul-ir...
And that wasn't the end of the fight against ISIS!
https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-army-ordered-mass-hann...
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/25/israels-october-7-propaga...
EDIT: Just want to add that the reality is more nuanced. Naturally Israel affects control over its border with Gaza and Egypt affected control over its border. Israel has definitely refused to let Gaza operate an airport or a sea port and so it maintained some amount of control together with Egypt. That said a lot of how this evolved was around choices made by Palestinians and the rise of Hamas led to the official blockade being imposed. I do think this was an opportunity for Palestinians to demonstrate how they can govern territory controlled by them and be peaceful neighbors which ofcourse did not happen.
Nobody in the former Ottoman Empire did.
> No sovereign country would tolerate a complete blockade of its borders
Plenty of enclave countries exist. The blockade clamped shut when Hamas took power [1]. A coup, mind you, which overthrew Gaza’s fledgling (and flawed) democracy.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip
Like you said, HAMAS exists solely for the sake of resisting Jewish occupation [0], from the river to the sea, which also means the extermination of Israel and Jews [1]. And their conviction stems from their religion, Islam, which allows them to persist despite all the opposition on earth because they are hoping for a reward in heaven[2].
And of course Israel won't allow itself to be exterminated ( hopefully this point is clear enough, no citation needed). So how can there be negotiation?
0. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/ha...
1. https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/From-the-River-to-the-Sea
What claim?
As far as civilian casualty rates go, mid 60s is nothing to be proud of, but square in the middle of the pack when it comes to modern wars [1].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8581199/#B12
The aid was going first to fighters, then to stockpiles, then to the people. To the extent it could be traded for weapons it was. Now we’re seeing allegations UNRWA employees participated in the October 7th attacks [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/world/middleeast/un-aid-i...
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/idf-mistakenly-hit-festival-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%27eri_massacre#Survivors'_t...
[1] The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2017):
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556/thehundredyears...
Using the same broad stroke generalization and similarly de-humanizing moral compass; how do you judge the society these people celebrating child murder, arson, death, riots, mass executions, hateful incitement belong to: https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17237393892624344...
> But that is what will be required to take Palestinian civilians out of the middle of this endless nightmare
One might say, the chief among requirements is for the occupation of a people who have rejected it every step of the way to end. Everything else is a distraction.
IDK what your point is with the Taliban, since they're a different group in a different country that isn't allied with ISIS. (And are unrelated to Israel and Gaza.)
Negotiate, like they did with the PLO before?
The PLO was willing to negotiate and Hamas is not. Hamas has repeatedly said they are not willing to agree to a permanent peace deal with Israel, and have said that they intend to carry out these attacks repeatedly until Israel is destroyed. In this situation, not a hypothetical one where Hamas wants peace, what exactly do you think Israel can do to prevent being attacked?
Democratically elected...
They won the legislative elections but not the prime ministership and subsequently started a massive civil war with the rest of the PA, which ended up in the PA maintaining control of the West Bank and Hamas controlling Gaza. Which is why Israel and Gaza have gone to war many times, but Israel and Ramallah have not — Israel and the PA mutually recognize each other, albeit with a fair amount of mutual enmity.
Bullshit. There was nothing in the resolution that called for war. The most it had said was in tune of - you must comply and if you don't we will report you. No particular enforcement.
the resolution is here - https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/682/26/PDF...
>"it was never firmly established as illegal"
Really? It was an act of aggression. It is illegal by definition unless the UN had explicitly decided otherwise which I believe it did not.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/09/biden-admini... 2. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-25/ty-article/.p... 3. https://www.voanews.com/a/us-aircraft-carrier-to-remain-in-m... 4. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-un-resolution...
https://x.com/jonathan_k_cook/status/1748390405173842099?s=4...
Meanwhile, Josh Paul, a former US State Department official, detailed how a 13 year old kid was raped in an Israeli prison and “The State Department's inquiry into the case resulted in Israeli officials shutting down the charity involved in bringing the case to light.”
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231205-resigned-us-state...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjam...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-m...
Improving the living conditions of Palestinians is almost certainly a necessary precondition to lasting peace, but it is far from sufficient. Unfortunately, we are now stuck in a very stubborn vicious cycle - the Israel-Palestine conflict perpetuates anti-Semitism, which perpetuates the conflict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world
Fatah are somewhat less politically extreme than Hamas, but they are scarcely any less corrupt; within the West Bank, the PA is widely viewed as illegitimate.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/29/palestinian-authori...
Many Palestinians are just ordinary people who want to get on with their lives, but some are fanatics. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it is the fanatics who are in charge. Of course, the same could be justifiably argued about the current Israeli government; the crucial difference is that Netanyahu and Smotrich can (and likely will) be removed at the next election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_I...
Not a wise move.
> opposes recognition... promises war
I think you're confusing Likud's charter with Hamas'?
> uninformed people would swallow
Some say Egypt, Jordan, and Israel equally sabotaged the elections: https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/84509
> Some people wanted to start another front and got crushed
Truly crushed, or rather collective punishment / war crimes were the words you were looking for? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/01/israel-opt-je...
From your second source that seems to not be the case, at least not in serious degree. "Traditionally, Jews in the Muslim world were considered to be People of the Book and were subjected to dhimmi status. They were afforded relative security against persecution, provided they did not contest the varying inferior social and legal status imposed on them under Islamic rule. While there were antisemitic incidents before the 20th century, during this time antisemitism in the Arab world increased greatly." And later, "The situation of Jews was comparatively better than their European counterparts, though they still suffered persecution." There is more detail at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Musl...
Anecdotally, I've heard that before the establishment of Israel, relations between the two groups were much less hostile. Muslims and Jews would, for example, have their Jewish or Muslim neighbors watch over their kids during holy days when they'd have to go to mosque/temple. There is also a long history of Jews being treated fairly well in the Arab/Muslim world - better indeed than they were in Christian lands where pogroms were much more common (it's astonishing how many times Germany, in a state of high fervor, decided that the most appropriate thing to do would be to massacre the Jews again). Again, anecdotally, the "depth of hatred against Jews" in the Arabs I've spoken with has little to do with Jews and much to do with the actions of the state of Israel and what it does in the name of Jews.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palesti...
https://twitter.com/TaliaRinger/status/1738328128999575931
And it's not just Morocco; Yemen for example had official state policy of kidnapping Jewish orphans to forcibly convert them to Islam. Baghdad massacred Jews starting in the 1820s, long before Israel existed. The Damascus affair was in 1840: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair
Dhimmi status is bad! It's not as bad as being pagan in Muslim countries historically, where you could just legally be killed if you didn't convert to Islam. And at times it was better than Europe, which more-frequently murdered its Jews. But it was bad, and it was bad long, long before Israel. There's a reason Mizrahi Jews form the right-wing base in Israel — it's not because it was good.
Except that doesn't seem to the be the case in the context of the time for specifically the Jewish communities living in Muslim-controlled regions? Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi - "Generally, the Jewish people were allowed to practice their religion and live according to the laws and scriptures of their community. Furthermore, the restrictions to which they were subject were social and symbolic rather than tangible and practical in character. That is to say, these regulations served to define the relationship between the two communities, and not to oppress the Jewish population." There's a section on Jews on that page that seems unanimous in the view that while dhimmi status was not as good as being a muslim citizen, it was a better than what they had either before the Muslims took over or what they had available elsewhere. It's weird to label what is generally an improvement in living conditions/social regard as stemming from deep-seated discrimination.
Per atrocities - of course there were atrocities committed against Jews. Just as there were atrocities committed by basically every long-lived group against every long-lived group in their territories. No one is stupid enough to say that Muslims have never persecuted Jews, just as they wouldn't say that Christians have never persecuted Jews, or that Muslims never persecuted Christians, or that Christians never persecuted Muslims, or that those groups never persecuted themselves in schisms and internicine warfare. But the impression that Islam is fundamentally and necessarily opposed to the practice of the Jewish faith is fairly contradicted by even the history of dhimma. As the first paragraph of that Wikipedia page states; 'Dhimmī... is a historical term for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state with legal protection. The word literally means "protected person", referring to the state's obligation under sharia to protect the individual's life, property, as well as freedom of religion, in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of the jizya tax, in contrast to the zakat, or obligatory alms, paid by the Muslim subjects. Dhimmi were exempt from certain duties assigned specifically to Muslims if they paid the poll tax (jizya) but were otherwise equal under the laws of property, contract, and obligation.'
On the other hand, look at how the Jews were treated during the Islamic Golden Age in Spain; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_i... ("The golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, which coincided with the Middle Ages in Europe, was a period of Muslim rule during which, intermittently, Jews were generally accepted in society and Jewish religious, cultural, and economic life flourished."). It's hard to square that with the idea that there is this deep-seated hatred among Muslims towards Jews as the GP stated.
My point is that conflict between the two sides is not inevitable, nor is this idea of extreme latent anti-Jewish sentiment in the Muslim world really true. Purges and persecution that people bring up are probably not caused by ancestral hatred, but rather the same thing that causes every society to suddenly fall into itself in violence and accusation; uncertain economic conditions, unstable political environments, natural disaster, epidemics, war, idiotic rulership, etc.
TLDR: the ways they end are:
- partition
- equal representation
- one side driving out/murdering the other
It does seem like a lot of people have given up on the first two, but if it's not one of those then it's the third one. So we have to work towards making it one of the first two.
"At least two-thirds of the world’s top 50 container ports are owned by the Chinese or supported by Chinese investments, up from roughly 20% a decade ago."[1]
[1] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/experts-warn-of-chinas-inf...
Here's a BBC article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-47286935 and the report that it sources its data from https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Women-in-ISIS-r... if you care to learn more.
There's no retreating in my comment -- it's a fact that they sourced people from everywhere. I threw an asterisk on there at the last second because I wanted to show good faith; there's nothing nefarious about it.
> Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not?
It was definitely a bunch of European guys, and Asian guys, and American guys, etc... my point was that ISIS was a group of people from around the globe and not an ideology endemic to the region.
See my other comment here >>39153097
1. Jews exist in a region.
2. Muslims take over. Conditions improve for the Jews.
3. Time passes.
4. Muslim civilization declines.
5. Internal strife and conflict. Among others, Jews are blamed.
6. Commenters 1000 years later; "This was caused by incipient hatred of Jews by Muslims."
This does not explain why conditions improved when Muslims originally rose to power in various regions. Again, the persecution of minority population is an expected result of the decline of civilizations. From the Wikipedia article your Twitter source is quoting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Moroccan_Jews: "Morocco's instability and divisions also fueled conflicts, for which Jews were frequent scapegoats. The First Franco-Moroccan War in 1844 brought new misery and ill treatment upon the Moroccan Jews, especially upon those of Mogador (known as Essaouira). When the Hispano-Moroccan War broke out on September 22, 1859, the Mellah of Tetuan was sacked, and many Jews fled to Cadiz and Gibraltar for refuge. Upon the 1860 Spanish seizure of Tetouan in the Hispano-Moroccan War, the pogrom-stricken Jewish community, who spoke archaic Spanish, welcomed the invading Spanish troops as liberators, and collaborated with the Spanish authorities as brokers and translators during the 27-month-long occupation of the city." This is a nation in decline, lashing out at every perceived cause of trouble, like plague-stricken Europeans slaying cats and dogs and flagellating themselves.
Here are some other quotes from that article;
"The golden age of the Jewish community in Fez lasted for almost three hundred years, from the 9th to 11th centuries. Its yeshivot (religious schools) attracted brilliant scholars, poets and grammarians. This period was marred by a pogrom in 1033, which is described by the Jewish Virtual Library as an isolated event primarily due to political conflict between the Maghrawa and Ifrenid tribes."
"The position of the Jews under Almoravid domination was apparently free of major abuses, though there are reports of increasing social hostility against them – particularly in Fes. Unlike the problems encountered by the Jews during the rule of the Almohads (the Almoravids' successor dynasty), there are not many factual complaints of excesses, coercion, or malice on the part of the authorities toward the Jewish communities."
"During Marinid rule, Jews were able to return to their religion and practices, once again outwardly professing their Judaism under the protection of the dhimmi status. They were able to re-establish their lives and communities, returning to some sense of normalcy and security. They also established strong vertical relations with the Marinid sultans. When the still-fanatic mobs attacked them in 1275{note; no source for this on the Wikipedia page, no link; unable to find what this is referring to}, the Merinid sultan Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Abd Al-Haqq intervened personally to save them. The sovereigns of this dynasty benevolently received the Jewish ambassadors of the Christian kings of Spain and admitted Jews among their closest courtiers."
This is not what I would expect of a civilization that is fundamentally racist towards Jews. I would not expect, for example, a Louisiana governor in the 18th century to appoint a black man to be his advisor, yet we see Jews in the position of vizier in Morocco. This does not square.
Racism is not the most useful lens to view this relationship through. The culture of the Middle East is low-trust compared to post-Enlightenment Western societies. There remain sharp social divisions based on old tribal allegiances in even developed nations there (unsurprising, perhaps; there remain living people who remember that this tribe used to be slavers and that tribe killed our uncle and so on). Lashing out at neighbors who one thinks are being treated too favorably has little to do with race or religion, in my experience, and more to do with envy. It is the narcissism of small differences writ large and exacerbated by actual stakes.
Children are detained for years under this law.
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/20/bezalel-smotrich-jordan-gre...
This is incitement.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-67926799
Denying access to water is a war crime, and is acknowledged to have happened here.
There are links here, where are yours to prove your assertions?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-concern-for-humanitarian-...
According to Omer Bartov, scholar of genocide, the criterion for genocide is that there is intent to commit genocide:
The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-gaza-genoc...
There are numerous articles in the press reporting on mass graves of Palestinians killed in the war, in Gaza. For example:
Palestinians digging mass graves inside al-Shifa hospital, health official says (14 November 2023, Al Shifa hospital)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/14/people-flee-no...
Bodies are being buried in a mass grave at Gaza City’s largest hospital, health officials say. (14 November, Al Shifa)
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/14/world/israel-hamas-g...
More than 100 Palestinian bodies buried in mass grave in Gaza (22 November, Khan Younis)
https://news.sky.com/video/more-than-100-palestinian-bodies-...
"All the cemetaries are full': Palestinians buried in a mass grave in Gaza (23 November, Khan YOunis)
https://www.reuters.com/pictures/all-cemeteries-are-full-pal...
Israel Gaza: Drone shots show Palestinians buried in Rafah mass grave (26 December, Rafah)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-67825385
etc etc.
Strawman - I explicitly referred to those hostages that were members of the IDF.
> Conflating the hostages to the Israeli prisoners is terrorist rhetoric
Ah, so anyone who disagrees with you is a terrorist? I see you.
You're also implying that all hostages held by Israel were involved in the attack on 7/10 - blatantly untrue. Several Israeli soldiers are on camera saying they take Palestinians hostage purely so they have something to exchange with Hamas - this has been going on for years.
> Red Cross was pretty useless and one sided against Israel.
I'm sorry, but this is the kind of nonsense that spokespeople (like Eylon Levy) and career racists (like David Colier) like to espouse - everyone who disagrees with Israel's genocidal actions is an antisemite and/or Hamas lover. "The Red Cross are Hamas". "The UN are Hamas". Honestly, it's pretty pathetic.
On Israeli guards torturing and raping Palestinian prisoners, including children, there is a wealth of evidence and many, many video interviews with victims. Here is just one story: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-cr...
I struggle to believe this is really a comment by a "commander in the IDF". Such a person should know that the use of civilians as human shields by one side does not absolve the other side from taking every precaution to minimise harm coming to those civilians.
Risk to civilians does not bar military action, but the principle of proportionality requires that precautions be taken to minimize the harm to these protected persons. This analysis includes considerations like whether circumstances permit the attacker to time a military action to minimize the presence of civilians at the location.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shield_(law)#Legal_doctr...
Specifically, saying the IDF doesn't target them, they're just in the way, is a cynical denial of that responsibility.
Further, a commander of the IDF would remember the proverb about throwing stones when living in a glass house: there is extensive documentation of the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by the IDF. See for example the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead (2009):
10. The use of Palestinian civilians as human shields
55. The Mission investigated four incidents in which Israeli forces coerced Palestinian civilian
men at gun point to take part in house searches during the military operations (Chapter XIV).
The Palestinian men were blindfolded and handcuffed as they were forced to enter houses ahead
of the Israeli soldiers. In one of the incidents, Israeli forces repeatedly forced a man to enter a
house in which Palestinian combatants were hiding. Published testimonies of Israeli soldiers who
took part in the military operations confirm the continued use of this practice, in spite of clear
orders from Israel’s High Court to the armed forces to put an end to it and repeated public
assurances from the armed forces that the practice had been discontinued. The Mission
concludes that this practice amounts to the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and is
therefore prohibited by international humanitarian law.
Despite Israel's claims Hamas does not use civilians in this way. Instead they fight from built-up areas and make it difficult to distinguish combatant from non-combatant. They "hide among civilians" but they don't "use them as shields".
Those houses are full of people and there are estimated to be thousands of dead under the rubble.
Thousands of bodies lie buried in Gaza’s rubble. Families dig to retrieve them, often by hand
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-11-17/bodies...
Under the rubble: The missing in Gaza
Finding the 7,000 Palestinians believed buried under collapsed buildings is becoming increasingly difficult.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2023/12/28/under...
‘Scarred for life’: the families still seeking dead amid Gaza rubble
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/25/scarred-for-li...
etc etc.
I can't find that video online. I can find a video that shows a tunnel, allegedly under Al Shifa, and ending in a blast door.
IDF publishes footage of what it says is Hamas tunnel at al-Shifa hospital
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/19/idf-israel-arm...
I cannot find any "hard to watch" video of "commando units raiding" the tunnel. Do you have a direct link to such a video?
Note that the claim was not that there was a "significant [ward?]" under the Al-Shifa hospital. The claim was that Hamas had its headquarters under Al-Shifa.
For example, this claim was made by Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, in an interview with Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC, where Isaac Herzog claimed IDF is not actually attacking Al-Shifa:
[my transcript]: Undrerneath Shifa there is a huge huge terror base, actually the headquarters, the headquarters of Hamas Isis operations is right there under Shifa.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67397963?at_med...
So far, no such "yuge yuge terror base" has been found under Al-Shifa, or under any of the other hospitals targeted by the IDF.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxEqXkdJUWY&ab_channel=Insid...
Mokay, but then can I grumble? I've posted several articles on the subject of the alleged genocide of the Palestinians by Israel's IDF, here on HN I mean, and they all got flagged and not unflagged. I took care to post opinions on both sides of the subject, e.g. this public statement by "over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies" warning of potential genocide [1], and this NYT article by historian of genocide Omer Bartov, saying that genocide is not in evidence ("yet") [2].
[1] >>38036236
[2] >>38228704
Those are articles by scholars who discuss the subject in the most dispassionate manner imaginable (Bartov is particularly a pleasure to read for his level-headed and erudite analysis, although it's obvious he'll find it very hard to admit genocide by his country which he clearly loves) and I'm pretty sure that means they satisfy the "curious conversation" goal you, dang, hold sacred (and it's good that you do).
So what's up? I've been posting this stuff for months and now the subject has exploded in mainstream discourse with the ICJ case, which makes it even more emotionally charged than before. Wouldn't it have been better to get a chance to discuss this before it got to this point?
And while I appreciate there's not one side that HN favours, the ability to flag anything anyone dislikes shapes the discourse in the way vocal minorities prefer.
Sorry for grumbling. I hope you know I respect and admire the work you've done to keep HN on the straight and narrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_I...
Netanyahu is basically done and gone. His only hold on power is continuing the extermination campaign against Hamas and their families, until some miracle reversal in the polling numbers. His only mandate currently is for the "war".
Additionally, Israel doesn't need to compromise, due to large amount of outside support (in the form of material and political (vetoes in UN SC, etc.) support for its extermination campaign, and the sanctions against Hamas), and due to the massive power difference between it and Hamas.
Biblical stuff is largely a smokescreen/justification for pragmatic matters as far as government/politics goes. And maybe some ideological food for non-secular reserve soldiers to be more willing to go get maimed in Gaza.
How did it turn biblical, with 45% of Israeli Jews being secular, and 27% of population not being Jewish?
It is also important to remember that Israel did not exist before 1948. There was a lot of violence that occurred against Palestinians during it's formation -- within 2 generations of the current generation -- rapes, murders, displacement. I recommend watching the documentary film Tantura which outlines some of this. There is some pretty horrific stuff... 70 year old Israeli men laughing about old stories of raping women. Feeding men their own cut-off genitals etc. There is a reason the "Nakba" is not allowed to be mentioned in Israel.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16378034/
There also seems to be only a very basic understanding of the political realities behind why Hamas exists in this forum. "Big bad boogeyman Islamic terrorists" vs "Secular free modernity" is a stupid way to look at this. The Israeli government does not want a Palestinian state. Hamas was very much uplifted by the Israeli government since as early as the 80s because they delegitimize the idea of a free Palestine in the international sphere. They are easy to negotiate against because they are extremists. Even given their extremism, Hamas does not want to "genocide Jews" -- this is another absurd claim that is propagated but has no basis.
Hamas is also not ISIS. They are a resistance movement against an occupying power that uses violent means to influence political realities. This is dirty dirty work and many horrible things happen when you give 20 year olds AK-47s. I don't support it. But the existence of Hamas is very much an expected outcome of military occupation. It is interesting to note that the founder of Hamas was 8 year old when he saw 15 Palestinian men executed at point blank range by Israeli soldiers. He is also a pediatrician and a geneticist.
In general, I think people on this forum view terrorism through a very childish lens. It's a bit like calling everything a "programming language" ... well yeah maybe C++ has some similarities to Typescript ... but they are very different beasts. Osama bin laden and Hamas may have shared political objectives and ideals but they are not completely equivalent.
To summarize my feelings: Israel has definitively built a great civilization -- but we musn't equate that with some sort of moral cleanliness. Hamas is a terrorist organization -- but we musn't equate that with a lack of real grievances.
The statistics don't lie: Israel has killed more women and children in 100 days than any other recent modern military conflict. It has used more munitions than the US did for the entirety of the Iraq war. It's a ridiculous response that, given the context above, is nothing short of genocide.
“In 638, Palestine came under Muslim rule with the Muslim conquest of the Levant. One estimate placed the Jewish population of Palestine at between 300,000 and 400,000 at the time.[87] However, this is contrary to other estimates which place it at 150,000 to 200,000 at the time of the revolt against Heraclius.[88][89] According to historian Moshe Gil, the majority of the population was Jewish or Samaritan.[90] The land gradually came to have an Arab majority as Arab tribes migrated there. Jewish communities initially grew and flourished. Umar allowed and encouraged Jews to settle in Jerusalem. It was the first time in about 500 years that Jews were allowed to freely enter and worship in their holiest city. In 717, new restrictions were imposed against non-Muslims that negatively affected the Jews. Heavy taxes on agricultural land forced many Jews to migrate from rural areas to towns. Social and economic discrimination caused significant Jewish emigration from Palestine, and Muslim civil wars in the 8th and 9th centuries pushed many Jews out of the country. By the end of the 11th century the Jewish population of Palestine had declined substantially.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
You make it sound like they were treated like equals and then only discriminated against many centuries later in a decline. But really, history shows us that they were initially treated well for a few years as they had just been conquered (a classic historical power solidification move) but were then treated terribly the entire rest of the time under Muslim conquest.
> The Hannibal Directive (Hebrew: נוהל חניבעל; also Hannibal Procedure or Hannibal Protocol) is the name of a controversial procedure that was used by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) until 2016 to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces. According to one version, it says that "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces."
> Israeli newspapers have reported that the IDF was issued orders echoing the wording of the Hannibal Directive during the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. The IDF was ordered to prevent "at all costs" the abduction of Israeli civilians or soldiers, possibly leading to the death of a large number of Israeli hostages.
I'm not really aware of much European support for Zionism outside the Balfour declaration in those years. The declaration remained a declaration and pretty soon the Brits flipped their policy and banned Jewish immigration. You had tiny movements of Christians Zionists (Churchill was a Zionist for instance) but I'm not aware of any substantial support they gave. After the war the big immigration waves were actually from Middle Eastern Jews, not from Europe. Jews from Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria etc etc whose lives became increasingly dangerous. So my main point is its quite unclear if there was any major support for Zionism in the West in those years. Only after the holocaust could you find a majority that supported establishing Israel in the UN.
If you want to dig into this look into where Israel got its weapons from during its war of survival in 48: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_shipments_from_Czechoslov.... From the communists.
Holy shit that's burying the lede. Do you know what happened in Palestine, specifically Jerusalem, at the end of the 11th century?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade
"On 15 July 1099, the crusaders made their way into the city through the tower of David and began massacring large numbers of the inhabitants, Muslims and Jews alike. The Fatimid governor of the city, Iftikhar Ad-Daulah, managed to escape.[16] According to eyewitness accounts the streets of Jerusalem were filled with blood. How many people were killed is a matter of debate, with the figure of 70,000 given by the Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir (writing c.1200) considered to be a significant exaggeration; 40,000 is plausible, given the city's population had been swollen by refugees fleeing the advance of the crusading army.[17]
The aftermath of the siege led to the mass slaughter of thousands of Muslims and Jews which contemporaneous sources suggest was savage and widespread and to the conversion of Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount into Christian shrines.[18][19]
Atrocities committed against the inhabitants of cities taken by storm after a siege were normal in ancient[20] and medieval warfare by both Christians and Muslims. The crusaders had already done so at Antioch, and Fatimids had done so themselves at Taormina, at Rometta, and at Tyre. However, it is speculated that the massacre of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, both Muslims and Jews, may have exceeded even these standards."
And yes, the various Muslim powers at the time were in steep decline; if they weren't, they should easily have been able to defeat an army as poorly organized as the First Crusade was. The fact that just before the crusaders arrived, every powerful leader in the region died is basically the closest they came to actual divine intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_villages_dep...
Imagine the sort of intentional targeting we don't get to see, because the journalists are killed [1] or the internet is cut [2] or the power is cut [3] or because everyone hiding is terrified to even move, knowing anything moving will be shot on sight [4], even surrendering Israeli hostages [0]. What a nightmare.
Known (indeed, willing) indiscriminate killing of civilians (especially in civilian areas, yikes) is as much a war crime [5] as "intentionally targeting civilians", even if one shouts "get out of there!" or "human shields!" or "terrorists!" or "it's comin' right for us!" in a Calvinball-style declaration whilst doing it.
For more detailed analysis of how Israel seems to be ignoring their obligation to protect Palestinian civilians, I recommend consulting the full ruling [6] from the ICJ, the literal judges of this matter.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/world/middleeast/israel-h...
1: https://cpj.org/2024/01/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-...
2: https://www.wired.com/story/israel-gaza-internet-blackouts-w...
3: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-middle-east-67073970
4: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/16/middleeast/idf-sniper-gaza-ch...
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiscriminate_attack#The_1977...
6 (PDF warning): https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
The entire article is about how nobody buys Abbas' excuses (the other link is similarly not relevant to the discussion).
"A Journalist asked him" "how many children, how many people could be killed, to justify this operation? Is there an upper limit, where you think this is just to much this does not compute this does not add up?
"That congressman, couldn't give a number. And I thought to myself, -that man has been corrupted. That man has lost himself. He's lost himself in humiliation. He's lost himself in vengeance. He has lost himself in violence.
I keep hearing this term repeated over and over again "the right to self defense"
What about the right to dignity? What about the right to morality? What about the right to be able to sleep at night?
Because I know that If I was complicit, and I am complicit, in dropping bombs on children. In dropping bombs on refugee camps. No matter who is there. It would give me trouble sleeping at night, and I worry for the souls of people who can do this, and can sleep at night." -Ta-Nehisi Coates
Edit: sorry this took me so long. Here are my thoughts based on past experience:
It's not helpful to look at other accounts as "propagandists", "trolls", "bots" (or "shills", "astroturfers" or all the other similar terms internet commenters use), because there's no reliable way to distinguish between someone who is arguing for views they earnestly hold vs. someone who might be engaged in a propaganda campaign. The majority of commenters are sincerely arguing for what they sincerely think. A few may be doing something more sinister—but most people don't do such things, and there's no way to pick out the ones who are. Trying to pick them out will drive you crazy. Moreover, it doesn't matter in the end, because everyone is ultimately working with the same tool: arguing things in comments. Even the propagandists can't do more than that.
When people feel like someone else is a troll, propagandist, or bad faith actor, it's usually because that person's views are so distant from your own that it seems like nobody could possibly hold them in good faith. In reality, what's usually going on is that people on the internet underestimate how different each other's backgrounds are. It feels like you're talking to someone who is either insane or lying, but most likely you're talking to someone whose background is so different from yours that it's hard for the two of you to relate to each other. I wrote about this last year, if anyone is interested: >>35932851 .
I think the only way to handle this is by responding to bad arguments with better arguments and to false information with correct information—and to do this as neutrally as possible. Focus on clear information, and try not to let your feelings turn into aggression toward the other person. This is not easy, but it's in your interest to do it, because when commenters get aggressive with each other, fair-minded readers recoil.
For extra influence, if you can manage it: look for a way to connect with the other person, acknowledge some aspect of what they're saying, and implicitly make it clear that you're not trying to defeat or destroy them, but rather to understand. This is a big multiplier on how persuasive your comments become.
As for leaving bullshit unchallenged, I know it's hard to walk away from a thread that one feels is dominated by falsehood and distortion, but walking away is sometimes the most effective thing you can do. Here are a few thoughts which I try to remember in such situations:
(1) The internet is wrong about approximately everything. You can't change that, and you'll burn out trying.
(2) The one who walks away first usually comes across as stronger.
(3) Other people are not that different from you. When someone seems crazily wrong, they're most likely not bad or evil, but ignorant: they don't know what you know because they haven't experienced what you've experienced. For this reason, sharing your personal experience is probably the most effective thing you can do.
(4) When other people say things that produce strong feelings, try to let the feelings run their course in you before coming back to react. This is painful and hard, but it's in your interest.
"During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted and about 400 Arab-majority towns and villages were depopulated;[3] with many of these being either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jewish residents and given new Hebrew names. Approximately 750,000[4] Palestinian Arabs (about half of Palestine's Arab population) fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba#:~:text=During%20the%2....
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/s/YO2FAvEcNN
How can you defend this blatant killing of a civilian waiving a white flag?
The usual pattern is that flags come from a 'coalition' of users: some because they hold opposing views, while others just think the story doesn't belong on HN. Maybe they think it's off-topic or otherwise against the site guidelines, or they think the story has already been covered a lot recently, or who knows what.
I took a look at the flags on your two submissions. They followed this pattern. I saw one user whose flagging history looked primarily political, but only one—less than I expected to see. Among the others, here's a sample of other stories that at least one of those same users has flagged:
An Open Letter to the Next School Shooter - >>31721682
Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving - >>33732913
“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline” - >>34707305
Call Girl in Calangute Beach Escort Service And91-9319373153 - >>35927067
Humanity Just Witnessed Its First Space Battle - >>38195174
Did Ancient Rome Have Windows? - >>38733970
Joe Biden Plans to Ban Logging in US Old-Growth Forests in 2025 - >>38779191
Pregnancies from rape occurring in abortion-ban states - >>39147669
Gazan civilians have told Hamas was preventing them from leaving combat areas - >>39160294
As you can see, there's a range of topics there (all the way to outright spam) and possible motives for flagging. The last one is interesting because unless I'm mistaken, it has opposite politics to the articles you posted. This is a sign of what I mean when I say that not all flaggers are politically motivated.
So that's the flagging side; now for the admin side:
First, we can't moderate anything we don't see and we don't come close to seeing everything. There's just too much. If there's an article you (or anyone) think particularly deserves consideration, I can always be reached at hn@ycombinator.com and I'm happy to take a look.
When deciding whether to turn off flags, one thing we consider is whether a story is substantive enough to provide a foundation for a thoughtful discussion rather than a flamewar. (On a topic like the OP, the odds are sadly awful no matter what the article is, but it is still an important consideration.) I hear you that you think your posts met this condition—I haven't read them, but let's say that's correct. The thing is, it's not a required one. There are other concerns as well.
For example, we have to consider how much the topic has been covered recently, and how much coverage of it HN can 'take' without showing signs of breaking under the strain.
People have wildly diverging views about how much is too much. For some users with strong feelings on a topic, no coverage can ever be too much; any limitation at all must be proof that the mods are biased against it. For other users, any coverage is already too much and proves the mods are biased against them. So it goes.
It's trickiest when there's a major ongoing topic that goes on for months and generates a series of stories. We can't just say "no, HN covered that a couple months ago" if there has been a significant state change; but we also have to be careful not to let many follow-up articles onto the front page (e.g. articles that repeat what has already been discussed, perhaps adding some minor twist or opinion take, or media outlets circulating their own version of the same story), because they'll use up the community's 'attention budget' for that story, leaving nothing for later.
For example in 2013, the Snowden saga dominated HN's front page—there were so many follow-up articles that when something important did happen (e.g. when he finally left Hong Kong or whatever), it got drowned out, or bogged down in the "I'm so sick of all these posts" complaint that repetition inevitably generates on HN.
The principle we ended up settling on was the Significant New Information (SNI) one: does the new submission count as SNI in the sequence of threads that have already happened? SNI can mean some objective new development in the story; or it can mean something with enough of a diff from previous related submissions to count as a somewhat different topic.
There are other considerations too, for example about HN as a whole, which is a different scope than a particular topic. But this comment is already too long, so I'll skip those, and anyway I wouldn't be able to remember them all.
Putting all of the above together, your submissions got flagged by regular users for regular reasons, and we either didn't see them or decided not to turn off the flags, probably not because the articles weren't substantive enough, but rather because either (1) the topic had had a major thread recently; or (2) we didn't think they cleared the bar for SNI. I'm just speaking generally because I don't have any memory of those posts.
I'm afraid I've given a false impression that this is all somehow orderly or co-ordinated. It isn't. It's random and ad hoc, and various random factors (like whether we see something at all) are at least as significant as all this stuff. It's not a repeatable process. Moreover, we just make bad calls sometimes—especially in hindsight. Some of it is accidents of timing. People are far too quick to infer general patterns from specific data points they observe. That's true about everything on HN, but it gets more true as the emotions are more engaged.
I have one last thing to respond to in your comment:
> I've been posting this stuff for months and now the subject has exploded in mainstream discourse with the ICJ case, which makes it even more emotionally charged than before. Wouldn't it have been better to get a chance to discuss this before it got to this point?
I don't think that's right. It was just as emotionally charged before, and threads about those articles you posted would have ended up in the same place that this thread did, as did the earlier threads in this sequence. So no, I don't think it would have been better to discuss before it got to this point; I think it's the other way around—by waiting till this point, we at least had clear grounds for having a thread, since there's no question that this was SNI.
Historian Martin Gilbert writes that it was in the 19th century that the position of Jews worsened in Muslim countries.[38] According to Mark Cohen in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, most scholars conclude that Arab anti-Semitism in the modern world arose in the nineteenth century, against the backdrop of conflicting Jewish and Arab nationalism, and was imported into the Arab world primarily by nationalistically minded Christian Arabs (and only subsequently was it "Islamized").
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Ott...
TL;DR: ISIS was not "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized." It was mostly people from the Middle East and North Africa: somewhere between 75-93%. 95% MENA is probably not correct either, but it's much closer to correct than your original claim.
I still suck at this in practice but I'm sure of it in theory!
(I'm working on a longer reply to you at >>39158911 , but I can't resist replying here too because I feel like I figured this one out after 15+ years of frustration.)
>Scholars don't blame the Ottoman anti-Semitism on economic malaise, but instead point to it being imported by Christian Arabs from Europe
So this was not a latent feature of Islam or Muslim culture, but an import from a more anti-Semitic culture (of course, the word Semitic here is not quite correct, given that Arabs are also Semites - I don't know why that word is preferred when the actual meaning being conveyed is anti-Jewish). The original poster I was responding to said this;
>the issue of anti-Semitism long pre-dates the establishment of Israel
Perhaps that poster only meant that anti-Jewish sentiment rose in the region a few decades previous, but the most common way I have heard of that belief, it comes from a "clash of civilizations" mindset that holds that the region has been rabidly anti-Jewish for many centuries.
Also, to your point that the Ottoman Empire only began declining in the 20th century, see https://www.britannica.com/topic/decline-of-the-Ottoman-Empi...: "But the grandeur of the Ottoman Empire did not last, and Süleyman’s rule was followed by a slow and arduous decline that spanned nearly four centuries."
I'm not sure what you mean when you say things about "latent feature of Islam or Muslim culture." I do not think cultures are predetermined by hidden latent variables unique to them and are unrelated to their environments, and so that if something was introduced to the culture environmentally it somehow doesn't count. Similarly, European culture was once much less anti-Black a thousand years ago, and so anti-Black racism isn't a "latent feature" by the same standard. Nonetheless we can look at how cultures are
1. today, and
2. in the recent past
And see that anti-Black racism is now endemic. Similarly, anti-Semitism has been common for hundreds of years in Muslim societies, and blaming it on Israeli statehood is a non-sequitur since it has existed for less than a hundred.
If you insist on searching for hidden variables that are independent, I will point out that the Quran says that Jews are majority treacherous and "you will always find deceit on their part, except for a few" [2]. But of course, much of the Quran is simply a reference to the Christian Bible (e.g. references to the Jews killing Jesus [3], who Islam considers a prophet), so is it truly "latent" or is it an import from Christianity? Ultimately cultures are not machine learning models trained independently from each other on separate hardware; everyone steals from everyone else, so I think the distinction isn't meaningful. There has been significant anti-Semitism in the Muslim world for a long time, and it was endemic long before Israel existed. I reject victim-blaming the Jews for Muslim anti-Semitism due to the Jews creating Israel.
1: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...
Absolutely. I'm not against scrutinizing anything. Like I said about this specific case - the people most aggrieved and most understanding of the situation is Israelis themselves, since we're talking about cases where Israeli citizens were killed while trying to kill militants. It's absolutely something the Israeli press should explore and something that the Israeli public should and will hold the military accountable for.
It is not, however, something that should be used to "score points against the IDF" or whatever- if the affected citizens themselves are not against the way this was handled, a third party using it as some kind of way to show that "the IDF is evil" or whatever is a bit silly (and, btw, insulting).
Nor is this something that should be used to conclude that "actually, Hamas didn't really kill so many people" - which is clearly false based on vast troves of reports of people killed by Hamas, much of them filmed.
---
In this case, bitter experience shows that Hamas doesn't release captured citizens without horrible costs - last time, for one soldier, Israel released 1,027 prisoners, including the person who just masterminded the October 7th attack. This time, 100 hostages were eventually released for a much more favorable-to-Israel exchange, and in exchange for a pause in the fighting - which some people take as a sign that the fighting pressured Hamas into accepting this deal.
> I don’t think that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” is an actual policy by any country.
It is - though it's complicated, many European countries do in fact negotiate, the US less often. I've heard reports that it isn't clear which policy is actually better in terms of number of captured civilians.
Quoting Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_negotiation_with_te...
> On June 18, 2013, G8 leaders signed an agreement against paying ransoms to terrorists.[1] However, most Western states have violated this policy on certain occasions [...] These payments were made almost exclusively by European governments, which funneled the money through a network of proxies, sometimes masking it as development aid
> Some Western countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Britain, tend to not negotiate or pay ransoms to terrorists. Others, such as France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland are more open to negotiation. This is a source of tension between governments with opposing policies.
> In fact not negotiating seems like a horrible policy which only serves to maximize unnecessary suffering. It may be a good policy if you believe that the lives of the hostages is worth less then the blood of terrorists, or if you are actively trying to spew hatred towards terrorists among your electorate.
That's not the point at all! The point is to make it so that capturing hostages is meaningless - disincentivizing doing it in the future.
Many people in Israel warned, when deciding about that 1k-priosners-for-1-Israeli-soldier deal, that it would cause Hamas to really put effort into kidnapping more Israelis. Well - it happened - and a lot of people consider this proof that that previous deal was a "mistake".
> [Israel's government is] actively trying to maximize the perceived threat of Hamas, and don’t mind Palestinians as a group being dehumanized in the process. In the eyes of the Israeli government, the lives of the hostages are worth the cost as long as the perceived threat level increases. Their end goal is to justify annexation in the best case scenario or ethnic cleansing or genocide in the worst.
You're talking about this as if it were a coherent response calculated to benefit the government. The decision to shoot at fleeing terrorists was probably made under incredible duress, possibly by field commanders and not the government (I'm not sure), while Israel was experiencing the worst attack in 50 years, possibly since its founding. There was no way of knowing if this was the opening salvo of a much broader attack that would've strained Israel much farther than ended up happening.
Whatever you think of this government aside, these specific decisions were almost certainly not made in a calculated way to "justify annexation". (And I very much dislike this government, to put it mildly.)
It is a complete misunderstanding of the situation to think that the government needed to make the threat of Hamas seem larger at the expense of Israeli citizens.
Personally I'd rather non-tech world news stay off HN completely but I'm calling it out because as someone who is up on world news I see quite a double standard unraveling here and that seems unfortunate.
The part about "institutional capture" is obviously right, but the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) NGOs exist exactly in order to support and promote IHL. And it's a standard that when an IHL NGO speaks out against Israel's actions, Israel's or its supporters' response is to say that the NGOs are Hamas. That's where the main "hit" to those NGOs' reputation has come from.
You can see this tactic also in the defense Israel mounted to South Africa's case at the ICJ, where they basically accused South Africa of being in cahoots with Hamas [1]. In the most extreme form of this "defense", everyone is Hamas. I was watching this interview with Alan Dershowitz [2] where he says Doctors Without Borders have been recruited by Hamas, Unicef and Unesco have become voices for Hamas, and even the climate movement and Greta Thunberg is a mouthpiece for Hamas:
https://youtu.be/04ZdRUFITnw?si=T3Y4dUekvv4kfVgr [3]
And you know who is not Hamas, and therefore has credibility, according to Alan Dershowitz in the same video? The US State Dept., the UK, "some" of the other European countries, and Germany, and an academic who's a friend of Alan Dershowitz (although he disagrees with him). So, everyone who agrees with Israel's positions has credibility, everyone who disagrees is Hamas.
That is not NGOs lacking credibility because they adopt, say, a left-learning position, it's Israel and Israel's supporters doing their damnedest best to claim that those organisations have no credibility because they speak out against violations of IHL, which is what they exist to do, when it's Israel that violates those.
Well, the same NGOs have no hesitation to condemn Hamas' atrocities and violations of IHL, or the violations of IHL of any other nation-state or non nation-state actor [4]. That's what they constantly do. To quote Andrew Stroehlein, of Human Rights Watch, "If you only care about war crimes when your enemies commit them, then you don't really care about war crimes." [5]
__________________
[1] Ask me if you need a reference to that, I don't have one at hand.
[2] The interviewer in that clip is also extremely partisan, no question about that. Also, it's a vile smear to identify Dershowitz as "Ex-Trump and Epstein lawyer", as if that's all he is.
[3] Full interview: https://youtu.be/O2UJgI0P-zk?si=fU8hWVszQyu7LJU_
[4] Numerous examples; ask for refs if you need.
[5] https://twitter.com/astroehlein/status/1716111114340049389
I just wrote a long explanation of how we approach the question of flags on stories like this: >>39161344 . If you read that and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to hear it.
If you do read it, you'll notice that one factor is whether there has been a major thread about the topic recently. That's important here because the current enormous thread isn't even 2 days old. HN can't handle a major discussion about this topic very often. So while I've turned off the flags, I don't think another story about this topic should be on the front page yet.
If it helps at all, before I saw your comment I was just responding (by email) to someone asking why >>39160743 was flagged, and I answered the same way: that is, (1) I turned off the flags, but also (2) explained why HN can't have another frontpage thread about this two days after the last one.
I know a pair of cases is a small sample but I hope it can count as a sign of how we try to be even-handed. I've learned the hard way that it's simply impossible to avoid perceptions and accusations of bias on divisive topics; even the most neutral moderation is going to generate such perceptions (actually it's worse than that—it's going to generate more). I'm not claiming to be at that level but I can tell you for sure that we do work hard at being even-handed.
1: E.g. this man who actually did convert, immigrated to Israel, and then was jailed and beaten by the PA when he tried to visit his family in the West Bank https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-convert-to-judaism...
Israel is not launching airstrikes or displacing millions or doing anything remotely similar in the West Bank. There is targeted fighting as there often is with tens of Hamas-aligned militants dead. Every time there has been a major war in Gaza for like the past 20 years there has been nothing similar happening in the West Bank, and that's because Hamas does not control the West Bank and Israel is fighting Hamas. Ramallah does not look like Mosul right now and it hasn't in any of these repeated conflicts with Hamas, and Gaza has and does.
The last negotiations between the PA and Israel were broken off by Israel because the the PA and Hamas both agreed that Hamas should be involved.
No, Hamas never agreed to be part of peace negotiations. Israel broke off talks when Fatah and Hamas talked about merging governments in 2014 — not Hamas agreeing to be part of peace talks, which they never have — while the Hamas charter still included explicit calls for genocide of the Jews. Hamas has never stated that they are willing to make a permanent peace deal with Israel, and if they had, I would love to see one of you provide a source from Hamas saying that they are willing to make a permanent peace deal: I've been very willing to provide sources for Hamas official's frequent calls for the total destruction of Israel, e.g. https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-official-says-group-aims...
Look for the analysis by Scott Ritter on Youtube.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hannibal+protocol+haaretz
I do not think outright murder of civilians was the goal of the October 7th attack.
Israel is a small country with very few degrees of separation between people.
The communities attacked are highly organized, hate the current government,somewhat critical of the establishment, and closely connected to the highest ranks in the IDF. Including some generals. And also connected to many of the fighters who were there on the ground.
There is absolutely zero chance that the army would kill many people and that it would be kept hidden from the families and the public in large.
Also, Hamas was not merely taking hostages, but spraying people with bullets and setting houses on fire with families in them. So your SWAT team dillema means nothing, as the army had no other option other then engaging with the enemy as fast as possible. The fact that in many places special forces were indeed sent to carefuly deal with hostage situations is being criticised as it may have wasted time in which the Hamas was killing more people, and people who were trapped in their homes got choked or burned.
The better strategy may have been to charge at the terrorists, as their numbers and whereabouts were unknown and while some were holding hostages others were still moving around in cars or by foot looking for hostages to take or victims to kill.
The only confirmed friendly fire case during October 7 that I personally read about was a tank that entered into a fire exchange with Hamas hostage takers.
40 terrorists and 15 hostages were surrounded in a house at Be'eri, Firing at IDF and police forces that surrounded the house.
After a failed negotiation in which the Hamas commander alone surrenderd with one hostage, fighting resumed.
The Hamas members were firing with guns and RPGs at the tank and nearby forces.
The Tank fired two shells at the house killing the terrorists and all but 1 of the remaining hostages.
This is the Hebrew wikipedia page about the battle. https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%A9%D7%AA_%D7%9...
Soviets occupied lands more developed than them. They did not fail to invest, they looted the lands, for example the Uranium from Czechoslovakia [1].
[1] https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-historiques-de-l-electr...
Non-combatants, including US intelligence have concluded your country is: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/plan-one-month-gaz...
Or are you saying they weren't 'bombed' because they were tank shells?
Look up the actual definition of genocide. You're on the wrong of this.
1. xkcd 386: Someone is wrong on the Internet: <https://xkcd.com/386/>
2. Woozle's Epistemic Paradox: as epistemic systems become more prominently and widely used, they also become more attractive targets to those who would choose to manipulate them. See: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230606193813/https://old.reddi...>
3. More generally, all informational channels become battlegrounds, as noted by von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, numerous evolutionary biologists, and others. I've been slowly making my way through Jeremy Campbell's The Liar's Tale which is a big-picture look at this.
4. HN really isn't optimised around truth but conversation, and more specifically sustainable conversation, grounded in intellectual curiosity. There are numerous topics on which HN really is unable to have meaningful discussion (perennial ethnic conflicts are amongst these, as are other political hot topics), and its general tone-policing and penalisation of high-tension topics tends strongly to a status quo bias. (I've criticised HN for this often, despite an increasing awareness and appreciation of why those rules exist, see e.g., thread here: <>>39023516 >.)
5. Reporting blatant trolling and suspect motivations to HN mods does often work. Email to hn@ycombinator.com and link directly to the offending content and/or user, with a clear but succinct description of the problem.
6. Voting (up or down) and flagging also have their place. For sufficiently contentious threads this may well lead to something of a high-attrition zone, but often the really egregious crud does sink to the bottom. I find that higher-rated comments tend to be more anodyne than insightful, though occasionally truth does out.
7. I've found that rather than direct engagement, either supporting a counterthread, or writing your own well-reasoned and well-supported counter-thread, is often suprisingly effective. Remember that yours is always the last comment when you write it, though a thread may well have additional life. Sometimes my late efforts prove far more successful than I'd expected, and often I'll see that others have succeeded where I've either failed or failed to try. And again, supporting others' salient and productive engagement even where you don't have time or energy to contribute is highly underappreciated.
8. You don't have to attend every fight you're invited to.
9. Truth is not a popularity contest. Voting systems ultimately don't select for truth or importance, and expecting that from sites such as HN or Reddit will prove disappointing.
10. The meaningful audience is typically not who you're responding to directly, but the overwhelmingly silent majority reading rather than contributing to discussion.
Just like the Nazis destroyed Jewish homes.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/01/world/middlee...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/01/world/middlee...