Alright, let's do this thought experiment. Replace words like Israel and Palestine in the article with countries in Africa. Something like "Water pumps running off of solar power in Kenya, provided by a German start up are being removed by the local government". Would that be acceptable for HN? I am 80% confident, we wouldn't see all this discussion about how the story should have been flagged and or how it is totally unacceptable for HN.

So now ask yourselves, why is it different all of the sudden if we put "Palestine" and "Israel" back in the article.

Could it be that some here have an irrational and knee-jerk responses to that particular region of the world? If so, maybe that is an interesting discussion. How come a group that fancies itself more rational and straight thinking than others, has such strong biases one way or the other? Why is there so much discussion about this topic.

Are people driving an article down and flagging it as "inappropriate politically" not because they are trying to keep HN pure but because their own disguised biases are telling them to act that way.

> why is it different all of the sudden if we put "Palestine" and "Israel" back in the article.

Because it's a traditional flame-bait subject and will never produce useful discussion. Sure, some of the things you mention would be interesting, but this article does not discuss those, and even if it did discuss those the comments would still have very dull repetitive flame-baiting; and they would be the same comments seen for many many years.

> but because their own disguised biases are telling them to act that way.

No, it's just a really un-interesting topic for HN. As other people have mentioned there are much better places for this article. 4chan, or reddit, for example.

A big problem with this kind of topic is that, as you say, people have strong, irrational responses. In other words, it is toxic. It brings out awfully unpleasant people and brings out the worst in otherwise decent people. This is why we are especially unwilling to indulge this particular diversion from topic. It is harmful to HN. I don't fault you for your interest in discussing it, but feel very strongly that it should be elsewhere.

Then maybe another level of discussion is how come so many HN readers (and I've said this in my other posts, so apologies for sounding like a broken record) who fancy themselves rational and unbiased all of the sudden exhibit such a strong irrational response. Where does that come from? Is it brainwashing? What is going on? In other words I agree with you that topic might be toxic and that it bring out bad people, but I am interested in why does it bring out "the bad" in good people? Why not just say "meh, don't want to participate" and/or "don't know enough to form an opinion" and move on...

It may not actually be bias but fear, that this may get flamey if discussed in the HN-wrong context(israel v palestine).

Coincident: A leading human rights figure got a lot of flak for writing a newspaper article saying that our (kenya's) next president will not be from the same ethnicity as the current. Not a wrong fact just a speculative opinion but because people are touchy when it comes to talking(in public only) about ethnicity since the last bloody elections, people were calling that an incitement and (this is now a media buzzword) 'hate speech'. Question is: can we hn-ly discuss a related topic without getting into the touchy and flamey parts? Far shot but if someone noticed something hn-worthy(like a data pattern or a behaviour pattern) in something as off-HN as say lolcats, will it be impossible to talk about it?

I was banned for an critical comment on Apple. So I can tell you that their biases is not disguised anymore.

And now I have just been banned for this comment despite 4 upvotes...

And I can see that user "babbling" has been banned for this comment :

"Except that the Israeli Palestinian conflict is interesting to a lot of people and Hacker News tends to have more civilized discussions than some other places"

This doesn't feel right.

Israel is not the West-Bank government. Well, we can argue on that. But that makes your comparison inadequate, at least in my opinion.

But I'm here questioning the value of the discussion. If the Kenyan gov. removed the solar plants then there should be some reason, and that's worth discussing. I don't think that any (sane) gov. would remove solar plants providing free energy?

The value/(probability to start a war) of the article is close to 0. That's why I flagged the article. It's still my opinion, and I gave my argument. Certainly, I'd respect the HN community choice of what to discuss and how to discuss it.

Yes, let's just bury anything YOU disagree with. You're complaining about someone posting something and then say that they should post the very thing you accuse them of.

Do you think we should just ignore the human rights abuses that Israel is committing against the Arabs?