I suspect similar for "The Quebequois" and Canada. The Scottish and the UK.
On a surface level it doesn't say much.
I'm all for human rights, individual rights. I agree that there is a basic floor of those rights which should be respected on either side of the partition, and everywhere else. But rights of a group of people to act as "a people" with a state, and control over a contiguous block of territory, seems way less credible.
Does every civilian have a right not to be bombed or shot at or have power and water cut? Yes. Also rights to be treated equally before the law, not be subject to arbitrary detainment, fair and public trials, etc.
But "a people" as a group having rights? Would Catalonia, Veneto, Wallonia etc have a "right" to be separate states if their populations desire it? Unclear. What if Afrikaners tried to assert such a right? Seems sus. Did people inside the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone have rights to create it? Probably not, even if they had organized a plebiscite first. So where's the line?
Let's face a simple truth, Israel has no plan for Palestine but refuses to let it go. They are not winning this except by ethnic cleansing.
We can imagine a State of Palestine stabilizing eventually, but we can't imagine how Israel can ever stabilize its roofless GULag camp.
Since then Hamas established a brutal dictatorship taking all of the inhabitants of Gaza as hostages. Freedom of speech? Nope. Women‘s rights? Forget it. Gay rights? Of course not. Taxes and international monetary support was side channeled to establish an underground military force using hospitals and schools als command centers. For decades they fired rockets on Israel civilians and still Israel let them going on. Until they crossed the border last year killing hundreds of civilians and even took over a thousand of hostages including children.
When you insist Gaza being „Israel‘s gulag camp“ you are being delusional, put yourself far outside any civilized discourse and make yourself essentially a supporter of a truly criminal and violent gang.
I wish Gaza people all the best but their only hope for freedom is the total and utter destruction of Hamas‘ network of terrorists.
Gaza is still militarily occupied. Israel controls the flow of goods and people, prevents Gazans from leaving the territory, uses violence and collective punishment against the civilian population, and discriminates against Palestinians.
> For decades they fired rockets on Israel civilians
for decades, the people of Gaza have been subject to apartheid. i don't agree with violence but claiming that Israel has the moral high ground here is ridiculous considering that Palestinian civilians have been terrorized since 1948.
> even took over a thousand of hostages including children
"An estimated 10,000 Palestinian children have been held in military detention over the past 20 years, with Save the Children noting that they are "the only children in the world who are systematically prosecuted in military courts.'"
yes, taking children as hostages is horrible. but your focus shows your bias and leads me to believe that you're not arguing in good faith.
> their only hope for freedom is the total and utter destruction of Hamas‘ network of terrorists.
we know this is absolutely false because this ethic cleansing predates the creation of Hamas. Israel was in fact involved in the creation of Hamas and supported it in the early days as a way to prevent the left-wing PLO from taking power.
in short, your "argument" completely ignores history and the context of this conflict.
Of course, Israel protects its border against a region that keeps sending assassins and rockets. You simply can not establish an open border if you want to control the smuggling of weapons and suicide bombers! That may create hardships for Gaza civilians working in Israel but you cannot blame Israel for that.
> for decades, the people of Gaza have been subject to apartheid
No. For decades Palestine‘s politics is driven by hatred of Jews and not love for their own children. Israelis would love to live in peace with their neighbors (and for some of them they do). But as long Palestinian politicians aim for the eradication of all Jews in the Middle East there can never be peace.
> „An estimated 10,000 Palestinian children have been held in military detention“
Because Hamas have strapped bomb belts around their children!
> we know this is absolutely false because this ethic cleansing predates the creation of Hamas.
„Ethnic cleansing“? Really? What do you think what Hamas would do to the Israeli people if it were successful in their aim to „destroy Israel“? If Israel wanted to „clean“ Gaza from Palestinian people they would have done air raids around the clock. Instead they sent ground forces to try to minimize civilian casualties. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to target Hamas fighters if their hide in schools and hospitals …
> leads me to believe that you're not arguing in good faith
I think you make it yourself way too easy and chose to conveniently side with your perceived „underdog“ — while the underdog happens to be a wolf claiming to fight for freedom of the people of Palestine while in fact what they do is rob Gaza from any perspective of sustainable peace.
I am not saying you should uncritically endorse everything what the state of Israel does but you should be stepping back for a moment and reconsider your uncritical sympathy for the devil.
yes, you can! Israel created and enforces the apartheid state that all Palestinians suffer under. again, you're ignoring history.
> For decades Palestine‘s politics is driven by hatred of Jews and not love for their own children
this is not a religious war. jews co-existed with muslims in palestine before israel existed. to reduce this entire conflict down to "Palestinians are so anti-semetic that they hate jews more than they love their own children" is truly insulting to not only the Palestinian people, but to the intelligence of whoever you spout this to. and AGAIN, complete ignorance of history.
> Israelis would love to live in peace with their neighbors
their "neighbors" are the people they're oppressing, whose people they are murdering, whose land they're stealing.
yes, ethnic cleansing. i'm sorry that you've been brainwashed with so much propaganda that you believe that every hospital in gaza in a hamas command center, but the rest of the world can easily see through this. see also: the UN vote.
israel _is_ doing raids around the clock. they've killed over 20,000 people.
> I think you make it yourself way too easy and chose to conveniently side with your perceived „underdog“
none of this is "easy" or "convenient". it's horrific to witness atrocities being committed daily, to experience anti-Arab racism, to be called a sympathizer with the devil for advocating for the lives of innocent civilians, and to worry that doing so can and will get you fired and blacklisted.
the "underdog" is Palestinians, not Hamas. your inability to separate the two is your own failure. i side with oppressed people and liberation movements, not settlers and colonial states.
I think you tried to engage in goal-post moving, by arguing that Israel has not "occupied" Gaza following the "disengagement", which is not directly tied to the "Gulag" label you were disagreeing with. While I think the claim that Israel was not occupying Gaza during this period is literally true, this is only because international legal definitions of occupation have multiple specific requirements. Though Israel was not stationing soldiers inside the territory, and was not running a sole government in the territory, it has still had enormous control. Imposing a blockade by sea, air and land for years on end, and continuously imprisoning Palestinians without charge or trial, is technically not "occupation", but it is an enormous projection of state force over a territory that Israel claimed was not in its control. Perhaps it's not "occupation" as defined in international law -- fine. So let's come up with a new word for it, but continue to recognize it as abusive.
In that context, talking about the rights of women and gays inside Gaza seems like bad faith whataboutism; if Israel cared about their rights and equality, it could let women and queer people living in Gaza leave.
You conveniently ignore why Israel has been controlling Gaza’s borders. Because it is ruled by Hamas since 2007 misusing their power to build up an armed terrorist origanization instead of a country. And they keep attacking Israel’s territory. If Israel had established an open border policy (which they had when they were actually occupying Gaza) last year‘s massacre would have happened already years back.
I keep getting criticized for „ignoring history“ but your post is a very good example how the self-proclaimed supporters of Palestinians, here, are constantly engaging in cherry-picking the historical facts trying to win their arguments. Israel haters should really step back for a moment at least and consider who they are supporting and what cause.
I have no objections to Israel trying to control the flow of dangerous individuals and materiel across its own land. Why should it have a right to block sea and air access? Why should it stop the flow of ordinary goods? Nowhere have I recommended open borders; there are lots of options between open borders and the blockade system.
I'm not actually a supporter of Palestinians. You'll note that I started this sub thread arguing that the UN resolution talking about right of a people to self-determination doesn't seem coherent. But I am a supporter of human rights, and this is a situation in which there seem to be many serious violations.
Well, except Hamas won the last elections held in Gaza way back in 2007.
Moreover they won on the promise that they would seek a peaceful resolution with Isreal and they were (at that time) clearly the better of the only two realistic choices.
The Hamas of 2007 was not the Hamas of last year.
(BTW: The elections were held in January 2006 — not in 2007 as I have stated above.)
[1] https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=c0e0eae4...
Hard fact Israel cleared out of Gaza 17 years ago and since then the Palestinians have let themselves be ruled by a terrorist organization. So doesn't seem like the Palestinians should be allowed to have their own government. Normally the solution to this sort of problem is they'd be handed over to some other government. Problem is no one wants the headache.
The hard reality is the Palestinians are a couple of million people that can't get their shit together vs 30 million refugees many of whom are in grave danger not of their own making.
After 50 years of paying attention to these guys I really can't care anymore. And that's really what everyone else should do. Because if no one cared about them anymore they'd have to deal with their own shit.
Why not? Isn't that an universal right? How are Sudanese or Lebanese better than Palestineans in that regard?
Your attention is worthless because it did not led Israel to implement two-state solution. What would you want? Retirement benefits?
Contrast with Lebanon where despite everything that have some form of practical government. Sudan where it is an internal civil war. I'll point out there was far more refugees in Sudan than Palestinians. And most of those unlike the Palestinians are blameless. By rights every dime we give to the Palestinians should go to them instead.
"They" is doing a lot of work here. Who is "they"? Half of the population of Gaza are under the age of 15. "They" keep electing terrorists and keep starting wars.
> They should get what every other group gets when they do stuff like what they did on Oct 7th.
Again, "they". What other group? Name them. Name one. Outside of what the Nazis did and how they rationalized it. Outside of how terrorist groups rationalize and attempt to justify what they do.
> This too does the for a totalitarian environment so well prepared vernacular express in its own way when it no longer speaks of "the" Russians or "the" French, but tells us what "the" Russian or "the" Frenchman wants.
-- Hannah Arendt
So cause the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet right now..
https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue...
.. blow up infrastructure and make fun of that...
https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17317722618482647...
https://twitter.com/ireallyhateyou/status/174329670657626944...
https://twitter.com/ytirawi/status/1743411493813575711
.. and then "they" will... stop being radicalized into terrorism?
And while you're at it, attack refugee camps in the West Bank? Because children who weren't even born in 2006 elected terrorists in Gaza, and enough is enough.
Nonsense. And everybody know it is.
> "In the context of de-legitimization - Hamas is an asset (for Israel) and the Palestinian Authority is a liability"
-- Smotrich, https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1741196470399783296
> If we act strategically correctly, there will be immigration and we will live in the Gaza Strip. We will not allow a situation where 2 million people live there. If there are 100-200 thousand Arabs in Gaza, all the talk about the day after will be different. They want to leave, they have been living in the ghetto for 75 years and are in need"
-- Smotrich, https://twitter.com/GLZRadio/status/1741347524693127398
So if you keep electing people who are murdering civilians to commit ethnic cleansing to take over the land, or keep electing leaders that supply those other leaders with weapons to do that, and then, as an adult, go on a forum to re-iterate that you personally agree with it, that's fine. But kids in Gaza, they have to pay for what they did.
Yeah all the Hamas members who went on a spree of rape and murder on Oct th were children in 2007. What happened? Hamas and their parents ruined them that's what happened. So now they have to be killed. How was that future fair to them in 2007?
Why would you want to let Hamas do that to the next generation. How is that moral?
And on top of all that, which is grave enough, you simply ignore everything I posted that demonstrated this is about wanting to take over the land. Netanyahu and his right-wing ilk treated Hamas, you now use as an excuse to commit wanton mass murder like clockwork, as an asset precisely for that reason, to be preferred over the moderates.
If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban your account—that's standard HN moderation practice and has been for many years: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I understand that this topic is unusually important and also unusually distressing, but what your account is doing is not ok on HN; and that, btw, would be just as true if you were on the opposite side of the issue.
A long time? A few comments in the last week. Do I owe you token comments on other subjects? I am reading, I just haven't seen anything I had anything to say about in the last week. This is the subject I currently am learning about.
For example, on that Ultima thread, I wrote a long comment and then didn't post it because I am too sad and too appalled. I thought fuck this, IDF soldiers brag about bombing schools so kids can't become engineers, and I'm posting some derpy nostalgic anecdote?
So? I don't owe you or anyone comments pretending everything is alright.
What a weird, arbitrary criticism. So now, whenever I say anything about this subject, I'm out? Or is there a quota?
I can only say as vaguely defined and as arbitrarily applied the terms you use are, it's just whatever. I tried my best, I refrained from personal attack and generally posted less than when you talked last to me, that's all I can do, if you want to ban me for not posting enough filler, just do it, it's fine. But when it's justified in this Kafkaesque way -- as "standard" as it may be -- I simply can't follow and can't care.
> if you're relating to what the other person is saying, remaining respectful
How did I not do that here? If someone brings up morality as an argument, and with this issue in general, morality is on the table. It's not a discussion about tabs vs. spaces.
As I read your comments, you have routinely been crossing over the line into disrespect and even getting aggressive. Of course this is a matter of interpretation, affected by differing cultural standards and whatnot, but I think most HN readers would perceive your comments this way—at least to the extent one can factor out political agreement/disagreement with them. I realize that the topic lends itself to this (to put it mildly) and that other users are also doing a lot of it. But that's why the guidelines say ""Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.".
Even just taking your GP comment:
* beginning with "What $thing?" is already abrupt and signals hostility - this is the kind of thing the guidelines mean when they say "don't cross-examine."
* "You are currently shrugging off the $horrible" is pejorative and personal, and immediately ups the ante.
* "with that broad brush racist talk" - again pejorative and personal, and escalates further
* "And on top of all that, which is grave enough" - more rhetoric of cross-examination
* "you simply ignore everything I posted that demonstrated" - similar
* "you now use as an excuse" - again pejorative and personal
* "you now use as an excuse to commit wanton mass murder" - WTF? This reads as if you are accusing the person you are talking to of that. If so, that's completely beyond the pale. More likely your sentence here was confusingly written, but that too is against the site guidelines, because getting carried away with such rhetoric is the opposite of what commenters should be doing. After barraging the other person with that many swipes, tropes, and denunciations, I would expect the person on the receiving end of that to react extremely badly, and this would largely your fault for commenting so aggressively.
I'm quite aware that (1) lots of other people are posting like this, (2) the topic lends itself to it, and (3) the topic is important. But I'm not aware of any other commenter who has been posting this much about it while breaking the site guidelines so frequently, even indiscriminately. This is not ok.
I hope it's clear from the fact that I've given you several extensive replies, trying to explain these things, that I don't want to ban you—partly because of the three factors I just mentioned—but you're making that a lot harder than it ought to be.
While I agree with PG that this outcome should be jarring and force Americans to consider why our country has taken the positions it has, I think we also have to interrogate the resolution. What does a right to self-determination mean? Who gets to be a 'people'? If such a group is not unanimous in what they want, what does self-determination at the group level mean? When multiple such groups attempt to 'self-determine' in ways which are clearly in conflict, what does it mean for the international community to recognize such a general right?