I remember 20 years ago, during the first bombing of Gaza, they hit just ONE building and felt pressured enough to apologize for the handful of civilian deaths. Unfortunately, faced with larger threats (real or imaginary) and weak international pressure, Israel has been able to escalate the level of deterrence through the years to what we are witnessing now.
That is why any ruling to curb that "automatic" escalation (like today) is wholeheartedly welcomed.
IMO there are also subtler layers of racism coloring these policies. It's not as blatant as the far-right rhetoric, but a persistent undertone within elements of Israeli society justifies severe deterrence tactics and totally overide any empathy learnt from historical lessons.
I am certain that you have very legitimate reasons for feeling strongly. Whatever your reasons may be, I respect them. At the same time, posting in a thread like this has to do with how one manages one's feelings: do they express themselves in (let's call it) a weaponized way? if so, that's against the intended spirit here. Or can you post in a way that is somehow larger than that? No one can be asked to do the latter, but I do think we can ask commenters to refrain from posting if they can't get there.
I am certain that you have very legitimate reasons for feeling strongly. Whatever your reasons may be, I respect them. At the same time, posting in a thread like this has to do with how one manages one's feelings: do they express themselves in (let's call it) a weaponized way? if so, that's against the intended spirit here. Or can you post in a way that is somehow larger than that? No one can be asked to do the latter, but I do think we can ask commenters to refrain from posting if they can't get there.
Past experience has unfortunately made it clear that moderation needs to be relatively active on topics that are as divisive as this one. I wish it weren't so.
You're far from the only person who has been posting that way, but it's what we're trying to avoid here.
The Israel-Hamas War is entirely a response to this event.
What I can add is that this is indeed not just a "larger" threat for them. It "activated" a millennium-deep Jewish trauma (through pogroms up to the Holocaust). Deep, very deep.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
Remind yourself, this is the UN: https://youtu.be/narPqy6TXhQ?feature=shared
I’m not even sure what accusation you deny. Quote the accusation I made you have a problem with.
The history books don’t mention the Nakba and civilian casualty statistics in Gaza are dismissed as Hamas propaganda.
And I don’t mean to suggest Israel is unique in this. There are many parallels for instance with American “world police” patriotism.
I think recent events have taught this to Israel without any help from propagandists.
So the combination having to destroy Hamas and the unwillingness of other countries to take refugees is terrible for hapless civilians.
Problem is history shows "temporary" displacement tend to become permanent displacement (AKA Ethnic cleansing) under the current settler-apartheid regime ruling Israel, so other countries understandably refrain to abet ethnic cleansing.
Why should other countries bear the burden and costs for a problem that is overwhelmingly a consequence of the actions of the Israeli state in general, and the current far-right government in particular?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...
I don’t understand why people think this is a good argument. Lots and lots of places shifted in control since 1948. Poland moved half a country to the left, world empires got decolonized, India and Pakistan split and then the latter split once more, all with enormous population movements, the list is nearly endless. “All of that should revert to how it was before, even if at the cost of kicking out or killing everybody who live there” is a pretty extreme revisionist take.
In all these countries, “we should restore our borders to $maximumSizeEver” is widely understood to be a far right take (the Russians want Ukraine, the Greater Hungary people want Transylvania, the Greek neonazis want Trabzon (!), everybody wants Kashmir, etc etc etc). It’s a far right talking point. But for Palestine it’s somehow a mainstream opinion. I don’t get it.
I mean, there’s lots of good arguments to be made for the Palestinian case IMO but I don’t find “they once had more land and therefore they should get it all back no matter the consequences” very compelling.
Karelia is another one. Whether or not such situations are resolvable peacefully is entirely up to the nations involved.
I don't see why revanchism gets a free pass in the specific case of the Palestinians.
Do you also think Lviv should be Polish? And Wrocław German? And Trabzon Greek? No wait I mean Armenian, which do we even pick, seriously everybody wants Trabzon! Should the entire Arabian peninsula be Turkish again?
Where does it stop? Why should Palestine be restored to its one-time borders but not the rest? All this happened in a time when moving populations around at the whim of a few imperialist rulers was considered a super normal thing to do. That doesn't make it right, but the Nakba isn't a particularly unique historical event. Get over it, and focus on the actual current events that are also bad, such as the settlements, decades of effective imprisonment of everybody in Gaza, and so on. There's plenty of good arguments! But "from the river to the sea" is a far right revisionist talking point and in my opinion it does an enormous disservice to the Palestinian case.
There is now no real Palestine state and no realistic prospect of one. Somewhere between 5 and 8 million Palestinians are now condemned to be extremely unwilling subjects of an endless military occupation by a hostile state and reduced to second class status in their own homeland.
_That_ is the crucial difference.
It's really not very nuanced at all - if you want to kill or deport all the Jews, even when formulated in fluffy terms like "give those poor Palestinians their homeland back", you're not really trying to make the world a better place are you? You'd be just like those far right Israelis who seem to want to kill or deport all the Palestinians. It's the exact same vibe, just aimed in the other direction. They're both the baddies. Don't be like them.
woah! dial it back there. I advocated no such thing
please take a few deep breaths and read slowly over the thread making note of who said what. then please reconsider slinging accusations like that around.
I'm in favour of a two state solution.
My main point is that the long term actions of the Israeli state, especially in the West Bank, have made the viability of a Palestinian state (i.e. one in coexistence with Israel) completely impossible.
> When you occupy someone's land, there can never be peace until they get their land back or are fully exterminated or controlled militarily
This is advocating for destroying an entire country and deporting or killing the people in it. This is the context in which I read your comment, because you came to their defense. I read your comment as explaining why you thought their comment was a perfectly OK one.
I'm happy to read you don't actually agree on this with them, and I think we pretty much agree.
not to argue, but I want to be really really really clear on this. I did not come to their defense. Please see my direct reply to their comment.
ANYWAY I think you made your point clear and we agree, sorry for messy edit commenting here :)
There was never a real Palestinian state. Locally there were Egypt and Jordan, two states that still exist in the same way that Finland does.
And in fact, the Zionist argument is exactly that one: "because there were some Jews here 2000 years ago, this land must be a Jewish ethnostate". Why is that argument ok, but "there were Arabs here 80 years ago" is not?
Because, in reality, both arguments are stupid and tribal to a level rarely seen after 1950. Both should join modernity and move to a shared state - not based on XIX century racism, but on XXI century respect for democracy, religious equality, etc etc.
Unfortunately, the side with (atomic) power refuses to even countenance the possibility, because of a tribalistic ideology that shames some of their magnificent ancestors. And so we continue with an eye for an eye, like in the darkest of times.
Note: Gaza and West Bank are not Israel.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/27/israeli-protests-ca...
This is a huge one too:
They want vampires? That's bold
Zionists were living in the area long before British Mandatory Palestine or the Balfour Declaration - they bought land and legitimately immigrated there while it was under control of the Ottoman Empire. The UN chose to partition the region in 1947 due to ongoing violence on both sides - and the British actually voted against it I believe. The Arab states then chose to go to war against the newly formed Israel - not the other way around, as your comment implies.
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.
If I sell you my land, does that make it right for you to form a separate state with it? Perhaps I would rethink that decision with the advance knowledge of your intentions.
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.
And I can certainly think of some other ethnicity in that region who that ethnicity cleansed from the region according to their own holy book. :)
Deuteronomy 20:16-17 (God telling Joshua, leader of the Israelites, to go to war)
> 16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.
Slightly more seriously (Though only very slightly more seriously :)), IIRC our current understanding of history is that the jews are Canaanites. Quoting from Wikipedia "Ancestors of the Israelites are thought to have included ancient Semitic-speaking peoples native to this area.[59]: 78–79 Modern archaeological accounts suggest that the Israelites and their culture branched out of the Canaanite peoples through the development of a distinct monolatristic—and later monotheistic—religion centered on Yahweh.", so at the very least one of those peoples survived until today :)
That's very much not true.
Compromises are possible and are often the only way. Do I need to start listing examples?
I think you could add assimilation to this list. In this particular instance though, it looks almost entirely unlikely (due to Israel being fundamentally defined as a Jewish state).
If the lesson is "Everybody wants to kill us and the only solution to safety is to have a nation state and defend at all costs against any other group", well it just all make sense. Of course this is not the conclusion of every jew in the world but I fully expect it to be the conclusion of post WWII zionists, even though it was not the case for a lot of them that were influenced by socialist ideas but lost influence and power with time.
Of course the strategy of always planning for aggression in order to come up on top is somewhat self realizing in that defending your dominant position will necessarily mean abuses of power and resistance to it.
So the lesson is "Better safe than sorry" although it's not that simple because there is actually a safety cost to pay to maintain such a strategy.
Ignored? No, most of that administration actively encouraged and fostered Hamas for years and years. To their mind, it was better for their aims to build Hamas into a hardline organization, and more appealing than the alternative, which was a Palestine which was (slowly) becoming more open to compromise, more diplomatic (around the end of Arafat).
It pushed their nationalist agenda further to have a boogeyman in the form of Hamas, than to have to answer awkward questions like "Palestine is being very reasonable and open, so why isn't Israel?"
So people that engage in colonialism end up doing similar crimes. Israel remains probably the only old school colonial project in the present day with present day technology, backed by the U.S. empire to secure geopolitical interests in the oil-rich region among other things.
Something to think about: America is also a genocidal settler-colonial project and is one of the only nations to back Israel in the UN. Our genocide is still ongoing: visit a native american reservation and witness the immense poverty. Similarly to Gaza, the US state will simply say that despite being an occupying power, these are autonomous zones and we have little responsibility.
It does not absolve many, including self-proclaimed Zionists, from criticizing some of Israel policies.
On other hand, my interpretation of people who are self-proclaimed anti-Zionists logically flows from above statement that they believe that the present state of Israel DOES NOT have a right to exist. Which implies deportation of extermination of 6 million Jewish Israelis
In my opinion, the word Zionism has been hijacked by activists who know that being anti-Jewish is not good optics, but anti-Zionizm is still something that can be sold to the masses.
I think the framing of this argument is so tricky, because states don't have any rights. States aren't human beings. There is so much to unpack in the statement "X state has a right to exist".
> On other hand, my interpretation of people who are self-proclaimed anti-Zionists logically flows from above statement that they believe that the present state of Israel DOES NOT have a right to exist. Which implies deportation of extermination of 6 million Jewish Israelis
I am not saying that Israel's borders should be dissolved, but if Israel and Palestine were integrated into a single state where Jews and Arabs had equal rights, would this not still be a home for Jews?
Destruction of the state of Israel is not equivalent with the genocide of all Israeli Jews, unless your definition of genocide is the same as the one used by white supremacists in the US, who believe that letting non-whites into the country is genocide.
The point I am trying to make is that is Zionism, by your definition, exclusionary? If so then what you are describing is an ethnostate, which many would argue is a fascist idea.
Jews, Roma, Kurds, and all ethnic minorities deserve human rights. However, they are not entitled to statehood and their states are not entitled to any rights themselves.
Also, I do agree there are antisemites who say "zionism" as a dogwhistle for "jews".
Do you think it's realistic that if Israel is replaced by a new state tomorrow that has a majority arab muslim population it won't quickly become somewhat theocratic and enforce some degree of religious law against people of other religions? I think this outside view of a one state solution pretends the entire population of Israel believes in some sort of Western Democratic values and will provide a strong foundation of individual rights. I just don't see good evidence for that.
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
The state of the debate on this problem is so shockingly bad, it dishonours the long tradition of superb Jewish intellectuals.
I don't know that Turkey has zero discriminatory laws against non-muslims, but they managed to operate as a secular state for almost 100 years before Erdogan.
> Do you think it's realistic that if Israel is replaced by a new state tomorrow that has a majority arab muslim population it won't quickly become somewhat theocratic and enforce some degree of religious law against people of other religions?
I have no way of knowing this.
> I think this outside view of a one state solution pretends the entire population of Israel believes in some sort of Western Democratic values and will provide a strong foundation of individual rights. I just don't see good evidence for that.
Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein both agree with you on this point, and I tend to agree with them. My argument was not that a one-state solution was viable, but I was trying to get the OP to say if their idea of Zionism was exclusionary or not.
Personally I do not think that a one-state solution would be possible unless mass de-radicalization took place, because Israeli ethno-nationalists see coexistence as genocide. I think the most viable option is a two-state solution, where a competent Palestinian standing army could hopefully force some sort of detente.
This argument is used to shutdown legitimate criticism of a multi-generational occupation, land theft and discrimination. Those things are not inherent to being Jewish. So the distinction holds.
Here's a piece on it:
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/one-democratic-state-pale...
If this sounds very similar to "great replacement" fears in US and Europe, it's because it is based on the exact same principles: the concept that a state's ethnic composition should be fundamentally immutable, and it's legitimate to fight against any threat to this immutability with discriminatory laws (or worse).
Unsurprisingly, that means that the European right, these days, have largely dropped their traditional antisemitism, and will happily share a platform with the Israeli government. The fact that a purposely Jewish state now cooperates with the heirs of Hitler and Mussolini should surely appear revolting to Israeli citizens. Alas, it does not.
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...
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."
That's part of why they're acting this way. Security fears. I'm telling you, the median Israeli isn't motivated by bloodlust or a desire for land, they're motivated by a high level of fear that they will one day be killed by Hamas/Hezbollah/etc. That fear causes them to demand complete "security control" of the West Bank and Gaza. That fear explains why they would not budge on allowing Palestinians an army as part of previous two-state negotiations. That fear explains why they would give back the Sinai but not the geographical high ground of the Golan Heights. That fear explains why the Israeli Left completely collapsed after the Second Intifada. They're happy to give part of the West Bank back in two state negotiations, but they would never, ever, allow Palestine an army. Because of security fears. The Palestine-Israeli conflict is this positive feedback loop caused by a desire for security conflicting with a desire for freedom. We're in the terminal doom spiral phase of this feedback loop right now.
I wouldn't use the term propaganda account for several reasons, one of which is that on any divisive topic, no one agrees about what counts as 'propaganda'. People mostly use that word to refer to points they strongly disagree with. In that way, it's a lot like the word censorship. For moderation purposes, it's better to use different words so we don't get tangled in definitional arguments.
But it's against HN's rules to use the site primarily for political battle (among other things), and when an account does that repeatedly and ignores our requests to stop, we usually end up banning it. I did that a while ago in this case.
Fascism does not "just stop". You can already hear the far right wingers claiming that Israel also has a right to expand into Lebanon and the Transjordan. Ironically looking at how Germany was radicalized is really useful for understanding how Fascism has taken hold in Israel.
The thing is, I personally can’t relate to any of that. It’s just like reading a book or watching a movie. It’s just so far removed from my reality. I think you greatly overestimate the impact of the holocaust on modern day Jews.
This is your error. States and peoples are not unitary entities with a single coherent outlook and will. The vast majority of the Israeli population is far too young to have directly experienced the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago. There are plenty of people in Israel who do not want to commit atrocities against Palestinians. There are also people who feel that they have a (literally) god-given right to occupy the territories where Palestinians currently live. If you think of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet as being basically the same people who survived Nazi concentration camps in World War 2, then nothing Israel is doing in 2024 will make much sense.
To my mind, Israel's actions toward Palestinians (both in Gaza and the West Bank) are powerful evidence that nationalism inherently leads to atrocity no matter who's involved. If the cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust won't stop an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime, what will?
There's no question that the Holocaust has enormous salience to Israeli Jewish people. But if you trace your roots to rural Arab Jewish families from Yemen or Iraq, your more immediate concern would be your own family's immediate viability in a world without Israel. A new rise of European fascism wouldn't be your problem; the fact that you'd have literally no place to go would be. You're sure as shit not moving back to Yemen.
Zionists even false flag attacked Iraqi Jews to help spur immigration to Israel:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-jews-attacks-zionist...
Further, it doesn't matter. Most stats I've seen suggest that the Mizrahim are at least a plurality of Israelis, and none of those people can return to their "colonialist home countries". By way of example, long before the current Gaza war, the literal first "official" action Ansar Allah took when it established control of territory in Yemen was to expel the very few remaining Jewish families.
I think it does matter to the Palestinians who have their land taken as "payment" for other people's actions. That never has been and never will be acceptable.
One reasonable way to think about Israel: their moral claim to Tel Aviv is much stronger than our claim to Dallas. And yet, for all the "turtle island" talk, no serious person entertains the idea of rolling back American sovereignty.
None of this legitimizes the ongoing military strategy in Gaza, or, for that matter, the West Bank crisis or the management of the 2-state process, something that the Israeli right has successfully and for decades worked to derail.
I only bring this up because I feel like there's a tendency in message board discussions to center Israel's legitimacy on the Holocaust, as if that's the sum total of what binds Israeli Jewish people to the land. No, it's much more complicated and deep than that.
That being the case (maybe it isn't!), there are two big problems with your strategy:
1. It isn't possible. They're not going anywhere.
2. It's incoherent. There are very few countries in the world with a morally-hygienic claim to their land. Certainly, with the possible exception of Egypt, none of Israel's neighbors can! They're all of them creations of France and the UK.
Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was disbanded. It has less support than ever before politically.
1. Israel has in fact immense support, far more than the South African government ever had.
2. Apartheid South Africa was a system of minoritarian rule, which does not exist within the 1967 borders of Israel (further, Arab Israelis have nominally full citizenship rights, and in fact fight for the IDF; they are a minority, unlike the victims of Apartheid, but they're also not living under an apartheid system).
3. For a majority of Israeli Jewish people, there is no other place in the world for them to go. There is no prospect of a negotiated settlement that forecloses on a Jewish state. Their BATNA is war. That wasn't the case with the Boers.
In these kinds of discussions I feel like people conflate the situation in Gaza and the West Bank with that of Israel proper. Continued Israeli occupation of Gaza probably is untenable! That occupation will eventually be disbanded, the way South African Apartheid was. But here we're talking about the entire state of Israel. Like I said, start with Texas, because that'll happen first.
It isn't formal, but Arabs are marginalized and discriminated against. In West Bank, E Jerusalem, and Hebron, all that supremacy is dialed upto 11.
> Israel has in fact immense support
Fear and intimidation isn't support. Besides, I don't see this support lasting long outside of the US and Germany if the Oslo-process continues, which it will because for the Israeli right Judea and Samaria are too good to give up.
> talking about the entire state of Israel
I think folks mean the one-state reality but not total exodus of the Jews, though, it might come to pass if they let their guard down, now that there's genuine animosity to fuel a feud for another century.
South Africa wasn't disbanded, not even close. Apartheid ended more-or-less peacefully; non-whites were given the vote; and more-or-less democratic elections have been held ever since.
The problem is: it doesn't matter. The point is that Arab Jewish people are in Israel now, by the millions. The issue isn't that they've won some kind of trauma competition; it's the simple practical fact of their presence and the history that brought them there.
Your second point, about MENA "nations" expelling Jewish people "in a vacuum", is deeply concerning. No matter what Israel did in Palestine, Arab Jewish people had no culpability. Arguments like this are why the distinction between criticism of Israel and outright antisemitism are so slippery. I too think that distinction is weaponized, but it's hard to press the point when you're making facially antisemitic arguments.
How does something occurring in Palestine justify this? Tying the actions of Jewish militias to your local Jewish population is antisemitic… if they expelled them to protest the creation of Israel, then that isn’t anti-Zionist. That they mostly all ended up going to Israel is ironically supporting the Zionist cause
We cannot question their allegiance?
If an Iraqi did the same thing when the U.S invaded Iraq, you wouldn't question their loyalties?
Arab countries are within their right to question the allegiance of their population when their local population is conspiring (or suspected) against their national interests.
Do I need to remind you the Japanese internment camps in the United States?
It's 1956, it was before the mass surveillance era, internment and expelling was a valid solution when you stop a literal terrorist plot.
That doesn't change the fact that you (I don't mean you personally, but everyone commenting) need to follow the rules and post in the intended spirit regardless of what others are doing.
Everyone always feels like the others started it and are doing worse; if you take that as a basis, all we end up with is a downward spiral, and that's what we're trying to avoid here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(These aren't necessarily my opinions, and I am not Jewish. However I'm very closely connected to people who are, and I'm sharing the perspective I've been given)
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...
There actually is a real, present threat of extinction of the Israeli state, nation and all families contained within. The threat takes the shape of a worldwide community deciding for Israel that it must submit to a two-state solution where the other state has a military, has demonstrated willingness to murder, torture and rape all Israeli Jews and has the close physical proximity required to execute such an act with resistance being almost physically impossible (take a look at a map of Israel and imagine how many civilians will die from say 20 Iranian mortars stationed in the mountains of Shomron). Even if Israel survives such an attack, it could easily kill 10% of the Jewish population, and looking at international sentiment right now, it definitely seems like Israel would not be able to retaliate in such a case.
Even just allowing Hamas to survive is an incredibly massive threat, as they have already demonstrated the ability to commit one October 7th and if they are allowed to they will have no problem executing another one after some years of rebuilding their strength (though next time I assume they will tone down the atrocities to immediately get the international community on their side, so you'll probably see less rape and genital mutilation and just the regular, internationally permitted, murder of Jews).
I think that they think there is a real, persistent threat of Hamas continuing to make this kind of attack. Hamas has consistently said so, so Israel has reasonable grounds for thinking so. Hamas has even said that they won't settle for a two-state solution - they demand the destruction of Israel.
So if you're an Israeli, that leaves you very few choices: stay and accept being massacred every so often, shut down the country and leave, or destroy Hamas. Unsurprisingly, they choose the third option.
I don't think the attack could be repeated as successfully even if Israel withdrew. And Israel clearly had justification doing something - but without an analysis of their options, it's hard to know what's justified - which is the heart of this case.
I agree that Israel's options are limited - in the absence of outside assistance. In fact, I don't see how Israel can solve the situation in the absence of a neutral outside security force. Here's why:
For a peaceful settlement, both populations need to be given hope.
- Israelis need hope of long term safety and security
- Palestinians need hope of self-determination and civil rights.
No deployment of Israeli forces satisfies both conditions. If Israel occupies Gaza, they deny the Palestinian hope. If they withdraw, they give up their own (which they won't do). Even if Hamas is destroyed, the PA is too weak to guarantee security for either Palestinians or Israelis, and Israel won't trust them enough to allow them to grow strong. Ergo, a neutral force is needed. But, that would require US co-operation, if not actual US forces, and I don't think Biden will risk it in an election year.
This sounds like the perfect task for a UN peacekeeping force. (Of course, after various "resolutions" over the years, the Israelis may view the UN as biased...)
They won't. It's a fantasy.
Many of Americans, including soviet immigrants, enlisted in the army driven by that feeling.
Israelis lost significantly more of their population percentage-wise during October 7 attack perpetrated by the official government of Gaza AND as we know now, some Gazan civilians. Over 200 Israelis were taken hostage.
With that in mind, its fairly simple for me to empathize with the Israeli public who are angry at the death of their fellow citizens and want Hamas to be punished.
>I was in my 20s and remember the feeling in the air after Al Qaeda members hijacked commercial planes and flew them into WTC in 2001. Fear, Anger, A bit of revenge
Yeah the people in Gaza feel that pretty much every day
>Many of Americans, including soviet immigrants, enlisted in the army driven by that feeling.
They also feel this, which leads to them joining Hamas and is part of the reason there are normal Palestinians who support Hamas. Terrorists don't come out of no where.
>Israelis lost significantly more of their population percentage-wise during October 7 attack perpetrated by the official government of Gaza AND as we know now, some Gazan civilians.
Yeah I mean again just flip that and the people in Gaza experience that at a much higher rate
>With that in mind, its fairly simple for me to empathize with the Israeli public who are angry at the death of their fellow citizens and want Hamas to be punished.
Same but I also empathize with all the Palestinians just trying to live their lives in an open air prison and want revenge. I think both Hamas and Israel have genocidal intent, but one has much more power and is actually carrying it out right now.
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.
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.
I didn't argue it wasn't a terrorist attack.
I didn't say it did, I just wanted to show that the population of Gaza does seem to condone terrorism as a whole, and it's not a small minority as you were making it sound.
Also if Israel wanted to slaughter everyone in Gaza they could do it almost over night. And it wouldn't require nuclear weapons, they possess more than enough conventional weapons to do so. Hamas has been shown to keep and fire their weapons in population centers, it makes it incredibly difficult to truly minimize casualties. If Israel wanted to maximize civilian casualties, they easily could.
>cycle of vengeance you seem fond of.
Seriously my comment was simple, not sure why you think I condoned 'vengeance'.
When did I dispute the 75% figure? I said you'll find bloodlust in the general Israeli population too.
Wanting to slaughter everyone in Gaza isn't the standard to apply. It has shown it doesn't care if it does if that means killing the small fraction of that population responsible for October 7. It's shockingly callous, disproportionate and can never justify heavy bombing a populated urban area.
>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...
Definitely. Conversely, it should also be fairly simple to empathize with the Palestinian public in the (just picking one fairly recent example) Operation Cast Iron aftermath.
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).
But, a mistake you make in asking the question is two-fold, one - the Holocaust was not a lesson taught to Jews so they'll learn empathy. It was something horrible and traumatic that was done to them. Two - comparing the Holocaust to what happens in Gaza means you're not aware of what the Holocaust was. Maybe you know highlights such as gas chambers etc, but not what it really was (through no fault of your own I'm sure).
But, to attempt some semblance of an answer. In the same way you wouldn't ask Haitians why their gov did terrible things to the DR and their population - didn't they learn from slavery? Or about India/Pakistan, didn't they learn from the raj? Or any of the African states in conflict - didn't they learn from colonialism? Or Turkey and Syria, Iraq/Iran etc. Then why ask this from Israelis? I hope you get my rhetorical point.
Well of course I am not suggesting that it was a lesson to teach empathy. My comment was merely that people who suffer traumas tend to have empathy for other people suffering similar traumas. I don’t think this is a particularly controversial observation.
> Two - comparing the Holocaust to what happens in Gaza means you're not aware of what the Holocaust was. Maybe you know highlights such as gas chambers etc, but not what it really was (through no fault of your own I'm sure).
Well I suppose you might be right. I’ve seen a number of the major films and documentaries and read Viktor Frankl, Eli Weisel and Anne Frank and visited Auschwitz, and I’ll be the first to admit this is merely a very basic overview of the atrocities rather than any form of academic investigation. But from this overview it seems like there are common threads of severe oppression based on immutable racial characteristics, no?
On your final paragraph, I probably would ask the same question!
Please don't tell people to harass random jews wherever they live about political stuff they aren't involved in. Thanks.
Please don't let people on hacker news say things like what questions should be asked of jewish people not in israel etc.
They weren't recommending randomly accosting anybody. If the comment had been limited to its first 10 words, I could imagine understanding it that way, but the more important part was what they said right after that: "not HN. The response you'll get here obviously won't answer this question" — in other words, a question like that can't be answered by people who have no experience with it. It doesn't follow that one should indiscriminately harass everyone who does. I know some people are jumping to that, but it's not the strongest plausible interpretation of the GP.
If you had begun your reply with "Unfortunately some people are using this line of thinking to" instead of "Please don't tell people to", it would have been fine; and still more so if you had added some of the information that you included in your reply to me.
> 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-...
I wrote a much more strident and knee-jerk response to this at first (I'm sorry about that, and I should have read through the whole comment instead of snagging at the first sentence), but that first sentence is quite a snag! It seemed to upset other people who replied, and I can't really blame them too much for that.
Urban warfare is an ugly and complicated thing. Many of the Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza are moderates risking their life to defend their home and bring back their people.
When individual cases of reckless disregard are discovered (like in videos shared by Israeli soldiers on groups that get leaked out), those soldiers are disciplined.
But globally, it's just not true that the IDF has complete disregard for Palestinians.
> When individual cases of reckless disregard are discovered (like in videos shared by Israeli soldiers on groups that get leaked out), those soldiers are disciplined.
Really? Do you want us to believe it?
My understanding is that the colossal tradegy of Holocaust made Jews realise that not fighting back is an existential threat for them.
When Israel was established then Arabs did not accept its existence nor the existence of Jews in the region. What followed was a genocidal war to exterminate Jews in Palestine and destroy Israel. We know this war today as Israel war of independence.
The Arabs who participated against Jews in this war fleed in fear of retribution and were not allowed by Israel to return. We know these people and their descendants today as Palestinian refugees (they have special inheritable status given by UN).
After the war Israel was established nearly within the borders of UN assigned Jewish territories and UN assigned Arab territories were annexed by Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (West Bank). But it was still not tolerable for the Arabs who again in 1967 attempted to exterminate Jewish state with the war.
After the failure Isreal took control over larger territory that was then inhabited largely by Palestinian refugees (Palestinians) - West Bank and Gaza and also part of Egypt over the Suez canal and part of Syria called Golan Heights. The reasons where twofold. First the UN assigned territory was clearly not realistically defendable and second the large part of the previously not controlled territories like Bethlehem or Jerusalem were believed to be Jewish lands (historically Jewish lands were between Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea). Territories belonging to Egypt were later returned by bilateral treatis (but Israel kept control over Gaza).
Fast forward to today and it appears that Palestinians have not abolished the idea of genocide against Jews. It has been clearly established that the 7th October attack was a genocidal act to eliminate as many Jews as possible. Around 3000 Palestinian men took part in it, Hamas had around 40000 fighters. This demonstrates that they had wide support among Palestinians.
This leads us back to Holocaust. Jews promised to themselves that they will not let the genocide happen against themselves ever again. Yet it happened.
What is going on in Gaza is a systematic work to eliminate this threat.
They do this with minimal risk to their soldiers who are mainly reservist e.g. common people with military training. They can't afford to lose thousands of people. Palestinians in contrast value martyrdom and are willing to take very high risks (like attacking an armored vehicle with a RGP within a group of civilians next to the hospital entrance (this has been documented by the video evidence)).
It is not a police operation. It is a military operation against heavily armed and trained opponent. The weapons are chosen accordingly. The urban landscape makes it especially difficult and destructive. Regardless as far I have observed then Jewish military has made great efforts to systemically minimise civilian casualties.
What they did not realise first was that in addition to the military operation on the ground there is also sizeable information war against them and when the enemy can find many willing sympathisers then the enemy can produce what ever claims they please regardless of the truth as was demonstrated by the al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion.
I haven't observed the situation closely for months but by then Jewish armed forces evolved to be more open in their communication and to communicate more clearly the threats they had to fight against.
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...