I have no idea about your intent, of course—we have to moderate by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Turning this thread into a flamewar about Israel was the effect of what you posted, and you're responsible for that. If it wasn't what you intended, you should either have posted something entirely different or refrained from posting.

I have no memory of previous responses to you, nor do I recognize your username. If I've posted moderation comments in the past, it would be in exactly same way as I do toward any other user. None of this is personal.

This policy means that

A) Nobody can ever even so much as mention Israel.

B) To completely suppress speech about a topic on Hacker News, I only need about 5 accounts. Hacker News is completely vulnerable to a singular group's efforts to suppress topic discussion.

C) The effects of a completely innocuous post can punish the author.

Unless you believe I am a malicious mastermind, it's obvious that this ex post facto methodology of meteing out bans is ridiculousa and ineffective and mostly just a justification for your current emotional state.

HN has had many comments about Israel and related topics in the last few days. Difficult as the discussion is under current circumstances, not all of them were flamebait. Your comment was. Worse, it was a generic flamewar tangent—taking the discussion away from the historical material of the OP and into an ugly slugfest about an obvious flamewar topic.

Re B: if you're going to make a claim like that, you should supply links, so we can look into what happened, and so readers can make up their own minds.

But in any case B is irrelevant to whether or not you broke the site guidelines in this thread, which you certainly did—it's not a borderline call.