it isn't a flamewar, it's one side flaming and flaming. allowing them to do that once a month while stopping them from injecting it everywhere all the time might be a good policy, but I don't get a sense I'm hearing both sides

It's definitely not just one side flaming. As evidence of that, I have no idea which side you're saying this about.

there are plenty of pure "Israelis bad" comments, not downvoted. Can you point me to a "Palestinians bad" comment that's not downvoted? I don't mean this as part of the debate, I would just enjoy reading it, don't kinkshame me.

Not sure what kinkshaming is but fully on board with not doing it!

It's hard to respond without specific links. From my perspective, there are throngs of comments on both sides of this getting downvoted and flagged, mostly for good reason but not always.

FWIW, I think any "$large-group-bad" comment probably should be downvoted on HN. The world doesn't work that way, so any such comment is likely to be a pretty bad one (relative to what we're trying for here).

Thanks for demonstrating that at least one user feels this way. I wasn't sure.

Even if literally no one agreed, I still feel deeply that never discussing this topic at all is not an option, and I think that could be derived from the first principle of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), although I admit that the exact proof escapes me.

I do appreciate the hard work you and Tom are doing. This is an immense work you both are doing. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the quality we appreciate here. And I can understand the challenges to moderate a topic like Israel/Palestine.