Israel has officially said many times they are not targeting civilians but they are targeting Hamas. Israel is even arming Palestinians that oppose Hamas: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyn2m9yk0vo - "Netanyahu confirms Israel arming clans opposed to Hamas in Gaza"
So Israel is certainly not universally saying that everyone in Gaza is Hamas and the official Israeli position is one of separating the uninvolved from Hamas.
There is a lot of nuance here. Some Israelis, including soldiers, do consider the entire Gaza population to be complicit in Hamas' crimes. A large number of Palestinians support Hamas, support the Oct 7th attack on Israel, and there are even "civilians" who participated in murder and looting on Oct 7th and in abuse of hostages. Some hostages were held by "civilians". Hamas makes it intentionally hard/impossible to distinguish between a civilian and a combatant and they report all their deaths as civilian deaths.
The devastation of large swaths of the Gaza strip is real. But not all of Gaza is devastated. There are still some parts of Gaza city that are not. You can't tell and media will show you the parts that are not. You can notice however how the narrative magically switches from "Israel destroyed all the hospitals" to "injured people treated in hospitals from some IDF attack" as is convenient without people for a second questioning how the hospitals are still functioning despite Israel supposedly having bombed them all to the ground. We also had images early on in the war that told us "everything is devastated" but yet the IDF keeps toppling more buildings (that supposedly according to the media were already all bombed a year ago). The various UN groups still have buildings, warehouses, etc. In Gaza.
There's little doubt Gazans are suffering a lot in this war. But they're definitely staging a lot of stuff as well. Anything to manipulate public opinions is game. Truth is not a requirement. They've shared images from Yemen and Sudan claiming those to be Palestinians. They misrepresent other medical conditions as starvation. Check out: https://gazawood.com/
Now I'm not naive, both sides are pushing a narrative, the Palestinians are actually suffering, but it's not as clear cut as you're trying to paint it either.
Who benefits and who loses from news of "starvation in Gaza"? Hamas benefits. Israel loses. If you look you'll find images out of Gaza of people trying to make a buck by selling aid packages in the markets. How many times since the war began have we heard about famine and starvation? The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. There are likely poor people or people who can't fight with the others that steal aid who are doing badly. There are people who can afford to or who use violence to procure food for themselves (e.g. Hamas). There is certainly not an abundance of food and certainly whatever is available isn't the most nutritious.
Gazans have and do use civilian infrastructure extensively for military purposes. They booby trap houses. They have tunnels running everywhere.
I also think unless they want to kill or evict all two million Gazans, Israel's #1 priority in this conflict should beconvincing Gazans that the Israelis are the good guys and Hamas are the bad guys. No matter how you spin it, they are failing at this, and they're using the wrong sort of weapons. It's merely sowing seeds for another three generations of unshakable hatred. That is not at all good for Israel but it might be just fine for Benjamin Netanyahu.
What I am sure of is that Israel's situation is not a war against a near-equal. The kind of rules of engagement I'm talking about are par for the course in peacekeeping operations, and there's no reason Israel cannot be employing them. Israel is shooting fish in a barrel, and if there's not enough time for them to double-check their homework on a missile strike then they have plenty of time to wait for a cleaner opportunity to take a shot. More importantly, I think that being extremely delicate is not only a moral imperative but a strategic one. Realistically, bombs dropped on Gaza can do more damage to Israel than to Hamas, both by causing fresh grievance in Palestinian hearts, which is the sustenance on which Hamas feeds for support and soldiers, and by gaining them sympathy abroad. I've been watching this happen in real time and it's playing out like clockwork, and I am sure that Israeli strategists see it too. But I also think Israel's loss is Netanyahu's win, and the stronger Hamas gets, the more justification Netanyahu has to push things further. So I see a feedback loop playing out in which Netanyahu and Hamas are on the same side, buffing each other while Israelis and Palestinians both lose.
(It also goes without saying that I also, obviously, denounce Hamas and the Oct 7th attacks, just like I denounce Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Un, Putin, and other villains. But I rarely see any point wasting breath on that kind of denouncement, at least not until I meet someone who thinks otherwise.)
The other side of this coin is when you fight this kind of fight, in a dense urban environment, where combatants intentionally blend with civilians, and use any imaginable tactic they can to attack you, and put weapon stashes in civilian homes, and tunnel entrances etc. Where the enemy may even want to increase civilian casualties on their side, and when you have infantry and armor fighting day in and day out with no sleep and under constant pressure. You are going to have more of these incidents. There might be some at the margin that are actually war crimes but many are just what happens in this kind of war and in this specific scenario.
I'm not going to judge those people when I'm not in their shoes. Including the people who ordered the strike on that convoy. I am Israeli (who hasn't lived there in a long time, but I served in the distance past in the IDF) and I have spoken to people who have been in Gaza. So I know targeting an international aid group is not who we are. I also know that if it was decided that they were Hamas then they'd get obliterated, so that part is not a surprise.
The other thing I do know for sure, is that Hamas started this war and that Israel can not accept Hamas in Gaza after the war and it can not accept Hamas holding hostages after the war.
I'm not sure I see what Israel can do here in terms of Gazan perception of Israel or why it even matters. Many Gazans hate the Hamas but they have no control.
I don't disagree with you. But because this is a predictable result, it's also part of the calculus that Israel has to weigh as part of the choice to deploy its soldiers in those positions in the first place.
I do think that Israel doesn't have to be fighting this fight; instead it could be playing the soft power game in Gaza much better, and it's barely even trying to. In my opinion the carrot almost always works better than the stick, and Israel should be throwing a Marshall plan at Gaza, literally truck-tons of money making Palestinians rich and happy, under the one condition that they turn over the hostages and any Hamas militants who don't surrender. All that would cost pennies compared to the costs of waging war (and the eventual rebuilding, and the next century of anti-terrorism policing, all of which Israel will undoubtedly be footing the bill for). Instead Israel is choosing to stir the pot in the West Bank at the same time, removing any chance of getting the Palestinian Authority as an ally against Hamas, and burning through what was left of the post-WW2 international goodwill that got it statehood in the first place.
It's understandable and predictable but I think it's still deeply mistaken, and very sad for me to watch.
What makes you think that?
You mention the Marshall Plan, but the Marshall Plan worked in part because of Germany's unconditional surrender and the Allies complete assumption of control of Germany. If Israel wanted to follow the same game plan, they would have to do what they are doing, until Hamas was utterly defeated militarily.
It's important to recognize that Germany's surrender was not conditioned on any aid or support or anything else. Imagine if the Marshall Plan had been started prior to Germany's defeat -- it would only have prolonged the conflict.
Their strength in armaments almost doesn't matter; even if every tunnel is collapsed and every rocket launch site obliterated, even if a ceasefire is reached and the hostages returned, even if Hamas leadership capitulates, you still end up with two million angry people swearing revenge for the injustices they've suffered.
There are two stable equilibria that this can settle into: no grievances, or no surviving civilians. I think the former is the only hope although Israel is making all the wrong moves. I am sure there are right-wing hardliners who would push for the ethnic cleansing route, but most Israelis are peace-minded moderates who would never forgive that option, and so I really think that result would eventually collapse the state of Israel from the inside out, doing more damage than any Hamas rockets ever could.
This is not a problem that has a money solution. At least not at this point. One big misunderstanding of the "west" is that everyone wants the things that "they" do. Like a nice car, house, money, Costco, Walmart. Doesn't work like that.
Oddly enough the Palestinian Authority is siding with Israel in that Hamas can not control Gaza after the war. They just made a statement to that effect. The PA depends on Israel, Israel supports the PA, the Palestinians don't always like the PA. The PA is arguably happy with the IDF going after Hamas and PIJ in the West Bank in places like Jenin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenin_Brigades ) because Hamas wants to overthrow the PA just like it did in Gaza. The Israeli government makes a bit of a show of being against the PA while actually knowing very well it needs the PA and collaborating with the PA on security. OTOH the current government does not want the PA to get control of Gaza.
The "west bank" problem right now is that the extremists amongst the west bank settlers have more or less free reign by the government to attack Palestinians (and sometimes other Israelis). This is a result of Netanyahu's brittle coalition and the war. The Israeli right wing has always wanted to make sure there can not be a two state solution. What they still haven't quite wrapped their heads around is that they will instead have a one state solution. Really that would appear to be the only solution of sorts. Oddly enough the international community is still stuck in this "two state solution" despite it being completely unacceptable to both sides in this conflict and having proven to not work.
$40 billion over 26 years does certainly sound like a lot of aid money, but it works out to just around $300 per Palestinian per year, which is, I think, not even enough to counterbalance the economic damage that Israel imposes on Palestine (and especially Gaza) through movement restrictions and trade barriers and blockades. It certainly pales in comparison to the budget of the Israeli military (which, admittedly, obviously has more on its plate than just Palestine, and couldn't be entirely repurposed towards aid). At any rate it's not in the realm of what I contemplate as a Marshall plan approach.
And for it to work, that aid all has to come prominently stamped "courtesy of your friends in Israel". International aid from other sources can improve living standards but doesn't build much goodwill with the neighbours.
But I agree with you on the rest of what you say.
And even before this war, the peace treaty gave Israel big control over the Rafa crossing. They have a camera and watch everything going in and out, and can ask for extra searches if they don't like what they see. And in all, it's just for individuals, not cargo. Whatever cargo goes through, there is just a limited amount that requires prior approval from Israel.
So Egypt really doesn't have any power over the situation unless they are willing to risk a war, which they can't win.
That would normally be a great plan, however, that doesn’t work with an enemy like Hamas. It doesn’t work with a people so thoroughly indoctrinated by Islamist extremists for decades. It’s something that us westerners just don’t comprehend readily.
It’s challenging to know what solution would work that doesn’t end up being as brutal as the Islamic countries often are to their own citizenry.
The wars in Yemen and Somalia are just as terrible as in Gaza but with 10’s of times the number of people and a fraction of the world aid Gaza gets. It shows what happens when those governments aren’t in strict control.
It’s also why almost every non-Islamic state in the Muslim world ends up being brutal military dictatorship. Hussein’s Ba’athist (atheist) party survived by being more brutal than the religious extremists. But in the west we think we can bring democracy or prosperity to such cultures and that it’ll flourish. The US spent trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan and decisively lost. Hundreds of thousands of people died and nothing changed.
Hamas literally kills and tortures any dissenters to gain power and to retain it.
Hamas infiltrated every Mosque in Gaza and installed their own clerics where they indoctrinate children from the youngest age that destroying Israel, killing Jews, and being a jihadist martyr is the loftiest goal.
Hamas isn’t shy about this either. Their original charter reads:
> The Motto of the Islamic Resistance Movement Article Eight > "Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model to be followed, the Koran its constitution, Jihad its way, and death for the sake of Allah its loftiest desire."
It states its goal is to not rest until the Quranic prophecy is fulfilled:
> the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes. > The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: 'The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.' (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim)."
I watch videos from Gaza and hope and pray that the Palestinians there will realize that Hamas cares nothing for the lives of their children or them. Only for their ideology. Then perhaps Israel can do what you suggest.
Israel is in a tough place. The easiest option for them would to become what many people claim they already are and become right wing religious extremists on par with the Arab dictators. However, even now most Israelis don’t want that I believe. They’ve returned the Sinai to Egypt in the past. They withdrew from Gaza. What they got was Oct 7th.
Except that it was the currently Israeli government to prop up Hamas power in the Gaza strip in order to de-legitimize the other (non terrorist) Palestinian political authority the PLO.
It's very convenient to have a terror organization as your counter party when you want to crush any hope for a two state solution.
In fact, the current Israeli government and intelligence helped Hamas fund and arm itself. And they knew about a huge terror attack coming and did very little to prevent it or defend their own people.
I agree the current Israeli government should have continued working with the PLO. Netanyahu has been a terrible leader for Israel. However they didn’t create Hamas either.
Some people accuse Israel of being a colonizer. I disagree. The proof that Israel is not a colonizer power is that every colonial power understood much better than Israel how to control a hostile foreign population. The trick is that no society is truly homogeneous, so you find a dividing line and split them along it, and richly reward the side that sides with you.
Israel needs to provide as much help as possible to Hamas' opposition, and undermine their state power. It can do that relatively easily because it can shelter dissidents and their families out of reach of Hamas, amplify their stories, and make Palestinian voices the most prominent ones that denounce Hamas. It can sponsor a government in exile and work to grow their legitimacy. It had a perfect chance to do so with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank but so far Israel has almost completely blown it.
Israeli government is relentless with this. Those suburbs are incentivized with subsidies for the settlers, more so than people inside Israel itself.
Oct 7 was horrifying, but for a nation that wants to expand out and build suburbs inside Palestine, it was a lose-win situation. Oct 7 was a loss, but now they don’t have to pretend about building those suburbs anymore. They can just say “each home is on top of a Hamas tunnel”, and boom (literally), clear lot for new housing.
Anyway, the deed is done. All other discourse on this thread is between Israeli apologists and just about everyone else that is not morally bankrupt.
Last but not least, everyone apologizing for Israeli, please save your faces. Please. IDF does not even allow foreign journalists into Gaza. That’s all you need to know. But again, I believe the apologists are no longer trying to save face. It’s an insidious “well, what needed to be done, needed to be done”. Beyond immoral.
——
Prayer is in order, as I don’t know what else anyone can do (it’s all be done).
My hope is the Israeli people at the very least prosecute war crimes internally just for the purity of their own soul, and educate their future generations on a modest truth, that being - “we Israelis in 2025 could not find a better solution, and may you never seek a solution we sought in those dark times. May you be better, for we sinned on a scale the bathroom mirror in the morning won’t allow us to forget”.
Before my words are twisted, let me make it clear I am pacifist. I have to literally turn away whenever scenes from Gaza are shown. I don’t support Hamas or the IDF. I believe Hamas commits child abuse by indoctrinating young Palestinians into terrorism. It’s literally a carbon copy situation of black gang violence that’s perpetuated by gang culture (Chiraq, Chicago gang violence). Yeah, believe it or not, teenagers are impressionable and vulnerable everywhere in the world, stop radicalizing them. Hell, we can’t even stop the kids from entering the manosphere here in America, they’ll gravitate right to Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.
The children cannot fight an endless fucking war, and that is what both the Israelis and Palestinians are doing to these children. It’s child abuse on an epic scale.
Now, in America, we’ve got some sense not to virtually nuke Chiraq, but over there in the Middle East, they have no qualms about bull-dozing the problem.
No, the post you are responding to is correct.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/24/video-jewish-e...
If “Israel” didn’t benefit from starvation in Gaza then “they” wouldn’t be directly causing starvation in Gaza. You’re going to say “but because hamas blah blah”, but it doesn’t matter. Israel is the one holding trucks of food outside a starvation zone, because they (and you, apparently) think that the benefits of doing so are worth the costs of perpetrating genocide.
You are blind to the Hamas' control of the narrative coming out of Gaza. You are also blind to the Hamas' ability to impact the situation and to their absolute control of any word coming out of the mouth of a "hospital director" or a "journalist" who are either Hamas or operating under the threat of death, torture, and violence to themselves and their families if they don't say what they're asked to say.
Here's some coverage: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-us-humanitarian-envoy-pans-... It's not super favorable for Israel but has some nuance that you're missing.
The article is an interview with: "David Satterfield, who served during early months of war, says dangerous transport routes, looting by desperate Palestinians severely hinder ability to pick up and deliver aid"
... "UN trucks repeatedly looted, including by thousands of desperate Palestinians, unsure when they and their families will receive their next meal."
"UN trucks repeatedly looted, including by thousands of desperate Palestinians, unsure when they and their families will receive their next meal."
"Moreover, looting carried out for purposes of commoditization will also dissipate because the value of assistance in the marketplace will drop due to the rise in supply."
So Palestinians are stealing food from other Palestinians to make a buck.
"Satterfield said “there’s no question” that the terror group has worked to take “political advantage and certainly some physical substantive advantage out of the aid distribution process.”
Hamas operatives have made a point of “flaunting” their presence at aid sites in a message to Palestinians that the group has no intention of ceding its role in the distribution process."
Israel is a settler-colonial white supremacist occupation and reporting on the "nuance" of how that situation has evolved over 76+ years without acknowledging Israel has no right to exist only serves the genocidal occupation of Palestine. We need to abolish all white supremacy projects, including those from Zionist entities.
So we should not trust "hospital director" or "journalist" with scare quotes as they MIGHT be Hamas, but happily take IDF soldier's words as truth. The transparent bias is laughable.
I guess also that Israel forbids aid airplanes to take air footage of Gaza because Hamas bends the light to make it seem like IDF is committing war crimes. How devilish of them.
LOL 51% of Israelis gave Palestinians a 0 out of 100 score rating of their humanity, according to PCPSR and the Times of Israel poll: https://pcpsr.org/en/node/989
"When asked about the level of humanity of other side, Palestinians gave Jews an average score of 6 out of 100; Jews gave Palestinians an average score of 14. 51% of Jewish Israelis gave Palestinians a score of zero, and 71% of Palestinians gave the same score to Israelis. One percent of Palestinians gave Israeli Jews a score of 80 or higher, and 2.7% of Israeli Jews scored Palestinians in this range. This question could reflect respondents’ perception of the inherent qualities of the other side, or their assessment of the other side’s behavior, or both."
Here is some older (pre-Oct 7th) but maybe more "color":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dPoDb81OiI - "Israeli Soldiers: Do you hate Palestinians?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=r5168ysQ2rU&t=37... - "Israelis: How much do you hate Palestinians?"
I recommend the ask project on Youtube for people who want to get a little less black and white opinions on these topics.
> Mirror image negative perceptions: Israeli Jews and Palestinians hold near-mirror images regarding the current war: a majority on each side views the other as seeking to commit genocide; each side believes it is the worst victim in the world, and on each side, a large majority believes the other lacks humanity.
I think Israel is disproportionately responsible for the atrocities in this war, given that it's militarily ascendant. But the two groups are about the same in terms of sentiment, which bodes poorly for any future peace in the region (and plays into Israel's standard refrain, i.e. that peace is structurally impossible because Palestinian extremist groups would reward peace with violence (much like how Israeli extremist groups reward peace with violence)).
The rest of this reads as trolling.
The real answer is 19th century warfare in the tunnels where all of Israel's tactical advantages disappeared.
But instead they cowardly ordered 2,000 lb bombs that didn't accomplish any of their stated goals and killed their own hostages. Instead they designated everyone in Gaza as a terrorist and killed their own hostages when they managed to escape because everyone has the same Semitic phenotypes (awwwwkwaaaard). Instead they put their freshman IDF conscripts on social media to claim any dissent of the military strategy was incitement against Jewish people's right to exist. On the social media front, I'm not sure what's more embarrassing, getting paid to do that, or not getting paid to do that.
Thanks for redefining that term, its the substantive comment we needed. I apologize for my chauvinistic idea that avoiding masculine altruism during an actual war to accomplish the actual stated goal might be internationally seen as cowardly.
please ignore their warnings of war being mechanized chaos and indiscriminate violence, unintentional causalities never happen in conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_friendly_fire_incident...
Hiroshima was 80k dead? How do you achieve a Hiroshima without the blowback of using a Nuke? Heh. You can get the same causality count minus the Nuke fan-fare, IDF lunch special (a bomb sandwich).
Hate is an emotion and hard to quantify; what's easier to measure are actions and intentions.
E.g. 56 percent of Israeli Jews polloed favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants.
There are enough incidents of needless cruelty or provocations, such as [1] or [2] - and in turn hatred against Israeli pro-peace groups that want to break the cycle [3]. I think those are hard to explain if there wasn't widespread, systemic hatred and dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society.
They also feature the only national-league soccer club where racism is official policy [4]
Also: The IDF prides itself to be a "citizens' army" that is deeply embedded into Israeli society. Yet at the same time, a substantial part of the IDF's activities is protecting the settlers in the West Bank, and generally maintaining the occupation there. If the settlers were really a fringe minority with no support in wider society, I'd expect to see some form of protest against that kind of duty. Yet, there isn't any.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-28/ty-article-ma...
[2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-27/ty-article/.p...
[3] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-03/ty-article/.p...
> According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
It's true that Netanyahu is and was opposed to a Palestinian state and that dividing the Palestinians between Hamas and the PA was strategic in that regard. However he misjudged Hamas as not having motivation or ability to attack Israel. A by the way is that since 2007 Israel has attacked Hamas in Gaza and Hamas attacked Israel as well so it's not exactly like they were pals. It was more of the devil we (thought we) know kind of situation.
But there is a previous there which is the failure of the Oslo accords due to Hamas' suicide bombing campaign on Israel. Hamas bombed the peace process to death (alongside with hundreds of random civilians) and also directly cause the rise of the right in Israel and the change of opinion in the Israeli public from accepting the idea of a two state solution to a belief that Israel can not accept that solution. Dividing the Palestinians as a strategy came after the Palestinians showed Israelis that living side by side is impossible. And if the Israelis needed further proof we got the Oct 7th attack.
It's also worth mentioning that short of re-taking Gaza (which we see is not simple) Israel didn't really have a lot of choices once Hamas took and established itself in Gaza. Maybe the right thing to do was to retake Gaza immediately in 2007. I'm sure the world, including you, would scream bloody murder occupation if that happened. Otherwise there's not a lot that could have been done. The civilian aid that made its way into Gaza and Hamas' hands was also a result of international pressure on Israel under the idea that if there was some sort of stability/prosperity in Gaza that would lead to peace. What happened in practice is Hamas channeled all of that into its military efforts and we see where that led us.
Why would the Israelis support Hamas if they were the faction that was attacking them? Wouldn't it have made more sense to support the PA even more?
Please omit swipes and flamebait from your posts, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This is also in your interest, since you can always make your substantive points without it and it will make your comments more persuasive.
edit: I suppose I should add that yes, commenters on the opposite of the conflict are doing this just as badly. This is not a partisan moderation call.
The rules however do not permit personal attacks and name-calling. You can say the same things without the name calling or attacks.
What made the difference between that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718039) and the one I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718268) was the pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling in "You Zionists are really not even putting any effort into your hasbara anymore." (this line has since been edited out by the GP commenter). That is a dividing line where we can post mod comments because (1) there aren't so many such posts, so it's feasible, and (2) attacks like that have a particularly bad effect on threads.
> Pro-Genocide ? Fine. No swipes and flamebaits tho!
I hear you, but these two things are on different levels. To explain what I mean, let's assume that I completely agree with you on this topic. Ok? We agree that genocide is wrong and bad—far more than somebody being snarky in an internet comment, right? So wtf is wrong with the mods if they penalize one and not the other? Is "pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling" worse than genocide? Of course not; only a monster would say so.
The answer is that we're not trying to exclude wrongness and badness in the comments here. I know that sounds bad, but suppose I said "the mods' job is to decide what's true and good and then impose it on everyone else". You wouldn't want that, right? what if we disagreed? Certainly the community as a whole would not want that.
Rather it's your job (i.e. the commenters) to work that out through discussion and argument. The mods' job is to try to keep that discussion and argument respectful* between the players. When we see people crossing that line, we respond. Otherwise we don't respond, even when someone says something which we feel is both wrong and bad, because it's not our place to impose that on the community.
(Btw I posted a bit more on this theme here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719138)
* For practical purposes "respectful" means in keeping with the guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It has been classified by israeli holocaust scholars as Genocide, by israeli human rights groups as Genocide, by the United Nations as Genocide:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holoc... "I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-g...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-c...
but one still has to painstakingly debunk Nazi style propaganda every single time? It's much easier to spread lies than it is to debunk them. Often such posts contain some half truths filled with a bunch of lies, the debunking of which requires knowledge and effort while the fabrication of lies requires zero effort. By the time you debunked the obvious lies, the propagandist has already spammed 10 more comments denying or justifying Genocide with the exact same rhetoric and arguments that Nazis use to deny or justify the holocaust. That's a losing game.
Something also tells me that this won't be equally applied as it's claimed to be applied. I just can't imagine that ycombinator would allow the exact same rhetoric from literal Nazis to justify or deny the holocaust ever happened or that jews inflated or made up the number of victims of the holocaust.
Take the exact same scenario for which that comment got nuked:
A: "Some lazy and evident Nazi lies to justify a Genocide/Holocaust - The problem aren't the Nazis, the problem is the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto who refuse to be subjugated by our glorious German Reich"
B: " *Here some evidence with sources that debunks your narrative with quotes from your own people.* You Nazis don't even put any effort into your propaganda anymore"*.
Strangely B is treated as the ultimate sin because of one mild line despite being a small fraction among concrete evidence, but somehow that still justifies the nuking of the comment. And it's not just that interaction, but the overall obvious pattern of quick and dirty lies that are spammed with low effort but don't result in any disciplinary actions, while others report that they have been throttled for arguing against Genocide.
I'm not accusing you personally by the way, I'm sure it's brutal keeping up with all of this, but many people have observed these and similar patterns and it's a terrible look. Some people seem to forget that incitement to Genocide is an actual crime.
"Incitement to genocide is a crime in the USA primarily due to its adherence to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This international treaty, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, defines genocide and related acts, including "direct and public incitement to commit genocide," as punishable crimes. The United States ratified this Convention in 1988 and subsequently enacted the Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 (also known as the Proxmire Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1091). This act incorporates the provisions of the Convention into U.S. federal law, making it a federal crime to commit, attempt to commit, conspire to commit, or directly and publicly incite the commission of genocide. Therefore, under U.S. law, anyone found guilty of direct and public incitement to genocide can face severe penalties, including imprisonment."
"Whoever directly and publicly incites another to violate subsection (a) [the genocide offense] shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
It’s Rumsfeld level of denialism.
”I just can't imagine that ycombinator would allow the exact same rhetoric from literal Nazis to justify or deny the holocaust ever happened or that jews inflated or made up the number of victims of the holocaust.”
They allow it because they are human. Not everyone can actually believe a genocide is happening whilst also being defended by what many would consider educated professional peers. See, it’s unbelievable, so have to forgive people who are truly bewildered (”this can’t really be happening, can it?”). It’s really happening , and HN is suffering from the fog of war that an ongoing atrocity creates. If I punch you hard enough, you may not actually perceive what just happened in the contemporaneous. It’s intellectual and moral shell-shock.
Reality check:
Your world is not just software and a first world country with a nice economy, and neighbors and countrymen that would neeever do anything wrong. Your world is full of a lot more sin, believe it.
When they allow the journalists to finally enter Gaza, where reporters will fly a simple $500 drone over Gaza, we’ll see all of our world.
HN calls outa lot of bullshit, and there’s no way that virtue should be put aside for this obvious genocide.
I've been trying to describe how we (try to) operate this community. I think the lesson I'm drawing from exchanges like this (not just this one, but many others) is that this can't work and is therefore a mistake in this context. All that hits the reader is the ghastly discrepancy between the two layers (moderation minutiae vs. starvation and slaughter). It comes across as dissociative, like responding to tragedy with trivia. This is so built in to the situation that communication becomes impossible. That's why people respond by repeating claims about the much more important topic, as if I had been arguing with them about that.
> It's much easier to spread lies than it is to debunk them. Often such posts contain some half truths filled with a bunch of lies, the debunking of which requires knowledge and effort while the fabrication of lies requires zero effort. By the time you debunked the obvious lies, the propagandist has already spammed 10 more comments denying or justifying Genocide with the exact same rhetoric and arguments that Nazis use to deny or justify the holocaust. That's a losing game
Yes, I know. A lot of what we do here is to try to maintain a space where something other than that becomes possible. Unfortunately, what most people want is for the mods to enforce their view and ban the opposing side. This is related to the certainty that the opposing view is so wrong and bad that it could only be held in bad faith by bad people.
No one seems to notice—or rather, everyone is under so much pressure that there's no room to care—that to actually do this would be to stop all discussion. A corollary is that, when we don't do it, people feel like we are complicit in the crimes of the other side.
> Something also tells me [...] the overall obvious pattern [...] many people have observed [...] others report
Phrases like this come up often. I can tell you from long experience that they invariably describe an image of HN and/or HN moderation that is profoundly inaccurate. They don't match how the community really functions nor how we really moderate it, nor what we're trying to achieve. What they do match is a subset of datapoints (often a rather small subset) that happen to match the image. (I don't mean this in any way personally either btw! It's super common, from every side of every topic.)
These images seem impervious to change. It makes no difference to show someone datapoints that contradict their image; and I'm pretty sure that any statistical study of the entire dataset, however it turned out, wouldn't change anyone's mind either. This makes me think that these images come from people's pre-existing beliefs about the world (society, power, one's group, oneself, etc.), such that we notice the datapoints which confirm and reconstitute our image. I'm sure that no one does this consciously, but it's a strikingly consistent phenomenon.
To pick just one example from what you listed, there's no way that we would throttle anyone for "arguing against genocide". That's absurd. We might moderate them for breaking HN's rules while they were doing it, but you won't ever find that interpretation circulating in any of these claims.
Yes we should have long philosophical debates about whether starving and exterminating an entire people is genocide or not.
In fact, let's debate so long that it's over by the time we're done.
Remember, Israel is a foreign invasion force of Europeans that decided they wanted to invade a non-threatening Palestine, burn alive children (as they literally did during the Nakba of 1948 exactly like they’re doing now), and steal their land, just to make their own private Mediterranean resort homes. Under no circumstances do they have a right to exist. Just a completely evil criminal enterprise of murderous thieves from the beginning.
Israel was always the problem, as people now see.
October 7 was a good thing. Celebrate it. In fact, we should make October 7 a national holiday in the US to celebrate as a second Independence Day, the day America started to gain their independence from Israel.
The world needs to immediately get rid of Israel. And we all need to start supporting Hamas in their fight against these evil Israeli monsters.
Seriously. Israelis will happily kill children, as polls of their population makes clear. And they are literally doing it. The entire society is trash and needs to be removed.
This is the problem.
I fear many Jewish people hide their utter hatred for Palestinians behind this callous shrug off, as in, “well what are we supposed to do? They are either a terrorist or sheltering for one”. Low key callous, but truthfully, murderous.
The lies are so incredible, that one might even believe Gazans are staging the world’s greatest photo shoot of starvation and devastation. Make up, lighting, props, casting, and everything. They even casted Israeli soldiers, straight from Israel. Quite the production, eh? It’s a sick world.