Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.

Tens of millions protested the US response.

Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.

You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.

Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".

I genuinely don't know what distinction you're trying to make here. Do you think there aren't equivalent protests in Israel? There were minorities in both countries that opposed these responses from the beginning and those responses generally became more unpopular as time went on just like the men who spearheaded them, but a majority of both countries were initially supportive.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but your initial post reads as if Israel's genocide in Palestine is consistent with historical precedent such as the Iraq war when facing similar national traumas.

I'm suggesting that many of us are disgusted now by Israel's genocide, land theft, and murder ... just as millions of us were disgusted by the Iraq war.

>Perhaps I'm wrong, but your initial post reads as if Israel's genocide in Palestine is consistent with historical precedent such as the Iraq war when facing similar national traumas.

The US response was deadlier in both total number of people killed and in proportion to the inciting terrorist attacks. Both countries also committed clear war crimes along the way.

The primary distinguishing factor between the two is the label of "genocide" only consistently being applied to Israel's actions, but that is mostly due to practical reasons, namely the relative small size of Gaza in terms of both geography and population. If Afghanistan and Iraq had the population density of Gaza, not only would that have likely made the US response even more deadly due to the mechanics of warfare, but it certainly would have led to more people describing the US's actions as genocide.

Once again, this is not a defense of Israel. If this reads to you like I'm downplaying the actions of Israel, then you are underestimating the death and destruction caused by the US. Some estimates have the US responsible for as many as a million deaths.

I'll dispute that.

While I recall many at the time calling it being called a genocide by some due to the sanctions, the thrust of the military action was an illegal war.

Israel, by contrast, systematically murdered civilians, journalists, starved a civilian population with impunity and with government intent, and ... the list is tragically too long. Size and numbers have nothing to do with it.

Israels actions were ruled a genocide in the ICJ, the UN, among many other genocide experts (including Jewish experts).

The Israeli's had/have actual genocidal intent. Just read the reprehensible words of some of the current Israeli cabinet. Not some radical fringe, but the actual Israeli cabinet.

Sure, you mention you're not defending Israel, but the implication that there is some double standard here (perhaps "antisemitic" given your focus on labelling) is in itself a defense of Israel.

The current "administration" is a disgusting body, and the Zionist ideology, in its current form, is an absurd, preposterous ideology which gives birth to a population who dehumanise their "enemy" in exactly the same way as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews (not my words, but the words of Jewish scholars).

Your opinion of the US is too high.

>Israel, by contrast, systematically murdered civilians,

I'm not willing to ignore the US's propensity for bombing weddings.[1][2][3][4][5]

>journalists

Or the notorious Collateral Murder strikes.[6]

> starved a civilian population with impunity and with government intent

I already hit on this with the mentioning of Gaza's population density and the mechanics of war. Gaza is much smaller and denser which means that the same bomb dropped there will kill more people and destroy more infrastructure than in Iraq or Afghanistan. That has caused a larger percentage of the arable land in Gaza to be destroyed and they already had less of it to begin with. This had made them more reliant on Israel. The US simply didn't have the opportunity to control the food supply in the same way and I'm not willing to categorize a lack of opportunity as evidence of a lack of intent. And despite that all, the long tail of the US's actions still has led to a food crisis.[7]

>Just read the reprehensible words of some of the current Israeli cabinet. Not some radical fringe, but the actual Israeli cabinet.... The current "administration" is a disgusting body, and the Zionist ideology, in its current form, is an absurd, preposterous ideology which gives birth to a population who dehumanise their "enemy" in exactly the same way as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews

If we're talking "reprehensible words" and dehumanization, it hasn't even been two weeks since a US congressperson said that Muslims were below dogs. The US has the benefit of two extra decades of hindsight and many still haven't learned the lesson you're discussing.[8].

I genuinely think you should read through some of this[9]. It sounds like it might open your eyes to the US's actual record of behavior.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haska_Meyna_wedding_party_airs...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massa...

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruzgan_wedding_bombing

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Radda_airstrike

[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...

[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_hunger_crisi...

[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Fine#Muslims

[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#War_o...

Thanks for the links. I'm afraid I won't click on them because I'm not sure what we're disagreeing on now, so probably a good moment to end this. I'll absolutely call the US a power hungry monster that has inflicted genocide on many people. Israel has done the same from the point of view of a perverse, religious-nationalist ideology. Not much point splitting hairs on that one.

What a strange reply. You were the one who originally replied to me and tried to split hairs, but I guess now you're above it.

Well, I'll take that as a compliment, as you've clearly descended into horseshit. Sorry to see it. Have a nice day. Bye.

I was alive at the time. While there were some protests, i dont recall them being all that significant, and many of the objecting voices seemed more concerned with the price tag rather than the human cost.

This is pure misinformation. I have personally never seen such large crows as the anti war demonstrations of 2002-2003. There 100k people marching several times for several weeks in the European capitals I know.

Some estimate that these were even bigger than the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. These put the total number of people going out in demonstrations world wide at 30M+. This war was massively protested against, any which way you count.

Hmm, i googled it and i guess you were right. I suppose subjectively it was something i didn't particularly notice at the time.

You might be referring to a different period, but I'll note that the anti-war protests in early 2003 (immediately before the invasion of Iraq) were quite literally record breaking.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040904214302/http://www.guinne...

They were significant enough to make news in countries outside of US.

This is a fair criticism of the U.S., though I'll also point out that millions of Palestinians have lived out their entire lives under occupation now, and history didn't start on October 7. To me, all of the evidence going back to 1948 points emphatically to genocide.

Also, I'm not clear on whether there was a precursor to 9/11 comparable to Israel's response to Gaza's 2018 non-violent protest, the Great March of Return.

You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.

>the local indigenous people called Palestinians

While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.

> implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous.

Is there not? I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.

Not clear, and unlikely in Australia.

* https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...

This recent genetic based view replaces the "gut feeling" view akin to yours that was long pushed by Quadrant et al.

But surely, the different tribes in Australia also moved around and replaced each other? They might all come from the same people that came to Australia first, but that doesn’t mean they are native to the place they currently live in. If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe, who gets the land now? And how do you settle that without some arbitrary statute of limitations?

> But surely, the different tribes in Australia also moved around and replaced each other?

Read article, chase up the papers, evidence says "no".

The Tasmanians and the Noongars (Southern most to east, southern most to west) have genetically been in place a long time and had no one to replace.

The article mentions "genetic diversity" between east, west, centre, north, south, etc - that comes from not mixing.

"But surely..." <-- gut feelings? You should joinn Quadrant.

> If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe

Do you have any evidence of that?

> who gets the land now?

There's a wealth of material on Mabo, Land rights, Native title, et al that address all that - if you're generally curious it's there to read.

eg: starting with, say https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/mabo-case

Ok, then we settled who gets Australia.

Sorry for shifting the goalposts now, but we still need a method to determine what to do with the rest of the earth, right? Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?

"We" haven't settled anything .. neither of us is an expert or player in the domain of indigenuous land ownership.

Your "assertion" (weakly stated) was

> I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.

which is _false_.

A single counter example suffices, the Māori people of New Zealand are still in a shared treaty with European settlers and no prior humans were displaced by the Māori people when they first arrived circe 1320 or so.

Australia and that region offer up many many other examples.

> Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?

I cannot see how this is related to your global assertion nor can I see how I'm responsible to answer it.

The original problem is whether there is a "statute of limitations" for being indigenous.

Even when my original assertion that every single tribe replaced another tribe at some point is wrong, there still needs to be some mechanism do determine what to do with the rest of the world where my claim applies.

If you take the view of history that the ability to forcibly drive other people off their land grants the new inhabitants a valid claim to that land, then Israel's actions are only objectionable because they are happening now rather than in the history books. It's inherently a doctrine of might is right, and the Israelis are mightier than the Palestinians at this current moment in history.

Right, but at least historically, what alternative is there? You can’t really unroll thousands of years of human history and make everyone go back to where their ancestors came from (even just because people ended up mixing after colonizing other places), so you have to take some state as the correct one and then condemn every change after that (or just let everyone do whatever they want).

Otherwise, how would you decide who gets which part of the world?

Which is exactly why this area has been in conflict for millennia. Many different groups have valid claims to the area being their historic homeland. Dubbing one single group as "indigenous" is a refutation of all the other people's historical claims on that land and it means all the Israelis have to do is wait out this conflict until it becomes "history" and the Palestinians lose that "indigenous" label.

This will be the case tho.

US big brother will make sure to protect its little “older” brother. Hilarious as it sounds.

Arabs are not indigenous to Palestine. Palestine was Roman when it was colonized by the Arabs. Before Palestine, Judea was a Jewish state which was colonized by the Romans.

You think you are a smart alec

And before that, the australopithecus

They are the same people, they just converted to another religion since the diaspora that saw some of the population leave 2000 years ago.

Obviously Palestinians were displaced and that needs to be addressed, but ethnic cleansing is a tough sell. Their population has multiplied by 20x since then.

Forced displacement due to the mass destruction of all facilities in an area consists exactly in ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing means : systemic removal of a group or person by another group of person in an area. And it's exactly what's happening. It makes no sense to say it's neither a genocide nor ethnic cleansing if the population grows. Same as saying there were no genocide or ethnic cleansing in Rwanda or Bosnia since the population has grown.

I mean by that definition, USA's immigration enforcement constitutes ethnic cleansing. I guess I just question your moral authority to second guess Israel's handling of their very unique situation.

> USA's immigration enforcement constitutes ethnic cleansing.

Indeed, it is ethnic cleansing. This situation isn't unique at all. Actually, it's quite common in History. The same happened to Algeria with the French colonization.

You can call hamas whatever you'd like, but it's certainly not hamas doing most of the terrorizing in palestine....

I am entirely behind this take.

> and it quickly grew beyond any reason

Why did it quickly grow?

Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?

For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.

Consider the possibility that “bomb bomb bomb” was the entire and only point of the exercise.

Because there were children to starve. Brown children.

More than half of the Israeli Jews are "brown people" from the neighboring Arab countries.

The correct answer is: because the Biden administration told them there were no red lines. Israel is completely dependent on the US, Reagan picked up the phone and got them to stop bombing Lebanon in 1982. As Israel continued to ramp up the atrocities, they discovered that nothing would cause them to lose patronage from the US.

Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.

Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.

The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.

This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.

We should stop using this term terror/terrorist, it's lost any meaning. If Hamas are terrorists because they're terrorizing Israeli population then so are Israelis' IDF or whatever force kills other country's population. And the list extends beyond that. To paint a resisting force/army as terrorists is just charged language to emotionally manipulate and pollute discourse. It would be more useful to put in balance what each side is fighting for.

Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.

Target a music festival with no military value: terrorism.

Blow up a building because hamas has a tunnel under there: not terrorism. If the military value gained is disproportionate to the civilian cost, it is a war crime. But still not terrorism.

> Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.

Not disagreeing with the definition but this is what both sides have been doing.

Look, blowing up aid workers, which is in question in this article, is also terrorism. Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist. Also if you you use your definition for what Israel has been doing in the last 70-80 years it makes them terrorists as well, the word is simply meaningless at this point.

What political/ideological goal does attacking the aid workers move forward? It's a war crime, no doubt, but terrorism has a meaning that doesn't include all war crimes.

> Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist.

The vast majority of lethal force actions in Gaza are targeting Hamas operations. Civilians getting killed by those strikes is NOT terrorism.

> What political/ideological goal does attacking the aid workers move forward?

Terrorizing aid workers, which reduces how much aid reaches the Palestinian population?

Israelis brag about inflicting casualties on Gaza civilians and when confronted about it say that this will stop when Hamas releases the hostages and lays down the arms. This is textbook terrorism.

Netanyahu is very clearly on the record supporting and defending a policy of allowing Qatari money into Hamas‑run Gaza, including publicly defending those payments to his own party as a way to keep Hamas and the PA separated.

There is real evidence that Israeli authorities helped the Islamist network that later became Hamas to grow and organize, but not good evidence that Israel secretly “founded” Hamas in the sense of designing or controlling the group. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Israel allowed and at times supported Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist charity Mujama al‑Islamiya in Gaza (the Muslim Brotherhood–linked precursor to Hamas), seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO. eg From 1967 to 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza reportedly tripled, with Mujama heavily involved and benefiting from Israeli recognition and Gulf funding; Israeli officials hoped Islamist forces would weaken leftist, PLO‑aligned groups.

Scholars and former officials describe this as “blowback”: Israel strengthened the Brotherhood‑type infrastructure, which then reorganized itself into Hamas and turned violently against Israel.

There is no credible evidence that Israeli intelligence drew up Hamas’s founding charter, appointed its leaders, or covertly directed its formation in 1987; the group was an initiative of Palestinian Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

To reiterate: Israel did not secretly found Hamas, but it surreptitiously facilitated the growth of its Islamist precursor networks and tolerated them for strategic reasons, and several former Israeli officials now openly say that this policy helped “create” Hamas in hindsight.

You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.

> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.

here you go:

> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...

IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.

I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.

Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.

I take it that literally every NGO in this space and genocide scholars are all in on the lie?

> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning,

You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.

> and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

you still refuse to call it a crime against humanity? shame on you.