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'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

aljazeera.com

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Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#371

Post by hersko »

ZunarJ5 wrote: post #335
wahnfrieden wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted this perspective previously ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38071749 ) but it was immediately flagged out: https://libcom.org/article/voices-front-line-against-occupat... >I want you to know something else, which is that the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas do not represent us, the Palestinian people, at all. We reject authority and we reject Abbas and all his ministers. I do not know…

Additional friendly reminder that Bush Jr is responsible for Hamas. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/was-hamas-electe...

Don't treat the Palestinians like they have no agency...

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#372

Post by pgeorgi »

shihab wrote: post #329
nahumfarchi wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think that is a reasonable take at all. 1. This is warfare, not civil law. Hamas, which is the sovereign in Gaza (there has been no Israeli military presence there for years), commited an act of war in which hundreds were killed, raped, and kidnapped. Israel, as a state, has the moral duty to fight back and make sure this never happens again. Otherwise, it breaks the most basic contract between citizen an…

Israel absolutely has the right to fight Hamas. But on the question of whether it's really defense vs avenge on entire population, I urge you to go through recent nytimes article titled "Gaza After Nine Weeks of War" with an open mind [1]. Entire neighborhoods has been bombed to rubbles, parks and roads have been bulldozed. Every single civilian structures, hotels, homes, playgrounds, port- on a large stretch beside…

> it's the picture of a fight against the entire civilian population

Israel could have been done with that 6 weeks ago, if they didn't care about making the distinction. It's a pretty small region, after all.

Are they doing a good job in distinguishing military targets and civilians? No. Could anybody do better and still make progress towards the stated goal? Uncertain.

But I don't think that "Israel is not even trying to protect civilians" is supported by Israel's actions.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#373

Post by bushbaba »

LtWorf wrote: post #184
bushbaba wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source in that? Here’s a source countering https://www.timesofisrael.com/number-of-arab-students-in-isr...

> Source in that? Me, I have personally met people doing it, while being a student myself. From your link: > In postgraduate programs, the proportion of Arab students rose 60% from 3.9% to 6.3%. If you have 0 students and then you get one, it increases ∞%, but sometimes looking at the % in the title, which is just a Δ of the actual % doesn't tell the whole story.

You state Israeli universities have a limit on the number of Arab students. I didn’t see anything which supported such a remark.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#374

Post by dang »

EvgeniyZh wrote: post #316
dang wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users usually flag them, but yes, moderators often downweight them too—and then there are times that we turn off the flags. The answer to your question goes like this: (1) some stories with political overlap are on topic (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... (2) we try to be careful about which those are, so the site doesn't go down in flames; (3) I think it follows from HN's core princ…

I skim through headers of 100+ vote submission daily, and since 7.10 I haven't seen anything about this conflict until recently, and now this is second in last week. Since the discussion usually tend to be broad topic rather than specific link, this feels a lot (I left a single comment last time and was flooded by responses). Both entries are talking negatively about Israel (I think specifically Al Jazeera is not ver…

Yes - the reason is that it slowly started to dawn on me that we can't avoid this topic altogether and still remain within the intended spirit of this site. That took a while, and it's probably better to have waited in any case, because otherwise the odds of reflective rather than reflexive responses (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) would have been even lower than they currently are.

Basically everything in how we run HN is an attempt to optimize for the core principle: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... I know it's not at all obvious how this topic can be within that spirit, but it's also not obvious how avoiding the topic can be within that spirit, so it feels to me like we have to try. I'm trying to support that in this thread a lot more actively than I usually do. (Btw, this has the side effect of paying much less attention to what else is on HN's front page, or happening in comments elsewhere. Usually I make the opposite tradeoff.)

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#375

Post by wolverine876 »

xyzelement wrote: post #254

I have mixed feelings about this topic appearing on HN as I feel like folks are entrenched one way or the other and information isn't going to sway anyone. If this were a discussion we want to have here, this feels like a very bad article as by it's nature it's a one-sided subjective narrative with very little light to shed on the depth of the conflict. An interesting differentiator left unsaid in this article is tha…

> I feel like folks are entrenched one way or the other and information isn't going to sway anyone

People like to profess doom and hopelessness but I see productive conversations, in this thread and another recent one. Why, in the face of the evidence, is it important to believe and convince people that it's hopeless?

The trend to despair just pisses me off. Nobody ever taught me to embrace despair; I don't know about you. Let's get off our asses and make sh-t happen.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#376

Post by drc500free »

dang wrote: post #4
ameminator wrote: post #3

I honestly don't think this subject should be on here. I don't think it's possible for a coherent or respectful or even useful conversation to happen here. I haven't seen any conversation about this topic that hadn't gone to hell.

Yes, you're of course right—and at the same time, if I ask myself how to follow HN's core principle [1] in relation to this topic, I can't see "don't touch it at all" as right either. It may be an impossible quandary—but it's not in the spirit of this place to take an easy way out; or to put it differently, the easy way out (if one exists) is not in the spirit of this place. What does "curiosity" mean in a context li…

Al Jazeera is state propaganda run by the Qataris, who also fund Hamas. The one topic that they absolutely cannot provide unbiased commentary on is Israel-Palestine. Picking an AJ article as the jumping off point is akin to picking a Pravda or RT article as the jumping off point to discuss Ukraine-Russia.

I think this community is better than most at keeping things analytical, and you're better than any other moderator I've encountered in decades on online communities. But it's not exactly a neutral framing to kick off the discussion. An article about the numerous rapes and tortures committed by Palestinians during October 7th and on the hostages afterwards would likewise not be the most neutral.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#377

Post by feedforward »

bluescrn wrote: post #73

Meanwhile, Egypt seems to get a free pass, minimal criticism for keeping its border locked down while being adjacent to a terrible conflict? They could at least let the most vulnerable/sick/injured flee.

In 1948 Jewish terrorists drove numbers of Palestinians from their homes into Egypt during the Nakba. Israel has refused to let the refugees they created return for the past 75 years. So while Israel is carpet bombing Gaza,the party to be condemned is - Egypt? For not cooperating in Israel's effort to drive the Gazans from their homes?

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#378

Post by password54321 »

megaman821 wrote: post #78

Taken in isolation there is nothing wrong with this type of reporting, the IDF should be held to high standards. In the context of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, there is a tendency to hold Israel to a much higher standard and excuse the Palestine side as if they were naive children. I don't see how that could possibly set up any lasting peace. Israel will become more deaf to outsiders, and Palestinians will not be…

> Excuse the Palestine side as if they were naive children.

I am not seeing this anywhere, unless being treated as civilians (which they mostly are) is now equivalent to being treated as "naive children".

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#379

Post by vladgur »

dang wrote: post #43
srackey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a highly politically charged conflict that’s mainly relevant for being a sort of rhetorical proxy conflict (see all the other conflicts going on that receive a fraction of the attention). The point of discussing this topic is to rhetorically battle. Unlike say, the current civil war in Burma or Sudan, or the Azeri-Armenian war, basically everyone who clicks on this will have an opinion that’s not, well, acade…

That is not the only point of discussing this topic, and definitely not the point of discussing it here. This follows from HN's core principle* because curiosity and battle can't be active at the same time. I agree with you about this: > everyone who clicks on this will have an opinion that’s not, well, academic let’s say ... but as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, I don't think suppressing the topic outright…

It is clearly a charged topic and while you did a good job setting the tone, it clear that moderating this discussion will be a daunting task for anyone.

I am already seeing the antisemitic comments calling Jews colonizers, stealing land from indigenous people for 75 years. The one-liners or single-sentence zingers lack context or, often, truth.

I do appreciate comments from people living in that area -- what their lives were and are before and during this conflict.

I do wish that instead of this charged subject on HN, instead an article discussing the history of this land and people living on it. History of empires, conquests, displacements, wars, attacks.

Etymology of the names and Meaning of terms that are being used by both sides.

* What did Zionism mean in 19th and 20th centuries? What does it mean in 21st century?

* What does Anti-Zionism mean?

* Where does the word Palestine come from?

* What really happened in 1948?

* What happened to Gaza Strip under Egyptian rule from 1948 to 1967?

* What happened to West Bank under Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967?

Discussing history of what happened and what did not would be less explosive and more productive use of great minds on HN, in my opinion.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#380

Post by kamikazeturtles »

axus wrote: post #350

My impression is that leaders of both militaries have a goal to remove the civilians of the other side from the borders of Israel, permanently.

When you consider Netanyahu, for years, propped up and funded Hamas, it makes everything more confusing to understand

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

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