401–410 of 1001 posts
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Statistically that seems quite improbable as Jews are only 0.2% of the worlds population vs the Arab and Muslim world (which majority supports Palestinians) Edit: not to mention the CCP and Russia taking an anti Israel stance as well, both known to conduct massive online campaigns to align with their own agendas.
All: if you're going to comment in this thread, please do not do so in the spirit of battle. The latter is off topic here, and the last thread HN had about this did not do well enough at keeping to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Instead, ask first whether you can find a place of compassion in yourself before commenting. If you can't, that's understandable, but then please don'…
Thank you, Dang. As someone on the Israeli left I feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place- I do not condone Netanyahu and his government and am indeed very critical of Israeli governments of the past decades. But on the other side, my 78 year old mother is fleeing to shelter every couple hours as my hometown (not anywhere near the west bank or the Gaza strip) gets hit by rockets, as do my young nieces and nephe…
Why are the 1948-1967 borders considered so important? They lasted for 19 years.
Also, in 1967 Gaza was occupied by Egypt. Do people want that again?
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This is a common, but very flawed misunderstanding of the situation in Israel, by analogizing it to 9/11. (Many Israelis were pushing this narrative at the start of this, btw, but that doesn't make it true.) This wasn't just a terror attack, like 9/11 was. It was an invasion . Thousands of armed militants breached the border and invaded Israel, then killed more than a thousand Israelis. The militants were inside Isra…
> it was very unclear whether this would lead to a wider, joint attack by other forces as well I agree that it's easy to discuss rationally from the outside. Hamas is not a threat to Israeli existence. Without extensive and far superior outside help, Hamas could not hold a square meter of Israeli (non-Gazan) territory). Do you have insight into why Israelis talk about an "existential" war? I'm not dismissing their fe…
All: if you're going to comment in this thread, please do not do so in the spirit of battle. The latter is off topic here, and the last thread HN had about this did not do well enough at keeping to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Instead, ask first whether you can find a place of compassion in yourself before commenting. If you can't, that's understandable, but then please don'…
Can you walk me through how the below commentary is adding value to the HN community? What % of participants will walk away from this conversation with a positive perspective of their peers?
Those are the most serious allegations: "The men and teenage boys were taken to a warehouse where they sat on a bare floor covered in scattered grains of rice. There they were beaten, interrogated and verbally abused. There was no sleep, and the grains of rice cut their skin as they sat there, undressed." A man claims: "Some people didn’t return from the torture sessions. We would hear their screams and then nothing.…
I don’t think your take is entirely unreasonable, but I do think you’ve missed a critical detail: Hamas continues to attack Israel. So Israel’s military operation is contemporaneous with a threat, and does at least serve some degree of self-defense purpose. As I understand it (and wow, the press coverage is incomplete in so many ways), Hamas has a very large number of, approximately, these things: https://en.m.wikipe…
They've said, numerous times, that they will do it - invade Israel again and again, killing as many Israelis as they can. (Leaders have also said they will kill Jews anywhere in the world, btw.)
If Israel doesn't take out Hamas, it is entirely unclear if it will be able to prevent them from carrying out more attacks in the future.
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Name a conflict or intervention by the US in that region that has made use of US assets based in Israel. Hint: there aren't any. We instead use assets in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, etc. Using anything based in Israel would cause more problems than would be solved. Israel isn't really an asset to the US, it is more of a liability that we tolerate.
Operating out of Israel would be an international relations nightmare for both the US and Israel. We’d not do it if we had any other options (and we’ve always had several, for relevant values of “always”) We give them aid to prevent another attempt at conquest by neighbors. The other prong of that fork is that we also pay Egypt (check out the list of top US aid recipients over the last few decades) to keep them out o…
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what's wrong with al jazeera?
They are state-owned media for an authoritarian government that is hostile to Israel. They are incentivized to make Israel look bad.
The fact that Israel doesn't like their reporting doesn't necessarily make their reporting less factual.
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Other wars are discussed. There have been threads on Russia vs. Ukraine in recent months. Perhaps Israel look bad in the press because they are acting badly. It seems to me that Israel are unambiguously the stronger power in this conflict: they have are much stronger military, and additionally have the backing of the US and a bunch of other nations that would step in were Israeli territory under threat. And they are…
> And they are using that power to aggressively attack the weaker power in the conflict with little regard for civilian casualties (“collateral damage”) or proportionality of response. It is certainly aggressively attacking Hamas, but that's because, despite Hamas being weaker, they've shown themselves capable of invading Israel and killing thousands of citizens. You write "little regard for civilian casualties", but…
Could you share any source for these numbers?
The majority of the reporting I have seen is that around 17-18,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7 and that the majority have been women and children. If we take that at face value, it seems that we would almost have to assume that the majority of men killed are being counted as Hamas militants. Given that there were assumed to be ~40,000 of these (as far as I can recall) in a total population of over 2 million, it seems unlikely.
A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶̶g̶l̶a̶r̶i̶n̶g̶l̶y̶̶ ̶b̶a̶d̶ ̶l̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶i̶r̶c̶u̶m̶v̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶p̶o̶l̶i̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ ̶r̶u̶l̶e̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶p̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶h̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶i̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶P̶G̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶s̶u̶e̶.̶
Update: Actually, I went back and took a closer look at the couple examples I thought supported my argument that PG had some kind of bias on the issue. On second glance, I don't feel like I can honestly claim that he does. Perhaps he does, but I don't have any evidence on hand to support it. I don't want to be adding to the confusion here so I'm going to have to walk back that claim. However, I still don't feel like this topic really belongs on HN. It's a tragedy all around and very important on the world stage. But it seems like there are too many groups that have an interest in steering the conversation one way or another for reasons that have nothing to do with the rights of the victims.