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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

#421

Post by __blockcipher__ »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #273
ido wrote: post #237

Plenty of Palestinians oppose Hamas and want peace and a free Palestinian state according to the '67 borders. These would be the equivalents on the other side.

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…

> These are completely rejected in the Palestinian street, but unfortunately they are officially and internationally recognized by the United Nations and supported by the United States of America.

To me a smoking gun here is that Biden's administration wants the Palestinian Authority to rule Gaza "after Hamas" (as an aside, I sincerely doubt Israel will be successful in destroying Hamas, but ofc even if they do there will just be a more radical group taking its place anyway); history shows pretty well that the US only installs a power when they know they will be a vassal/puppet of US interests. There's many examples but the most recent one is when we (I'm American) propped up the bogus Afghanistan "Government" only for it to instantly collapse and be replaced again by the Taliban the moment we withdrew.

Really hope there's a path forward that gives the Palestinians real autonomy and an end to the bloodshed. In reality, I expect this conflict to continue indefinitely and us to just continue supporting the occupation, which I find heartbreaking but my rational mind is convinced is the most likely outcome.

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

#422

Post by kamikazeturtles »

throwaway48r7r wrote: post #202

It would be nice if people in the region at least pretended to be working towards peaceful solutions.

Hard to do when most of the middle east is run by autocratic regimes that either get military aid from the US or the US is their security guarantor. You have to seem Pro-Palestinian to please the masses but ultimately undermine the cause to please the US

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

#423

Post by programmarchy »

ido wrote: post #48
dang wrote: post #2

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…

I can empathize with this, and hope your family remains safe. But I'm afraid Netanyahu and Hamas are just tips of icebergs, and criticism at that level will not be even remotely sufficient to resolve the underlying issues. I'd love to be corrected, but it seems to me that _all_ religions (not only Judaism or Islam) are plagued by supremacist beliefs about their own ethnic group. At the ethnic group level, religion seems to be an evolutionary advantage if not a primary driving force of genetic success. But at the global, human level, it is often catastrophic. Religious apologists tend to paper over their (often subconscious?) supremacist fundamentals with moral teachings and utopian visions, but I think it's crucial that these beliefs are publicly examined and criticized on the global stage, "heresy" be damned. Would be curious to hear your thoughts.

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

#424

Post by edanm »

ido wrote: post #163
dang wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in touch with several Israeli HNers who are in much the same position as you describe, and I admire their, and your, capacity to stay open despite being under orders of magnitude more pressure than most of us here. This is the spirit I'm asking for commenters to find in themselves before posting. (Edit: Lest this seem like an expression of bias: I've been in touch with HNers on the other side of the conflic…

I have not lived in Israel for most of the last 20 years, but I do have family and friends there. I also know plenty of both Israelis and Palestinians moderates, but they are unfortunately the small minority on both sides.

I don't think it's fair to say that Israeli moderates are the minority - though that entirely depends on what you mean by "Israeli moderates".

I think the majority do not have any "territorial ambition" and would usually happily agree to a two state solution peace agreement, including giving up the WB, as long as security to Israel was guaranteed.

We are very far from this being realistic because of a lack of leaders on both sides, and because the security guarantees are incredibly hard.

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

#425

Post by starik36 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #273
ido wrote: post #237

Plenty of Palestinians oppose Hamas and want peace and a free Palestinian state according to the '67 borders. These would be the equivalents on the other side.

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…

[flagged]

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

#426

Post by qwertthrowway »

nahumfarchi wrote: post #396
qwertthrowway wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an honest answer would be to end occupation and oppression of the Palestinians by Israel. Any occupying force has an interest to silence and stop indigenous people from claiming their land rights. For example, Gaza had been described as an open air prison for almost 2 decades because its borders, imports, sea usage, had all been controlled by Israel. This is not what we call “sovereign rule”. The West Bank ha…

As a Jew, I have quite a few qualms with the comparison to Warsaw. I'm not denying the suffering in Gaza in any way, but it's far fetched to put this on the same grounds as Warsaw, in which an estimated 300-400k Jews were murdered, and which was just one of an industrial system of mass murder. I agree that the settlements are an obstacle to peace, no argument there. But there are solid reasons why the border between…

1, this is a human issue above all. One does not have to be Jewish or non-Jewish to recognize the extreme human toll being exacted on Gaza. When I see bombs collapse buildings of innocent residents, hospitals invaded with entire ICU units dying, mass starvation due to a blockade, and a death toll with over 40% being children; I think all of this warrants comparisons with industrial mass murder. Just because it is being termed “self-defense” or a “war” does not make it any less blameworthy. Let’s look at the real human loss here: it’s mostly innocent people in an urban area being killed, where a large percentage of the population is children.

2, the terming of hamas as a “fanatic death cult” appears quite an extreme label. Hamas is more comparable to a political party with political, social, and military wings. In fact, it’s quite clear that Hamas’s brands itself as part of the resistance against occupation; and the motives for recent attacks lie in the Israeli aggression committed against Palestinians in the West Bank this summer and seeking to release Palestinian prisoners, many who were children, women, and held without formal charges. Even comparing how many hostages who have been released talked about how they were treated by Hamas, with the way Palestinian prisoners were treated by Israeli captors, shows that Hamas is not merely a “fanatic death cult”, given they treated prisoners with a degree of humanity they didn’t need to.

It’s also unclear that removing Hamas will fix the situation; after all, before Hamas, the PLO was labeled terrorists and dealt with brutally. In a resistance situation, the occupying force will typically seek to discredit and derail any process that threatens its control.

3, a desire to end occupation must be one that can be accepted by the occupied people. None of the peace process deals appeared to be honest efforts from the Israeli camp because the ultimate end goal of the occupying force has been to take control of “greater Israel” without the people who are living there.

I would propose a way to move forward for Israel would be a one-state solution: to recognize Palestinians as equal people with human rights, give them citizenship in a democratic rule, and allow them to return to their land. All of this without any military occupations. Because it is clear that a two-state solution has been dead for quite a while, given the occupying force has no intentions to end its theft of land in the West Bank.

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

#427

Post by bluescrn »

stoorafa wrote: post #197
pgeorgi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Egypt prefers dead Palestinians within Gaza over Palestinians living elsewhere and Israel, maybe, controlling the Gaza strip. Al-Sisi, as reported in https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2023/10/12/Ga... : > But the case of Gazans “is different”, he said, because their displacement would mean “the elimination of the (Palestinian) cause.”

[flagged]

And if they keep the border shut tight, aren't they complicit in Hamas's use of civilians as human shields?

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

#428

Post by jhallenworld »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #72
sickofparadox wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't any that would have access to Gaza. If you are reporting from the Palestinian side, much of your data/facts are going to come straight from Hamas spokespeople. If you report from the Israeli side, its going to be IDF spokespeople. The fog of war prevents anything but propaganda from coming out of this conflict.

Note that it is Israel which prohibits international press from accessing Gaza - they monitor the Rafah crossing and have prohibited any journalists from contacting Palestinians via any means available or releasing reporting without going through Israeli censors first. And that there are civilian journalists on the ground who are certainly not “all hamas”

63 of them have been killed:

https://cpj.org/2023/12/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-...

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

#429

Post by CloudYeller »

kamikazeturtles wrote: post #277
baz00 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hamas statements have said it's about killing Jews and it being the moral duty of Palestinians to do that and sacrifice their children to the cause. It's religious in at least one direction. It was about land once. I suspect, to throw the exact level of thinking on the table by these people, about as worthy as a meme at this point.

Any source for Hamas saying it wants to kill Jews. I read it was in their charter but they removed it ~20 years ago

It was removed from their 2017 charter but they still do "pay for slay"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority_Martyrs_...

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

#430

Post by __blockcipher__ »

drc500free wrote: post #352
reissbaker wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP but Netanyahu is living on borrowed time — he won't be replaced in the middle of the war, but even Likud is having private talks about who replaces him once it's over. I would give very high probability that he is replaced well before his term is up.

Unfortunately, given Bibi's single-minded focus on staying in power, "he won't be replaced in the middle of the war" guarantees that he will try to make this a forever war.

I'm curious if pressure from the US ever mounts enough to end this war. Currently we're supporting Israel just like we always have and are just making some empty statements to signal to the more left-leaning segment of the Democrat voter base. I think it's most likely this reality continues, but it does seem possible, albeit unlikely, that Democrat voter discontent gets high enough that we force an end to the war in the next two months.

Of course, even if that somewhat far-fetched scenario comes true we'll probably be up to at least 40,000 Gazans killed :/

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