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Deep Zionism

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Re: Deep Zionism

#51

Post by richardfeynman »

konmok wrote: post #46
richardfeynman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me, but my initial claim is that there is no genocide in gaza because there is no massive population collapse. During the holocaust, 66% of european jewry was murdered in a systematic effort -- all civilians, with no Jews attacking European cities. The figures during the rwandan and armenian genocide were similar: massive population collapses. Whether you believe there have been 100 births a day or 140 or 150…

Thank you for providing sources. I do find it interesting that the Washington Institute report concludes by saying that the Gaza Health Ministry's list of deaths is generally considered accurate, and that list currently includes more than 60,000 names. But maybe you're right! Maybe the very sources you're relying on are wrong, and only 50,000 or so Gazans have died. That still doesn't mean this isn't a genocide. The…

The sources I provided show that there are severe problems with the Gaza Health Ministry list. You may find particular sentences that show the top-line number is correct, and indeed that may be true. I provided those sources not to show that 60k is the wrong number of dead--a figure I myself used in my initial comment--but rather to show that the list itself has issues and that arguments can be made that it's an overestimate rather than an underestimate. I agree the actual figure is difficult to pin down. There's no need for snarkiness ("Maybe you're right and your sources are wrong.") in a discussion like this, where the goal is to discover truth on a complex, emotional issue.

The bottom line is that whether you believe 60k people died or 100k people died, and whether you believe 60k people were born or 100k people were born, there has been nothing close to a population collapse in Gaza. Indeed, the population appears to have risen. Therefore, if you're going to make the argument that there is an ongoing genocide, you're going to have to also admit (as it appears you now do) that Gaza's population has either risen during this alleged genocide, or decreased by a small amount.

There are additional hurdles for those claming a genocide: (1) why has Israel dropped millions of leaflets to warn of impending attacks?; (2) why has israel sent millions of text messages warning of impending attacks?; (3) why has israel ordered evacuations of combat zones prior to attacking; (4) why has israel set up refugee camps/ safe zones; (5) why has Israel supplied so much aid to a civilian population you claim it's trying to kill; (6) why has its genocide been so incompetent and long-lasting if it could accomplish its alleged genocidal goal in a week; (7) what % of those killed are terrorists?; (8) why is the civilian:combatant death ratio so low; and I can go on forever. You may have respones to some of these questions, and we can debate these, but perhaps it's not necessary. The argument for genocide is one of those "emperor has no clothes" issues. People say it with such confidence, as though it's common knowledge (and indeed it is widely believed), but that doesn't mean it's true, or that the emperor has clothing.

Finally, by the end of 1942, the Nazis had killed 30% of european jewry, 3 million innocent civilians. There was already a clear genocide, which the world ignored. The inverse is true today: there is no clear genocide, but most of the world maintains it is.

Re: Deep Zionism

#52

Post by richardfeynman »

cherry_tree wrote: post #50
richardfeynman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an accusation without meaning. You don't know what information I see, so you don't know whether I see propaganda at all. The reverse is true as well; I don't know what information (or propaganda) you see. But no, I don't see how Israel giving Gaza to the Gazans (something Egypt never did) demonstrates "the entire issue," whatever you happen to mean by that.

You are commenting on a propaganda article. You have posted the same authors links before. You consume hacker news at all. Your implicit assertion that you consume no propaganda itself belies your naïveté to politics as a subject.

You are not commenting in good faith. The author, a respected computer scientist with deep knowledge of this issue, is not a propagandist; you just don't like what he says. I have been on Hacker News for well over a decade, I'm not some fresh two year old account like yours. And I didn't say I don't consume any propaganda (I'm sure I do), it's you who said I'm "deep into propaganda" which is a false and evidence-free statement.

Re: Deep Zionism

#53

Post by anatoly »

konmok wrote: post #45
anatoly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this data in fact suggests growing population, for the following three reasons: - the survey recorded a surprisingly small excess of nonviolent deaths (in excess of what's demographically expected), this is discussed in the preprint. The much larger number of violent deaths is almost matched by births, so the total balance is somewhat towards shrinking, in that cohort - however, it is well known that the violent…

Once again: do you have sources for any of this? Yes, there were more violent deaths at the start of the war, but how much more ? @richardfeynman did provide quotes for his birth rate claims, but as I already mentioned, those quotes appear to be estimates of birth rates for a single month. Extrapolating that data across all 22 months is nonsense. Additionally, your argument hinges on a single preprint paper that has…

The time-wise imbalance of deaths is a very basic fact about the ongoing war, I didn't realize you were ignorant of it and needed a verification. The Hamas-provided statistics are timestamped, you can look e.g. at https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/casualties-daily/, download the CSV file, look in the cumulative deaths column, see that it's just over 60k for the entire period, and note that 30k occurs around 2024-03-01. So I was slightly off and it's a little less than 5 months (oct 07 to mar 01) out of a little less than 23 months (oct 07 to 2025-08-31) that account for 50% of the deaths.

There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.

There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.

Re: Deep Zionism

#54

Post by richardfeynman »

konmok wrote: post #44
richardfeynman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this comment. I'd like to acknowledge that as you point out the 6.6% figure refers to exits from Gaza via Egypt using documented means, and may include people who exited multiple times, so the actual people exiting would be slightly lower. Similarly, it'd be nice for you to acknowledge that this figure doesn't include undocumented exits via tunnels in Rafah, or the 424,000 documented exits from Gaza via Is…

Yes, it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but you have provided no evidence with which to obtain even a ballpark estimate. I don't think the real figure would be "slightly lower" than 6.6%, I think it would be much lower, since many of those exiting Gaza would be e.g. truck drivers who make the trip constantly. As for the "secret Gazan escape tunnels", while some Hamas tunnels may exist connecting Rafah and Egypt,…

We were debating whether Gaza was an open-air prison. My claim is that it wasn't because people could get in and out. I have already acknowledged that the 6.6% figure refers to documented exits via the official Rafah crossing rather than indivudual people, and that this includes people who cross multiple times. You have not yet acknowledged the >400,000 crossings from Gaza to Israel, and you put in scare quotes the "secret Gazan escape tunnels."

But these tunnels weren't secret and they did exist. "To mitigate the impact of the blockade on Gaza, a tunnel economy evolved and peaked between 2007 and 2013, with more than 1,532 underground tunnels running under the 12 km border between Gaza and Egypt. "

Source: https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tdb62d3_en...

That's just one source and likely an underestimate on the number of tunnels. You claim you were unable to find the easily-findable stats on the birth-rate in Gaza; this should be an easy one for you as there are multiple documentaries about these tunnels you can find freely on youtube, and you can see video evidence of the tunnels.

I am glad you now say that when people refer to Gaza as an open-air prison, they don't actually mean what they say, but are instead referring to a situation where there were hundreds of thousands (indeed more than half a million) documented exits each year between Egypt and Israel; to a place where the men with guns patrolling the prison were Hamas, not the IDF; to a place where if you were going to get killed, your killers were most likely to be Hamas, not the IDF.

Likewise, I appreciate you acknowledging that this is a special kind of genocide where the population hasn't really been reduced much.

And I also appreciate your deep skepticism of everything I say, despite the many credible sources I provide, and your complete failure to provide any primary evidence for your claims of tons of nameless, faceless, odorless corpses under rubble; your evidence-free claims that people born in Gaza today have a low chance of living; and your prediction that if you give Israel 10 more years, it will eradicate the population of Gaza. I look at population charts; this will be an interesting one to watch - care to make a bet on polymarket with me?

Re: Deep Zionism

#55

Post by iainmerrick »

konmok wrote: post #8

This post got flagged and hidden, but I vouched for it because I think it's more interesting than just another political take. It's a historical record of a brilliant academic (one who I once followed and respected) slowly being pushed into accepting, and then embracing, a genocide.

I was just reading through the discussion here because I was curious how people would respond to that post.

Thanks for all your thoughtful, level-headed and incredibly patient replies!

Re: Deep Zionism

#56

Post by oscaracso »

richardfeynman wrote: post #11
marssaxman wrote: post #9

> Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than ...the fact that you have walled him and everyone he knows into an open-air prison, where nothing goes in or out without your approval, systematically keeping him, his family, his friends, his children, and everyone around him just this side of starvation, with no hope of release, for decades on end?…

Prior to 10/7, more gazans travelled abroad each year than Indians on a relative basis. There was no open-air prison.

That is an interesting statistic, but India is a subcontinent while Gaza is one marathon long. I would anticipate need to travel to vary inversely with area. Wouldn't it be queer if, at most, 6% of Manhattanites stepped foot off the island each year?

Re: Deep Zionism

#57

Post by tastyface »

Israel has successfully conflated “being Jewish” with “embracing Israeli politics.” What a PR coup! I wonder, though, what they expect to happen when they lose their last remaining allies, as the world gapes in horror at the situation in Gaza. After all, most people have an intuitive sense that blasting a terrorist through their hostages is a morally indefensible action, unless you don’t really see the hostages as people.

Re: Deep Zionism

#58

Post by dttze »

richardfeynman wrote: post #16
konmok wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Also, is that "travelled abroad" or "decided escaping persecution was worth losing their home, never to return"?

Source: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/movement-and-out-gaza-2022 "In 2022, the Egyptian authorities allowed more exits of people through their border. The 144,899 exits recorded during the year are 44 per cent more than in 2021, representing the highest figure since 2014." That's 6.6% of the gaza population travelling out of gaza per year, higher than the percent of Indians who travel abroad each year. This statist…

> In 2022, more people were let out of Gaza; however, their movement remained the exception rather than the rule, with the vast majority of residents, over 2 million people, virtually ‘locked in.’

Nice selective quoting.

Re: Deep Zionism

#59

Post by richardfeynman »

oscaracso wrote: post #56
richardfeynman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to 10/7, more gazans travelled abroad each year than Indians on a relative basis. There was no open-air prison.

That is an interesting statistic, but India is a subcontinent while Gaza is one marathon long. I would anticipate need to travel to vary inversely with area. Wouldn't it be queer if, at most, 6% of Manhattanites stepped foot off the island each year?

Two clarifications. First, I’m talking about exits, not unique people. Pre-war Gaza logged ~500k documented exits/year (via Israel and Egypt) out of ~2 M residents; India logged ~21.6 M departures out of ~1.4 B. Both are trip counts, so repeat travelers are included.

Second, area is a red herring. Cross-border mobility is driven by policy, permits, visas, income, and border agency capacity—not square kilometers. Manhattan is integrated into a national customs/transport network; Gaza isn’t. Despite severe restrictions, Gaza still had hundreds of thousands of recorded border crossings annually.

That’s why the literal “open-air prison” claim fails. Prisons don’t run departure counters. If the term is metaphorical for harsh movement controls, say that. But if it’s meant literally, the exit data contradicts it.

Re: Deep Zionism

#60

Post by dttze »

richardfeynman wrote: post #54
konmok wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but you have provided no evidence with which to obtain even a ballpark estimate. I don't think the real figure would be "slightly lower" than 6.6%, I think it would be much lower, since many of those exiting Gaza would be e.g. truck drivers who make the trip constantly. As for the "secret Gazan escape tunnels", while some Hamas tunnels may exist connecting Rafah and Egypt,…

We were debating whether Gaza was an open-air prison. My claim is that it wasn't because people could get in and out. I have already acknowledged that the 6.6% figure refers to documented exits via the official Rafah crossing rather than indivudual people, and that this includes people who cross multiple times. You have not yet acknowledged the >400,000 crossings from Gaza to Israel, and you put in scare quotes the "…

You forgot the rest of the quote: “ While the tunnels prevented the complete collapse of Gaza's economy, they were unsustainable, informal, uncontrolled and unregulated by governments on either side of the border. They were closed by mid-2013.”
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