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

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

#521

Post by RationalDino »

bjourne wrote: post #456
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…

Let's also not forget the unbearable plight of all Russian HNers, who due to circumstances beyond their control are now isolated from the rest of the world. Many of them suffer greatly and fear for their own lives as Ukrainian drone attacks hit deep into Russian territory. We shouldn't treat this situation as a football match, where people only support "their" side. Instead, peaceful coexistence with both sides fulfi…

Funny, my mother-in-law lives in Russia and describes nothing of this sort of fear.

Young men there do have trouble working internationally. And they do have legitimate fears. But the fears are more along the line of being conscripted and sent to the front lines, and not the rather insignificant risk of drones.

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

#522

Post by h3rsko »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #460
tsimionescu wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be arguing from a bizarre perspective that Israel is the defender here. In reality, Israel is the aggressor, and Palestine is the state that has been under occupation and illegal blockade for decades. October 7th was an (illegal, abhorrent and criminal!) act of retaliation against previous Israeli aggressions, not an unprovoked attack. If Ukraine were to bomb a Russian city during the current war, no one…

> but there is no right whatsoever to blockade Gaza's access by sea This by the way is an important fact to bring up when the claim that "Israel left Gaza many years ago and the problem didn't improve". In actuality, they withdrew their occupying army but still kept up a blockade, including a literal cap to the number of calories allowed to enter the country, which I can only interpret as a population control measure…

Israels next door neighbor calls for its total destruction and routinely launches rockets at its cities. In what world would they not blockade them?

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

#523

Post by kamikazeturtles »

asylteltine wrote: post #486
blaufast wrote: post #437

I suspect a very large number of people are too smart to speak up, but also resentful of the forces that work to prevent actual nuanced dialogue. That's certainly the sentiment in my bubble. As somebody who isn't fond of the idea of an ethnostate and sees atrocities coming from all of the actors here, I don't feel comfortable speaking up due to the lack of nuance in public forums.

[flagged]

It's hard to argue Israel "cant avoid civilians" when 40% of Gaza's housing is rubble. Israel's airstrikes aren't "calculated" if they calculate everything as a legitimate target

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

#524

Post by dragonwriter »

rehitman wrote: post #334
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…

This statement is very uninformed. Isreal left Gaza very logn time ago. They had an election and Hamas came to power, and they never hold an election after. There is no land dispute between Isreal and Gaza (Unlike Westbank where there are serious disputes). The main problem is that Hamas and its supporter Iran consistentnly in word and in practice declared that want to wipe out and destroy Isreal. It is not about som…

> Isreal left Gaza very logn time ago.

Israel has not left Gaza.

> They had an election and Hamas came to power, and they never hold an election after.

Israel has obstructed agreements between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Gaza on all-Palestine elections on several occasions since then (the fact that some people who would be voters in such elections live in occupied territory outside of what Israel claims as Israel but which is currently administered by Israel, among other factors, gives Israel the power to do this.)

> There is no land dispute between Isreal and Gaza

Yes, there is. Or, rather, there is no dispute at all that the kill zone of officially 100m and in practice up to 1500m that has been enforced by Israel since it supposed "disengagement" on the Gaza side of the security fence is Gaza, and not Israel, and that Israel is exercising control of that swath of Gaza territory, against the wishes and interests (and lives) of the people living in Gaza.

> The issue is that Hamas need to agree that Israel has the right to exist. Period.

Out of Israel, Fatah (the governing party of the PA centered in the West Bank), and Hamas, the only one that hasn't accepted the 1967 borders of Israel, with presently-occupied territories (plus Gaza, for those who accept Israel's claim that it is not presently occupied) outside of those borders as a Palestinian State is Israel.

Israeli rhetoric about other people needing to accept their right to exist is exactly backwards.

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

#525

Post by xg15 »

I don't want to start another top-level thread on this topic, as it is contentious enough already - but just as an aside, the UN General Assembly just passed a (symbolic) resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire with 153 to 10, an even stronger majority than the last resolution.

Of course UN votes are always subject to all kinds of political considerations and power dynamics and the saying "nations have no friends, only interests" still applies, but when such a wide range of countries from completely different geopolitical alignments vote for this (e.g. pro-palestinian but strongly anti-Hamas Egypt together with hosts of Hamas Turkey, Qatar and Iran, together with pro-Israel western countries such as France and Switzerland), this does give a strong hint how the world opinion on the matter seems to be.

News bulletin: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717

Votes by nation: https://twitter.com/UN_News_Centre/status/173468680169949197...

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

#526

Post by midasuni »

Levitz wrote: post #442
psipisi wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>When you're on the side of women and children, who lose in every conflict, everyone else gets confused because they expect you to pick one of the men's teams. So men don't lose in every conflict? Countries are "men's teams"? I'm sorry but this is infantilizing as well as brutally sexist.

95% plus of the time the war is decided and progressed by men. Very few women in the Israeli government, and none making decisions in Hamas. Same in Venezuela and Guyana, Russia and Ukraine, Sudan etc etc

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

#527

Post by beeboobaa »

davesque wrote: post #410

It's really disappointing to see so many exceptions to the no politics rule right when we need that rule the most. There really isn't anything to be gained by discussing stories like this. We all know that atrocities are taking place. It's a war zone. A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶ ̶g̶l̶a̶r̶i̶n̶g̶l̶y̶ ̶ ̶b̶a̶d̶ ̶l̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶e̶d̶ ̶…

What's that supposed bias?

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

#528

Post by qwertyfoobar »

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…

[flagged]

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

#529

Post by ComputerGuru »

kamikazeturtles wrote: post #196
cjdrake wrote: post #145

Slightly related, I wonder what opportunity cost the Israeli tech sector will incur from this conflict. Instead of developing their startups, lots of young people are busy with warfare at the moment.

I know the IDF uses Gaza as a testing ground for battle testing new weapons, so it goes both ways.

This is actually true; it’s been discussed with citations in previous HN threads. Elbit systems notoriously used to advertise this on their website (doing R&D on the population of Gaza to bill their drones as “battle tested”) until the latest redesign, but they’re not the only ones.

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

#530

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

If they're being tortured that's a real problem I'd hope is investigated but at the same time, suicide bombers are a thing. I see no issue with being asked to strip.

Having served in Afghanistan it is blatantly obvious that most of HN doesn't have the faintest idea what war is like and how a terrorist insurgency fights.

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