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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

#731

Post by acdha »

yyyk wrote: post #673
acdha wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to discount the effects of that but most people are also capable of knowing when they’re not getting the whole story. Only around a quarter of Palestinians approved of Hamas before the war.

>most people are also capable of knowing when they’re not getting the whole story. Most people are conformists. >Only around a quarter of Palestinians approved of Hamas before the war. But a lot more approved of violence and terrorism, and they did prefer Hamas over alternatives (that's why no election for 17 years - because everyone knew Hamas would win). Basically, there's nothing Israel can do that will compare wi…

> But a lot more approved of violence and terrorism, and they did prefer Hamas over alternatives (that's why no election for 17 years - because everyone knew Hamas would win).

That makes no sense: why prevent an election you’re going to win? Palestinians don’t like the way Israel treats them, with no small amount of past incidents to base that on, but that doesn’t mean that Hamas is the only option.

> Basically, there's nothing Israel can do that will compare with the main driver in Gaza: Hamas control of media and education or ability to just conscript

This is just propaganda designed to absolve the Israeli right-wing of decades of bad decisions. If the Israeli government had done anything to help Palestinians have viable jobs or elections, for example, then the Hamas leaders would have had to justify their positions rather than blaming all of their problems on Israel. The underlying problem is that Netanyahu liked having Hamas as a justification for why they couldn’t allow Palestinians to have a state, and as a bogeyman to point to any time they needed political support.

https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-...

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...

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

#732

Post by briantakita »

dang wrote: post #374
EvgeniyZh wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> reflective rather than reflexive responses

I understand where you are coming from. In my experience, the reflective response is often a steel manning of one's own position. This often involves framing, as in using phrases that are agreeable in another context into the author's position. The error I see is both sides of the argument constraining the scope of their discourse to only use information that supports their position. Lies by omission & more often than not, lying to oneself first.

In my experience, having tools to expand the contextual scope is vital, if not the definition, to supporting intellectual curiosity. That's where we seem to disagree on flagging & even downvoting. I think being able to somehow deconstruct comments to extract the insightful (& indicative) as signal over the noise in the comment would also be useful. It's open ended on how that would be done but it's worth exploring IMO.

I think tools that improve expression, understanding, & evaluation of context are critical to improving cohesion across humanity. I am busy writing open source libraries with the intent of creating apps to support contextual expression & understanding. I hope others create & collaborate in building these sorts of tools (tech, social, spiritual, etc) because it may be one of the most important advances for healing our many divides.

---

> That's where we seem to disagree on flagging & even downvoting.

I think the author's intent of expression is often not heard with the same context. So the meaning of what was spoken & what was heard is different. Often one applies their judgements to what was heard while not grasping the context of what was spoken.

Have you done any analysis on who downvotes/flags, on what they downvote/flag, & how often?

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

#733

Post by monocasa »

rayiner wrote: post #696

[flagged]

> Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.

Which in the context of the cited request for 1967 borders and right of return, could read to be an additional call for the right of return of Palestinians to the lands within the Israeli side of the 1967 borders.

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

#734

Post by colechristensen »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #586
whycome wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been in touch with HNers on the other side of the conflict as well This thinking kind of reinforces what you're trying to stay away from. There are not just 'two sides' to this. And I'm not sure what you would envision as an HNer from the "other side": someone in support of Hamas? In support of the Palestinian people? I'm only commenting here because I think the bias you fear expressing can still kind of appea…

There are two sides - ordinary people on both sides, who mostly just want it all to stop, and the leaders on both sides, who want it to continue. (As do arms dealers.) The ordinary people have far more in common with each other than they do with the leaders who are keeping this war running.

60% of surveyed Palestinians “extremely supported” the military actions on Jan 7, an additional 15% somewhat supported. This was research done by Palestinians based locally.

There is a lot of hopeful thinking about humanity being conjured out of thin air, evidence on the ground is to the contrary. Many people on the ground support the conflict and expect to win. A great majority of Palestinians supported the attacks in January. A great majority of Israelis insist on a military response taken to its conclusion.

This is not the case of peoples being held hostage by their leaders. They might not like their leaders but they would put new ones in power who were substantially the same.

https://news.stanford.edu/report/2023/12/05/palestinians-vie...

https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20...

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

#735

Post by Georgelemental »

natch wrote: post #388
stoorafa wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an interesting parallel, Gazan’s response is also borne of a history of oppression. Living with food insecurity, being an intergenerational refugee unable to return to home a few miles away, watching family members harmed, etc seems to motivate a lot of Palestinian behavior.

Their ancestors lost their homes when they needlessly started, and then lost, a war against people who owned land outright and others who moved onto the land only after the UN divided it and gave a vast proportion of it to Jordan, and part to Israel… ancestors who also abandoned their land after the war defeat on the advice of their warlike leaders. The ones who stayed behind became Israeli (Arab muslims, Christians,…

> moved onto the land only after the UN divided it

Why should people who have lived in an area for generations heed the dictates of nations thousands of miles away?

> ancestors who also abandoned their land after the war defeat on the advice of their warlike leaders.

This is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. A full accounting won't fit in an HN comment, but it's beyond question that many Palestinians were expelled at gunpoint from homes they had been living in for generations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_fro...

Personally, I would recommend the series "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem" [0]. The guy behind it is a former US DoD contractor who worked for many years with the IDF, friends with Israeli soldiers, etc, but who is also married to a woman with Palestinian relatives. It's extremely well-researched, and explains the motivations of all the players without exculpating any side.

[0]: https://martyrmade.com/fear-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem/

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

#736

Post by acdha »

w7 wrote: post #719
acdha wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I addressed the same point in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38620617 Basically, I think it comes down to options. After WWII, the average person in Germany or Japan wasn’t forced out of their home and livelihood, and the Marshall plan was quite effective at giving people peaceful options to be proud of. What I’m not seeing now is how Palestinians get something similar, and if you push people…

What do we consider "forced out of their home and livelihood". Allied bombing of Japan in WWII destroyed upwards of 3.4 million homes and rendered the areas unlivable for a period of time.

Consider how that would have gone if we had then moved settlers into that space, including areas we hadn’t formally claimed, and dared the former residents to make us leave. There’s a big difference between “we have to rebuild” and “other people are living well in your fathers’ homes but you live in a squalid camp”.

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

#738

Post by aluminum96 »

kamikazeturtles wrote: post #149
iddan wrote: post #136

[flagged]

I always saw it as the Israel-Palestine conflict has been ongoing for 75+ years with no resolution. It's a conflict that's symbolic of the deep divide of the historical imperial powers and the Global south that suffered from colonialism. I feel this is why people in different continents of the world react so differently to the conflict and why many find it so interesting.

Israel is emphatically not a colony, and viewing it through the lens of colonialism will lead you astray.

Jews have a legitimate and ancient claim to indigeneity in the Levant. (In fact, Chanukah is about Jews being persecuted and evicted from their homes in the Levant by the Greeks.)

Jews are obviously not the only ethnic group with a legitimate claim to the land. Turks, Ottomans, Arabs, and Palestinians all lived in the area "historically."

In fact, many Israeli Jews are the opposite of colonizers: millions of Mizrahi Jews fled persecution from Arab countries (especially Yemen and Morocco), to return their ancestral homeland in Israel.

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

#739

Post by yyyk »

cassepipe wrote: post #56

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.…

1. Hamas is still holding hostages and firing missiles and promises to attack over and over, leading to a situation where the border communities are ethnically cleansed because nobody sane is going to just wait there for the next attack. The defence is to remove the threat for good.

2. This formulation is mind-reading. I recall the more correct formulation is asking what the "reasonable person" would do. Or in this case the 'reasonable state'. It's probably impossible to define a reasonable state without sneaking in our preferences. But if we look at the past record of democracies, they were very aggressive in similar situations.

3. There are reams of papers on proportionality with never any clear conclusion, because the definition was intentionally made to be subjective. The better options are to look at other states are doing (a lot more dead in the campaign against ISIS) or to compare the likely futures given each course of action and see where less people are killed:

There's no peace with Hamas, and they won't let themselves be unelected peacefully. So at best we can expect having another war. We need to compare the future of continuing this war, to the future of stopping and having another one a bit later. I can see a lot of scenarios where the future war is bigger and more destructive compared to this one (the future war would have to retake areas cleared in this one; Hamas could take over the West Bank in the meantime, or manage to drag Hezbollah into the war next time).

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