Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

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> Israel is not "openly genocidal".

Yes, it is [0].

> Arguments that Israel's policy is genocidal do not tend to survive acquaintance with a serious international lawyer.

False [1].

> It is simply false that 92% of people have no effect on policy

Oh yeah [2]? Also, the majority of the US supports free healthcare, a ceasefire in Palestine, free college, clean water, modern drug policy, fair housing, and higher taxes on the rich. It's pretty obvious that the people are not being represented.

> Nobody in this thread has complained about the existence of political work.

You're changing the argument.

> I think your opinions are much stronger and more certain than your knowledge base warrants.

You might be right. Doesn't mean I'm wrong, and your arguments that I am are pretty flimsy for a self-proclaimed scientist.

0 - https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...

1 - https://www.un.org/unispal/document/icj-southafrica-israel-g...

2 - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of...

I'm glad you accept my point about inequality. For Gilens and Page, don't waste time reading TPM. Just read the original article. Notice that they correlate expressed preferences with policy, find it higher for rich people, and draw their conclusion. An alternative explanation, backed up by 50 years of public opinion research, is that most people don't have carefully thought out opinions on public policy. They have non-attitudes which will change whenever they are asked or depending whose asking. Not surprisingly, randomness doesn't correlate with anything. Rich people are often more interested in politics - you are likely an example.

As for Palestine, you're citing an advocacy organization, and the UN, of which the less said the better. To quote Ben Kiernan, "Israel's retaliatory bombing of Gaza, however indiscriminate, and its current ground attacks, despite the numerous civilian casualties they are causing among Gaza's Palestinian population, do not meet the very high threshold that is required to meet the legal definition of genocide." Here's another reasonable take: https://archive.is/O8HpJ

So, you're literally a genocide denier. So is Ben Kiernan.

That's horrific bro.

Heinous semantic quibbles aside - 30,000 people have been killed. PEOPLE. Lives ended.

ZERO senior Hamas leaders have been killed.

ZERO hostages have been rescued.

75% of all homes have been destroyed, for 2.3 million people.

This result cost 11 figures.

And you and Ben Kiernan say you're not sure if there's enough intent to call it a genocide! Buddy, Israeli state TV have a bunch of schoolkids singing about "total annihilation" of Gaza. There's HD video of too many war crimes and atrocities to list. These people are filming unimaginable horror, and you're cherry-picking one genocide researcher's statment from 2 months and 20,000 murders ago. That's a yikes dude.

The list of genocidal statements from Israeli leaders is looooong - I already posted it. You dismissed it as "from an advocacy group", even though it's fully sourced. The less said the better about the UN?? Why - because Israel have killed more UN workers than any conflict in history?!

You are literally a genocide denier. You're helping ethnic cleansing happen. You are. Deny it, call it what you like, that is what you are choosing to do with your one life on earth. God help you.

0 - https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide

That's correct. I'm denying that Israel is committing genocide, because I think it isn't.

1) Hamas quotes 22K people killed. I don't know where your 30K figure comes from. Even if you believe the figures of Hamas, which has every incentive to lie and no ethics to hold it back, this is 1% of the Gaza strip's population. If Israel wanted to kill many more times that, it obviously could. I suggest to you that urban warfare against irregular forces has inevitable casualties, which does not make that war unjust. Was the taking of Berlin genocide? If not, what is the difference?

2) Numerous hostages have been rescued, in negotiations which were enabled by the military pressure put on Hamas.

3) A senior Hamas leader was widely reported killed just 2 days ago.

4) You don't know how many homes have been destroyed. The UN estimates 65,000 homes. The highest estimate quoted here by the Guardian is 33%. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/08/the-numbers-th...

I'm happy to believe that Israel has committed war crimes, and it would not surprise me. I worry about ethnic cleansing too - though that will be shown by what happens after the war and not by the fact that Israel encourages civilians to flee a war zone. Claims of genocide are overblown, and I suggest you should tone down your heated rhetoric. The original context was one guy making a lot of inaccurate claims; a second person doing the same does not weaken my case.

> This is what Israel has begun to do - we cut the supply of energy, water and diesel to the Strip ... But it’s not enough. In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza ... The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave. If Egypt and other countries prefer that these people will perish in Gaza, this is their choice.

-- Giora Eiland

> If we act strategically correctly, there will be immigration and we will live in the Gaza Strip. We will not allow a situation where 2 million people live there.

-- Smotrich

Two of dozens and dozens such statements, with rather tame language compared to others. Under the Geneva Convention the Israeli government is required to prohibit and prosecute such speech, not engage in it. And then there are is the actual murder, which in turn unrolls into hundreds of things, including soldiers incriminating themselves with a sort of "humor" that reminds of the cruelty of Abu Ghraib, plus "the Temple will be built soon" and all that.

Even outright targeting of journalists. https://rsf.org/en/israeli-politicians-call-journalists-gaza...

It's worth noting that the Netanyahu government, in official statements, has disavowed Smotrich and Ben Gvir's rhetoric --- and claims that Israelis will re-settle Gaza in particular --- and that the war cabinet doesn't include them (was, in fact, formed in part to exclude them). There's probably no side of this debate that thinks Smotrich is anything less than a monster, so continually citing him isn't doing much to move the conversation forward.

(Smotrich and Ben Gvir have said worse things than this!)

None of this is to vouch for Netanyahu, who is himself a deeply problematic figure and is of course responsible for forming a coalition with these people in the first place --- something I think most people feel he did in order to escape prison.

Not to keep one of these cursed threads going even longer, just, if you're trying to parse reasons why citing Smotrich isn't getting you more traction with your interlocutors, that could possibly be one reason.

I appreciate your effort, but I am citing him because he's put it very succinctly. As I said, that unrolls to many other people saying the same or worse things, many of them in the government.

And their words match the current military actions, the flattening of villages, the religious zealotry, the wanton attacks on civilians. When I referred to Abu Ghraib I wasn't trying to be polemic, that's just the best one-phrase description I can give of all the shit I've seen and read and seen justified.

> There's probably no side of this debate that thinks Smotrich is anything less than a monster

When it comes to Israel itself, thinking that these people are "monsters" isn't enough under the convention against Genocide. As for the rest, where are the calls to stop this? Where is even honest reporting on it? NYT is currently lying about "Israel scaling back the war", meanwhile:

https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17443264624490293...

https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1744351540435935525

Again, just the tip of the ice berg. Videos chosen for not being very graphic. Just enough to realize that the convenient, clean narrative put forward can't possibly be correct.

And the people who watch in horror and watch how it's swept under the rug, how the people scratch each other's back while having "concerns" (say, Biden delivering weapons, saying no to a ceasefire, while paying some lip service to being a nice human because that's all he has against Trump), how Palestinians are just treated as non-persons, vermin to be exterminated to take their land, while that is glorified with sombre references to the Holocaust, will never forget it.

Every time there is something about, say, the atrocity that was putting Japanese Americans into camps during WW2 (which it was), they will think back on how Palestinian children and civilians were blown to bits, starved to death, in the ten thousands currently, with the declared target being hundreds of thousands if not millions, and how their neighbors, friends and family, shrugged and said "their fault for voting Hamas 2006", and how the connection they felt to that person died that day. That's not an argument, but that's what will happen. It already happened. We don't know why people do this or that, just like we never will fully understand the Holocaust, but we know what they did, and that will have to do.

I'm not saying this to convince anyone. I can't convince anyone who isn't shocked about what I already posted and looking into it themselves. I try to stay on top of it, and I pass on some of the things I saw I see nowhere outside of the sources I stumbled onto by caring about and researching the issue. I like to think that makes it valuable enough, certainly as valuable something that contains no quotes and just rephrases justifications that are well known. When I reply to a person I haven't talked to before in a thread I haven't posted in yet, I might repeat a quote or a link, obviously. I don't have the time to come up with something fresh every time.

Respectfully, there aren't a lot of new facts here, just a more impassioned restatement of the argument you've already made. But I'm not here to convince you of anything. You don't have to fend me off!

To the extent we're having these discussions on HN (which I think are largely cursed), I'm interested in the facts being on the table: that Gaza isn't somehow an independent territory Israel can wash its hands of, that Israel is not in fact populated mostly with Europeans and Americans, that everybody from Hezbollah to the IDF has used the "river to the sea" slogan, and so forth.

I meant what I said in my preceding comment. I'm not suggesting to you that because Smotrich is a fringe figure, you should recalculate your opinions about Israeli leadership. I'm literally telling you that you can make a better, more succinct, and more persuasive case by relying less on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Assume the persuadable audience for what you're writing already reviles both of those characters, and avoid giving your readers an excuse to stop reading by make them load-bearing parts of your argument.

Alternatively: stop having an argument at all! It's extraordinarily unlikely that you will ever on HN have a "debate" with a counterparty on the other side of this issue that ends in you somehow "winning". And as these "debates" progress, they get less compelling, more tedious, and more damaging to everybody's case. Apathy could have no better advocate than a 30-comment-deep HN thread.

Instead, just wait for things to appear that are contrary to the facts, and calmly correct the record.

Fair enough, and point taken. Thanks for taking the time to re-iterate it.

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