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Comment by JeffSnazz | Hacker News Reader

Israel has a parliamentary system, no? It seems appropriate to blame the parties that forms the coalition for the behavior of the state, and there's certainly no shortage of illiberal actions Israel has done against their own citizens in the last three months to point to.

Regardless, our (USA) parties are in fact the biggest blockers to our functioning correctly as a liberal democracy. One is desperate for votes from anyone, the other party is terrified to pass anything or imagine any kind of future that isn't a slightly less grim version of what the republicans offer. Just by our ability to come to a consensus and do things as a country, we seem to have ground to a complete halt. So yea, people should be a lot more critical of whether or not we're actually espousing the democratic ideals we claim.

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Friend, Israel has a shitty party in power and a shitty prime minister in power, but that doesn't mean it's not a liberal democratic state. It's pretty obvious that you don't know much about Israel. Do you know that the kibbutzim that were attacked on october 7 were full of people who used to go to Gaza to drive gazans to Israeli hospitals? I myself have donated to gazans and marched with palestinians for decades. I will not stand silent as people who know much less than they think they do make overconfident statements maligning Israel.

I agree that having Likud in power is not in and of it self a reason to cast doubt over democracy in Israel. However I do think that the occupation over the West Bank, the Blockade of Gaza, the double judicial system for Palestinians vs. Israeli, the apartheid, the unequal paths to citizenship, etc. together makes Israel no more democratic then Apartheid era South Africa or pre-civil rights era USA. Neither of which constitute a liberal democracy be modern standards.

2 million Palestinians live in Israel as equal citizens. They're called Israeli arabs. They disagree with you that Israel is an apartheid state. There are arab supreme court justices in Israel. Those Palestinians love Israel. There is no separate judicial system for them. There is no apartheid. There is a separate judicial system for foreigners, like people living in Gaza, just as there is in the United States.

I do not agree with Israel's policies on the West Bank, but the issue is more complicated than I suspect you think and I encourage you to read Israeli perspectives on it.

So there is no apartheid if we ignore those living under apartheid?

Gaza is not part of Israel. They have their own government (Hamas), their own military (Hamas) and their own administrative functions. Israel withdrew in 2005, forcibly pulling out every Jewish person that lived there (and Jewish people have lived there for thousands of years).

A) You are ignoring the West Bank

B) Apartheid South Africa used the same excuse. That black people lived in independent bantustans who were self governing and therefor not apart of South Africa.

C) You are ignoring the fact that Israel very much controls Gaza, including every border crossing, the airspace and sea access, imposes a blockade, controls the registry, etc. Unlike apartheid South Africa, Israel does not recognize independent Palestine, let alone independent Gaza.

A) I thought we were talking about Gaza? The Palestinian Authority controls the West Bank, so obviously there is a different legal system there. I don't like Israel's west bank policies either, but unless you consider palestinians living there to be Israelis (something I think they'd object to) then of course they have different ways of life and different administrative functions.

B) The apartheid in South Africa was based on race. By contrast the different policies in the West Bank reflect the historical and cultural context there: that it used to be part of Jordan, that the people there want to be separate from Israel, etc.

C) Israel does not control Gaza's border crossing any more than the US controls Canada's border crossing. Israel is an independent, sovereign country, so of course they get to control who goes in from Gaza. The other border gaza has is with Egypt, and Egypt has the same policies.

Your point C is bad. Israel has a border with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Israel tries to control its side of those borders. But Israel doesn't try to control whether those countries have sea and air ports. Israel very much tried to ensure Hamas in Gaza didn't have a sea and airport, to limit the weapons Hamas has. There was (and is) a blockade. Gaza was reliant on Israel and/or Egypt for bringing in food, fuel and electricity. If it was a regular independent country (albeit a small one), it would have control of its own sea and air port, and would be able to bring in heavy weapons from Iran.

Israel controls its borders with Gaza, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan. That's what a state does; it's what a state is supposed to do. I too don't like the fact that Israel limits Gaza's maritime access (though it's worth noting Hamas developed a surprisingly sophisticated Navy indicating some degree of control of its maritime access). Hamas has not tried to build an airport in Gaza, though Qatar has proposed one, and proposed managing it. I can surely understand why Israel wouldn't want that.

Gaza was reliant on Israel for water because Hamas not only didn't invest in infrastructure, but literally dug up water pipes to make rockets. Why the heck should Israel be responsible for providing Gaza with water, food, fuel, or electricity? Do you also believe Ukraine should provide this stuff to Russia?

We are debating whether Israel can count as a liberal democracy. And I am using the occupied territories to dispute that, because modern democracies have equal rights for its subjects, and imposing an apartheid system discredits any argument in favor of calling Israel a modern liberal democracy.

Palestinians in the occupied territories may not be Israeli citizens, but neither were the South African residents of the bantustans, so which passports the subjects of Israel holds doesn’t matter. What matters is that Israel controls most aspect of their lives and imposes different rules and condition depending on whether you are Israeli or Palestinian. However you separate the population doesn’t matter either, the fact that Israel does is all that counts.

There is a different legal system on the West Bank, true, however the Israeli settlers living there get charged in Israeli courts, and so do Palestinians, except that Palestinians get charged in a different court system, namely military court. This is a double justice system, and there is no other way of describing it. Modern liberal democracies don’t have those, only apartheid states do.

Gaza is and has been effectively occupied by Israel since 1967. It's independent from Israel in the same way that Xinjiang is independent from China. Sovereignty and autonomy in Gaza have been aspirational ideas since Sharon's 2005 disengagement. Meanwhile: only a small fraction of the population of Gaza has ever voted (they're too young to have, in the last election, wherein Hamas threw supporters of the PA off rooftops), so it's deeply misleading to describe Hamas as "their own government".

Pro-Palestinian rhetoric on this site goes off the rails in so many directions, and because it seems to be the majority opinion on the site, there are many more examples of off-the-rails comments from that side. But this assertion of Gaza's independence from Israel is one of the reliable off-the-rails pro-Israel sentiments I see here.

To me "occupied" means there is control enforced by troops on the ground. Israel didn't have any control of what went on inside Gaza.

Gaza was blockaded. Israel tried to control who and what goes in and out of Gaza (to try to limit the weapons Hamas has). But Israel had no control over what the Hamas Gaza government did in Gaza, how they spent their budget, what they built, what they taught in schools, what their military was planning.

A common pattern for state autonomous zones seems to be devolved local governance, but no foreign policy or inter-state security, which seems to describe Gaza pretty well.

The national / federal government is able to send agents and enforce its will on states / provinces. Israel was not able to send anyone into Gaza.

It would be a "breakaway province" situation, except that:

a. Israel intentionally got all its citizens out of that place and

b. Israel had no intention of taking control and forcing Gaza to join back into Israel.

Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.

Gaza was mostly an independent country at war with Israel and not even a little bit an autonomous province of Israel. The war could not be resolved and so it was stuck in a state where Israel thought it prevented Hamas from bringing in heavy weapons but did not want to commit to conquering a city.

I think some people thought that after Israel pulled out in 2005, and Gaza became autonomous, it would become a normal independent country, and people still treat Gaza of 2023 as if it's the Gaza of 2005.

This paints a very rosy picture of the actual situation. Hardly any international organization would call Gaza an independent nation, not even Israel does that. Most (all?) international organization describe Gaza as an occupied territory of Israel.

Having control over a territory is what makes it occupied. And Israel very much has control over Gaza. The government and the legislator is one of few things which Gazans them self control, almost everything else is controlled by Israel, including the population registry, what goes in and out, etc.

> Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.

They never thought such thing. There were regular bombing campaigns which Israelis described as “mowing the lawn” (talk about dehumanization) where the Israeli military went into Gaza—sometimes with groundtroups—including in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. In 2018 the Israeli military indiscriminately shot at unarmed protestors inside Gaza. Israel always assumed Hamas to be a terrorist organization first, and an illegitimate government of Gaza second.

By dint of Gaza's small size, dependence on Israel for resources, lack of control of its own borders (or, for that matter, it's own seafront), mandated lack of control of its airspace and complete inability to land an airplane, total inability to conduct international trade or international relations of any sort, political interdependence on the discontiguous territory of the occupied West Bank, and repeated IDF and IAF military incursions over the last 15 years, it seems facially unreasonable to suggest that Gaza is an independent country just because Ariel Sharon withdrew settlements just under 20 years ago.

I think if someone is going to raise the "Gaza isn't Israel it's an independent country" argument, the facts lining up against an natural reading of that kind of statement make it incumbent on the speaker to lay out the qualifications and contingencies, rather than counting on other speakers on the thread to do it for them. It's not a thing you can just say and pretend is clear; it's more or less an extraordinary claim.

I'd entertain the argument if someone wanted to explore it in a curious fashion. But, like, it's not true. Gaza is occupied territory in the intuitive meaning of the term.

Speaking as someone very familiar with the situation in Xianjiang (my best friend is a world authority on it), there are countless differences. The most obvious difference is that Xianjiang became a part of China in 1949, whereas Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Gaza has also been a part of Egypt. Moreover, China's control is focused on assimilation, a crackdown on religious practices, and re-education, whereas Israel is concerned with none of those things. I could go on forever.

I wrote downthread about how persuasive this argument isn't.

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