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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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