Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

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<del>You are right.</del><ins>I would argue</ins> Israel is much worse.

Israel is a state actor with a state level budget, and a state level arsenal which includes nuclear weapons. The damage it can and does inflict is an order of magnitude worse than the horrors any terrorist organization could ever dream of inflicting. But unlike Hamas, Israel also has state level responsibilities, of which it is horrifically failing to uphold. We should judge Hamas as a terrorist organization, but we should also judge Israel as a state actor, and as such any moral failings of Israel is infinitely worse.

> The simple fact is that civilian casualties are not all equally and cannot simply be tallied.

If true the horrors of 75 years of colonization, occupation and apartheid should be weighted in. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are under constant threat of being shot at for opening a car gate, going down the wrong street, or simply for protecting their orchards from settlers.

That said, atrocities and crimes against humanity should not be ranked in any order. They should all be prevented, and in the worst case scenario prosecuted.

What my parent said was: “There is no doubt that Hamas wants to kill all Israelis because we not only have the text of the charter, but we have their actions on October 7th and their subsequent statements.” is the only thing I’m equating.

The case against Israel at the ICJ is exploring whether it can be stated without a doubt that Israel intents (wants) to kill (or displace) all Palestinians in Gaza as a group. For this South Africa cites written and spoken statements by Israeli officials (written charter) but also its actions during the current conflict (hindering aid, destroying civil infrastructure, leveling residential neighborhoods, etc.) as well as also actions prior to Oct 7 of which this inferred intent only builds upon.

My parent was assuming genocidal intent onto Hamas, all the while many states are doing the very same against Israel. My parent may be right, but if South Africa et.all are right, the results are an order of magnitude more horrific, by the very nature that the perpetrator is not a mere terrorist organization, but a state actor.

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EDIT: Removed an unnecessary name calling from post.

I don't think you've made a case for Israel being worse here that doesn't rely on simply tallying up civilian deaths; in fact, your argument lowers the bar further for Hamas, by suggesting Israel has special obligations conferred by statehood. Together, this offers a mode of inquiry that would lead one to believe that virtually every industrialized country is far worse than every terrorist organization.

If you have an argument that would be persuasive to someone who does not in fact believe that almost every country in the world is worse than Hamas, maybe there's a point in continuing to talk. Otherwise, it's fine that we disagree.

While I have you, can you stop writing things to me like that "you are right" barb?

Sorry about my choice of rhetoric. I’ll try to improve.

I want to note that Israel does indeed have special obligation coferred by statehood. Formally those are all the international agreements it has signed and promised to uphold. Relevant here are, among others, the Geneva convention, the Genocide convention, Convention on the Rights of the Child, etc. I’ll give special mention to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which Israel hasn’t signed, thus making it scary as North Korea.

When a state signs these obligations but then fails to follow them, they have in fact failed humanity on a moral level. When these failures result in countless deaths and horrors, they are especially bad. To me this is what makes Israel worse then Hamas. You don’t have to agree with me, but I hope you understand where I’m coming from.

Thank you for the edit! I appreciate it.

I think Israel's actions in Gaza have been hard to defend (their motivation: less so) so none of what I'm saying is an apology for Israel. But the idea that they're even morally comparable to Hamas is an extraordinary claim. Many (most?) normal reasonable people will read it and scratch their heads.

Every country fails humanity at a moral level in a great variety of ways. Israelis sometimes feel --- with some justification --- that they're held to a standard that does't apply to other western countries, let alone countries in their own region, where the deliberate, planned murder of civilians has occurred within just the past decade or so at scales that dwarf what's happened in Gaza.

I think the root of our disagreement is in Israel’s motivation. We will see when the ICJ rules whether Israel’s intention is merely counter terrorism or—as it is accused of—to destroy Palestinians in whole or in part. In the latter case (which is what I believe) the motivation is indeed hard to defend.

When you think about this, remember that there are 2.2MM Palestinians in the Gaza Strip alone, and almost 5MM total. 24,000 is a terrible toll, and I think much of it is reckless and probably criminal, but it isn't a dent in the Palestinian population. There's no way to write that without sounding soulless, as if people were scoring tokens on some sort of strategy game we're all playing. But it's deeply relevant to the formal notion of a "genocide", which is what we're talking about when we talk about the ICJ.

Yemen and Syria are instructive comparisons here, and I'll note that while everyone was pretty grossed out at Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen (which had more to do with how we felt about Saudi Arabia than a genuine concern for Yemenis, who, like Palestinians, are for the most part victimized by the combatants on "their side), you didn't see much talk about Yemeni genocide.

Further arguing against a finding of genocidal intent on Israel's part is the provocation they responded to, which, again, is among the worst in modern history: a truly, deliberately vile attack done at breathtaking scale.

Like I said, we will see when the ICJ rules on the matter, which probably won’t be for another decade. However if the court rules in favor of provisional measures (which will probably be in the coming weeks) you must at least see how I’m justified in believing the genocidal intent. And even if it isn’t, the very fact that these serious charges are being pressed, means that many legal experts think there is a probably cause for concern.

The other points raised here are irrelevant. I’ve said before in this thread—and other threads—that there is no justification to genocide. So however heinously Israel was provoked, the genocidal conduct afterwards speaks for it self. This was explicitly stated in the oral arguments by South Africa.

As for the numbers, that also is irrelevant to the question of genocide. The convention states “in whole or in part”. South Africa argued that Palestinians of Gaza constitutes a group, and that Israels conduct in Gaza violates annex (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; of Article II of the Genocide Convention.

In comparison the Army of Republika Srpska was convicted of Genocide for killing 8,372 victims out of a population of 1.2 million living in territories controlled by the perpetrators. The total number didn’t matter, what mattered was the intent to destroy Muslim Bosniaks living in Srpska as a group.

I don't think you need the ICJ ruling to press a case that Israel is perpetrating a genocide, because there is a colloquial meaning to the word that covers any mass killing that targets a specific ethnicity. That isn't the legal definition, but legal definitions aren't the only ones that matter --- especially in international law, where the legal definition doesn't much matter at all, since international law is largely performative, a vehicle for mobilizing diplomacy and little else.

I would just caution that the colloquial meaning of "genocide" covers a lot of other terrible events in recent history that people don't single out as genocidal, and Israelis are, with very good reason, especially alert to the multiplicity of different standards here. They're largely (leaving out goblins like Ben Gvir) convinced they have no intention of displacing all the Palestinians, let alone killing them all.

I agree that Serbia perpetrated a genocide that killed far fewer people than Israel did. We killed more than 3 times as many civilians as the IDF in Gaza in our doomed Afghanistan invasion, and not only did very few normal people call it a genocide, but they got angry when we abruptly left. And I again urge you to check out the numbers on Syria and Yemen, two other conflicts Iran helped instigate.

The world is messy and usually pretty horrible. I'm not trying to persuade you of anything, but I think it's helpful to know what another perspective on this might be.

> They're largely (leaving out goblins like Ben Gvir) convinced they have no intention of displacing all the Palestinians, let alone killing them all.

Some IDF soldiers made TikToks addressing Netanyahu, starting their intent to complete "Occupation, Expulsion, Settlement". There are dozens of them bragging about how many houses they are blowing up, while they do it with wired explosives. Right now, the last "functioning" hospital in Gaza is under attack, while Israeli youth make fun of "killing Palestines" (most of them can't even pronounce "Palestinian" apparently) in live video chats. Some dude on Israeli TV saying "I'll be honest, I don't care about the war crimes, I just want to see buildings destroyed, mooooore buildings" etc. and everyone laughs.

[edit: And the line that "there are no innocent people in Gaza" is still being repeated by all sorts of people, including military. Here's for example Lt. Col. Oren Schindler in a radio interview: "We need need to make sure that wherever the IDF meets Gaza, there is devastation. Nothing less, nothing more. Where Battalion 74 was - it happened. I can garuantee you that devastation, nothing less, in every place we were, there was only sand left, and houses on the ground. Because in every home, unfortunately I learned that in Gaza there is no innocence."

One might say this proves they don't want to kill innocent people, but Hamas forces them to, etc. but given the context and the actions, I'll just note that this is true about any atrocity. Look any of them up, from the most obvious to the most obscure ones, and you'll find someone painting the it as either a.) doing good or b.) doing bad because bad people forced them to or c.) doing bad for good reasons or a good goal that sanctifies the bad deeds. I doubt "genocide lawyers" would weigh such lip service much, if at all.]

Yes, there were also thousands of people in Israel chanting "Bibi, Bibi, you can't hide, you're committing genocide". But they sure are in the extreme minority.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/13/it-is-a-time-o...

> “Most Israelis don’t know much about Palestinians. They think they are terrorists, all of them, or vague images with no names, no faces, no family, no homes, no hopes,” Baruchin said. “What I am trying to do in my posts is present Palestinians as human beings.”

> Ten days after that Facebook message, he was fired from his teaching job in Petach Tikvah municipality. Less than a month later he was in a high-security jail, detained to give police more time to investigate critical views he had never tried to hide.

Netanyahu has historically low approval, and most observers expect him to get booted as soon as the Gaza war winds down (sooner, if he can't wind it down expeditiously). When that happens, there's a nonzero chance he's going to end up in prison. It is not at all reasonable to suggest that his opponents are an "extreme minority".

People who are calling out the genocidal speech by hundreds and thousands of high-ranking "trolls" and the genocidal actions by the IDF are in the extreme minority.

As exemplified by a teacher put into solitary confinement for posting about innocent deaths in Gaza and suggesting having empathy for those.

Can you show me some, who aren't getting smeared and persecuted for it? I am not aware of a single one.

I agree with all of you that we should not tally crimes, that one crime doesn't justify another. But if I had to rank anyone morally, I'd say the same deed becomes morally worse the better off a person/group/nation is. We can trivially observe this in daily life, too. A rich person stealing 1€ from a beggar would be considered kind of monster, even though it might not even matter that much to the beggar. A beggar stealing 1€ from a rich person dropped wouldn't be a hero, but wouldn't raise any eyebrows either.

And the difference Gaza which has been cut off from the internet for 4 days in a row now, and a government that buys Google ads to smear the ICJ genocide charges as being politically motivated support of Hamas, is rather stark. The US senate just voted with a 75% majority to not even record Israeli war crimes. Are they affording that to other countries in the region, too?

> let alone countries in their own region

That's such an odd defense we never hear anywhere else, but constantly in contest of Israel. Why would the physical region matter? Those other countries aren't taking part in the Eurovision song contest, for example. They're not claiming to be a democracy respecting humanitarian values. Israel was founded by educated Europeans in no small part, not people from the region. If someone brags so much, including having "the most moral army in the world", while that army is doing what it is doing now, it might have something to do with them (too), not (only) the people who don't buy it having double standards.

We expect no better of other countries who currently aren't developed and weren't ever, we're barely even on speaking terms with them, when it comes to having a place at our table in polite company. I bet they also brag about being the best and having the best army, but we don't even hear about it and don't care. If one of them got accused of genocide via a formal trial, most media outlets would have covered and translated the first hearing, where the accusations where laid out -- instead of totally ignoring that and then reporting on Israel's so-called defense the next day.

We certainly don't have a fleet of journalists embedded in the armies of other countries in the region posting feel good stories, while the other half is writing up other random personal interest stories to make people feel good about the part of the picture they're not being shown at all. Or politicians just leaping to their defense before the ink on the accusation is even dry: https://gpil.jura.uni-bonn.de/2024/01/germany-rushes-to-decl...

To my eyes, Israel is held to the standard of a colonial European power in the 1960s, just prior to decolonization.

The atrocities and horrors of European colonization were indeed recognized, but not loudly, the media talked about it, but in a weird tone, often justifying or devaluing the lives of the colonized peoples. Resistance movements among the colonized were described as terrorists, and any fight against them (which was a fight to keep the European colonies) was described as just and moral. The UN spoke against colonization, but was ignored. Human rights abuses in the colonies were ignored or justified amongst western governments.

Of course Israel today doesn’t parallel this dark time period of European history. But the standards applied to Israel today are in many ways quite similar to the standards applied to a European colonial power aiming to keep their colonies.

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