Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> equating a terrorist organization on the one hand with a democratic state with functioning judicial system and accountability for any crimes committed on the other hand by putting them in the same press release is pretty bad for the court

War crimes are war crimes, and these were committed in the same war. This is like complaining a corporation and an employee were charged in the same press release. They’re different, but not in the respect of the alleged crimes.

> why doesn't the ICC look into Egypt's conduct of refusing to allow civilians to flee from this conflict?

Refusing refugees isn’t a war crime and isn’t—to my knowledge—under the ICC’s jurisdiction.

View on HN

Furthermore, if Egypt did accept refugees, depending on how it was done, they could be implicated as an an accomplice to ethnic cleansing

In that sense, the UK and America (among others) were accomplices to the Holocaust, by accepting Jews who were fleeing Germany?

The US and UK have a checkered record with respect to accepting people fleeing the Holocaust [1].

Saving them was not an objective of the war effort and was opposed by many due to domestic anti-Semitism and ethno-nationalism (Nazism had significant open sympathy in the US at the time).

Until the political tides changed in the US/UK, both countries definitely wasted time during which many perished in the Holocaust. Mostly people watched as the Nazis killed millions. There was no public uproar to intervene while the events were happening.

It's also not clear that either country would have ever accepted millions of Holocaust refugees, even though the US certainly had the space. The creation of the state of Israel after the war in a way helped them not have to face that question.

1. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-united...

My reading of the history is that a not insignificant fraction of early Western support for Zionism was explicitly to avoid Jewish immigration to Western nations.

That was among the secular/ethno-nationalist rationales.

But there is also a religious rationale. In fundamentalist Christianity, the re-establishment of the state of Israel to its biblically described borders is a precondition for the return of the Messiah and Judgement Day, when the same Jewish people will supposedly be given a last chance to convert ... or else. So the policy is in part rooted in the anti-Semitism of Christian eschatology.

Those ideas had strong appeal after WW2, and they are a major policy motivator of the Christian religious right-wing in the US today.

Just one minor note: these are parts of American Protestant fundamentalist Christianity, I don't think similar concepts can be found in even the more fundamentalist factions of Catholic, Orthodox, Calvinist, Lutheran, or Ethiopian Christian sects.

Yes, I don't generally include Catholicism, Orthodox, and several other Christian sects when I use the term fundamentalist Christianity (although I'm sure fundamentalists exist in any sect of any religion).

I suppose a better term would be "evangelical protestant fundamentalist Christianity", although I suspect that even there, some small number of them are not focused on politicizing Christian eschatology.

An interesting comparison. If they took in every Jew in Germany they would have been accomplices to an ethnic cleansing but would effectively have prevented an ethnic extermination. So while technically the answer would have been yes in that case it might have been a good thing anyways.

But the analogy breaks down here because (1) the UK and USA had strongly antisemitic attitudes at the time and imposed very small quotas on the number of Jews they accepted as refugees and (2) it appears that Israel is not pursuing extermination of Palestinians.

The point is that a law which would label people saving the victims of the holocaust as being complicit in a genocide then it's a stupid law.

It's not a war crime but it is against the 1951 and 1967 refugee conventions, both of which Egypt is a signatory to. I wish more time was spent lambasting them for that.

How about Israel take them as refugees. After all, some of them still have the keys to their homes which were stolen in the Nakba.

You’re confused. The people of Gaza have always been in Gaza. You’re thinking about others who left Israel to go to Jordan, Syria or Lebanon.

I'm not sure that's historically accurate. Gaza was where a lot of Arabs fled during the Nakba and surrounding periods.

That cannot be true based on any logical thinking. It would be amazing if that were the case. That people fleeing in Nakba all said “we will go anywhere but the remaining unoccupied Palestinian territory”

That's absolutely false. Yes, there were Palestinians in Gaza before the Nakba, but the reason there are refugee camps and the reason UNWRA exists is to provide for the Palestinian refugees from the Nakba.

I agree, you should be roughly 50-50 in terms of pressure.

Palestine using human shields are not Israel's war crimes. They are Palestine's war crimes.

Israel is not at fault for trying to recover hostages from a population aiding and abetting terrorists. Have you even seen footage of a Hamas member in uniform being killed? They dress as civilians so their rightful killing is interpreted as "war crimes" by gullible American students.

> gullible American students

The prosecutors at the ICC are neither gullible nor American.

> Palestine using human shields are not Israel's war crimes

Starvation as a war tactic ... can't be human shields? Dropping a bomb every 50secs for the first 2 weeks and now again in the past week killing 15k+ can't be human shields? Withholding aid, inciting genocide, destroying large swathes of infrastructure isn't merely human shields.

There are many, many pieces of evidence I could cite to refute this argument, but the one I find the most compelling is the situation in the West Bank. Hamas does not control that area, there are no "human shields" there. And yet the IDF kills civilians and commits crimes there regularly (with reams of documentation from organizations like https://www.btselem.org/ and https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/). Why should I trust the IDF to be any less criminal in Gaza?

> gullible American students

I know one such student quite well. They are Jewish, right-wing, and all their life were taught (at the Jewish school they attended, and by their family) to support Israel. Then they went out into the world, and met some Palestinians. Now they are leading protests against the war

> War crimes are war crimes, and these were committed in the same war.

Some were committed 7 months ago, the other were allegedly committed a short time ago.

Putting them both in the same release is utterly repugnant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com