For those out of the loop the actions of the Israeli gov. are not some fringe overreaction. This is what the people want. by their own admission, 48% of Israeli Jews want Palestinians to be ethnically cleansed which would constitute a genocidal act, while 79% believe they should get preferential treatment over Arabs. [0]
Both Israeli Arabs & Palestinian Arabs. This is not some, 'oh no! it just happened.' Everyone who has actually spent time studying this conflict, the state of Israel has a policy of systematic rape, torture, mass incarceration, murder, and dehumanization of Palestinians at an industrial scale that's been in place for decades now.
They're just going mask-off in a way Western audiences can't pretend not to know about it any longer.
Israelis and their Western supporters try to make out their actions as that of fringe far-right loonies like Smotrich, etc. Nope. Systematic rape, torture, murder, of non-Jews has been their policy for decades now. You're just finally learning about it after so long. The ultra-orthodox don't make up a plurality of the population and used to not serve in the military until recently. So, if their abominable ideology is state policy, it's because Israelis are okay with it.
> Systematic rape, torture, murder, of non-Jews has been their policy for decades now.
I'd like some evidence for each of these three. I'm aware of the policy of interrogation which might count as "a policy of systematic torture". Can you do systematic rape and murder?
> Jewish sources like Jewish Chronicle, ADL and JVL are largely banned, as well as all the major conservative news sources.
Source?
My personal rule-of-thumb is that an international news source is likely to be fairly reliable so long as it's not reporting on something that they have a conflict of interest in (eg home country/demographic).
> Most editors seem to agree that Al Jazeera English and especially Al Jazeera Arabic are biased sources on the Arab–Israeli conflict and on topics for which the Qatari government has a conflict of interest.
> Al Jazeera's live blogs should be treated with caution, per the policy on news blogs.
The note about bias does nothing to prevent it from being used. Wikipedia doesn't really have any policy of avoiding biased sources; see WP:BIASED.
The live blog warning is mostly ignored in practice, even though it reflects a broader policy (WP:NEWSBLOG). Al Jazeera's live blog alone is probably used more than any other source in the topic area.
> The note about bias does nothing to prevent it from being used.
If you actually edit in this topic area, you should know that its bias comes up all the time. Almost every talk page on I/P is littered with endless debate over whether Al Jazeera covered this or that accurately.
> From a very particular pool of sources. Jewish sources like Jewish Chronicle, ADL and JVL are largely banned, as well as most of the major conservative news sources.
This is a misunderstanding of Wikipedia policy. In particular the ADL is still considered a reliable source outside of a few narrow circumstances.
Unreliable sources may still be cited as a reliable source of the source’s author’s opinion of a matter. So they are not, in any real sense, “banned.”
> Meanwhile Al Jazeera has the highest status, and is the top source for most articles in the topic area. . .
This is incorrect. Wikipedia’s list of perennial sources contains the following disclaimer:
> Al Jazeera is a Qatari state-funded news organization and in the 2024 RfC there was consensus that it is generally reliable. Most editors seem to agree that Al Jazeera English and especially Al Jazeera Arabic are biased sources on the Arab–Israeli conflict and on topics for which the Qatari government has a conflict of interest.
It's not a policy, it's a summary of past community discussions.
> In particular the ADL is still considered a reliable source outside of a few narrow circumstances.
They're not narrow at all, they're essentially the only areas that are relevant to the ADL. It's like "narrowly" banning CNN, but only for news.
Al-Manar (Hezbollah's propaganda arm) has a similar carve-out for example. It doesn't really matter; even deprecated sources are generally useful for basic uncontroversial information about themselves and what not.
> This is incorrect. Wikipedia’s list of perennial sources contains the following disclaimer:
Which part do you think is incorrect? If it's the RSP part, GREL is indeed the highest status, and the note about bias is inconsequential since there's no particular policy basis for avoiding biased sources (see WP:BIASED).
There is an abundance of allegations and testimony from not exactly neutral sources and a few isolated cases that have actual evidence going for them - which have been investigated and prosecuted by authorities.
"Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group, or calling it a euphemism for genocide or cultural genocide."
That's not what anyone said. I said that moving people is not genocide. Killing people is genocide. And sometimes one happens (like when all muslim states in the entire world moved out the jews into Israel) and that's not a genocide, and sometimes the other happens (when the nazis killed the jews) and that IS genocide.
Trying to put an equivalence between those two things is idiotic. And if you DO that, then the arab world perpetrated a massive "genocide" in 1948, much bigger than what the Nazis did. See how crazy that is? Obviously that's not what happened!
-cide is a latin suffix that quite simply means "kill". Trying to call ethnic cleansing genocide is like calling divorce mariticide or moving away from home patricide.
The correct latin term would be something like "expulsio gentium".
Raphael Lemkin, the guy who first coined the term "genocide", considered "cultural genocide" (the killing of a culture if you will), a central component of genocide.
Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but people generally resist being ethnic cleansed, and so the perpetrators have to kill a lot of them.
Historically, forced mass migrations are usually both a mechanism and an ideological cover for genocide. People like you are an integral part of these genocides by legitimizing their actions with statements like "moving people is not genocide".
[David Attenborough voice] Here, we have one of such in the wild, benignly justifying genocide, just like the German national socialists moved millions of their victims to the concentration camps where they'd eventually be exterminated.
Watching Israelis and their supporters denounce the Holocaust as the worst tragedy in human history, while perpetrating theirs, in full view of everyone would be funny if it wasn't sad and heartbreaking.
Please don't comment like this on HN. We all know it's an awful situation. It needs to be discussed with sincerity, even if we find other people's opinions about it to be abhorrent. It's unbecoming to use tropes like this to sneer at other people's positions.
You can make a good argument that a state forcefully resettling ethnicities is a form of genocide (the Nazis did that, too, e.g. with german speaking northern Italian minorities).
But comparing that with the holocaust is just disrespectful hyperbole.
Holocaust had 6M jewish victims[1] (depending how you count). Current confirmed gaza death count is -as yet- ~65K [2], with projected ~600K at risk by year's end [3][4][5]. The original population of gaza was ~2M [6] which sets the upper bound to the crisis. (If you look at it as a % of population, it's quite a large number already.)
Of course, one can argue that if the allies had been able to intervene sooner, the holocaust would have been less severe. Obviously we'd like to demonstrate some lessons learned here.
A huge part of the Holocaust was the forced relocation of Jewish people* to concentration camps, which would have been (rightly) remembered as an inexcusable horror even if the killings in said camps hadn't been as extensive and inhuman.
* and Roma, and Armenians, and others - but that's less salient here.
> [Palestinians] will raid and murder, rape and destroy
> those savages
Wtf? I already responded to a later comment of yours here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454043, but this rhetoric is unacceptable on HN and if you continue to post like this we will ban you—the same way we ban accounts that post like this about other groups.
My parent comment said :"the state of Israel has a policy of systematic rape, torture, mass incarceration, murder, and dehumanization of Palestinians at an industrial scale that's been in place for decades now."
How is that allowed while what I said isn't? My parent comment literally says the same thing. Your moderation is one sided. I didn't say anything that wasn't claimed by the other side.
I see far worse slurs about Israel and Jews here which remain unmoderated. And you won't even let me attack them back.
There's a big difference between making such a statement about a government vs. about an entire population. That ought to be obvious.
> I see far worse slurs about Israel and Jews here which remain unmoderated
There are many comments criticizing Israel (and many defending Israel), but comments slurring Jewish people in general are another matter and we crack down just as hard on those (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45377645).
We don't see every post on HN, but I don't believe there are many such comments going unmoderated, because readers are usually pretty quick to point them out to us. If you see a comment that should have been moderated but hasn't been (and certainly if you see one that is slurring an entire population), you can help by flagging it and emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Also, the outright antisemitic comments I see are mostly by a small number of serial trolls, by which I mean troll accounts in a sequence n, n+1, n+2, ... where they create n+k+1 after we ban n+k. That tells me that these are mostly, if not entirely, fringe participants.
Edit: as a spot check, I just skimmed through all (live) comments from the last week that contain the word 'Jews'. I didn't see any slurs in there, and most seem to be from people defending Israel, arguing against antisemitism and so on.
Not every antisemitic comment is going to contain the word 'Jews'; the art of being antisemitic without such overt references is a long-honed one that few are aware the totality of. Unfortunately, today is also the one day of the year that the already relatively few people best equipped to identify and flag antisemitism are mostly offline.
Governments are hierarchical, and they can (and should) be held responsible for their actions. The population of Palestine, taken as a whole, is not. If you had said "the Hamas state is savage and murderous" that wouldn't have bothered me very much, but instead you generalized each individual Palestinian as a savage. I think @dang's moderation makes perfect sense here.
I was gonna argue with the parent comment but instead here you are doing your best to prove their point. In your mind there’s one Palestinian person, multiplied by a couple million, and you hate that person. It’s the same as any racism.
> Gaza was given to the Palestinians for free in 2005.
That doesn't mean anything. Israel was illegally occupying Gaza before 2005, and has been illegally blockading it since.
And every single year for the past 50 years or more, Israel has murdered more Palestinians than the Palestinians have murdered Israelis - most years, at least 2 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli. Not to mention, Netanyahu has been one of the biggest international supporters of Hamas in the world, and he has admitted to as much repeatedly: the PLA having control of Gaza would have risked a real two state solution, and he will never allow that to happen.
The Ottomans had conquered the whole of Palestine, including Gaza, and had been ruling it for some few hundred years at the time their empire crumbled and the British Empire acquired it from them. The vast majority of the population, both Arabic and Jewish, and either Muslim and Jewish and Christian, were regular citizens of the Ottoman Empire. It was not being "occupied" by the Ottomans, any more than Turkey is "occupying" Istanbul today.
Then, the majority of this population, and the vast majority of the Arabic parts of this population, were displaced to make room for the novel state of Israel, most of the population of which were Europeans and Americans of Jewish descent. They came in and took the homes of the Palestinians living today in Gaza and the West Bank, or their parents or grandparents. And then they have occupied the lands where these Palestinians had been driven away to, with direct military presence for a long time, and then with "just" a blockade and controlled movement.
You sound almost exactly like Trump talking about Mexicans. When you dismiss an entire people as murderers, rapists, and savages, something's gone wrong with how you understand the world.
I'm sure that many many Palestinians hate Jews, but that shouldn't be a surprise when Palestinians have been brutally oppressed for a century for the sake of creating a Jewish state. This is the natural consequence of oppression, and the way to end that hatred is to end the oppression.
Lastly, you say "Gaza was given to the Palestinians for free", but neglect to mention how Israel came to control Gaza. Is it really that generous to return a small piece of the land that was stolen?
As if rolling out the tanks, building a wall and using the population for low skill low wage workers is giving away anything. Gaza is under a blockade since 2006.
Both Israeli Arabs & Palestinian Arabs. This is not some, 'oh no! it just happened.' Everyone who has actually spent time studying this conflict, the state of Israel has a policy of systematic rape, torture, mass incarceration, murder, and dehumanization of Palestinians at an industrial scale that's been in place for decades now.
They're just going mask-off in a way Western audiences can't pretend not to know about it any longer.
Israelis and their Western supporters try to make out their actions as that of fringe far-right loonies like Smotrich, etc. Nope. Systematic rape, torture, murder, of non-Jews has been their policy for decades now. You're just finally learning about it after so long. The ultra-orthodox don't make up a plurality of the population and used to not serve in the military until recently. So, if their abominable ideology is state policy, it's because Israelis are okay with it.
[0]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/plurality-of-jewish-israelis-w...