The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.
There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
> When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card?
It only works if you deploy it against someone lower-status than you. The tactic is largely irrelevant and can be seamlessly replaced with any of a number of other tactics as needed. It's just enforcement of power hierarchies.
It really does only work when deployed against someone of a lower status. Just for example, if you imagine a sterotypical homeless man complaining that he felt unsafe against a sterotypical Karen, in the US there is no real chance he will be taken seriously regardless of the circumstances. It is more or less the "Get this peasant away from me" of our time.
I found your comment to be very insightful and I appreciate it banannaise
Watching some of the endless examples of police abusing their powers or committing crimes or obviously lying in the US on youtube videos has removed any ability to just trust police. In the US, because the police basically can always escalate t violence on any occasion, they are just dangerous to be around.
I never thought about it until this horrible store at the top, but why don't soldiers have to have cameras record their actions? Because war is a terrible thing and we don't want to have video of people murdering each other. But peacekeeprs should have cameras.
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous".
To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
The strong/dominant beating up in the weak is as old as time unfortunately. One doesn’t always have to make that particular comparison as it is a sensitive one. You can point to any major instance of colonization (by whomever) to see similar polices and in the past it was even more brutal because there were no reporters (eg Belgium Free Congo had an estimated population decline of 75% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... .)
In the 1200's British colonizers invaded Ireland, in 1920's the same colonial oppressors were moved to Palestine. Arthur Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 till 1891 and it was his idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
Ship out the jews, radicalize the natives, have the two of them fight for hundreds of years. It couldn't be a more British idea.
It was absolutely not Balfour's idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Balfour declaration was from 1917. But the Zionists first started to move to the region in the hopes of establishing a homeland in the early 1880s, based on their belief that a Jewish state (anywhere; Argentina was another candidate) was necessary for their long-term survival due to the long history of antisemitism in Europe - getting worse by the day - and their (correct, it turned out!) fear that it could reach cataclysmic levels. It was very much their idea.
Balfour's declaration, which wasn't official law, didn't single-handedly dictate British policy for the next 30 years and 14 governments; people vastly overstate the importance of it. Britain did not "ship out" the Jews - most Jewish migrants to Mandatory Palestine were from Eastern Europe and came to Mandatory Palestine very much of their own volition, without British help. And in 1939 - just in time for the Holocaust - Britain cracked down hard on Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine to try to quell Arab unrest; Jews continued to migrate illegally anyway, despite what the British wanted.
Of course Britain had its role in contributing to the violence in the region, but to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
> to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
I'm Jewish (though not Israeli); my grandparents were among those Jews who fled to Mandatory Palestine against the British's and Arabs' wishes to escape the Holocaust. Kindly, I think I'm a better judge of the right hills to die on when it comes to this particular subject.
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
Yes, American police use these kinds of justifications when innocent people are killed too. It's absurd (watch Surviving Edged Weapons [0] some time) either way.
The reality is, if you have soldiers mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms, mowing down hundreds of people each year [1], you've over-indexed on vigilance and under-indexed on the value of human life. You're not trigger-ready, you're trigger-happy.
I'm going to repost and elaborate on a reply of mine that appears to be shadow dead with no explanation. This doesn't seem to be the usual result of disagreement flagging. The only problem I can see is that perhaps this did not meet the level of substantiveness expected from an HN comment (OTOH I don't see how what it was replying to would meet this either, and mine is at least coming from the direction of intellectual curiosity!)
"Perfect example of how no one thinks they're the villain in their own story"
To be clear, the comment I'm replying to is justifying "mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms" based on some amorphous other "players" supposedly not valuing their own life (as a hypothetical soldier!). If this isn't a stark illustration of how individual people in a cycle of violence justify their own crimes to themselves, I don't know what is.
The position would make sense in the context of say a street mugging where the victim ends up shooting the assailant. It might make sense in the context of domestic policing where the subject of an arrest attacks the police (modulo the usual moral hazard wherein cops create pretexts to claim they were being attacked). But in the context of this article and the proceeding comment, I don't see how it is anything but a rationalization for some pretty sick violence.
That's pretty crazy mental gymnastics. Palestinians have been attacking Israel civilians forever. They strapped bombs under their kids beds, etc. It's clear they don't value Israeli life, nor their own. They have been indoctrinated to hate jews before birth. There is nothing controversial about it. Israel has been doing their best to avoid civilian deaths, polar opposite of Palestinian behavior. Yes mistakes have been made, but trying to equate the two is deliberate misinformation.
Please elaborate on what exactly you're calling "crazy mental gymnastics". Your followup points are merely textbook dehumanization of an entire group. So as I said, cycle of violence.
The only thing I've said here is calling out your incitement to genocide. If that qualifies as an "agenda" to you, then I don't know that there is anything left to say.
> Between 7 October 2023 and 15 March 2026, the UN's humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, says 1,071 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, including at least 233 children.
Does that sound like genocide?
Meanwhile, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks says 1,195 civilians and security forces killed. 4300 rockets launched. How many people would that have been if Israel was jamming kumbaya?
lol. That refrain has gotten pretty tired and even the mainstream is waking up to how preposterous it is.
Suffering horrific atrocities in your culture's past is not some license to commit your own new atrocities. Seriously, try applying your own rationalizations to the Palestinian perspective and see how that makes you feel - can October 7th be justified because "[Israelis] have been attacking [Palestinian] civilians forever" ? The answer is a resounding NO.
A professional looks at and understands the situation as it exists now. A professional is trained to not get into situations where fear controls them. Your argument is a compelling one that either these are not professionals or that they are professionals and are doing this on purpose. The stats today clearly show the massive difference between danger to Israeli personnel and Palestinians. Israel at this point has either failed to train professional forces that seek to deescalate and avoid dangerous situations or is training forces to find situations they can claim fear as a justification for murder. So, pick. They are either amateurs at which point it is a deplorable to put amateurs with this much force near a vulnerable population or they are professionals trained to do exactly this, find ways to kill a vulnerable population and claim self defense.
Luck implies a lack of fault. Also we probably shouldn't open fire on suspects fleeing from a heist either, kid or no kid. Extra-judical justice is generally a bad thing, this is why pit maneuvers exist. Allowing police to fire at moving vehicles is a universally bad idea, and one thats understood by most nations.
Or in democratic societies we can insist that our "public servants" actually serve the public interest of law and order rather than merely using it as a pretext to be able to commit their own violent crimes.
Your rationalization is nothing more than a product of a failed society. Bringing it up as pragmatic advice might make sense, although still not for this incident where the "offense" seems to have been merely stopping a car on the side of the road. But invoking it as some universal value of "what ought" is a pure crab bucket mentality.
Then by your logic, every society on earth failed, because there are no places where you can act belligerently towards law enforcement and expect it to end well.
Correct, they failed. Cops are rightfully called all kinds of nice things in all countries. We are far from having what should be a non failed society. But liberal democratic capitalist countries get much closer to success.
Perhaps by your obtusely applied system of logic, but not by mine. Societal values are ideals to be worked towards, not some sort of axiomatic foundation that pops into existence fully formed. The failed society condemnation pertains to your remark, which comes from a place of having given up on the idea that governments should be accountable to their citizens - aka authoritarianism.
I'll repeat the bit about professionals being trained to avoid and deescalate. That is the point. I think the details of this, and many similar incidents clearly show a lack of attempt to deescalate or avoid. That was the clear argument I made in my post and am re-emphasizing now. This clear trend shows either malicious intent by professionals or amateurs put in a situation they shouldn't have been allowed near and those above them should be held accountable for it.
The IDF is not law enforcement. It's a foreign army. It treats Palestinians with utter contempt and has no problem with killing them. Its job is to protect Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land and to prevent the Palestinians from resisting Israeli rule.
Comparing the IDF to law enforcement in a democratic country is not relevant.
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
Technology is not a form of control at all. Technology is the practical application of things you know, to achieve things that don't happen naturally. Here's what the wiki says:
> Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.
By this definition, the earliest wooden and stone tools, use of fire, wheel, agriculture, housing and clothing were all legitimate technology. It's no more 'a form of control' than medical science, any form of economics and commerce or any arts are.
It's true that technology is being used as a tool of oppression. But there are several reasons for it. Controlling its access is one of the easiest ways to control a society - either by gatekeeping access to its building blocks or through draconian legislations. This is possible and done with medical science and arts too.
We can live quite comfortably without the 'modern technology' that only the rich can control. But we are subjected to peer pressure by statements like "you can't compete in this era without smartphones", " you will be jobless without AI", etc. And we fall for all of it without any questions. It enrages me when I suggest that people should choose freedom over convenience, and people reject it flippantly citing market forces and supporting the abusive companies that make them.
Mischaracterizing and vilifying technology in response to its hijack like this will not serve us in any manner. People already have a negative response when they hear technology. But it's a discipline that we must own, instead of being the just the consumer of. Technology is one of the components we need to fight back against control.
Stone tools, fire, the wheel and farming are forms of control. You learn that from prehistory; stone tools and fire provide the baseline for manufacturing, trade and warfare. Farming and transport creates a backbone for logistics and taxation. Each invention contributes to a greater degree of state-sanctioned control; "the people" rarely ever win.
The mischaracterization comes when people get comfortable assuming that technology cares about them. Your stone axe does not want to keep you alive; your iPhone has no self-preserving motivation to maintain privacy. Making these kinds of hopeful-but-foolish assumptions is how people become disenfranchised with progress and associate it with evil.
i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
I was shadowbanned for mentioning Iryna Zarutska. Most political topics can be connected to technology: technology after all is often how we hear of and discuss these things.
It's not strictly tech. But tech tends to be both new and intellectual. Sometimes it can be an old phenomenon but also curious; people often just paste Wikipedia links here and they trend.
From the guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
there is and always has been a strong prohibition of anything political on HN. it is widely and frequently discussed as the main problem with HN. Usually, a post like this would be removed very quickly
There are many objections that could be raised to both my tone and content there but I don't think "pedantic" is one of them.
It's certainly mocking. The subject matter is overly political. It's even plausible that it strays across the line laid down by the HN guidelines, although personally I think it's acceptable given the context. Something about fighting fire with fire.
Those stories aren't very visible because they are BS. Few people are dumb enough to think than a puppet government set up by an occupying force will improve their lives. Those dancers are either paid actors or not very bright.
The double standard I would like to see addressed is this: will any country have enough cojones to boycott the World Cup this year. My guess is no.
Like the other commenter has said, the reason there are no such stories is that they would be hypocritical BS, and I'll add, designed to manufacture consent for unlawful military action against a sovereign nation.
The perennially genocidal occupying force controlling all aspects of Palestinian life including forcing them into a subsistence diet, "mowing the lawn" in Gaza every so often, shooting down peaceful unarmed protesters - some of them disabled - and all that before 7/Oct - has no right to complain about terrorism, for it's what it has inflicted on Palestinians for decades.
The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.
I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.
Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.
Gaza and the West Bank aren't countries, they have no autonomy. Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.
Palestinians are people, must like Jews are people. Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel, the west bank, and gaza.
Much like all Jews aren't responsible for the actions of Israel, All Palestinians aren't responsible for the actions of Hamas. Even the residence of Gaza.
Fair enough. I should say that it was the name of the region as they've basically not been fully autonomous in modern history. But prior to the establishment of Israel, they were basically just left alone by both the Ottomans and Brittan.
Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
There are horrific acts on both sides going back very very far. I grew up in a country with a relatively balanced media reporting on the issue and have tried my best to stay informed. Suicide bombings, bus hijackings, mass murders.
The inequality in force applied has still been a constant.
Also, the fact is that any peace deal has been made impossible by the hunting down and killing of anyone that could actually hold that conversation. All secular and left wing movements in Palestine have been eradicated in favor of Hamas, Islamic Jihad et al.
Likewise the Israeli extreme right wing now in power killed their own prime minister for trying to negotiate.
Also see the birth of Hezbollah as a response to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which also gave rise to suicide bombings. These then spread across the region.
The reason Israel invaded was to fight the Palestinians there who were displaced by the founding of the Israeli state and the following conflicts.
Edit: the Palestinian groups there were doing raids in northern Israel and fleeing back across the border to Lebanon
It's a gordian knot at this point and i am very doubtful there will ever be a peaceful solution.
All I can think is that there is no chance of proper peace talks or any kind of truth commission since oct 7 / the genocide in Gaza.
The most likely outcome in my view is that Israel succeeds in cleansing and redeveloping Gaza and keeps settling and splitting up the West Bank until the Palestinians become nothing but 2nd class citizens in a singular state.
This will not stop the terror attacks.
It's all very depressing. I think both sides have lost.
Israel has put Gaza under siege & total blockade since 2006. The population has been used for low paid work in Israel and treated more or less like cattle.
Forcible accounting of the 200 nukes, their confiscation/decommissioning and crippling bloackades against the country illegally holding nukes and lying about them could be a beginning.
Really? I acknowledged your point before I pointed out its limits. It seems weird you would flag that. Either way,
I’ve seen what makes HN upvote, flagging doesn’t bother me.
A Palestinian growing up in Gaza saw all the Jews leave when they were 5. They then went to an UNRWA school which taught them to kill as many Jews as possible. Their life is poor because billionaires that live in Qatar run their country and spend all the money on themselves and war rather than running Gaza. What’s your point?
But what GP said is true - we can see UNRWA educational materials.[0]
Im not sure what is being taught in orthodox jewish schools in Israel, but I’m pretty certain that in secular Israeli public schools, death of Arab neighbors is not glorified, terrorism and martyrdom is not glorified. [1]
Unlike that of UNRWA.
In other words, one side promotes violence, the other does not
HN flagged a post that pointed out that Palestinians continually attack Israeli civilians. One can listen to any news article to point out each night’s rocket attacks and confirm them.
It’s not surprising they would also flag a post pointing out UNRWA curriculum.
Because people flag facts, this site is essentially a cesspool when it comes to discussing anything political. The moderators have recently been manually un flagging political posts, and then writing their own comments about people they dislike such as Dan’s recent comment about Elon Musk.
It’s a cliche that everyone thinks a site is going downhill, but Hacker News is absolutely going downhill.
Imagine, this is just one of thousands upon thousands of incredibly tragic and similar stories of the last few years (going back much further than October 7th).
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
The scale of these atrocities and our governments' support are the reason why this story should be on HN. We elect people who support this, therefore it's only right it follows us and comes up often, even when it's not convenient. That "inconvenience" (skipping a story in HN feed every now and then) is nothing compared to the oppression our democracies support
Also there's barely a tech industry to talk about as our economy collapses through $100 oil and private equity backed destruction of our way of life - what else are we supposed to discuss now - it might as well be Israel.
This kid will grow up and fight, and I don't blame him. Gaza is a concentration camp, West Bank is an apartheid. These people have the audacity to bribe and threaten our governments to do their nationalist ethno-state bidding in one hand while pushing the narrative that the west must not have any identity or borders in the other. They fund PACs that threaten 80% of congress with "we'll front an opposition candidate and BTW 97% of them win". They fund NGOs who offload the people they don't want onto Europe and muddy the political waters allowing both far left and far right extremists to thrive. When TikTok woke the kids, they bought it. When Epstein died they fought tooth and nail to cover it up. Oil is $100, they do not understand the pure rage and anger they have dredged up.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
It's hard to claim ""bad apples"" when the top brass acquits soldiers who get caught on camera sexually abusing a prisoner and instead prosecutes the whistleblower for leaking evidence of the crime.
I mean, almost entire society participates in (what they believe is the "most moral") military service. It is scary to think folks with murderous tendencies might not be minority.
Eh, tbh I've given up. Can't point out the terrible things that the IDF are up to without being labelled an apologist, or terrorist supporter, or just getting a massively negative reaction.
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
> is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things?
I agree. Hamas and IDF do terrible things - the ICC issued warrants for the leaders of both. This is why an external party has to impose a solution and it should involve in my opinion separation (two-states.) Both parties are radicalized at least for now and need to be separated and allowed to manage their own affairs while allowing the other to exist.
It's pointless to engage with the argument that one party didn't think it was offered enough so it's right for the other party to offer even less. In never made any sense and it's just one of the myriad rhetorical tricks to twist, muddle and subvert the discussion.
Then you didn't understand. Palestinians can be forced to accept a state with the 1967 borders and Jerusalem East as a capital, as it's proven by the fact that they are forced to accept occupation and apartheid every single day.
But Clinton is of course lying as well as disparaging a whole people with racist remarks.
> Palestinians can be forced to accept a state with the 1967 borders
I don’t know what you mean. Palestinians should agree to accept a deal.
> forced to accept occupation and apartheid every single day.
No. Arabs in Israel have more rights than in any Arab country. Apartheid is illegal under Israeli law. You clearly have very little knowledge of Israel.
Arabs in Hamas and Hezbollah areas have bad lives because of their governments.
> Clinton’s racist remarks
Palestinian is a political identity created in the sixties. Racially these people identify as Arabs, just like the arabs inside Israel. That’s why they chant for “Palestine will be arab”. People should know that as a minimum to participate in any discussion of the middle east.
Have you researched what he says in Arabic, rather then English? In a 2014 interview on Egyptian TV (Arabic), Abbas stated he would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state and could not "close the door" to "refugees" wishing to return.
He's also insane: in 2023 at the UN (in a speech with Arabic elements echoed domestically), he denied proof of Jewish ties to Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount and accused Israel of lies akin to Goebbels propaganda. In April 2025, during a PLO Central Council meeting in Ramallah (televised in Arabic), he claimed the Quran places the Jewish Temples in Yemen, not Jerusalem.
> "Hitler did not kill the Jews because of their religion; he killed them because they were Jews. And we must remember that, because there are those who would do the same today if they could."
— Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the World Holocaust Forum in 2020.
> "Hitler was not only a mass murderer, he was a master of deception. He deceived the world about his true intentions, and ultimately, his goal was to exterminate the Jewish people."
— Benjamin Netanyahu, during a speech at Yad Vashem in 2012.
> "For many, Auschwitz is the ultimate symbol of evil. It is certainly that. The tattooed arms of those who passed under its infamous gates, the piles of shoes and eyeglasses seized from the dispossessed in their final moments, the gas chambers and crematoria that turned millions of people into ash, all these bear witness to the horrific depths to which humanity can sink."
- Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at the 5th World Holocaust Forum in 2020
I hope every Hitler-apologist and Holocaust-denier says and believes things like that.
Compare that to al-Husseini, a key figure worth learning about. He was an Arab leader that stoked anti-Jewish sentiment with religious propaganda about Al-Aqsa Mosque (still going today perpetuated by Hamas), possibly to distract from his corrupt management of religious endowments. Al-Husseini led anti-British and anti-Jewish violence for years. He contributed to what is a key turning point or escalation of the conflict, the Hebron Massacre in 1929.
A rumor that Jews planned to take control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque resulted in a violent pogrom against a Jewish community with continuously presence for thousands of years. By the end the mob killed 67 Jews. The rioters attacked homes, horrifically tortured and killed entire families, mutilated, raped, stabbed children, and enacted mass destruction on the Jewish quarter. In many ways it was eerily similar to October 7th. I was shocked when I read about it.
There were some noble people that saved lives from the hundreds. One Arab man literally rode in on a white horse to protect some defenseless people.
What did al-Husseni say about the riot?
> "The massacre in Hebron was the result of a natural and justified reaction to the growing presence of Jews in Palestine. The Jews were responsible for the violence that broke out."
He blamed the victims.
> "Palestine is the land of the Arabs, and it will remain so. The Zionist movement is an illegal act and must be opposed by all means, including violence."
He advocated for violence.
> "The Jews have no place in Palestine and should leave."
al-Husseini had very close ties with Nazis. He broadcast Nazi propaganda over Arab radio from Berlin, urged Muslim and Arab populations to support Nazi efforts, and echoed their antisemitic ideology. He openly called for the destruction of Jewish communities in the Middle East. He helped recruit Muslim soldiers for the Waffen-SS, which is considered among the worst of the Nazi forces in terms of atrocities and war crimes.
And Abbas? An actual Holocaust denier and revisionist?
> "The Zionist movement cooperated with the Nazis in persecuting the Jews, and this is a well-known fact.”
— Mahmood Abbas, 1982 in his PhD thesis "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism."
> "The number of Jews killed during the Holocaust is exaggerated."
— Mahmood Abbas, 2018
These are some examples of what Holocaust denial and revisionism typically sound like.
> I hope every Hitler-apologist and Holocaust-denier says and believes things like that.
You’re right - he’s only a Hitler apologist and holocaust denier when it suits him. He’s not consistent about it.
He’ll tell this story to demonize current-day Palestinians and justify the violence done daily to them. He doesn’t just “advocate” for violence, he personally directs it, and he tells stories like this to make of worse.
He tells the other stories you mentioned to capitalize Jewish victimhood, silence critics, and distract from Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, which have nothing to do with any of this.
> These are some examples of what Holocaust denial and revisionism typically sound like.
Not really. Both quotes from Abbas are very tame. They make him about as much a holocaust denier as Bibi is.
At any rate, they don’t make him or the Palestinian people any less of a partner for peace.
And even mentioning Abbas’ views on the holocaust, in the context of the subjugation, persecution and extermination of his own people for over a decade, is so incredibly cynical and cruel and pathetic, it should tell you everything you need to know about Israel’s position in the conflict.
The two-state solution doesn't need to be offered, it needs to be imposed. And it needs to be imposed on both parties, which means that Israel needs to be forced to withdraw within its legitimate borders.
Israel (with the West's participation and complicity) has been perfectly able to impose on Palestinians the settlements, the walls and the apartheid. Therefore Israel and the West will have no trouble imposing on Palestinians wider borders, withdrawal from settlements and the end of the occupation.
Yes. Another pattern you can observe throughout the years of the conflict, right now again in Lebanon: When Israel rejects an offer, they get a better offer. When everyone else in the region rejects an offer, they get a worse one.
Countries recognising Palestine doesn't matter. Palestine wants one state and to kill all the Jews. They say so explicitly and repeatedly. Anyone who has done any research into the middle east knows this.
I feel something very similar. I have strong views that what Israel is doing is wrong. But I look around at our politics (in the UK), and there is such a well oiled Israeli PR operation that is very happy making career ending accusations that talking publicly about this is actually quite dangerous (Not helped by the loonies who are, and have always been disgusting anti-semites). And you look at our politician's stance on it - and the career of people like Lord Walney, and it's clear we're in a very dangerous place. I think there is a very wide gap between what the average British person actually believes about Israel and what is happening to the Palestinians, and the acceptable positions you can express in Westminster. I also fear that once the dam breaks, and it's no longer the case, that the swing back against Israel is going to be quick harsh, and that's difficult because I have friends and family in Israel - I would like to see Israel be a free and open liberal democracy that shares what used to be western values, but maybe we're too late for that.
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
Interesting, I imagine the propaganda was also used for the German public, because they had no idea they were death camps.
Israel would doubtless keep its genocide a secret if it could, but there's just so much evidence created by smartphones. This is actually an example of how technology is making the world a massively better place--it's so much harder to genocide without creating tons of evidence.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
What does that have to do with the subject of this thread at all? Christians are also terrible to gay people, and European societies have only very recently (in the last two to three decades) become somewhat more tolerant.
In the context of Israel-Palestine, this issue is only raised in order to somehow justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, a la "They deserve it because they're not as enlightened as we are."
It’s relevant because most commenters here hold moral standards that are completely self-undermining because they choose to not apply them to the “oppressed” group.
Consider that it doesn’t matter how genocidal Israel’s Islamicist neighbors are. The IDF occassionally targets civilians when they shouldn’t. Meanwhile Israel’s neighbors don’t even draw the distinction.
The IDF killed more than 20,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.
"But Muslims don't like gay people" does not justify that.
And saying the IDF "occasionally" targets civilians is just completely divorced from reality. They've been systematically attacking civilians for more than two years straight now, racking up a kill count of more than 80,000.
Western governments don't fund their neighbors. They do fund Israel. You have to live up to the standards of the patron such as observing western rules of engagement, treatment of prisoners, and human rights in general.
Western governments do fund Israel's neighbors. This includes Egypt (one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid), Jordan, Lebanon (including indirectly through UNIFIL and UNRWA), Syria, and Iraq if they count as a neighbor.
Patrons don't necessarily apply any standard evenly.
Egypt receives US aid in exchange for maintaining good relations with Israel. That's the deal they have with the US. It's basically the same with Jordan.
And look at surveys taken by European Muslims on their opinions on what should be done to gay people like me, when they can answer anonymously or think the surveyor is a fellow Muslim.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's
role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.
I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).
I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.
>and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
Simply not true. The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews, see Ben Gurions private letters. Netanyahu has supported Hamas to make sure that Palestine couldn't be politically united to be able to continue taking over the west bank. The power balance has since long been tipped to one side that is engineering the situation.
> The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews
This is true.
But denying Palestinians of any agency or fault is wrong. They made mistakes too. And if it’s wrong for Netanyahu to support Hamas, isn’t it just as wrong for any Palestinian to support them too?
"We must seek agreement and understanding with the Arab people only through the Arab worker, and only an alliance of Jewish and Arab workers will establish and maintain an alliance of the Jewish and Arab peoples in Palestine"
That's a Ben Gurion quote, who was a socialist and believed in shared class struggle of Jews and Arabs. The rest of your comment is influenced by other lack of nuance
Ben-Gurion famously preached coexistence publicly (sometimes) but his private messages and memoirs betray his true beliefs:
5 October 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to his 16 year old son Amos: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.”
“It is very possible that the Arabs of the neighboring countries will come to their aid against us. But our strength will exceed theirs. Not only because we will be better organized and equipped, but because behind us there stands a still larger force, superior in quantity and quality …the whole younger generation of Jews from Europe and America.”
Ben-Gurion, Zichronot [Memoirs], Vol. 4, p.297-299, p. 330-331.
See also Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, p. 182-189
And that's the difference between 1937 and the 1920s. In between the Palestinians had committed the 1929 and 1936 massacres which included ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities which predated Arab presence, such as the Jews of Gaza.
Interesting to know that your quote is disputed in the original text, as to say the exact opposite.
> In between the Palestinians had committed the 1929 and 1936 massacres which included ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities which predated Arab presence, such as the Jews of Gaza.
What’s your point here? What I’m understanding is that you believe that the sentiment that Arabs must be expelled from Palestine is justified.
My point here is that saying it was "the plan from the start" like GPP does, ignores the fact the the zionist movement had became more militaristic as a defensive measure to palestinian ethnic cleansings, which is quite clear from the chronology of your own quotes
However, even if you wanted to show Ben Gurion wanted to "expel the palestinians", quoting a single personal letter that is almost unintelligible, that has your quote disputed between "we must expel" and "we must not expel", right after a British committee proposed solving the conflict by transferring Palestinians, is a weak argument
Well newsflash, the Israeli socialists and left wing have lost all influence for the most part. The only way you can form a government in the Knesset today is by a coalition of parties, most of which lean right-wing to far-right or ultra-Orthodox.
Every single person is a product of their circumstances. If you personally were to grow up in either country, the neural network in your brain would be trained with a way different set of data compared to what you experienced, and you would be a different person.
I don't have sympathy or hated for either side, this is just a byproduct of being human.
Are you trying to justify or minimize families being killed for no reason?
I don't get your response in context of what I posted. There are truths, and pointing out someone that goes against that truth shouldn't have to worry about circumstances - especially if those circumstances have been widely documented to be violence since its inception.
If 2 teenagers end up doing drive by shooting on each others houses, all because their fathers were in gangs that did the same back in the day and thats the life the kids grew up in, how are you going to assign who is at fault? To either kid, the other side started it.
Germany is cucked, what Hitler did was outrageous and destroyed any rational ability for generations - and yes while I am heavily critical of Israel and the demonstrably true supremacy and nepotism they have created outside of Israel, I am strongly against the "rounding up of Anne Franks". Germany must now tread the difficult tightrope between standing up for themselves and going full-on loony right, and every time they fall they simply reset to loony left. This is why the establishment just puts their head in the sand.
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Yes, it is a downward spiral. How do you propose to stop it, assuming both parties want another one to disappear from reality, and see any compromise as weakness?
Regarding rules of whether or not this should be posted here - I think it's less about whether it's important and more about whether it causes arguments.
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
I was going to say I disagree, that I think that at least some level of discussion on HN about important things going on is important. Israel is actually a tech powerhouse and a lot of this is seriously shaping the defence technology policy and is telling a lot about how power dynamics actually can play out.
Having said that, my settings show me all comments that are flagged. HN is apparently not capable of having a respectful conversation about this. Almost anything expressed on the actual topic has been flagged. The only thing left are comments rules lawyering to say we shouldn't discuss the topic at all.
It's kind of an indictment of the users of HN. It might be the right move to remove the article, but it becomes the right move because the users of this site can't be trusted to actually conduct a conversation about it.
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Banning all political content means banning all mention of open-source software, self-driving cars, anything involving a Big Tech company, anything concerning AI, anything to do with EU or US legislation, anything involving hacking or right to repair, anything about copyright...
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
Politics is how you make decisions collectively. In other words the market is political, LLCs are political, and common rules about how work is licensed is political.
AI is also being used (unfortunately) to make decisions. AI is therefore political (massively so).
What about AI slop causing the Iranian school-children strike ? US military confirmed that they are using AI to identify targets and provide coordinates. Will you ban that because its "politics" ?
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
This is IMHO the most unfortunate thing about how HN has changed in the last 10 years or so. People downvote now as a form of disagreement, rather than using it as a form of collective moderation. The net result is that the popular opinions rise, while unpopular opinions tend to fall or die out.
On the plus side, it does make for an interesting barely scientific way to poll for popularity of a topic on HN. Absolutely not worth it IMHO, but it is at least a bit interesting.
IMHO showdead often surfaces a lot of interesting info. It's one of my favorite things about HN, and I love and appreciate that HN has that feature.
One example: If you want to see how bad the LLM slop commenting is, showdead is very helpful. It's not as bad as some people think, but it's certainly non-zero. On the plus side, those comments do seem to get identified and flagged/killed pretty quickly.
I wouldn't care about it being a German or American or Chinese national any more than I care about it being a family of Palestinians, and more importantly it wouldn't belong on HN in any of those cases.
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
Why? Everyone has alternative news sources where they can find such stories, and there’s nothing new here. There’s always some tragedy that you could argue deserves more attention, I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
> I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
I don't think that's an accurate framing of the situation. It's a single post that enough people decided was worthy of being upvoted to the front page. I think allowing the community to decide is far more inline with the spirit of hacker news than the outright banning a category of posts.
Without taking one side or the other I just want to point out that a large part of the utility of guidelines or rules is that communities left to their own devices typically develop toxic patterns that are detrimental on the whole. They enable the community to decide not to leave something up to the community in the future.
It's a large part of the idea behind countries having constitutions for example.
Agreed. In the ideal, I would love for politics and many things to be part of HN, because I yearn for the thoughtful, objective, "hacker" analysis on all topics. But in practice I've seen that generally speaking HN isn't capable of this. And realistically it's not fair to expect that as it isn't really consistent with human nature (despite my wish that it was). Someday though I hope to find the "hacker news for {politics, news}" but I realize it may just not be possible.
Because there is often a large tech component to it. The United States and Israel have two of the most advanced high-tech sectors in the world and they are playing a large role in this conflict.
That's a legitimate question and it has no good answer. Not just Sudan. There is an ongoing genocide in Myanmar, against the Rohingya. There is an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in china. None of those get nearly the amount of coverage the genocide in Gaza gets, or, now the war in Iran and Lebanon.
I have no idea why. I have recently started to grow a bit paranoid and wonder whether I am being manipulated by the media I consume. That would not be a huge surprise, I'm willing to bet most people are influenced by some of the things they read online.
Anyway this is an interesting question that has to be answered: why only Gaza, and not the other genocides?
If you really cared about those other conflicts, I'd expect to see you mention them more often in your comments. Are you sure you actually care about them or you just want people to stop talking about Gaza?
Super easy answer: because only on Gaza your government openly sides with the perpetrators, arms and finances them, the media justify them, laws are passed to curb criticism and punish boycotts, and people in online discussion forums bring up always the same debunked arguments and rhetorical devices to divert the attention [1], blame the victims and justify the perpetrators. It's the disagreement that fuels the discussion, the obvious contrast between the right position and the official statements and public propaganda.
1- of which yours is a classic example: "why talk about this and not about something else?"
Because the west (our political and economic system) supports this war, and does so much more loudly than the war in Sudan,which is funded by the UAE, also a US ally, but a far less visible and consequential one. Nobody is visible working the media or politicians to win people over for the UAE every day, unlike Israel.
The aggressor in the Gaza genocide is also pulling the rest of the west into new wars in the region. The war is also deeply connected with our defense and tech industries.
Also, the conflict around "the area from the river to the sea" in it's entirety is something like 140 years old, with western countries having played a driving role since the very beginning. The Sudan conflict on its own has no such history. (The colonial history of Africa is a different story)
Generally, I think it's reasonable to pay more attention to conflicts where the own side is in the wrong. I don't need to demonstrate or raise awareness if my government is already acting like I'd want it to.
> it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war
Sure. Let's spin the story on developments in laser-guided sniper rifle accuracy:
> Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The tech community props up these regimes by continuing to serve their tech needs. Everything is political in this day.
Toxic is saying politics needs to be kept separate. If we can't discuss how tech is literally fueling genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of people, then all other discussions tacitly serve those functions.
I disagree with this. The tech bros building these dystopian systems for big paychecks need to be informed somehow, this is the best way to reach them. They do care what their peers think of them and if we can reach their conscious in between bouts of agentic blogs and vibe coded hopes and dreams, then that is what we should do.
Yes. I would much rather do that. This stuff is all over all of the other information sources. What is wrong with having HN purely tech focused? Politics with way more of a direct intersection with tech - for example the E2EE "bans", chat control, meta's misadventures - makes sense. But not unrelated crap.
Nobody is "raising awareness" here (saw this mentioned above in this thread). Trust me people will still hear about these things if HN doesn't post them. We're just sharing a BBC article for heaven's sake. Its not like we have some new information source like say a former-IDF tech founder whistleblowing. Its all so performative.
There is zero new information any HN reader gains from this post. Its a BBC article, the comments are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit, and the responses from the "defenders" are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit as well.
I've commented before[1] about the weird lack of moderation/enforcement of this guideline:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This one is politics or crime depending on which side you're on.
Never seen it enforced. Not for gaza,iran,venezuela,pakistan,ukraine. The US elections, random nonsense trump does, US govt shutdowns, greenland too.
All of those have been covered here extensively with zero net benefit/net information transacted.
I'm not saying we should only talk about Flash Attention version 6546272. Like if you see the health insurance thread on the front page today, you can see a CFO, a tech worker in the space, etc, commenting and contributing net new information.
This simply doesn't (and I don't see how it can ever) happen on these gaza threads.
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times
- Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
- Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
- Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters
- Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
There's no mention of any particular company, tech or otherwise, here. Yes, you can probably connect your work in some way to something that affects the military if you live in the US or Israel (and even many places outside of it - we're not restricting to direct connections), but, after all, "there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism".
If I worked at [supposedly evil company], I doubt this largely unverifiable story would cause much turmoil. I'm sure at work I'd be hearing about much worse and more concrete stuff already.
Seen this on repeat lately - there will be some war crime that the IDF commits, soldiers or Israeli citizens celebrate it themselves in a TikTok or in Israeli media, then the US media will argue that it didn’t happen or “there’s some information missing”. It’s actually kind of nuts.
Verification _of what_ though? The OP article makes a lot of claims. Your own link says the car was a legit target for 'speeding at' troops, which completely opposes much of the BBC article.
Just because the IDF issued its "justification" doesn't mean it is. As we know from Gaza, there is always a justification.
Here is a good description from the New York Times:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
DIfferent people have different levels of empathy. If you can live with these things happening in the world, let along being involved even in an extremely minor way then fine, but don't try and downplay it.
I think it's naive to think that things aren't overplayed or dramatized whenever I read such an article, from whatever PoV. So it can only ever be _at most_ as bad as the article claims. Then it's only natural to downplay.
What's naive is to think that this is overplayed when the same events are happening day and day out after Israeli settles continue campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. This is just _one_ representative story of dozens that happen every day as reported by many NGOs. This one was merely made viral.
Sorry, I just don't buy the coached words of a 12 year old as categorically truthful. If anything, ethnic cleansing would be a more statistical and thus verifiable claim than the literal anecdote of a child.
Really interesting that out of all the testimonials coming out from Gaza and the West Bank that repeat observable, recorded events over and over again, by people in all sides of the conflict, that you selective choose skepticism about this one as if Hind Rajab didn´t happen.
This is a journalistic article that does provide multiple sources of evidence - including multiple sources of eyewitness testimony, the facts of what happened to the car/damage to the bodies, what the IDF says happened, and the non-response by the IDF to the evidence presented here - what other evidence could possibly meet your bar here?
This doesn't seem like a good faith discussion by people that informed themselves on what this piece is saying, so I'm bowing out. Have a good one.
I'm not sure the IDF has confirmed who was killed, but even so the article goes much further than that. That it was a bad shoot, that the car was stationary, that no warnings were given, that the family did nothing to prompt it, that the IDF weren't legitimately mistaken, that the kid's injury is from the incident, that this kid was even there, that they spent 50+ rounds, that the kid who died has special needs. And more. You can literally just read the article and extract the facts. Those are uncomfirmed save by anecdote.
Literally read it, thanks. Glad you did too. Your original post said “unverifiable story” which seemed like the basic facts of the matter could be determined by reading said article and making inferences based on the sources provide. I trust you performed such dilligence.
The only agreed upon basic facts by both sides are that someone has died at the hands of the IDF. The rest (i.e. what makes up most of the claims) is pure anecdote and thus, unverifiable. I'm not sure what the issue is with saying as much.
We (and I) have become desensitized. When I saw one of these for the first time about 25 years ago, I was thinking about it for a week. Maybe longer. Because it was new, internet was new, and the video (not the same but it really does not matter) was the first time I saw it for ... real, felt it for real.
But after seeing a 100 of these, after knowing some of these are AI, after seeing news of a 1000 more ... I mean how is columbine or sandy hook different ... you see these but you eventually scroll up, sometimes immediately sometimes after a few seconds.
I am not making light of it just saying ... a lot of people at evil companies are also tuned out.
Well, it's also compartmentalized isn't it. It's happening remotely, even if you're buliding the targetting systems or something like that. It's still all abstracted.
And as sympathetic as I might be otherwise, everyone is prone to dramatization and histrionics, which has a numbing tendency too. On both sides.
Yes that's the other part. Suppose I build a high performance on-device caching solution that allows computes on a drone to run 10X faster ... I am not really thinking about the drone, just the caching solution
PS: I have no knowledge of drones or caching solutions. Just saying.
Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?
Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.
Interesting how this highlights a philosophical conundrum here that I'm not sure I have the answer to that goes beyond just forums. Do people make the community, or do rules make the community? I can envision arguments for both sides.
If HN gets invaded by people who want to discuss cooking and start submitting and upvoting cooking articles and HN turns into cooking discussion website? And once they get majority, they'll change the rules to make it exclusively about cooking.
It's still people, just different people. People who like cooking vs. people who like technology and startups.
There's no philosophical conundrum.
Do you want HN to be colonized by cooking people or not? That is the question.
I don't.
We need to stand our ground and repel colonizers who want to change the character of HN. Our unity is our strength.
You think, charitably, that this is an astroturf, really? What's the distribution of upvotes look like for front-page posts, binned in 20 minute intervals?
Reviewing your post history, it's overwhelmingly in non-tech related threads. This seems like a standard post for your tastes, semantically. Why then the sudden distaste?
It absolutely does. Israel uses an AI system("Lavender") to decide which civilians to kill. I remind myself of this fact every single day when deciding where to apply my work. We(software developers) are more than ever exposed to the reality that our products will kill people in the real world.
Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
I agree, but I'd say it's important when pointing out how horrible this is you don't let the "they deserved it" narrative fly.
How Israel acts in the west bank is a testament to how poor their behavior in gaza is. They have no real justification for their evictions and murders of west bank citizens. They have no justification for turning a blind eye to settler violence. They have no justification for not punishing IDF soldiers who break theirs and international law.
Israel's plan to confuse people about what is happening in the west bank vs gaza is so effective that even their detractors are falling for it. Truly a genius strategy
Can't say I'm glad to have read that, but at the same time it's good that male victims of wartime sexual assault/rape get covered. It's just a shame that the response is still incredibly muted. It's like men just don't want to think about it.
Whereas I feel pure, hot rage at the lack of coverage, the lack of anybody caring. Raped men being offered paracetamol because the clinics after only for women has been seared into my brain for a long time now: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-....
It is good that it gets covered, but the antagonistic and accelerated nature of modern media means that such coverage is rapidly subjected to spin, repackaging and so on. This opinionated but imho fair article summarizes how one of the self-admitted participants in the incident was treated as a mini0celebrity by one of the right-aligned Israeli TV channels:-
Too many people think of politics as a tribal team sport. It's not. Politics overlaps with tech because it's really about labelling situations accurately and modelling consequences effectively.
If you fail at those, politics can literally kill you.
Technology happens to be one of the ways it can do that.
No that actually never happened. The very day Israel declared its independence its army was already outside the territory proposed for it by the UN's partition plan. Israel itself never declared what its borders were.
Israel doesn't need to "compromise", Israel needs to withdraw from every inch of land that it occupies illegally. A few notes about the most significant examples you provided:
Netanyahu's statement on the Hebron protocol:
"We are using the time interval in the agreement to achieve our goals: to maintain the unity of Jerusalem [illegally occupied], to ensure the security depth necessary for the defence of the State, to insist on the right of Jews to settle in their land [i.e. further the illegal colonisation], and to propose to the Palestinians a suitable arrangement for self-rule but without the sovereign Powers which pose a threat to the State of Israel."
Wye River Memorandum- never implemented, Israel only withdrew from 2% of area C instead of the agreed 13%.
Gaza Disengagement Plan. In the words of Dov Weissglass, Sharon's senior adviser:
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term 'peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Effective border control would be much easier to implement than the settlement program. In fact it largely has been working since the second intifada when they reinforced it. The west bank settlements make israel less safe, not more.
As if Israel, a nuclear power under complete protection of the world's sole superpower, could have any trouble defending its border. Though of course, turning your neighbours into your friends through appeasement and cooperation would remove the need for such heightened defense. The only problem is that it would be the end of their dreams of territorial expansion and Greater Israel.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
Yes, you are basically encouraging those affected to stay where they are, effectively to just die where they are. You are among the same people who asked the Jews during the Holocaust to stay where they were, to not leave the country, effectively leading to their mass murder.
If my tax dollars, military and government are killing those two people every second, you better believe that I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it.
You will never find a nation more illegitimate, manipulative and in control of the US government than Israel. I'm using my voice as a human to speak up and there are a rapidly dwindling number of Zionists. Israel will cease to exist as we know it very soon.
The fuck are you on about? Pretty sure most niche places like Iceland or Costa Rica are not doing this, and every government on earth thinks of war as passe.
Only defense companies who profit and religious fucking idiots like you think war is some necessary thing.
It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
I go to HN to read about technology and startups. I don't want to read about Israel/gaza, etc, I get enough of that everywhere else in life. But I guess that makes me not a compassionate person.
For people who don't follow this, the West Bank has a different government vs Gaza (they are not friends!), and is in fact pretty compliant wrt Israel.
Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people deserve a national state. Being anti-Zionist is equivalent to wanting Israel to not exist as a national state.
Zionism is currently realized as an apartheid system because there are too many non-Jews within the borders of Israel. The solution should have been two-states, but it seems that current Israeli leadership doesn't want that. So what is left? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/11/israels-netanyahu-s...
And why do they? There's minorities in almost all countries that doesn't have their own state. It's not unusual. What is unusual is creating a state on land where other people already live and then turns guns on them.
Please take your propaganda elsewhere. If Hamas or any other group in the region perpetrated any of the war crimes that Israel commits on any given day, every media outlet would be writing about it for weeks. In the meantime, Israel can bomb Gaza literally every day since the so-called ceasefire and nobody bats an eye. Israel just now acquitted its soldiers caught raping Palestinians in custody on camera. No coverage, no outcry. Israel is very objectively a bad guy, armed with nukes.
The West Bank is governed by the PLO, not Hamas, so it sounds like your concern is that you just don't wish to hear about it because it's an inconvenience.
Terrorist government? This is the West Bank, which is currently governed by Fatah, which has global recognition as the rightful representative authority of the Palestinian people.
I think you're right. Obviously this is awful and the IDF shouldn't be doing this and should be held responsible (of course they won't). But it seems like the implicit message behind the story is Palestine good, Israel bad, which at best is a massive oversimplification.
If you don’t mind developing, what made you switch stance ? many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence , and based on your prior level of support, I’m quite curious about the actual process .
Hard to tell in retrospect. I think the thick layer of distrust against palestinians (which was built by debunked lie after lie from Hamas etc over the years) was finally breached by the sheer asimmetry of power that Israeli forces have gained against Palestinian civilians.
Just forget that the two parties are Jews and Arabs and instead make them Suaheli and Kazakh, and then put one group in such an "agency-less" position as Palestinians are, and give the other group the leverage in power as the Israelis have, plus the grievances. Even if you can understand these grievances – there is just no way these things aren't going to happen.
Plus: The state of Gaza has reached a level of destruction that is just ... well basically as if they have nuked the place (Like I initally favoured). At some point the humane thing would be to call it a win and leave. An that point has probably passed a long time ago.
Plus, I have read about the background of some of Netanjahu's cabinet members and they essentially tick all the boxes of what I find problematic with the aforementioned power asimmetry:
Prior aggresive behaviour against Palestinian civlians in the settlement areas, with the victims having no proper way of legal recourse. Like ganging up on random Arabs there and beating them up. I know there is backlash for this from within Israeli society but man, things are bad if a literal street thug is getting a place in the cabinet, because he behaved that way.
Lets just say many Gazans didn't display any empathy for dead or almost dead civilians either that they dragged into the city and instead were filming themselves celebrating over corpses, and captured women bleeding from their r_pings as well as from the achilles-heel cuts applied. A technique highlighting how deep enslavement-culture run in this part of the world.
You're projecting, judging, trying, and executing every single person of a people. A people are not a hivemind. Treating people as such makes you a monochromatic, ignorant bigot of the worst sort.
Nuking Gaza is an abhorrent position but I don't think there will be any reform out there until there is a decisive win and if I have to pick a side it's not the Palestinians. If the Palestinians win it'll embolden other states or factions to have another go at the six-day war again and possibly prop up break-away action against other factions' host countries. There needs to be a complete and utter defeat that results in an enlightenment process. The strategy and military approach Hamas uses for example cannot be seen to win.
You have to look at the bigger picture. If they lose it's going to be a problem for all of us. Thus I have to support them.
And no I'm not a Trump supporter or Jewish or Israeli. The current operation in Iran is a fuck up. The whole thing that lead to 10-7 was a fuck up. It should have been dealt with years ago, preferably through diplomacy and threat of a strong hand rather than actually having to bomb the place.
There's no righteous side at all in this conflict.
Same thought in reverse. If oppressive regimes see that intentionally backing a population into a corner ultimately lets them get away with genocide on the global stage then presumably more of them will attempt it in the future.
Is the Gaza War a genocide? Two key features of the mortality data are consistent with that charge: first, unusually high mortality among women and children; second, the sudden and dramatic fall in life expectancy. In these respects, the war resembles the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides more closely than any other recent conflict involving the US or Israel.
That's literally the strategy of the Likud, who undermined the more moderate Fattah to allow the extremist Hamas to reign on the Gaza strip, hoping that one day the 7th of october would happen, and would let them unleash a genocide...
> It’s very natural to want to return the same in kind
They didn't return the same in kind. Compare the "stats" of Oct 7 vs what Israel did over the next 2 years.
If you think that what happened on Oct 7 justified such a response, then you should shudder at the thought of what is justified in a merely proportional response to Israel's response. Proportionality being the foundation of justice and all that.
Those are some serious claims there. It's been 2 years and all the captured people have been returned to Israel. Still no actual proof of such claims that are casually repeated by pro-Israeli media. Not even mere supporting testimonies by those who were held captive.
Anyway, you dodged nearly the entirety of my comment. You know very well what a proportional response to what Israel has done would be.
> It's been 2 years and all the captured people have been returned to Israel
No. The IDF retrieved some people and some bodies, sometimes Hamas returned live people, sometimes bodies like the Bibas babies they beat to death, sometimes other bodies that they pretended were the victim.
> Still no actual proof of such claims that are casually repeated by pro-Israeli media.
Most are from the victims. You can listen to the testimony of these people, in many cases via video:
Arbel Yehoud was sexually assaulted almost every single day during her 482 days in captivity by her captors (Palestinian Islamic Jihad, affiliated with Hamas operations).
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886646
> Anyway, you dodged nearly the entirety of my comment
Yes because it was disgusting. Maybe after reading this you should acknowledge that and apologise?
> You know very well what a proportional response to what Israel has done would be.
Hamas risking the lives of its own people to save some fictional hostages the IDF has not kidnapped?
Likewise, you haven’t acknowledged that IDF having a proportional response would be a drug fuelled death and rape rampage like Hamas did.
It seems like you support the Axis forces because more Germans died than British people. Israel defending its population from Hamas attacks doesn’t make Hamas good.
Seriously: listen to the victims and fix your life. Or better yet maybe Dang can do something about this new account.
First of all, Israel DOES conduct rape of Palestinians [1] [2], so that's not some hypothetical revenge scenario, but rather an everyday reality for Palestinians living under a brutal occupation. Randomly scoop up a few Palestinians every now and then, put them in prisons often at no charge at all ("administrative detention"), and then do anything you want to them behind the prison walls.
Second of all, I actually have principles, and I am against rape ALWAYS. If the victim testimonies that you referenced are actually true, then the perpetrators of those crimes deserve appropriate punishment. So do the Israelis who rape Palestinians.
> > Anyway, you dodged nearly the entirety of my comment
> Yes because it was disgusting.
No I won't let you keep dodging. What I wrote was that if you think that what happened on Oct 7 justified the response that Israel enacted by demolishing basically the entirety of Gaza, then you should shudder at the thought of what is justified in a merely proportional response to Israel's response. Proportionality being the foundation of justice and all that. For example, given that we know that Israel regularly kills and rapes Palestinians, would it be justified to do to Israel what Israel has done to Gaza? No? Then why do you people keep justifying what you have done to Gaza? When will you accept how disproportionally savage that was? Do you not see how disgusted by it the rest of the world is?
If you think that proportionality is disgusting, well, no need to engage any further.
> First of all, Israel DOES conduct rape of Palestinians [1] [2], so that's not some hypothetical revenge scenario, but rather an everyday reality for Palestinians
Your links don't support your statement that this is an everyday reality.
> If the victim testimonies that you referenced are actually true, then the perpetrators of those crimes deserve appropriate punishment. So do the Israelis who rape Palestinians.
Good, I'm glad about that. You seem to cast more doubt on the many cases of Hamas and regular Gazans brutalizing Israeli civilians than the few cases of Israeli soldiers brutalizing prisoners though. Why is that?
> No I won't let you keep dodging.
What have I dodged?
> What I wrote was that if you think that what happened on Oct 7 justified the response that Israel enacted by demolishing basically the entirety of Gaza, then you should shudder at the thought of what is justified in a merely proportional response to Israel's response.
Yes, I replied with what a proportional response by Hamas to Israel would have been:
> > Hamas risking the lives of its own people to save some fictional hostages the IDF has not kidnapped?
You seemed to have missed this.
> given that we know that Israel regularly kills and rapes Palestinians,
That's not given. Your links about an isolated brutality case does not support your case that this is regular or anything near the scale of the Oct 7 massacre. The soldiers that brutalized that man are being punished by the Israeli government. The Hamas operatives that perpetuated Oct 7 massacre are by the Gazan government.
> Then why do you people keep justifying what you have done to Gaza?
exactly. wanting to nuke the place is an absolute normal response to what the Palestininans did on 7 Oct. They livestreamed their joy of r_pe, enslavement and gruesome killings. Even the nazis, to which the Oct-7-abaters are never tired of comparing the Israelis to, had the decency to not openly advertise their atrocities.
> about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris
Really?
Aotearoan here. Our racist history is shameful. Many massacres, both sides but mostly one way traffic.
Our history of "othering" indigenous people here in law was shameful too.
But seriously, and with all due respect, fuck you!!
We are facing up to our racist past, present and (Dog help us) future.
Tikanga Māori is joining our legal system.
Being openly racist to Māori is politically suicidal (some right wing politicians are giving it a go, and getting burnt for it)
Māori institutions are integrating themselves into all levels of our culture and society
And on and on. New Zealand is a Māori country, I am Pākehā, I have no problem with that, I belong here too. We (white people) are learning to share, learning there are more ways than our ways. Israel could learn from us, but...
The Isralies are utterly different. The violent homicidal, nay genocidal, racism of Israel is institutional.
Fuck you. For all we have our problems with racism, we are not genocidal racist violent thugs, as are the IDF representing the Israli state
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
Sad story. War is sad. 2 countries in a war that cannot end otherwise.
Its either Palestine or Israel unfortunately.
Put your good will and emotions somewhere it can actually make a sensible difference guys
"Ethnic cleansing" is such a nice word. "Etničko čišćenje" is what the Serb paramilitaries called raping and murdering a population to make them leave. "Remove kebab" as the later meme culture would call it. It's so trite, and a little funny it seems. We should call it what it is: *genocide*; thereby robbing the perpetrators of any semblance of cleanliness or propriety.
Monsters are filthy. Let's call them the filthy monsters they are.
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination
This is the biggest lie of all.
Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We discuss pros and cons in terms of security, legality, world public opinion, etc. These are the only considerations. We don’t see any humanity there. We just need their land.
That said, it’s true that some Palestinians have dreams of defending themselves from us.
“ 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.”
“ Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."
Israeli society has a very, very strong genocidal current.
“ Israel's military has dropped the prosecution of five reservists accused of the violent rape of a Palestinian man … The shocking incident in July 2024 was caught on CCTV and later broadcast on Israeli television“
“ In a statement, the country's Defence Minister Israel Katz welcomed a decision by the military's top prosecutor to drop the charges, declaring "justice has been served".
people like you are responsible for the word 'genocide' meaning absolutely nothing in the last few years. go back to your reddit echochamber and post your 'free free palestine' slop there because I come to hackernews to escape netflix level takes on politics.
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
This will never stop, because on both sides there are people who benefit from the existence of the conflict and they are the ones with power.
The last time when Israel had a PM who was willing to find a way for ending the conflict, he was murdered and replaced by those who want a perpetual conflict.
I have worked in Israel for some years, and the vast majority of people that I have encountered were very nice, but I have also seen a few that were definitely evil, and of course, the evil ones were concentrated in positions like the government or the management of companies.
Because most Israelis live in constant fear that if they would ever lose their technological and financial superiority their neighbors will come and cut their throats, when I was there, and I assume that also today, the majority of the population was exploited in a way that would not be possible in any other country.
Everybody had to work very hard, much harder than in any other country, and prioritize work over anything else, because this was a patriotic duty, like one might have worked in USA during WWII or in Ukraine today or in any country that is at war and its survival depends on how everyone works, except that in Israel the war has been continuous for three quarters of a century.
For the elites of the country this war economy is extremely desirable because they can demand any sacrifices from the workers, since those are supposedly not for increasing the profits of the company owners, but for ensuring the survival of the nation, and anyone who would not want to do what is required would be seen as a traitor.
For ending the conflict, it is not possible to just say that from tomorrow the parties in conflict should stop hating each other. Reparations would be necessary, like Israel itself has received plenty from Germany and other countries.
However, it is very unlikely that Israel will ever have a government willing to end the conflict, instead of keeping it alive as long as possible, to have something with which to scare the population.
Even post Epstein revelations, Chomsky's core thesis in The Fateful Triangle from 1983 still holds. A minority of hateful, brutish war hawks and crazy people on all 3 sides perpetuate a never-ending cycle of violence. The challenge is removing them from power and holding them accountable.
There are no other countries in the world where the foreign invaders maintain an apartheid system over the native population. Only Israel does that, having one set of rights for the foreign invaders and another set of rights for the native Palestinians. Even the US allows native americans full citizenship.
Are any of them doing that with my tax dollars? Is my president starting wars on their behalf? Am I having my rights stripped to stop me from speaking out about any other situation? Nothing impacts Americans like Zionism, it's the #1 problem facing our nation.
> There's another 1000+ "invaders took my shit" issues in the world...
There's a lot less "invaders are continuing to take my shit". Probably a handful, and every such unresolved, escalating geo-political situation is pushing the world towards a dangerous timeline.
Except those people are dead. Those who ethnically cleansed Arabs (and Jews) during the nakba are dead. Almost everyone who was ethnicity cleansed is now dead. At a certain point you need to recognize that a new generation has been born into this conflict, and with it, a change in circumstances. Attitudes like yours ignore that Israelis who were born there don't have another home to 'return' to.
That doesn't mean that Palestinians don't have a right to resist occupation, but the circumstances are significantly materially different today then 40 years ago.
Joe Biden is older than the state of Israel and Zionists have continuously committed ethnic cleansing and apartheid since their inception. This is an active and current situation.
Joe Biden was 6 was israel was created. 6 year olds are not responsible for ethnic cleansing.
And yes, there is ongoing issues (from both sides), but solving the current situation is very different than solving the ethnic cleansing that happened in 1948.
For those wondering, it is verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.
There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
> When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card?
It only works if you deploy it against someone lower-status than you. The tactic is largely irrelevant and can be seamlessly replaced with any of a number of other tactics as needed. It's just enforcement of power hierarchies.
It really does only work when deployed against someone of a lower status. Just for example, if you imagine a sterotypical homeless man complaining that he felt unsafe against a sterotypical Karen, in the US there is no real chance he will be taken seriously regardless of the circumstances. It is more or less the "Get this peasant away from me" of our time.
I found your comment to be very insightful and I appreciate it banannaise
Watching some of the endless examples of police abusing their powers or committing crimes or obviously lying in the US on youtube videos has removed any ability to just trust police. In the US, because the police basically can always escalate t violence on any occasion, they are just dangerous to be around.
I never thought about it until this horrible store at the top, but why don't soldiers have to have cameras record their actions? Because war is a terrible thing and we don't want to have video of people murdering each other. But peacekeeprs should have cameras.
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are
IDF trains them.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
Everybody thinks the War on Drugs is about "keeping people safe". It never was, it was always about manufacturing a tool to oppress "others".
You can add The War On Terror to that list.
Where do think US police get all their fun toys to play with?
"How 9/11 helped to militarize American law enforcement": https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-milita...
Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous".
To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
from that lens it was almost necessary to invent a pretense since people got all huffy about overt oppression at the end of Jim Crow.
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing
Pretty sure police brutality was invented way before Israel existed.
[flagged]
The strong/dominant beating up in the weak is as old as time unfortunately. One doesn’t always have to make that particular comparison as it is a sensitive one. You can point to any major instance of colonization (by whomever) to see similar polices and in the past it was even more brutal because there were no reporters (eg Belgium Free Congo had an estimated population decline of 75% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... .)
[flagged]
In the 1200's British colonizers invaded Ireland, in 1920's the same colonial oppressors were moved to Palestine. Arthur Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 till 1891 and it was his idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
Ship out the jews, radicalize the natives, have the two of them fight for hundreds of years. It couldn't be a more British idea.
It was absolutely not Balfour's idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Balfour declaration was from 1917. But the Zionists first started to move to the region in the hopes of establishing a homeland in the early 1880s, based on their belief that a Jewish state (anywhere; Argentina was another candidate) was necessary for their long-term survival due to the long history of antisemitism in Europe - getting worse by the day - and their (correct, it turned out!) fear that it could reach cataclysmic levels. It was very much their idea.
Balfour's declaration, which wasn't official law, didn't single-handedly dictate British policy for the next 30 years and 14 governments; people vastly overstate the importance of it. Britain did not "ship out" the Jews - most Jewish migrants to Mandatory Palestine were from Eastern Europe and came to Mandatory Palestine very much of their own volition, without British help. And in 1939 - just in time for the Holocaust - Britain cracked down hard on Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine to try to quell Arab unrest; Jews continued to migrate illegally anyway, despite what the British wanted.
Of course Britain had its role in contributing to the violence in the region, but to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
> people vastly overstate the importance of it.
Fascinating, thanks for pointing this out.
> to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
Some hill to die on.
I'm Jewish (though not Israeli); my grandparents were among those Jews who fled to Mandatory Palestine against the British's and Arabs' wishes to escape the Holocaust. Kindly, I think I'm a better judge of the right hills to die on when it comes to this particular subject.
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are'
American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Yes, American police use these kinds of justifications when innocent people are killed too. It's absurd (watch Surviving Edged Weapons [0] some time) either way.
The reality is, if you have soldiers mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms, mowing down hundreds of people each year [1], you've over-indexed on vigilance and under-indexed on the value of human life. You're not trigger-ready, you're trigger-happy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6jhru-EqDA
[1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-press-release-17oc...
When RLM enlightens on the police brutality roiling America, and entertains!
[flagged]
I'm going to repost and elaborate on a reply of mine that appears to be shadow dead with no explanation. This doesn't seem to be the usual result of disagreement flagging. The only problem I can see is that perhaps this did not meet the level of substantiveness expected from an HN comment (OTOH I don't see how what it was replying to would meet this either, and mine is at least coming from the direction of intellectual curiosity!)
"Perfect example of how no one thinks they're the villain in their own story"
To be clear, the comment I'm replying to is justifying "mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms" based on some amorphous other "players" supposedly not valuing their own life (as a hypothetical soldier!). If this isn't a stark illustration of how individual people in a cycle of violence justify their own crimes to themselves, I don't know what is.
The position would make sense in the context of say a street mugging where the victim ends up shooting the assailant. It might make sense in the context of domestic policing where the subject of an arrest attacks the police (modulo the usual moral hazard wherein cops create pretexts to claim they were being attacked). But in the context of this article and the proceeding comment, I don't see how it is anything but a rationalization for some pretty sick violence.
That's pretty crazy mental gymnastics. Palestinians have been attacking Israel civilians forever. They strapped bombs under their kids beds, etc. It's clear they don't value Israeli life, nor their own. They have been indoctrinated to hate jews before birth. There is nothing controversial about it. Israel has been doing their best to avoid civilian deaths, polar opposite of Palestinian behavior. Yes mistakes have been made, but trying to equate the two is deliberate misinformation.
> Palestinians have been attacking Israel civilians forever. They strapped bombs under their kids beds
To the oppressed, everything is permissible.
> They have been indoctrinated to hate jews before birth
"Fetuses are antisemitic" is a new one.
[flagged]
Please elaborate on what exactly you're calling "crazy mental gymnastics". Your followup points are merely textbook dehumanization of an entire group. So as I said, cycle of violence.
I already did. I don't think this can be clarified anymore for a person with an agenda.
The only thing I've said here is calling out your incitement to genocide. If that qualifies as an "agenda" to you, then I don't know that there is anything left to say.
At the bottom of article:
> Between 7 October 2023 and 15 March 2026, the UN's humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, says 1,071 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, including at least 233 children.
Does that sound like genocide?
Meanwhile, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks says 1,195 civilians and security forces killed. 4300 rockets launched. How many people would that have been if Israel was jamming kumbaya?
I was not making the argument that the situation is genocide. Rather I was pointing out that your comments constitute incitement to genocide.
[flagged]
lol. That refrain has gotten pretty tired and even the mainstream is waking up to how preposterous it is.
Suffering horrific atrocities in your culture's past is not some license to commit your own new atrocities. Seriously, try applying your own rationalizations to the Palestinian perspective and see how that makes you feel - can October 7th be justified because "[Israelis] have been attacking [Palestinian] civilians forever" ? The answer is a resounding NO.
As I said, it's cycle of violence.
[dead]
A professional looks at and understands the situation as it exists now. A professional is trained to not get into situations where fear controls them. Your argument is a compelling one that either these are not professionals or that they are professionals and are doing this on purpose. The stats today clearly show the massive difference between danger to Israeli personnel and Palestinians. Israel at this point has either failed to train professional forces that seek to deescalate and avoid dangerous situations or is training forces to find situations they can claim fear as a justification for murder. So, pick. They are either amateurs at which point it is a deplorable to put amateurs with this much force near a vulnerable population or they are professionals trained to do exactly this, find ways to kill a vulnerable population and claim self defense.
[flagged]
So what exactly did the 8 year old boy sat in the back of his parents car do wrong?
[flagged]
Again, what law was broken here? By anyone in the car? I'm struggling to understand how this wasn't outright execution.
Luck implies a lack of fault. Also we probably shouldn't open fire on suspects fleeing from a heist either, kid or no kid. Extra-judical justice is generally a bad thing, this is why pit maneuvers exist. Allowing police to fire at moving vehicles is a universally bad idea, and one thats understood by most nations.
> I cannot wait for "kid" to be a number one accessory to bring to a heist then.
And when that happens then we can have a conversation. But as it is, you’re justifying slaughtering a family because of a story you invented.
Or in democratic societies we can insist that our "public servants" actually serve the public interest of law and order rather than merely using it as a pretext to be able to commit their own violent crimes.
Your rationalization is nothing more than a product of a failed society. Bringing it up as pragmatic advice might make sense, although still not for this incident where the "offense" seems to have been merely stopping a car on the side of the road. But invoking it as some universal value of "what ought" is a pure crab bucket mentality.
Then by your logic, every society on earth failed, because there are no places where you can act belligerently towards law enforcement and expect it to end well.
Correct, they failed. Cops are rightfully called all kinds of nice things in all countries. We are far from having what should be a non failed society. But liberal democratic capitalist countries get much closer to success.
Perhaps by your obtusely applied system of logic, but not by mine. Societal values are ideals to be worked towards, not some sort of axiomatic foundation that pops into existence fully formed. The failed society condemnation pertains to your remark, which comes from a place of having given up on the idea that governments should be accountable to their citizens - aka authoritarianism.
I'll repeat the bit about professionals being trained to avoid and deescalate. That is the point. I think the details of this, and many similar incidents clearly show a lack of attempt to deescalate or avoid. That was the clear argument I made in my post and am re-emphasizing now. This clear trend shows either malicious intent by professionals or amateurs put in a situation they shouldn't have been allowed near and those above them should be held accountable for it.
The IDF is not law enforcement. It's a foreign army. It treats Palestinians with utter contempt and has no problem with killing them. Its job is to protect Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land and to prevent the Palestinians from resisting Israeli rule.
Comparing the IDF to law enforcement in a democratic country is not relevant.
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology IS politics.
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
There must be guardrails
Technology is not a form of control at all. Technology is the practical application of things you know, to achieve things that don't happen naturally. Here's what the wiki says:
> Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.
By this definition, the earliest wooden and stone tools, use of fire, wheel, agriculture, housing and clothing were all legitimate technology. It's no more 'a form of control' than medical science, any form of economics and commerce or any arts are.
It's true that technology is being used as a tool of oppression. But there are several reasons for it. Controlling its access is one of the easiest ways to control a society - either by gatekeeping access to its building blocks or through draconian legislations. This is possible and done with medical science and arts too.
We can live quite comfortably without the 'modern technology' that only the rich can control. But we are subjected to peer pressure by statements like "you can't compete in this era without smartphones", " you will be jobless without AI", etc. And we fall for all of it without any questions. It enrages me when I suggest that people should choose freedom over convenience, and people reject it flippantly citing market forces and supporting the abusive companies that make them.
Mischaracterizing and vilifying technology in response to its hijack like this will not serve us in any manner. People already have a negative response when they hear technology. But it's a discipline that we must own, instead of being the just the consumer of. Technology is one of the components we need to fight back against control.
Stone tools, fire, the wheel and farming are forms of control. You learn that from prehistory; stone tools and fire provide the baseline for manufacturing, trade and warfare. Farming and transport creates a backbone for logistics and taxation. Each invention contributes to a greater degree of state-sanctioned control; "the people" rarely ever win.
The mischaracterization comes when people get comfortable assuming that technology cares about them. Your stone axe does not want to keep you alive; your iPhone has no self-preserving motivation to maintain privacy. Making these kinds of hopeful-but-foolish assumptions is how people become disenfranchised with progress and associate it with evil.
Technology is *DEFINITELY* a form of control of humans over their environment / nature / peers
[flagged]
[flagged]
i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
I was shadowbanned for mentioning Iryna Zarutska. Most political topics can be connected to technology: technology after all is often how we hear of and discuss these things.
How did you realize you were shadowbanned?
I'm curious because I sometimes wonder, if that happened to me, would it affect the way in which I engage with this website?
FWIW, I often lurk, but sometimes engage (like right now). Perhaps it could happen to me and I would not realize it for a while...
When your karma stops changing one way or the other is the biggest giveaway.
It's not strictly tech. But tech tends to be both new and intellectual. Sometimes it can be an old phenomenon but also curious; people often just paste Wikipedia links here and they trend.
From the guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
there is and always has been a strong prohibition of anything political on HN. it is widely and frequently discussed as the main problem with HN. Usually, a post like this would be removed very quickly
odd that i've never noticed
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
There are many objections that could be raised to both my tone and content there but I don't think "pedantic" is one of them.
It's certainly mocking. The subject matter is overly political. It's even plausible that it strays across the line laid down by the HN guidelines, although personally I think it's acceptable given the context. Something about fighting fire with fire.
[flagged]
Those stories aren't very visible because they are BS. Few people are dumb enough to think than a puppet government set up by an occupying force will improve their lives. Those dancers are either paid actors or not very bright.
The double standard I would like to see addressed is this: will any country have enough cojones to boycott the World Cup this year. My guess is no.
> Or much more most recently than WWII: not knowing that 1200 civilians were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists, whom palestinians did vote in power.
And if you want to go even more recently, check out what the IDF is doing in Gaza.
The crazy double standard is you telling absolutely verifiable lies and feeling completely fine and righteous about it.
Really? Verifiable lies? Please share your source to help us understand which one to trust.
AFAIK, his points are all well-documented and properly referenced on Wikipedia: 1) 1200 people slaughtered, referenced over 450 times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks 2) Islamic Republic of Iran slaughtered 30 000 unarmed civilians, referenced over 240 times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
Like the other commenter has said, the reason there are no such stories is that they would be hypocritical BS, and I'll add, designed to manufacture consent for unlawful military action against a sovereign nation.
The perennially genocidal occupying force controlling all aspects of Palestinian life including forcing them into a subsistence diet, "mowing the lawn" in Gaza every so often, shooting down peaceful unarmed protesters - some of them disabled - and all that before 7/Oct - has no right to complain about terrorism, for it's what it has inflicted on Palestinians for decades.
[flagged]
I'm wondering about the broader context here: Are stories like this rare or common? Are they increasing or decreasing in frequency?
Yeah it is getting worse. This was written 3 days ago before this event by Human Rights Watch:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/13/in-the-shadow-of-war-set...
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
> this is war 101
The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.
I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.
Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.
[flagged]
Wrong.
Gaza and the West Bank aren't countries, they have no autonomy. Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.
Palestinians are people, must like Jews are people. Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel, the west bank, and gaza.
Much like all Jews aren't responsible for the actions of Israel, All Palestinians aren't responsible for the actions of Hamas. Even the residence of Gaza.
> Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.
In the 40s, the British were ruling Palestine as a mandate, I wouldn’t really call that a country.
Fair enough. I should say that it was the name of the region as they've basically not been fully autonomous in modern history. But prior to the establishment of Israel, they were basically just left alone by both the Ottomans and Brittan.
[flagged]
What am I incorrect about?
[dead]
> You can't then say that the West Bank is not responsible for what the rest of Palestine did.
Collective punishment is a war crime.
> this is war 101, every day.
Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).
I don’t think anyone is going to forget about this
completely deranged way of thinking that calls for a hard self-reflection.
> this is war 101
genocide 101
"The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe."
Funny way of saying trying to run someone over.
I just know what type of person you are from this comment
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_Chronicles_from_the...
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
[flagged]
There are horrific acts on both sides going back very very far. I grew up in a country with a relatively balanced media reporting on the issue and have tried my best to stay informed. Suicide bombings, bus hijackings, mass murders.
The inequality in force applied has still been a constant.
Also, the fact is that any peace deal has been made impossible by the hunting down and killing of anyone that could actually hold that conversation. All secular and left wing movements in Palestine have been eradicated in favor of Hamas, Islamic Jihad et al.
Likewise the Israeli extreme right wing now in power killed their own prime minister for trying to negotiate.
Also see the birth of Hezbollah as a response to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which also gave rise to suicide bombings. These then spread across the region. The reason Israel invaded was to fight the Palestinians there who were displaced by the founding of the Israeli state and the following conflicts.
Edit: the Palestinian groups there were doing raids in northern Israel and fleeing back across the border to Lebanon
It's a gordian knot at this point and i am very doubtful there will ever be a peaceful solution.
> i am very doubtful there will ever be a peaceful solution.
I wonder if there’s room for any actual discussion here. This topic is damned from the first upvote.
Curious what people’s thoughts are about a non-peaceful solution.
For example, do you think that other countries should send their militaries over to help one of the sides win?
Yes. Other Arab states should run Gaza after Hamas is destroyed to ensure Gaza is safe, wealthy and deradicalized.
All I can think is that there is no chance of proper peace talks or any kind of truth commission since oct 7 / the genocide in Gaza.
The most likely outcome in my view is that Israel succeeds in cleansing and redeveloping Gaza and keeps settling and splitting up the West Bank until the Palestinians become nothing but 2nd class citizens in a singular state.
This will not stop the terror attacks.
It's all very depressing. I think both sides have lost.
Israel left Gaza in 2005 and they don’t want to return, except for the fact the aforementioned death rampage came from there.
Israel has put Gaza under siege & total blockade since 2006. The population has been used for low paid work in Israel and treated more or less like cattle.
> Israel has put Gaza under siege & total blockade since 2006.
As has Egypt. That's because Gaza's elected government is a terrorist group that openly states it wants to kill all the Jews in the world.
> The population has been used for low paid work in Israel and treated more or less like cattle.
Yes Israel gave Gazans jobs.
Forcible accounting of the 200 nukes, their confiscation/decommissioning and crippling bloackades against the country illegally holding nukes and lying about them could be a beginning.
[flagged]
I try my best to keep a nuanced discussion going here and you obviously have no interest in this. Enjoy your flagged post.
Really? I acknowledged your point before I pointed out its limits. It seems weird you would flag that. Either way, I’ve seen what makes HN upvote, flagging doesn’t bother me.
Someone else flagged your post.
Edit: try to imagine what it was like growing up as a Palestinian in Gaza, born 2000.
OK. Why did you mention it was flagged?
A Palestinian growing up in Gaza saw all the Jews leave when they were 5. They then went to an UNRWA school which taught them to kill as many Jews as possible. Their life is poor because billionaires that live in Qatar run their country and spend all the money on themselves and war rather than running Gaza. What’s your point?
But what GP said is true - we can see UNRWA educational materials.[0]
Im not sure what is being taught in orthodox jewish schools in Israel, but I’m pretty certain that in secular Israeli public schools, death of Arab neighbors is not glorified, terrorism and martyrdom is not glorified. [1]
Unlike that of UNRWA.
In other words, one side promotes violence, the other does not
[0] https://www.cfr.org/articles/teaching-hate-palestinian-schoo...
[1] https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ArabsPa...
HN flagged a post that pointed out that Palestinians continually attack Israeli civilians. One can listen to any news article to point out each night’s rocket attacks and confirm them.
It’s not surprising they would also flag a post pointing out UNRWA curriculum.
Because people flag facts, this site is essentially a cesspool when it comes to discussing anything political. The moderators have recently been manually un flagging political posts, and then writing their own comments about people they dislike such as Dan’s recent comment about Elon Musk.
It’s a cliche that everyone thinks a site is going downhill, but Hacker News is absolutely going downhill.
Imagine, this is just one of thousands upon thousands of incredibly tragic and similar stories of the last few years (going back much further than October 7th).
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Hind_Rajab
The scale of these atrocities and our governments' support are the reason why this story should be on HN. We elect people who support this, therefore it's only right it follows us and comes up often, even when it's not convenient. That "inconvenience" (skipping a story in HN feed every now and then) is nothing compared to the oppression our democracies support
Also there's barely a tech industry to talk about as our economy collapses through $100 oil and private equity backed destruction of our way of life - what else are we supposed to discuss now - it might as well be Israel.
The US economy will probably be ok. It's an oil exporter and the Apples and Nvidias are thriving.
This wouldn't have happened if they didn't dehumanize their enemies. This should be considered a crime in itself.
Who exactly are you blaming here, the IDF or the boys family?
https://x.com/Imamofpeace/status/2033709979211886928
Who pulled the trigger here?
[flagged]
This happened in the west bank.
https://www.haaretz.com/west-bank/2026-03-16/ty-article/.pre...
This kid will grow up and fight, and I don't blame him. Gaza is a concentration camp, West Bank is an apartheid. These people have the audacity to bribe and threaten our governments to do their nationalist ethno-state bidding in one hand while pushing the narrative that the west must not have any identity or borders in the other. They fund PACs that threaten 80% of congress with "we'll front an opposition candidate and BTW 97% of them win". They fund NGOs who offload the people they don't want onto Europe and muddy the political waters allowing both far left and far right extremists to thrive. When TikTok woke the kids, they bought it. When Epstein died they fought tooth and nail to cover it up. Oil is $100, they do not understand the pure rage and anger they have dredged up.
May be they all should embrace "show the other cheek" and the suffering will stop
This is a joke right?
[dead]
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
> IDF soldiers
Hopefully, such trigger-happy soldiers are in the minority.
It's hard to claim ""bad apples"" when the top brass acquits soldiers who get caught on camera sexually abusing a prisoner and instead prosecutes the whistleblower for leaking evidence of the crime.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2xrz71zm3o
They are not. And they are incited by their hierarchy to commit more crimes, because they are not held accountable
I mean, almost entire society participates in (what they believe is the "most moral") military service. It is scary to think folks with murderous tendencies might not be minority.
Eh, tbh I've given up. Can't point out the terrible things that the IDF are up to without being labelled an apologist, or terrorist supporter, or just getting a massively negative reaction.
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
> is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things?
I agree. Hamas and IDF do terrible things - the ICC issued warrants for the leaders of both. This is why an external party has to impose a solution and it should involve in my opinion separation (two-states.) Both parties are radicalized at least for now and need to be separated and allowed to manage their own affairs while allowing the other to exist.
[flagged]
100% not true. Abbas wants a Palestinian state beside Israel. This is what he has supported for a long time. And why many states in the last two years have recognized a Palestinian state: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mahmoud-abbas-palestinian-pres...
While there was rejectionists in the past, Netanyahu has been the rejectionist for the last two decades. He says so himself:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-boasts-of-thwarting-...
He and his cronies boosted Hamas in part to split the Palestinians so as to avoid having to negotiate a two-state solution:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
It's pointless to engage with the argument that one party didn't think it was offered enough so it's right for the other party to offer even less. In never made any sense and it's just one of the myriad rhetorical tricks to twist, muddle and subvert the discussion.
Here is Bill Clinton know what the Palestinians were offered: https://x.com/itscarterhughes/status/2033758202685268373?s=4...
Then you didn't understand. Palestinians can be forced to accept a state with the 1967 borders and Jerusalem East as a capital, as it's proven by the fact that they are forced to accept occupation and apartheid every single day.
But Clinton is of course lying as well as disparaging a whole people with racist remarks.
> Palestinians can be forced to accept a state with the 1967 borders
I don’t know what you mean. Palestinians should agree to accept a deal.
> forced to accept occupation and apartheid every single day.
No. Arabs in Israel have more rights than in any Arab country. Apartheid is illegal under Israeli law. You clearly have very little knowledge of Israel.
Arabs in Hamas and Hezbollah areas have bad lives because of their governments.
> Clinton’s racist remarks
Palestinian is a political identity created in the sixties. Racially these people identify as Arabs, just like the arabs inside Israel. That’s why they chant for “Palestine will be arab”. People should know that as a minimum to participate in any discussion of the middle east.
> I don’t know what you mean. Palestinians should agree to accept a deal.
No, the occupation is illegal and those who are illegally occupying the territory of other people must leave it, period.
Not even bothering to answer the rest of your fantasy propaganda.
> No, the occupation is illegal and those who are illegally occupying the territory of other people must leave it, period.
Why is it an occupation? Arabs declared war on Israel and lost Judea and Samaria.
Do you campaign that Poland and France illegally occupy parts of Germany and must leave the land? Or do you only do that when the state is Jewish?
> Abbas wants a Palestinian state beside Israel.
Have you researched what he says in Arabic, rather then English? In a 2014 interview on Egyptian TV (Arabic), Abbas stated he would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state and could not "close the door" to "refugees" wishing to return.
He's also insane: in 2023 at the UN (in a speech with Arabic elements echoed domestically), he denied proof of Jewish ties to Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount and accused Israel of lies akin to Goebbels propaganda. In April 2025, during a PLO Central Council meeting in Ramallah (televised in Arabic), he claimed the Quran places the Jewish Temples in Yemen, not Jerusalem.
[flagged]
[flagged]
> "Hitler did not kill the Jews because of their religion; he killed them because they were Jews. And we must remember that, because there are those who would do the same today if they could."
— Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the World Holocaust Forum in 2020.
> "Hitler was not only a mass murderer, he was a master of deception. He deceived the world about his true intentions, and ultimately, his goal was to exterminate the Jewish people."
— Benjamin Netanyahu, during a speech at Yad Vashem in 2012.
> "For many, Auschwitz is the ultimate symbol of evil. It is certainly that. The tattooed arms of those who passed under its infamous gates, the piles of shoes and eyeglasses seized from the dispossessed in their final moments, the gas chambers and crematoria that turned millions of people into ash, all these bear witness to the horrific depths to which humanity can sink."
- Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at the 5th World Holocaust Forum in 2020
I hope every Hitler-apologist and Holocaust-denier says and believes things like that.
Compare that to al-Husseini, a key figure worth learning about. He was an Arab leader that stoked anti-Jewish sentiment with religious propaganda about Al-Aqsa Mosque (still going today perpetuated by Hamas), possibly to distract from his corrupt management of religious endowments. Al-Husseini led anti-British and anti-Jewish violence for years. He contributed to what is a key turning point or escalation of the conflict, the Hebron Massacre in 1929.
A rumor that Jews planned to take control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque resulted in a violent pogrom against a Jewish community with continuously presence for thousands of years. By the end the mob killed 67 Jews. The rioters attacked homes, horrifically tortured and killed entire families, mutilated, raped, stabbed children, and enacted mass destruction on the Jewish quarter. In many ways it was eerily similar to October 7th. I was shocked when I read about it.
There were some noble people that saved lives from the hundreds. One Arab man literally rode in on a white horse to protect some defenseless people.
What did al-Husseni say about the riot?
> "The massacre in Hebron was the result of a natural and justified reaction to the growing presence of Jews in Palestine. The Jews were responsible for the violence that broke out."
He blamed the victims.
> "Palestine is the land of the Arabs, and it will remain so. The Zionist movement is an illegal act and must be opposed by all means, including violence."
He advocated for violence.
> "The Jews have no place in Palestine and should leave."
al-Husseini had very close ties with Nazis. He broadcast Nazi propaganda over Arab radio from Berlin, urged Muslim and Arab populations to support Nazi efforts, and echoed their antisemitic ideology. He openly called for the destruction of Jewish communities in the Middle East. He helped recruit Muslim soldiers for the Waffen-SS, which is considered among the worst of the Nazi forces in terms of atrocities and war crimes.
And Abbas? An actual Holocaust denier and revisionist?
> "The Zionist movement cooperated with the Nazis in persecuting the Jews, and this is a well-known fact.”
— Mahmood Abbas, 1982 in his PhD thesis "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism."
> "The number of Jews killed during the Holocaust is exaggerated."
— Mahmood Abbas, 2018
These are some examples of what Holocaust denial and revisionism typically sound like.
Here's a funny video to watch
https://youtu.be/f9HmkRYlVZw
> I hope every Hitler-apologist and Holocaust-denier says and believes things like that.
You’re right - he’s only a Hitler apologist and holocaust denier when it suits him. He’s not consistent about it.
He’ll tell this story to demonize current-day Palestinians and justify the violence done daily to them. He doesn’t just “advocate” for violence, he personally directs it, and he tells stories like this to make of worse.
He tells the other stories you mentioned to capitalize Jewish victimhood, silence critics, and distract from Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, which have nothing to do with any of this.
> These are some examples of what Holocaust denial and revisionism typically sound like.
Not really. Both quotes from Abbas are very tame. They make him about as much a holocaust denier as Bibi is.
At any rate, they don’t make him or the Palestinian people any less of a partner for peace.
And even mentioning Abbas’ views on the holocaust, in the context of the subjugation, persecution and extermination of his own people for over a decade, is so incredibly cynical and cruel and pathetic, it should tell you everything you need to know about Israel’s position in the conflict.
The two-state solution doesn't need to be offered, it needs to be imposed. And it needs to be imposed on both parties, which means that Israel needs to be forced to withdraw within its legitimate borders.
Israel (with the West's participation and complicity) has been perfectly able to impose on Palestinians the settlements, the walls and the apartheid. Therefore Israel and the West will have no trouble imposing on Palestinians wider borders, withdrawal from settlements and the end of the occupation.
Yes. Another pattern you can observe throughout the years of the conflict, right now again in Lebanon: When Israel rejects an offer, they get a better offer. When everyone else in the region rejects an offer, they get a worse one.
The State of Palestine is recognized as a sovereign state by 157 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, or just over 80% of all UN members.
The only obstacle to the two-state solution is Israel and the US blocking it with powerful violence.
Please don't lie.
Countries recognising Palestine doesn't matter. Palestine wants one state and to kill all the Jews. They say so explicitly and repeatedly. Anyone who has done any research into the middle east knows this.
Your comment is a complete racist fabrication. You should be banned.
I feel something very similar. I have strong views that what Israel is doing is wrong. But I look around at our politics (in the UK), and there is such a well oiled Israeli PR operation that is very happy making career ending accusations that talking publicly about this is actually quite dangerous (Not helped by the loonies who are, and have always been disgusting anti-semites). And you look at our politician's stance on it - and the career of people like Lord Walney, and it's clear we're in a very dangerous place. I think there is a very wide gap between what the average British person actually believes about Israel and what is happening to the Palestinians, and the acceptable positions you can express in Westminster. I also fear that once the dam breaks, and it's no longer the case, that the swing back against Israel is going to be quick harsh, and that's difficult because I have friends and family in Israel - I would like to see Israel be a free and open liberal democracy that shares what used to be western values, but maybe we're too late for that.
Also to note UK is on massive rise in anti muslim sentiment in recent years. That also a major contribution
If you feel the need to temper your speech to avoid offending people you are using the wrong moral compass.
There are plenty of good reasons to speak carefully, thoughtfully and compassionately, but avoiding criticism is not a good reason.
I'm not avoiding criticism, I'm avoiding very real legal repercussions by treading so lightly. Lest I get caught in the crossfire.
That’s really unfortunate. What country are you in that there are legal repercussions? Understand if you don’t want to divulge that information.
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
I live in DE too, it's terrifying. I didn't realize the extent of the armaments shipped to Israel from Germany until recently.
The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
Germany has a lot of very strange political formations. The anti-german antifa is very curious and close to this topic.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
Why is this?
I guess they feel guilty about previous generations gassing the jews.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
[dead]
[dead]
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
> Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra
Is this something from the post-war or did that really exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Orchestra_of_Auschwi...
“The Germans wanted a propaganda tool for [SS] visitors and camp newsreels and a tool to boost camp morale.”
There were also several men’s orchestras.
Interesting, I imagine the propaganda was also used for the German public, because they had no idea they were death camps.
Israel would doubtless keep its genocide a secret if it could, but there's just so much evidence created by smartphones. This is actually an example of how technology is making the world a massively better place--it's so much harder to genocide without creating tons of evidence.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
[flagged]
What does that have to do with the subject of this thread at all? Christians are also terrible to gay people, and European societies have only very recently (in the last two to three decades) become somewhat more tolerant.
In the context of Israel-Palestine, this issue is only raised in order to somehow justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, a la "They deserve it because they're not as enlightened as we are."
It’s relevant because most commenters here hold moral standards that are completely self-undermining because they choose to not apply them to the “oppressed” group.
Consider that it doesn’t matter how genocidal Israel’s Islamicist neighbors are. The IDF occassionally targets civilians when they shouldn’t. Meanwhile Israel’s neighbors don’t even draw the distinction.
The IDF killed more than 20,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.
"But Muslims don't like gay people" does not justify that.
And saying the IDF "occasionally" targets civilians is just completely divorced from reality. They've been systematically attacking civilians for more than two years straight now, racking up a kill count of more than 80,000.
Western governments don't fund their neighbors. They do fund Israel. You have to live up to the standards of the patron such as observing western rules of engagement, treatment of prisoners, and human rights in general.
Western governments do fund Israel's neighbors. This includes Egypt (one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid), Jordan, Lebanon (including indirectly through UNIFIL and UNRWA), Syria, and Iraq if they count as a neighbor.
Patrons don't necessarily apply any standard evenly.
Egypt receives US aid in exchange for maintaining good relations with Israel. That's the deal they have with the US. It's basically the same with Jordan.
Wait until you hear Muslims in Europe can be openly gay.
Often not to their families or Muslim peers.
And look at surveys taken by European Muslims on their opinions on what should be done to gay people like me, when they can answer anonymously or think the surveyor is a fellow Muslim.
The parent comment is just anti-Muslim hate. It has nothing to do with the topic.
Uh, I didn't say anything about Muslims at all. I just said that I was in Berlin.
The parent comment (to mine) is by nxor2; yours is the grandparent.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
[0] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/koepfe/Esther-Bejarano-Das-Erb...
> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.
I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).
I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.
The tragedy in Gaza, the tragedy in Srebrenica, the tragedy in Rwanda? Genocide is the word.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
There is a difference between war and extermination.
[flagged]
>and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
Simply not true. The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews, see Ben Gurions private letters. Netanyahu has supported Hamas to make sure that Palestine couldn't be politically united to be able to continue taking over the west bank. The power balance has since long been tipped to one side that is engineering the situation.
> The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews
This is true.
But denying Palestinians of any agency or fault is wrong. They made mistakes too. And if it’s wrong for Netanyahu to support Hamas, isn’t it just as wrong for any Palestinian to support them too?
"We must seek agreement and understanding with the Arab people only through the Arab worker, and only an alliance of Jewish and Arab workers will establish and maintain an alliance of the Jewish and Arab peoples in Palestine"
That's a Ben Gurion quote, who was a socialist and believed in shared class struggle of Jews and Arabs. The rest of your comment is influenced by other lack of nuance
Ben-Gurion famously preached coexistence publicly (sometimes) but his private messages and memoirs betray his true beliefs:
5 October 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to his 16 year old son Amos: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.”
“It is very possible that the Arabs of the neighboring countries will come to their aid against us. But our strength will exceed theirs. Not only because we will be better organized and equipped, but because behind us there stands a still larger force, superior in quantity and quality …the whole younger generation of Jews from Europe and America.” Ben-Gurion, Zichronot [Memoirs], Vol. 4, p.297-299, p. 330-331. See also Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, p. 182-189
https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quot...
And that's the difference between 1937 and the 1920s. In between the Palestinians had committed the 1929 and 1936 massacres which included ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities which predated Arab presence, such as the Jews of Gaza.
Interesting to know that your quote is disputed in the original text, as to say the exact opposite.
> In between the Palestinians had committed the 1929 and 1936 massacres which included ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities which predated Arab presence, such as the Jews of Gaza.
What’s your point here? What I’m understanding is that you believe that the sentiment that Arabs must be expelled from Palestine is justified.
My point here is that saying it was "the plan from the start" like GPP does, ignores the fact the the zionist movement had became more militaristic as a defensive measure to palestinian ethnic cleansings, which is quite clear from the chronology of your own quotes
However, even if you wanted to show Ben Gurion wanted to "expel the palestinians", quoting a single personal letter that is almost unintelligible, that has your quote disputed between "we must expel" and "we must not expel", right after a British committee proposed solving the conflict by transferring Palestinians, is a weak argument
Well newsflash, the Israeli socialists and left wing have lost all influence for the most part. The only way you can form a government in the Knesset today is by a coalition of parties, most of which lean right-wing to far-right or ultra-Orthodox.
FYI, the Israeli socialists and left wing have always supported policies of militarist expansionism and the occupation.
When there was still a left wing in Israel, the left wing governments built more settlements than the right wing ones.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Every single person is a product of their circumstances. If you personally were to grow up in either country, the neural network in your brain would be trained with a way different set of data compared to what you experienced, and you would be a different person.
I don't have sympathy or hated for either side, this is just a byproduct of being human.
Are you trying to justify or minimize families being killed for no reason?
I don't get your response in context of what I posted. There are truths, and pointing out someone that goes against that truth shouldn't have to worry about circumstances - especially if those circumstances have been widely documented to be violence since its inception.
Part of the problem for Israel is that it is becoming harder and harder to convince the world of its version of the “truth”.
And unrelated to that, Benjamin Netanyahu is about as truthful a man as Donald Trump is.
If 2 teenagers end up doing drive by shooting on each others houses, all because their fathers were in gangs that did the same back in the day and thats the life the kids grew up in, how are you going to assign who is at fault? To either kid, the other side started it.
Germany is cucked, what Hitler did was outrageous and destroyed any rational ability for generations - and yes while I am heavily critical of Israel and the demonstrably true supremacy and nepotism they have created outside of Israel, I am strongly against the "rounding up of Anne Franks". Germany must now tread the difficult tightrope between standing up for themselves and going full-on loony right, and every time they fall they simply reset to loony left. This is why the establishment just puts their head in the sand.
An eyewitness account from the article:
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
This is a side effect of using a guerilla terrorist tactics - normal people are start to be seen as "threat".
A side effect of brutal oppression is that it drives people to use guerilla terrorist tactics.
Yes, it is a downward spiral. How do you propose to stop it, assuming both parties want another one to disappear from reality, and see any compromise as weakness?
This is outrageous. No humanity by the Israeli government and the IDF
Regarding rules of whether or not this should be posted here - I think it's less about whether it's important and more about whether it causes arguments.
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
I was going to say I disagree, that I think that at least some level of discussion on HN about important things going on is important. Israel is actually a tech powerhouse and a lot of this is seriously shaping the defence technology policy and is telling a lot about how power dynamics actually can play out.
Having said that, my settings show me all comments that are flagged. HN is apparently not capable of having a respectful conversation about this. Almost anything expressed on the actual topic has been flagged. The only thing left are comments rules lawyering to say we shouldn't discuss the topic at all.
It's kind of an indictment of the users of HN. It might be the right move to remove the article, but it becomes the right move because the users of this site can't be trusted to actually conduct a conversation about it.
It shouldn't be on HN because it has nothing to do with tech and we come here to escape
It should be on HN because we are human and once in a while it is good to see human interest break through and calibrate the room
Remember; they are punishing Palestinian for wanting to be free and sovereign. To "LIVE FREE OR DIE" is definitively more than a motto to them.
[flagged]
If anything, it's refreshing to see something that isn't about the latest apple / llm / current techbro trend bullshit
I can go to Reddit for that.
You can also not click on links you are not interested in. Is that difficult?
You can go to Reddit for everything. There’s even r/hackernews.
Any strong signal left?
or just recycled points?
nah, leddit can collapse any day and i would not even notice.
[dead]
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Banning all political content means banning all mention of open-source software, self-driving cars, anything involving a Big Tech company, anything concerning AI, anything to do with EU or US legislation, anything involving hacking or right to repair, anything about copyright...
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
Only if you twist the definition of politics so much it becomes a pretzel, but sure.
Politics is how you make decisions collectively. In other words the market is political, LLCs are political, and common rules about how work is licensed is political.
AI is also being used (unfortunately) to make decisions. AI is therefore political (massively so).
What about AI slop causing the Iranian school-children strike ? US military confirmed that they are using AI to identify targets and provide coordinates. Will you ban that because its "politics" ?
bingo
[dead]
From the guidelines:
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
It's not just these articles. Having any differing opinions on basically anything now.
It's as far from hacking interest as it gets for me.
This is IMHO the most unfortunate thing about how HN has changed in the last 10 years or so. People downvote now as a form of disagreement, rather than using it as a form of collective moderation. The net result is that the popular opinions rise, while unpopular opinions tend to fall or die out.
On the plus side, it does make for an interesting barely scientific way to poll for popularity of a topic on HN. Absolutely not worth it IMHO, but it is at least a bit interesting.
FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on “showdead” in your profile.
IMHO showdead often surfaces a lot of interesting info. It's one of my favorite things about HN, and I love and appreciate that HN has that feature.
One example: If you want to see how bad the LLM slop commenting is, showdead is very helpful. It's not as bad as some people think, but it's certainly non-zero. On the plus side, those comments do seem to get identified and flagged/killed pretty quickly.
News not connected to technology or VC doesn't belong on HN.
is that an opinion or a consistently enforced policy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
I wouldn't care about it being a German or American or Chinese national any more than I care about it being a family of Palestinians, and more importantly it wouldn't belong on HN in any of those cases.
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
[flagged]
this article is about the west bank
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
> US Politics seems to get more of a pass,
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
All events are connected, but the only superpower is a little more connected.
Nothing exists in total isolation, you have to draw lines anyway.
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
At the same time, there must be a point where general humanity overrides community guidelines.
Why? Everyone has alternative news sources where they can find such stories, and there’s nothing new here. There’s always some tragedy that you could argue deserves more attention, I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
> I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
I don't think that's an accurate framing of the situation. It's a single post that enough people decided was worthy of being upvoted to the front page. I think allowing the community to decide is far more inline with the spirit of hacker news than the outright banning a category of posts.
Without taking one side or the other I just want to point out that a large part of the utility of guidelines or rules is that communities left to their own devices typically develop toxic patterns that are detrimental on the whole. They enable the community to decide not to leave something up to the community in the future.
It's a large part of the idea behind countries having constitutions for example.
Agreed. In the ideal, I would love for politics and many things to be part of HN, because I yearn for the thoughtful, objective, "hacker" analysis on all topics. But in practice I've seen that generally speaking HN isn't capable of this. And realistically it's not fair to expect that as it isn't really consistent with human nature (despite my wish that it was). Someday though I hope to find the "hacker news for {politics, news}" but I realize it may just not be possible.
Why does Gaza get 10x the coverage on HN and other social media well, when what has been happening in Sudan in the same time period is 10x worse?
(The 10x coverage number is from algolia hn search, the 10x worse number is from reported killings in the past year)
Because there is often a large tech component to it. The United States and Israel have two of the most advanced high-tech sectors in the world and they are playing a large role in this conflict.
And the people on HN work disproportionately in such companies, so it hits closer to home.
If Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, OpenAI, etc, were complicit in genocide in Sudan, Sudan would have much more attention.
Because Sudan isn't a tech/investment hub, and there's no overlap betweent he US and Sudanese defense industries.
The atrocities in Gaza are funded by, and sometimes even committed by, Americans. That’s why a predominantly American forum is interested in it.
That's a legitimate question and it has no good answer. Not just Sudan. There is an ongoing genocide in Myanmar, against the Rohingya. There is an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in china. None of those get nearly the amount of coverage the genocide in Gaza gets, or, now the war in Iran and Lebanon.
I have no idea why. I have recently started to grow a bit paranoid and wonder whether I am being manipulated by the media I consume. That would not be a huge surprise, I'm willing to bet most people are influenced by some of the things they read online.
Anyway this is an interesting question that has to be answered: why only Gaza, and not the other genocides?
If you really cared about those other conflicts, I'd expect to see you mention them more often in your comments. Are you sure you actually care about them or you just want people to stop talking about Gaza?
> why only Gaza, and not the other genocides?
Super easy answer: because only on Gaza your government openly sides with the perpetrators, arms and finances them, the media justify them, laws are passed to curb criticism and punish boycotts, and people in online discussion forums bring up always the same debunked arguments and rhetorical devices to divert the attention [1], blame the victims and justify the perpetrators. It's the disagreement that fuels the discussion, the obvious contrast between the right position and the official statements and public propaganda.
1- of which yours is a classic example: "why talk about this and not about something else?"
Because the west (our political and economic system) supports this war, and does so much more loudly than the war in Sudan,which is funded by the UAE, also a US ally, but a far less visible and consequential one. Nobody is visible working the media or politicians to win people over for the UAE every day, unlike Israel.
The aggressor in the Gaza genocide is also pulling the rest of the west into new wars in the region. The war is also deeply connected with our defense and tech industries.
There is plenty of reason to discuss this war.
Also, the conflict around "the area from the river to the sea" in it's entirety is something like 140 years old, with western countries having played a driving role since the very beginning. The Sudan conflict on its own has no such history. (The colonial history of Africa is a different story)
Generally, I think it's reasonable to pay more attention to conflicts where the own side is in the wrong. I don't need to demonstrate or raise awareness if my government is already acting like I'd want it to.
HN routinely talks about politics. Thinking that technology and politics can be understood in isolation is a pipe dream
> it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war
Sure. Let's spin the story on developments in laser-guided sniper rifle accuracy:
> Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The tech community props up these regimes by continuing to serve their tech needs. Everything is political in this day.
Toxic is saying politics needs to be kept separate. If we can't discuss how tech is literally fueling genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of people, then all other discussions tacitly serve those functions.
I disagree with this. The tech bros building these dystopian systems for big paychecks need to be informed somehow, this is the best way to reach them. They do care what their peers think of them and if we can reach their conscious in between bouts of agentic blogs and vibe coded hopes and dreams, then that is what we should do.
> and least toxic communities
Your comment sounds toxic to me. It endorses silence in face of a genocide.
We discussed a lot other wars here without immediate technological or economic consequences: Ukraine, Iraq, etc.
Why not the genocide in Gaza & West Bank?
[flagged]
Exactly! Don't bring politics into HN. Everyone and their dog have grievances. There's a time and place for them.
Exactly, we shouldn’t waste the precious time of HNers so that they can instead… checks notes… read about the nth vibevcoded side project!
I come here to escape these reddit style cesspools.. hacker news is literally for tech news and nth vibecoding side projects
Yes. I would much rather do that. This stuff is all over all of the other information sources. What is wrong with having HN purely tech focused? Politics with way more of a direct intersection with tech - for example the E2EE "bans", chat control, meta's misadventures - makes sense. But not unrelated crap.
Nobody is "raising awareness" here (saw this mentioned above in this thread). Trust me people will still hear about these things if HN doesn't post them. We're just sharing a BBC article for heaven's sake. Its not like we have some new information source like say a former-IDF tech founder whistleblowing. Its all so performative.
There is zero new information any HN reader gains from this post. Its a BBC article, the comments are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit, and the responses from the "defenders" are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit as well.
I've commented before[1] about the weird lack of moderation/enforcement of this guideline:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This one is politics or crime depending on which side you're on.
Never seen it enforced. Not for gaza,iran,venezuela,pakistan,ukraine. The US elections, random nonsense trump does, US govt shutdowns, greenland too.
All of those have been covered here extensively with zero net benefit/net information transacted.
I'm not saying we should only talk about Flash Attention version 6546272. Like if you see the health insurance thread on the front page today, you can see a CFO, a tech worker in the space, etc, commenting and contributing net new information. This simply doesn't (and I don't see how it can ever) happen on these gaza threads.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45435109
[dead]
[flagged]
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
[dead]
and your comment is flagged, as is mine. This article has no relevance to HN, just more political activism
As was mine. HN: a place for technology (and Palestine)
[flagged]
> The same reason your inane question is on HN.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
1. Either the illegal settlers or the israeli occupation force themselves set a Palestinian boy on fire in Ramallah: https://x.com/dillyhussain88/status/2033528694833127569
2. An israeli ran over a 6 years old in front of her home in Hebron while she was playing: https://x.com/anadoluagency/status/2033226719986069866
3. Another israeli settler deliberately ran his car over a Palestinian child in the Nablus: https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/2033402402062434589
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times - Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) - Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters - Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
There's no mention of any particular company, tech or otherwise, here. Yes, you can probably connect your work in some way to something that affects the military if you live in the US or Israel (and even many places outside of it - we're not restricting to direct connections), but, after all, "there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism".
If I worked at [supposedly evil company], I doubt this largely unverifiable story would cause much turmoil. I'm sure at work I'd be hearing about much worse and more concrete stuff already.
It is a verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers and it includes verification by the IDF:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
Seen this on repeat lately - there will be some war crime that the IDF commits, soldiers or Israeli citizens celebrate it themselves in a TikTok or in Israeli media, then the US media will argue that it didn’t happen or “there’s some information missing”. It’s actually kind of nuts.
Yes driving fast means - execution.
Verification _of what_ though? The OP article makes a lot of claims. Your own link says the car was a legit target for 'speeding at' troops, which completely opposes much of the BBC article.
Just because the IDF issued its "justification" doesn't mean it is. As we know from Gaza, there is always a justification.
Here is a good description from the New York Times:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...
I haven't sided with the IDF account, I've said you're overstating the number of facts that "both sides agree on" as a proxy for what's verifiable.
DIfferent people have different levels of empathy. If you can live with these things happening in the world, let along being involved even in an extremely minor way then fine, but don't try and downplay it.
I think it's naive to think that things aren't overplayed or dramatized whenever I read such an article, from whatever PoV. So it can only ever be _at most_ as bad as the article claims. Then it's only natural to downplay.
What's naive is to think that this is overplayed when the same events are happening day and day out after Israeli settles continue campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. This is just _one_ representative story of dozens that happen every day as reported by many NGOs. This one was merely made viral.
Sorry, I just don't buy the coached words of a 12 year old as categorically truthful. If anything, ethnic cleansing would be a more statistical and thus verifiable claim than the literal anecdote of a child.
Really interesting that out of all the testimonials coming out from Gaza and the West Bank that repeat observable, recorded events over and over again, by people in all sides of the conflict, that you selective choose skepticism about this one as if Hind Rajab didn´t happen.
I selectively chose skepticism about... the specific article we are on a thread talking about
> largely unverifiable story
there’s literally pictures in the article of the bodies
A photo of some people being buried doesn't confirm or deny the validity of the claim as to how they were killed.
I have no dog in this fight, but sources actually provide evidence.
This is a journalistic article that does provide multiple sources of evidence - including multiple sources of eyewitness testimony, the facts of what happened to the car/damage to the bodies, what the IDF says happened, and the non-response by the IDF to the evidence presented here - what other evidence could possibly meet your bar here?
This doesn't seem like a good faith discussion by people that informed themselves on what this piece is saying, so I'm bowing out. Have a good one.
Merely that someone died seems to be a tiny fraction of the claims here.
The claim is that the IDF shot his family. Even the IDF does not dispute this. What are you thinking this article is saying?
I'm not sure the IDF has confirmed who was killed, but even so the article goes much further than that. That it was a bad shoot, that the car was stationary, that no warnings were given, that the family did nothing to prompt it, that the IDF weren't legitimately mistaken, that the kid's injury is from the incident, that this kid was even there, that they spent 50+ rounds, that the kid who died has special needs. And more. You can literally just read the article and extract the facts. Those are uncomfirmed save by anecdote.
Literally read it, thanks. Glad you did too. Your original post said “unverifiable story” which seemed like the basic facts of the matter could be determined by reading said article and making inferences based on the sources provide. I trust you performed such dilligence.
The only agreed upon basic facts by both sides are that someone has died at the hands of the IDF. The rest (i.e. what makes up most of the claims) is pure anecdote and thus, unverifiable. I'm not sure what the issue is with saying as much.
We (and I) have become desensitized. When I saw one of these for the first time about 25 years ago, I was thinking about it for a week. Maybe longer. Because it was new, internet was new, and the video (not the same but it really does not matter) was the first time I saw it for ... real, felt it for real.
But after seeing a 100 of these, after knowing some of these are AI, after seeing news of a 1000 more ... I mean how is columbine or sandy hook different ... you see these but you eventually scroll up, sometimes immediately sometimes after a few seconds.
I am not making light of it just saying ... a lot of people at evil companies are also tuned out.
Well, it's also compartmentalized isn't it. It's happening remotely, even if you're buliding the targetting systems or something like that. It's still all abstracted.
And as sympathetic as I might be otherwise, everyone is prone to dramatization and histrionics, which has a numbing tendency too. On both sides.
Yes that's the other part. Suppose I build a high performance on-device caching solution that allows computes on a drone to run 10X faster ... I am not really thinking about the drone, just the caching solution
PS: I have no knowledge of drones or caching solutions. Just saying.
[flagged]
[flagged]
I'm a hacker. I find cooking interesting. Stories about cooking belong on HN.
Do you now see that it doesn't work like this?
I mean, a simple search reveals hundreds of stories posted about cooking on HN.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
At least it's more interesting than all those AI stuff.
It’s an interesting look into HN.
Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?
Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.
Interesting how this highlights a philosophical conundrum here that I'm not sure I have the answer to that goes beyond just forums. Do people make the community, or do rules make the community? I can envision arguments for both sides.
Does it matter?
If HN gets invaded by people who want to discuss cooking and start submitting and upvoting cooking articles and HN turns into cooking discussion website? And once they get majority, they'll change the rules to make it exclusively about cooking.
It's still people, just different people. People who like cooking vs. people who like technology and startups.
There's no philosophical conundrum.
Do you want HN to be colonized by cooking people or not? That is the question.
I don't.
We need to stand our ground and repel colonizers who want to change the character of HN. Our unity is our strength.
People here prefer arguing about the rules (and alleged violations thereof) more than they do making concrete, substantive arguments.
It’s the interaction of the two.
The rules are made by people. So it’s just people all the way down…
You think, charitably, that this is an astroturf, really? What's the distribution of upvotes look like for front-page posts, binned in 20 minute intervals?
Reviewing your post history, it's overwhelmingly in non-tech related threads. This seems like a standard post for your tastes, semantically. Why then the sudden distaste?
Flag and move on.
yes it does
It absolutely does. Israel uses an AI system("Lavender") to decide which civilians to kill. I remind myself of this fact every single day when deciding where to apply my work. We(software developers) are more than ever exposed to the reality that our products will kill people in the real world.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Don't worry, it will sadly get flagged like they tend to.
I don't know if HN does, but I very much do. But yes, don't worry - it will get flagged and removed soon, no doubt.
[flagged]
The technical answer is the bots pushed it over 30 points or thereabouts, so it became more difficult to kill with flags.
Well I guess let people vote and moderators do they work.
Maybe I need to see it at the top and then see it disappear to understand what I am looking at when reading HN first page.
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
[flagged]
I agree, but I'd say it's important when pointing out how horrible this is you don't let the "they deserved it" narrative fly.
How Israel acts in the west bank is a testament to how poor their behavior in gaza is. They have no real justification for their evictions and murders of west bank citizens. They have no justification for turning a blind eye to settler violence. They have no justification for not punishing IDF soldiers who break theirs and international law.
Israel's plan to confuse people about what is happening in the west bank vs gaza is so effective that even their detractors are falling for it. Truly a genius strategy
That's a good point actually.
[flagged]
Can't say I'm glad to have read that, but at the same time it's good that male victims of wartime sexual assault/rape get covered. It's just a shame that the response is still incredibly muted. It's like men just don't want to think about it.
Whereas I feel pure, hot rage at the lack of coverage, the lack of anybody caring. Raped men being offered paracetamol because the clinics after only for women has been seared into my brain for a long time now: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-....
Nothing has changed since then either.
It is good that it gets covered, but the antagonistic and accelerated nature of modern media means that such coverage is rapidly subjected to spin, repackaging and so on. This opinionated but imho fair article summarizes how one of the self-admitted participants in the incident was treated as a mini0celebrity by one of the right-aligned Israeli TV channels:-
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/the-main-suspect-in-the-sde-t...
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
HN was never about technology, just things interesting people find interesting.
Its in the rules. And up to Dang to decide.
Technology isn't apolitical.
Too many people think of politics as a tribal team sport. It's not. Politics overlaps with tech because it's really about labelling situations accurately and modelling consequences effectively.
If you fail at those, politics can literally kill you.
Technology happens to be one of the ways it can do that.
[flagged]
> it is very unfortunate and we as a society feel bad for this
> Sick pro palys...
Lol. And you as a society don't feel bad for illegally occupying and colonising other people's territory? Why don't you withdraw within your borders?
> Whilst Palestinians celebrate death
This poem might interest u/dikozaken: https://youtu.be/aKucPh9xHtM
> Why don't you withdraw within your borders?
They already did that multiple times with no positive outcomes whatsoever, go learn some history
No that actually never happened. The very day Israel declared its independence its army was already outside the territory proposed for it by the UN's partition plan. Israel itself never declared what its borders were.
wrong
Here are only some examples of Israel compromising (land and other) for the sake of peace:
1. Hebron Protocol — 1997
2. Wye River Memorandum — 1998
3. Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum — 1999
4. Gaza Disengagement Plan — 2005
5. Naharayim/Baqura and Tzofar/Ghamr special-regime expiration — 2019
6. Israel-Lebanon Maritime Boundary Agreement — 2022
Those only that were applied, many more offers were rejected by other side.
Israel doesn't need to "compromise", Israel needs to withdraw from every inch of land that it occupies illegally. A few notes about the most significant examples you provided:
Netanyahu's statement on the Hebron protocol:
"We are using the time interval in the agreement to achieve our goals: to maintain the unity of Jerusalem [illegally occupied], to ensure the security depth necessary for the defence of the State, to insist on the right of Jews to settle in their land [i.e. further the illegal colonisation], and to propose to the Palestinians a suitable arrangement for self-rule but without the sovereign Powers which pose a threat to the State of Israel."
Wye River Memorandum- never implemented, Israel only withdrew from 2% of area C instead of the agreed 13%.
Gaza Disengagement Plan. In the words of Dov Weissglass, Sharon's senior adviser:
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term 'peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Well somebody didn't inform the settlers. Tell me why does Ma'ale Adumim even exist then?
In all of these situations, settlements continued to be built.
Not correct
Effective border control would be much easier to implement than the settlement program. In fact it largely has been working since the second intifada when they reinforced it. The west bank settlements make israel less safe, not more.
As if Israel, a nuclear power under complete protection of the world's sole superpower, could have any trouble defending its border. Though of course, turning your neighbours into your friends through appeasement and cooperation would remove the need for such heightened defense. The only problem is that it would be the end of their dreams of territorial expansion and Greater Israel.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
Choose?!
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
The audacity you have to encourage them to die for nothing is what's staggering.
I'm not encouraging anything. I'm not the one putting onerous on the victims. Open a dictionary, if you don't know what "audacity" means.
Yes, you are basically encouraging those affected to stay where they are, effectively to just die where they are. You are among the same people who asked the Jews during the Holocaust to stay where they were, to not leave the country, effectively leading to their mass murder.
[flagged]
What you're talking about is called ethnic cleansing.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
If my tax dollars, military and government are killing those two people every second, you better believe that I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it.
[flagged]
You will never find a nation more illegitimate, manipulative and in control of the US government than Israel. I'm using my voice as a human to speak up and there are a rapidly dwindling number of Zionists. Israel will cease to exist as we know it very soon.
[flagged]
The fuck are you on about? Pretty sure most niche places like Iceland or Costa Rica are not doing this, and every government on earth thinks of war as passe.
Only defense companies who profit and religious fucking idiots like you think war is some necessary thing.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
I go to HN to read about technology and startups. I don't want to read about Israel/gaza, etc, I get enough of that everywhere else in life. But I guess that makes me not a compassionate person.
If you don’t want to read about it then don’t read about it.
It’s taking the time to post a mean reply that shows your lack of compassion.
Which war? This happened in the West Bank!
For people who don't follow this, the West Bank has a different government vs Gaza (they are not friends!), and is in fact pretty compliant wrt Israel.
This isn't a war, though. This is an extermination. This is an army with effectively limitless power against unarmed civilians.
> Collateral damage is inevitable in any war.
"Collateral damage" is when "they" die. "Tragedy" is when "we" die.
Or, in other words: "Some of you might die. That's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
[flagged]
[flagged]
> the Zios
It's okay to just say you don't like Jews. Just be honest.
_account created 3 days ago_
[flagged]
Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people deserve a national state. Being anti-Zionist is equivalent to wanting Israel to not exist as a national state.
Zionism is currently realized as an apartheid system because there are too many non-Jews within the borders of Israel. The solution should have been two-states, but it seems that current Israeli leadership doesn't want that. So what is left? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/11/israels-netanyahu-s...
> The solution should have been two-states,
Perhaps. But at a lower level the solution is justice
And why do they? There's minorities in almost all countries that doesn't have their own state. It's not unusual. What is unusual is creating a state on land where other people already live and then turns guns on them.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
> Palestine is an impoverished community with a terrorist government that isn't afraid to commit atrocities against humanity
If you're going to comment on the conflict, at least learn to distinguish between The West Bank and Gaza.
Please take your propaganda elsewhere. If Hamas or any other group in the region perpetrated any of the war crimes that Israel commits on any given day, every media outlet would be writing about it for weeks. In the meantime, Israel can bomb Gaza literally every day since the so-called ceasefire and nobody bats an eye. Israel just now acquitted its soldiers caught raping Palestinians in custody on camera. No coverage, no outcry. Israel is very objectively a bad guy, armed with nukes.
This is the same Israel that has attacked Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Quatar and Sudan (https://youtu.be/pRxKltphg6c?si=bDSB_jA-KPM4Efzu) and globally trafficked children?
(https://youtu.be/RJhqGDZbqBI?si=MQFuah6er7TvHcaD)
Or is it the Israel that deliberately destroys crops (https://youtu.be/Lyp9Xfess3Q?si=1_4usvB1yjgYhKSb)?
Maybe it’s the Israel that ignores ceasefires (http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxn4SkyNfKESV6nPO_ZzgOhdaH8lb_FAkx...) or fills in wells (http://youtube.com/post/UgkxaPo3ERDtr5fQKPAHnFgxwYkMaEeMgdlo...)
Or it could be the Israel that shoots and kills 234 peaceful protestors (https://www.972mag.com/gaza-return-march-idf/)
Restraint is not really in Israeli vocabulary, and the story being sold is a lie.
The West Bank is governed by the PLO, not Hamas, so it sounds like your concern is that you just don't wish to hear about it because it's an inconvenience.
Terrorist government? This is the West Bank, which is currently governed by Fatah, which has global recognition as the rightful representative authority of the Palestinian people.
I think you're right. Obviously this is awful and the IDF shouldn't be doing this and should be held responsible (of course they won't). But it seems like the implicit message behind the story is Palestine good, Israel bad, which at best is a massive oversimplification.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
If you don’t mind developing, what made you switch stance ? many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence , and based on your prior level of support, I’m quite curious about the actual process .
> many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence
Not the OP, but many people do. I've changed my stance on similar topics multiple times in the past, based on new (to me, at least) evidence.
[dead]
Hard to tell in retrospect. I think the thick layer of distrust against palestinians (which was built by debunked lie after lie from Hamas etc over the years) was finally breached by the sheer asimmetry of power that Israeli forces have gained against Palestinian civilians.
Just forget that the two parties are Jews and Arabs and instead make them Suaheli and Kazakh, and then put one group in such an "agency-less" position as Palestinians are, and give the other group the leverage in power as the Israelis have, plus the grievances. Even if you can understand these grievances – there is just no way these things aren't going to happen.
Plus: The state of Gaza has reached a level of destruction that is just ... well basically as if they have nuked the place (Like I initally favoured). At some point the humane thing would be to call it a win and leave. An that point has probably passed a long time ago.
Plus, I have read about the background of some of Netanjahu's cabinet members and they essentially tick all the boxes of what I find problematic with the aforementioned power asimmetry:
Prior aggresive behaviour against Palestinian civlians in the settlement areas, with the victims having no proper way of legal recourse. Like ganging up on random Arabs there and beating them up. I know there is backlash for this from within Israeli society but man, things are bad if a literal street thug is getting a place in the cabinet, because he behaved that way.
> nuke Gaza for good
Some great empathy for innocent civilians you got there, monster.
Lets just say many Gazans didn't display any empathy for dead or almost dead civilians either that they dragged into the city and instead were filming themselves celebrating over corpses, and captured women bleeding from their r_pings as well as from the achilles-heel cuts applied. A technique highlighting how deep enslavement-culture run in this part of the world.
You're projecting, judging, trying, and executing every single person of a people. A people are not a hivemind. Treating people as such makes you a monochromatic, ignorant bigot of the worst sort.
Nuking Gaza is an abhorrent position but I don't think there will be any reform out there until there is a decisive win and if I have to pick a side it's not the Palestinians. If the Palestinians win it'll embolden other states or factions to have another go at the six-day war again and possibly prop up break-away action against other factions' host countries. There needs to be a complete and utter defeat that results in an enlightenment process. The strategy and military approach Hamas uses for example cannot be seen to win.
You have to look at the bigger picture. If they lose it's going to be a problem for all of us. Thus I have to support them.
And no I'm not a Trump supporter or Jewish or Israeli. The current operation in Iran is a fuck up. The whole thing that lead to 10-7 was a fuck up. It should have been dealt with years ago, preferably through diplomacy and threat of a strong hand rather than actually having to bomb the place.
There's no righteous side at all in this conflict.
Same thought in reverse. If oppressive regimes see that intentionally backing a population into a corner ultimately lets them get away with genocide on the global stage then presumably more of them will attempt it in the future.
[flagged]
> population increases
https://original.antiwar.com/noah_carl/2026/01/07/is-the-gaz...Child mortality will be an issue if you use child soldiers, which Hamas do.
> more conflict means more power for them
That's literally the strategy of the Likud, who undermined the more moderate Fattah to allow the extremist Hamas to reign on the Gaza strip, hoping that one day the 7th of october would happen, and would let them unleash a genocide...
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-...
> My gut reaction to 10-7 was to nuke Gaza for good
What the actual fuck. Sorry, but you’re a fucking maniac.
[flagged]
> It’s very natural to want to return the same in kind
They didn't return the same in kind. Compare the "stats" of Oct 7 vs what Israel did over the next 2 years.
If you think that what happened on Oct 7 justified such a response, then you should shudder at the thought of what is justified in a merely proportional response to Israel's response. Proportionality being the foundation of justice and all that.
[flagged]
Those are some serious claims there. It's been 2 years and all the captured people have been returned to Israel. Still no actual proof of such claims that are casually repeated by pro-Israeli media. Not even mere supporting testimonies by those who were held captive.
Anyway, you dodged nearly the entirety of my comment. You know very well what a proportional response to what Israel has done would be.
> It's been 2 years and all the captured people have been returned to Israel
No. The IDF retrieved some people and some bodies, sometimes Hamas returned live people, sometimes bodies like the Bibas babies they beat to death, sometimes other bodies that they pretended were the victim.
> Still no actual proof of such claims that are casually repeated by pro-Israeli media.
Most are from the victims. You can listen to the testimony of these people, in many cases via video:
Arbel Yehoud was sexually assaulted almost every single day during her 482 days in captivity by her captors (Palestinian Islamic Jihad, affiliated with Hamas operations). https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886646
Romi Gonen endured repeated sexual assault and harassment over 471 days. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/middleeast/israeli-hostage-ga...
Multiple former hostages reported systematic sexual violence; a Dinah Project report documented 13 women and 2 men experiencing or witnessing it. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/08/middleeast/hostages-gaza-sexu...
> Anyway, you dodged nearly the entirety of my comment
Yes because it was disgusting. Maybe after reading this you should acknowledge that and apologise?
> You know very well what a proportional response to what Israel has done would be.
Hamas risking the lives of its own people to save some fictional hostages the IDF has not kidnapped?
Likewise, you haven’t acknowledged that IDF having a proportional response would be a drug fuelled death and rape rampage like Hamas did.
It seems like you support the Axis forces because more Germans died than British people. Israel defending its population from Hamas attacks doesn’t make Hamas good.
Seriously: listen to the victims and fix your life. Or better yet maybe Dang can do something about this new account.
Alright, multiple things.
First of all, Israel DOES conduct rape of Palestinians [1] [2], so that's not some hypothetical revenge scenario, but rather an everyday reality for Palestinians living under a brutal occupation. Randomly scoop up a few Palestinians every now and then, put them in prisons often at no charge at all ("administrative detention"), and then do anything you want to them behind the prison walls.
Second of all, I actually have principles, and I am against rape ALWAYS. If the victim testimonies that you referenced are actually true, then the perpetrators of those crimes deserve appropriate punishment. So do the Israelis who rape Palestinians.
> > Anyway, you dodged nearly the entirety of my comment
> Yes because it was disgusting.
No I won't let you keep dodging. What I wrote was that if you think that what happened on Oct 7 justified the response that Israel enacted by demolishing basically the entirety of Gaza, then you should shudder at the thought of what is justified in a merely proportional response to Israel's response. Proportionality being the foundation of justice and all that. For example, given that we know that Israel regularly kills and rapes Palestinians, would it be justified to do to Israel what Israel has done to Gaza? No? Then why do you people keep justifying what you have done to Gaza? When will you accept how disproportionally savage that was? Do you not see how disgusted by it the rest of the world is?
If you think that proportionality is disgusting, well, no need to engage any further.
[1] https://thecradle.co/articles-id/36452
[2] https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-war-chief-offers-apolo...
> First of all, Israel DOES conduct rape of Palestinians [1] [2], so that's not some hypothetical revenge scenario, but rather an everyday reality for Palestinians
Your links don't support your statement that this is an everyday reality.
> If the victim testimonies that you referenced are actually true, then the perpetrators of those crimes deserve appropriate punishment. So do the Israelis who rape Palestinians.
Good, I'm glad about that. You seem to cast more doubt on the many cases of Hamas and regular Gazans brutalizing Israeli civilians than the few cases of Israeli soldiers brutalizing prisoners though. Why is that?
> No I won't let you keep dodging.
What have I dodged?
> What I wrote was that if you think that what happened on Oct 7 justified the response that Israel enacted by demolishing basically the entirety of Gaza, then you should shudder at the thought of what is justified in a merely proportional response to Israel's response.
Yes, I replied with what a proportional response by Hamas to Israel would have been:
> > Hamas risking the lives of its own people to save some fictional hostages the IDF has not kidnapped?
You seemed to have missed this.
> given that we know that Israel regularly kills and rapes Palestinians,
That's not given. Your links about an isolated brutality case does not support your case that this is regular or anything near the scale of the Oct 7 massacre. The soldiers that brutalized that man are being punished by the Israeli government. The Hamas operatives that perpetuated Oct 7 massacre are by the Gazan government.
> Then why do you people keep justifying what you have done to Gaza?
How would you have handled Hamas' attacks?
> return the same in kind
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/689306/jewish...exactly. wanting to nuke the place is an absolute normal response to what the Palestininans did on 7 Oct. They livestreamed their joy of r_pe, enslavement and gruesome killings. Even the nazis, to which the Oct-7-abaters are never tired of comparing the Israelis to, had the decency to not openly advertise their atrocities.
Murder is bad. Still, killing 200 people is not equivalent to killing 2 million people.
Those numbers don’t refer to anyone in this conflict.
[flagged]
> Only relevant because the conflict is often portrayed in terms of European Colonialism or US race dynamics.
What do you want to tell with this? That there are no race dynamics because some people have a lighter skin color?
No "Judeo-Christian civilization", no "Villa in the Jungle", no "Light unto the nations", nope...
> about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris
Really?
Aotearoan here. Our racist history is shameful. Many massacres, both sides but mostly one way traffic.
Our history of "othering" indigenous people here in law was shameful too.
But seriously, and with all due respect, fuck you!!
We are facing up to our racist past, present and (Dog help us) future.
Tikanga Māori is joining our legal system.
Being openly racist to Māori is politically suicidal (some right wing politicians are giving it a go, and getting burnt for it)
Māori institutions are integrating themselves into all levels of our culture and society
And on and on. New Zealand is a Māori country, I am Pākehā, I have no problem with that, I belong here too. We (white people) are learning to share, learning there are more ways than our ways. Israel could learn from us, but...
The Isralies are utterly different. The violent homicidal, nay genocidal, racism of Israel is institutional.
Fuck you. For all we have our problems with racism, we are not genocidal racist violent thugs, as are the IDF representing the Israli state
Sorry but this is so off topic. Does not belong here.
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
It’s hard not to wonder whether better technology could someday help stop tragedies like this.
No. Better technology is only making it more efficient. We need better humanity, better morals, better policing of criminals in power.
That's misguided. Technology is a tool. Tools can be used for good or bad. The hammer that builds a hospital can also crack a skull open.
No, we need better people controlling the tools.
The israeli army are famous for their tech?
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
The Holocaust was built on IBM, the genocide in Gaza is built on Azure. Technology won't be on the side of stopping these tragedies.
nothing has changed https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
[flagged]
[flagged]
Hamas is the reason for all this. Palestine people will never forgive them
please...
A classic "HN is not for politics unless it is about Palestine" post.
Sad story. War is sad. 2 countries in a war that cannot end otherwise. Its either Palestine or Israel unfortunately. Put your good will and emotions somewhere it can actually make a sensible difference guys
The West Bank is not part of the war (if you can even call the Gaza war a war, it's an extermination campaign, but still, people do call that a war).
This is just a regular tuesday massacre for the IDF, not an ongoing conflict, just occupation policing.
This is incredibly heart breaking, but unfortunately, in war, there are always casualties. This is the grim reality of war.
Wasn't aware Israel had declared war on the West Bank.
There is no war in the West Bank, this is ethnic cleansing.
"Ethnic cleansing" is such a nice word. "Etničko čišćenje" is what the Serb paramilitaries called raping and murdering a population to make them leave. "Remove kebab" as the later meme culture would call it. It's so trite, and a little funny it seems. We should call it what it is: *genocide*; thereby robbing the perpetrators of any semblance of cleanliness or propriety.
Monsters are filthy. Let's call them the filthy monsters they are.
I agree!
[flagged]
* * *
My understanding if you read the Israeli news articles is that the justification is that the car was going fast:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
From the article, an eyewitness account:
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Indeed. Often one of the key details omitted is that Israel has been illegally occupying the west bank since 1967 as part of an apartheid regime.
The BBC had a literal Israeli officer as the head of their Middle East department. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/high-court-rules-favour-j...
I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination
This is the biggest lie of all.
Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We discuss pros and cons in terms of security, legality, world public opinion, etc. These are the only considerations. We don’t see any humanity there. We just need their land.
That said, it’s true that some Palestinians have dreams of defending themselves from us.
I believe they need all the help they can get.
>Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We? speak for yourself loser
“ 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.”
“ Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."
Israeli society has a very, very strong genocidal current.
https://archive.is/QvrVu
a poll of 1000 people in a country of 7 million..
ouch!!! got me!!!
> poll of 1000 people
Yes… that’s how polls work…
Do you have an actual rebuttal or have the wounds to your ego and identity rendered you incapable of substantive responses?
Genocidal attitudes pervade Israeli society; both its leaders and its citizens.
Surveys by the aChord Center at the Hebrew University found that 64% of Jewish Israelis believe there are "no innocent people" in the Gaza Strip
https://archive.is/IDoSk
“ Israel's military has dropped the prosecution of five reservists accused of the violent rape of a Palestinian man … The shocking incident in July 2024 was caught on CCTV and later broadcast on Israeli television“
“ In a statement, the country's Defence Minister Israel Katz welcomed a decision by the military's top prosecutor to drop the charges, declaring "justice has been served".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-13/israel-idf-drops-sde-...
people like you are responsible for the word 'genocide' meaning absolutely nothing in the last few years. go back to your reddit echochamber and post your 'free free palestine' slop there because I come to hackernews to escape netflix level takes on politics.
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
[flagged]
What's wrong with their charter?
This will never stop, because on both sides there are people who benefit from the existence of the conflict and they are the ones with power.
The last time when Israel had a PM who was willing to find a way for ending the conflict, he was murdered and replaced by those who want a perpetual conflict.
I have worked in Israel for some years, and the vast majority of people that I have encountered were very nice, but I have also seen a few that were definitely evil, and of course, the evil ones were concentrated in positions like the government or the management of companies.
Because most Israelis live in constant fear that if they would ever lose their technological and financial superiority their neighbors will come and cut their throats, when I was there, and I assume that also today, the majority of the population was exploited in a way that would not be possible in any other country.
Everybody had to work very hard, much harder than in any other country, and prioritize work over anything else, because this was a patriotic duty, like one might have worked in USA during WWII or in Ukraine today or in any country that is at war and its survival depends on how everyone works, except that in Israel the war has been continuous for three quarters of a century.
For the elites of the country this war economy is extremely desirable because they can demand any sacrifices from the workers, since those are supposedly not for increasing the profits of the company owners, but for ensuring the survival of the nation, and anyone who would not want to do what is required would be seen as a traitor.
For ending the conflict, it is not possible to just say that from tomorrow the parties in conflict should stop hating each other. Reparations would be necessary, like Israel itself has received plenty from Germany and other countries.
However, it is very unlikely that Israel will ever have a government willing to end the conflict, instead of keeping it alive as long as possible, to have something with which to scare the population.
Even post Epstein revelations, Chomsky's core thesis in The Fateful Triangle from 1983 still holds. A minority of hateful, brutish war hawks and crazy people on all 3 sides perpetuate a never-ending cycle of violence. The challenge is removing them from power and holding them accountable.
[flagged]
There's another 1000+ "invaders took my shit" issues in the world. Your logic only leads to non-stop fights between everyone
There are no other countries in the world where the foreign invaders maintain an apartheid system over the native population. Only Israel does that, having one set of rights for the foreign invaders and another set of rights for the native Palestinians. Even the US allows native americans full citizenship.
[flagged]
Are any of them doing that with my tax dollars? Is my president starting wars on their behalf? Am I having my rights stripped to stop me from speaking out about any other situation? Nothing impacts Americans like Zionism, it's the #1 problem facing our nation.
> There's another 1000+ "invaders took my shit" issues in the world...
There's a lot less "invaders are continuing to take my shit". Probably a handful, and every such unresolved, escalating geo-political situation is pushing the world towards a dangerous timeline.
Except those people are dead. Those who ethnically cleansed Arabs (and Jews) during the nakba are dead. Almost everyone who was ethnicity cleansed is now dead. At a certain point you need to recognize that a new generation has been born into this conflict, and with it, a change in circumstances. Attitudes like yours ignore that Israelis who were born there don't have another home to 'return' to.
That doesn't mean that Palestinians don't have a right to resist occupation, but the circumstances are significantly materially different today then 40 years ago.
Joe Biden is older than the state of Israel and Zionists have continuously committed ethnic cleansing and apartheid since their inception. This is an active and current situation.
Joe Biden was 6 was israel was created. 6 year olds are not responsible for ethnic cleansing.
And yes, there is ongoing issues (from both sides), but solving the current situation is very different than solving the ethnic cleansing that happened in 1948.
[flagged]