Posted by skilled 10/29/2025
The objection I have with that is that it's reductive.
"It's not *so* bad" is different than "it's not *entirely* bad", and my objection stands, whether or not "someone else could achieve good results"
To hold a strong opinion on whether those terms apply, I'd need more information than is available to the public, and go on a case by case basis.
For example:
The IDF claims Hamas use civilians as human shields. Hamas denies it.
Hamas claims the IDF targets civilians. The IDF denies it.
And I, with no access to internal IDF communications, and no access to internal Hamas communications, don't know what to make of all the videos and articles supporting and debunking both claims.
If the goal is to determine whether Israel actually is guilty of genocide then that approach isn't useful.
The sensible position is to be conscious of what one doesn't know.
It's less satisfying than believing that one side is just evil, like the person to whom I originally replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45766601
If the Israelis are committing genocide, it's of a people obsessed with destroying them.
If it's colonisation, it's colonisation with about a dozen caveats.
That doesn't make things any better for Gazans, for whom I also have sympathy.
The aspect of the original comment that I was poking fun of is that it is reductive.
That's the same justification used by a certain failed Austrian painter.
Genocide is never right.
The situations seem quite different to me, but maybe there is an outrageous gap in my knowledge of Weimar Germany.
By your logic, false flag attacks can be used to legitimize genocide. I am not saying those attacks were false flags. But, malicious actors aware of your logic can plan false attacks, “sacrifice few for greater good” and you will then support a genocide because it satisfied your conditions.
I should also note that the tactic itself dates way back before Israel became an independent state. Here's one honest Zionist writing it like it is:
Is there any subject in particular I am meant to address from that link? Quite a lot happened between 1923 and the founding of the modern state of Israel. As the letter itself implies, zionists had diverse goals and attitudes.
It should also be noted that the ruling party, Likud, is specifically a Revisionist Zionist organization, with an explicit historical link to Betar, and founded by Begin who was a Jabotinsky disciple. So this isn't just some kind of random coincidence; what we're seeing Israel doing in Gaza today is a direct consequence of taking Jabotinsky's main premise and running it to conclusion.
- when the colonists began colonizing, there were already a minority of jews in the region
- many of the colonizers believed themselves, with some reason, to be native to the land
- most israelis today, through no fault of their own, were born in israel
- when zionists came to colonize israel, it was already colonized (twice over)
- the initial colonization was carried out 'legally' (though, in hindsight, what that means is questionable)
- many of the colonizers were fleeing persecution and, especially around the holocaust, had no nations willing to accept them as immigrants
So they take over someone else's land and massacre and displace the locals? Sounds about right /s
For me Zionists for Palestinians are fair game, the same as Germans Nazis were fair game to German Jews.
The fact that Nazis are backing up Zionists in the West tells all the story.
That's not the fault of palestinians, and so it does make zionists 'fair game' through a pro-palestinian lens.
On the other hand, it does make it hard to say either side is in the wrong.
And I don't attach significance to which side nazis support today. There are far-right movements who claim to support gay rights, too. It's meaningless.
I hope you meant to say something like militants, otherwise this is justifying unlawful violence based on the victims' political beliefs.
It certainly wouldn't have been fair game for Jews to massacre random German civilians at a music festival, for example, irrespective of any speculation about their victims' political ideology.
Nazis in the West are actually divided quite a bit on this. Old-school Nazis were often anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian; some even converted to Islam from going down that path (e.g. Johann von Leers, Ahmed Huber). Support for Israel and Jews as "more white" than Arabs is a more recent phenomenon, and those two groups often fight each other.
Without taking a position in the underlying claim, which I am not interested in debating either way, I think you are conflating the Hannibal directive [0] and its alleged invocation on October 7 with the practice of hasbara [1] here.
Change it to Israel, sprinkle in some vaguely insidious language (a contract becomes a "secret agreement", etc), and suddenly it's a scandal.
Why not state your argument aloud? And link reliable sources.
This kind of absurd blunder is what happens when American public schools have twelve years of history education that consist of nothing but "Holocaust Class". Bro has probably had to read every popular holocaust book but has never even heard of Cambodia.
Edit: you Zionists can flag, downvote, whatever. Doesn’t make a difference. The world sees your grotesque actions and Israel will fall
I'm thinking that 99% of people would feel horrible and/or morally responsible if they lent an axe to their neighbor Mr. Seemed-Nice, which he then used to kill his wife. Vs. far less so, if their neighbor bought his fatal ax from Amazon or Walmart.
This might seem like a silly distinction to some but what I find depressing about modern culture wars is how "we disagree on these points" seems to morph into "you and everything you represent is terrible". Nuance matters.
Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement. Arguing its truth value is like kitchen-testing whether a cookie recipe turns out worse if you replace "2C sugar, 1/2t salt" with "2C salt, 1/2t sugar".
And sadly, such bombastic/emotive mis-statements are far, far older than our modern culture wars.
To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.
>Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement.
That's a cope. Words have meanings, and being able to make and walk back on misleading/false statements with "I was being bombastic/emotive and it wasn't meant to be taken literally" absolutely poisons any sort of attempt rational discourse. "Israel committed war crimes" becomes not a statement about whether Israel broke international laws but whether you support Israel or not, "fake news" becomes not a statement about whether the news story was conjured from thin air but whether you like the story, etc.
If you logically disproved the "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement - say, by finding one saintly-pure Israeli preschool teacher - would anyone outside the Temple of Ultimate Pedantry really care?
Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?
Do you think Trump supporters actually cares whether the stories he calls out as "fake news" were actually fake or just displeased the president? Or whether the election was "stolen", or he simply didn't like the way it was conducted?
>Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?
But why add all that extra stuff about being the most evil? If you just wanted to express his displeasure at israel, you could have just said "I'm mad at israel", or even "israel is evil". The fact OP went out of his way to say that "israel is the most evil" suggests that he thought he had something to gain from doing so, like adding the fib makes his argument more convincing or something. Same with Trump calling stuff "fake news" instead of just saying "I don't like this story about me".
Most don't. A few (and more of the swing voters) care somewhat. Good reason to not spend (waste) time getting picky on the details, eh?
> But why...?
Some combination of social signalling/performance - "look at my uber-ultimate loyalty to the anti-Israel cause!!!" - and an ancient human tendency to exaggerate for emotional emphasis. Anecdote: Back in the 1900's, one of my nieces routinely referred to her kid sister as the "spawn of the devil" and similar. Why? Until the birth of the younger, the older niece had been the baby of the family, and had her own bedroom. Plus normal sibling rivalry. Fast-forward 2 decades from that - and the two nieces were on perfectly friendly terms. The older one both got the younger one a nice office job, and was happy to have the younger one babysit her own small children.
Arguing about pedantic details does not change that.
Honestly, what is your point? What are you seeing that the rest of us aren't getting? For the record, my mother's family is mostly Sephardic.
This was about 50 years ago, was accidental, and Israel apologized and paid reparations soon after.
This is a pretty clear example of double standards for Israel - no other country gets demonized for friendly fire incidents.
We may never know the truth, taking Israel's Military Censor into account.
Israel captured the Golan Heights because it had been used to shell Israeli communities for decades, and that continued even after Syria officially accepted the ceasefire. It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression; no capable military would do so.
It would also be unreasonable to allow Israel to colonize the annexed territory in violation of international law, especially if the goal is to reduce the exposure of Israeli citizens to reparation attacks. The Knesset isn't exactly known for reasonable decisions though, and I'm willing to extend that judgement to the upper echelons of Israeli leadership as well. Maybe I'm bigoted.
Again - evidence-based speculation would be of use if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations. An honest postmortum was never going to be an option, even if Israel bombed the Liberty with custards and coffee. Cui bono, you decide.
This just seems like another double standard. What modern military doesn't censor reporting during a war in its own territory?
> An honest postmortum
Israel and the US settled the matter (with the help of substantial reparations) and went on to become allies. Why would they bother trying to convince anyone else?
And what would the convincing postmortum you're expecting look like? Some kind of third-party investigation? Can you name any military that willingly subjects itself to such investigations?
The ones willing to defer to an ICJ investigation? Hell, an IAEA inspection?
Both Dimona and the Liberty were critically reliant on America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression. Kennedy's stance towards Israel could have only convinced Johnson that resistance was futile, there's no way he could raise a finger if he did suspect foul play. The two nations were motley and often disagreeing partners united by a desire to mete out territory of neighboring petrostates. If a closed-door meeting ever decided that secrecy was the cost of keeping oil prices low, not a single American president would put their name on the line to speak up about it.
Not a damning accusation, sure. But it's also the same thing many Americans wondered in 1967.
What state has ever consented to an ICJ investigation that was focused on interrogating its military command or other sensitive military assets?
> Hell, an IAEA inspection?
If a state is an IAEA member, their nuclear program is (ostensibly) not a military program, so there should be no military secrets at risk.
> America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression
Even if we accept the extraordinary claim that the US would have tolerated what it knew was an intentional attack on an expensive ship, at best that means that we can't infer anything from the US reaction. There are plenty of other reasons to doubt that the attack was intentional. I.e. it's extremely difficult to imagine any risk-benefit analysis under which it would make sense for Israel to suddenly attack a neutral superpower in the middle of a war for its survival.
I don't buy them, especially given Israel's 1967 political situation. Fun discussion though, thanks for entertaining it!
Taking into account the lengths to which Israel goes currying favor with the US, pretending to show remorse for a sunken ship is nothing compared to the sham Dimona investigation they put together for the Kennedy administration. Lying isn't beneath their means.
Now my question: having purchased that land from France, did America have a right to eject the native people who lived there? Or did France in fact have no right to sell that land which, in all practical ways, actually belonged to the people who lived there?
Israel "bought" that land from people who had no legitimate ownership of the land in the first place.
(I know I'm talking to a wall here, getting you people to think outside of a legalistic mindset is impossible.)
You see the rule of the ottomans as invalid, and this all (legalistic) property rights during that period invalid? That seems it would apply everywhere. How are property rights ever established? What does it take to invalidate them?
Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.
If they then take to violence against you, you have the right to defend yourself.
Israel is comitting a genocide and attacking/murdering everyone right now.
That is the crucial difference.
What is wrong with "helping" Sudan? Your comment suggested that the only reason you weren't "helping" in Rwanda is that you couldn't because it was 30 years ago.
If you think commenting here is "helping" "Palestine", you need to recalibrate your assessment of the impact of HN comments on the world.
It in no way diminishes the genocide in Gaza
Both countries should be sanctioned
What’s also neat is that in America you can say “free Sudan” and not worry about losing your livelihood, but good luck with saying “free Palestine” and not getting swarmed.
"Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces which began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread
Not to mention that Israel has dropped the equivalent of several nuclear bombs on a tiny open-air concentration camp with no possibility to flee.
(No, this is not because of your views; yes it works the same way for accounts with opposite views. It's because this is a failure mode for HN, and therefore an important line to draw.)