Then what does winning actually look like today? Sure. Run against these people and support their political opposition in the next election. But take the win on the short term and get food to Gaza.
It feels more likely that if you push the message "yes, this is great" for the short term win they get elected again next term.
When do you switch from saying "yes these people are great for flip-flopping" to "no these people are terrible don't vote for them", and how do you say it in a way that gets through people's subtlety filters and doesn't make it look like you're flip flopping yourself?
If we want to use Gaza as a political tool to achieve some political aim (ie get my guy elected), that will be in conflict with doing something to help Gaza. Because in most countries, doing something meaningful is likely going to require cooperation between politicians from different parties. And it’s hard to get people to cooperate if you don’t plan on sharing the credit.
I do think cooperation and letting bygones be bygones for the sake of progress are important.
But I don't think it's right to frame it as "get my guy elected" vs "help Gaza". Does decrying them on social media mean they will flip flop again and be pro-gaza massacre? Even if that's the case, it's "get someone elected who will avoid Gaza-like tragedies in the future" vs "help Gaza now" which isn't black and white. Also, these people cooperated to enable the massacre in the first place...
Israel's real enemy won't stop and won't surrender until that country and it's people don't exist. They have taken the innocent civilian's of Gaza / Palistine / whatever you want to call the area hostage. They are also so ingrained into the region that resources are literally siphoned from humanitarian sites like hospitals into deep tunnels beneath; as just one example of reporting I'm inclined to believe is credible, even with the mutual atrocities both sites are carrying out.
What would winning look like from a moral and ethical standpoint? Liberating the people of that region from the violence and suffering. Return them to a functioning society with social and civic infrastructure. Fully deny major violence and terrorism in the region for LIFETIMES to the point that the hate and anger finally cool off enough for people to move on.
...
Winning is going to require a multi-generational investment in humanity by humanity. It's going to require the buy in of the people on the ground. It's going to require a United Nations coalition and boots on the ground from interests in that region who want to raise everyone above the hate. Also the afflicted country will need to be an absolute DMZ for that entire time. Membership in the UN peacekeeping organization the only military service allowed (and then likely in other countries).
Getting from here to there? Even less popular than the hugely unpopular war(s) anywhere else in the world. Don't ask me how anyone could do it, those skilled in the art of diplomacy have tried for longer than my lifetime and probably longer than your's and NOTHING has stuck.
There are subfactions, both among the Jewish and the Muslims, that do better if the problem isn't solved and goes on forever, but there is very little in-faction policing: If anything, atrocities make them stronger. There is no peace while the criticism to the other side quiet in-faction criticism. You need people that want peace to be in charge, but what leadership wants is victory. Nobody that believes in human rights is going to like the costs of victory
> Israel's real enemy won't stop and won't surrender until that country and it's people don't exist
Funny, this seems to be a pretty accurate description of Netanyahu's current position. He understands that he exists politically only as long as he can keep the war going. So, of course there is going to be no end to the 'war' against Hamas, even though it has transformed into mass genocide of civilians using starvation.
I don't believe any part of my statement endorsed or supported the leader of that country either.
I offered a supposition for what real peace might look like in the region. One component of which is a peace keeping force that is not too close to the action, but also not from so far away as to be entirely insensitive or invasive themselves.
Understood. My point was that the current state is entirely of Israel's choosing. At this point, there is no functional Hamas resistance left in Gaza. There is no need to starve people by restricting aid and then gunning down desperate civilians when they try to get the meager food aid that trickles in.
Israel has lost all moral superiority at this point and probably alienated an entire generation across the globe. All so that Bibi can cling to power a bit longer.
you bring up an interesting point, in that after two years of war, almost none of the pre-war hamas leadership is left alive. why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead? it should be clear that the "axis of resistance" wasn't coming to help on oct 8th itself, and two years later iran and it's proxies are toast. yet hamas opts to continue fighting, at this point it looks like a suicide cult that wants to drag civilians down with it for the purpose of martyrdom
>why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead?
How's an organization supposed to surrender when all of its leaders have been assassinated? Who's going to walk up to an IDF emplacement while claiming to lead Hamas? How would such a death-defying individual prove that they had any actual significance to Hamas?
the recent talks in qatar suggested that even though disorganized, enough of a hierarchy still exists within hamas to negotiate. the main complaints from the american side was that hamas seemed to be inconsistent / fractured in their demands, outside of forcing the israelis to return to pre-war status-quo via a ceasefire that protects hamas rule
It's entirely possible there's no longer any single person in charge in practice, but rather a bunch of more or less individually operating cells - each with their own leader.
Imagine you are a 19 year old in charge of some Hamas survivors. Let’s say you want to surrender.
1. Would it even mean anything? It’s not like you or anyone else has the control to stop everyone else. And Israel will use any attack as a sign of bad faith and ignore the surrender.
2. Would it improve anything for your people? If Israelis are intentionally starving babies, there is no reason to think they will stop the genocide just because the militarized part has given up. Have you even heard any news of Hamas even fighting back recently or has it all just been killing civilians?
All a surrender would do is get you tortured for information and executed for no gain.
ironically only indian and pakistani news really report on the IDF casualties / hamas attacks, make of that what you will (IDF journalism blackout backfiring, news bias, maybe south asians love telegram war footage, etc)
What Netanyahu is doing in Gaza to Palestinians is broadly popular in Israel. The "opposition" coalition leader has made genocidal statements about Palestinians and there's no reason to think his leadership would be any better. This is a society where people directly benefit from ethnic cleansing and have spent decades already justifying it to themselves to get to this point. It's not going to be an easy fix of replacing one guy and focusing on him misses all the institutions that were constructed to facilitate genocide.
Wait, didn’t they launch 6500 rockets on Israel civilians in the 8 months before October? How doesn’t that moot your point, attacking while in a peace period?
When you use a phrase like "genocidal rhetoric", I assume that you consider certain comments to be wrong and bad. From that perspective your question could be generalized to "what's the best way to respond to wrong and bad comments on this site?" Keeping in mind that "bad" here doesn't just mean the comment is badly written—in internet jargon, it means the commenter is bad.
Curiosity doesn't exclude wrongness or badness—it's interested in it. How did this comment (or person) get so wrong and bad? Could that change? Is there a response that could pull them out of wrongness and badness into rightness and goodness? Why do most of my (<-- I mean any of us, of course) attempts to do this fail so badly? Is there a more effective way to respond? Might there be something interesting here beyond wrongness and badness?
That's the spirit we're trying for on this site, so that's the answer to your question.
If I ask myself what other approaches are possible, there's one obvious option, and that is to crush/destroy/defeat the wrong and bad argument (and person) utterly. This is the desire to kill the other person (if only metaphorically (and maybe not always so metaphorically)), and thus establish rightness and goodness over wrongness and badness.
So the "accepted way" here is to listen to the other and dance with them, rather than killing them (or their position). Dance rather than war, if you like.
Is there a third option? I'm not sure. When I look inside myself, I can find the listen/dance option (or one could say give-and-take), and I can find the kill option. But I'm not sure I can find a third.
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Edit: reading this the next day, I think the word 'dance' could have trivializing associations (e.g. let's just dance rather than deal with violence and tragedy). I don't mean it that way. I mean something like moving and changing in response to each other. If anyone can do that in response to the other, even just a little, then one's self becomes a place for at least a modicum of change.
As someone who abandoned rightness/wrongness 9+ years ago (except in the idea of alignment with the cosmos), I can say that "genocidal rhetoric" doesn't necessarily imply rightness or wrongness. There exist language patterns that indicate a perspective that, when culturally carried and compounded for years, has the effect of cultivating behaviors that lead to extinguishing a people, whether intentional or not. This is genocidal rhetoric.
As for options as to what to do with it, I find this useful for finding more.
> "genocidal rhetoric" doesn't necessarily imply rightness or wrongness
I believe you when you describe your perspective this way, but it's so far beyond conventional usage that it may be misleading to express it in this way. Certainly I didn't understand your GP comment as being anywhere near what you're saying here, and I doubt others would.
It's true...conventional usage is rooted in addiction to violence, which includes dualistic myths of right/wrong, life/death, like/dislike, belief/disbelief.
Perhaps a site-wide call for curiosity when encountering such myths could help spur people to pull themselves out of such ways of "killing" nondual animist views of experience.
I appreciate you dang and the culture you are trying to cultivate, but I think in a genocide civility politics are inappropriate. I'm jewish, and I am certain that "raising questions" about whether jews should live or die or are intrinsically evil terrorists would not be allowed on this site. For balance, this should be accorded equally to palestinians, who are in fact being killed mercilessly in line for food by Israeli forces and US mercenaries. pg in fact has been loudly talking about the genocide, which I appreciate.
I will try to be less flippant in my comments. Nonetheless, it is a lot of work to cut through genocidal lies that are often supported (at least in editorials if not in actual reporting) by the mainstream media. The north of Gaza has been nearly obliterated and still these guys get to cast aspersions justifying the annihilation of a people.
> "raising questions" about whether jews should live or die or are intrinsically evil terrorists would not be allowed on this site. For balance, this should be accorded equally to palestinians
What are examples of such comments not being flagged and/or moderated? I'd appreciate links. Such comments are unacceptable by any interpretation of HN's guidelines, and the only reason we wouldn't crack down on them (same as with antisemitic comments of course) is if we didn't see them.
> I think in a genocide civility politics are inappropriate
I'm not talking about civility and stopped using that word years ago. Shallow words like civility or politeness don't reflect how we think about moderation. (I listed a few past explanations about that below*, if anyone wants them.)
What are we looking for? Not sure I can answer that better than I did in the GP comment. We want people to listen to each other, because of the two available options—listening and killing—only listening is compatible with the core value of the site.
I know it's a provocation to use the word "killing" in this context, and obviously I mean it metaphorically, but I think it's accurate. When people stop listening and seek to destroy the other's argument/position/view, killing energy is the quality that shows up. I don't think it takes too much emotional self-awareness to feel this, nor too much self-honesty to admit it.
That is the dynamic behind weaponized internet comments. It's easy to deny, because the genre itself is so trivial, and so are the weapons (snark, tropes, etc.). But one need only sense into the feeling level and it's no longer so trivial—in fact, it's all there.
This explains the distinctive mix of rage and pain that flares up when one reads a comment fired against one's position, and also the distinctive mix of...let's call it righteousness and triumph that flares up when a comment is fired in favor of one's position.
Perhaps it would be less provocative to use the word "war" rather than "killing" for the non-listening option, but I'm not sure that abstraction is beneficial in describing this. It creates distance from the reality inside ourselves, and room for denial and evasion.
Regardless of what the best names are, we want the listening option, because the alternative is just more destruction.
(Needless to say, I'm not talking about you here, I'm talking about all of us.)
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* Here are a few posts touching on how we stopped thinking in terms of 'civility'...lots more can be found in HN Search if anyone cares...
how are refugees from russia and germany colonizers? are venezuelan refugees colonizing america by your logic? if the zionists aren't the colonizers, but allied with colonizers, then who is the backer? the ottomans? the british? the french? the russians? what prevented the palestinians from allying with outside powers if the israelis were doing the same?
when you claim colonizers, you're just making an excuse for the repeated strategic errors that the palestinians made, and will continue to make, that led them into this humiliating situation.
You're touching on a very true point by saying that the high-level ideas, like ancient homelands or Marxist theory, create a lot of argument that in the end seems to distract people from the obvious reality, which is the mass slaughter of civilians, many of them children.
In reality, the challenge remains, what is a better solution from the Israeli perspective? If the proposed alternative is they all pack up and leave or dissolve their government, there is 0% chance that will happen.
It may be in the interests of someone to kill a witness to a murder, but it's up to law and society to stop them. Likewise I am sure plenty of genocides have been in the interests of the victors, but it is up to law and civlization to stop them. What I am not sure about is that it is truly in Israel's interest to be known forevermore as one of the racial exterminators in mankind's long and fraught history.
It seems like you are dodging the question by claiming it doesnt matter what Israel wants or will accept (like a murderer). Do you actually think that is true in reality, or do you simply wish that it did not matter?
Calling Jews “colonizers” of their historical homeland is ridiculous, not to mention that about half of Israeli Jews fled there from Arab countries, not from Europe.
Sources from the early Zionist movement are replete with discussion of colonization. It's only now when the connotation (not the reality) of the term has changed that Israel supporters try to pretend it never happened.
Apartheid South Africa’s real enemy—the ANC, the liberation movements, the “terrorists”—wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t surrender until white minority rule and its entire system didn’t exist. They had taken the innocent Black civilians of South Africa hostage. They were also so ingrained into the townships that resources were literally siphoned from humanitarian sites like churches and schools into hidden safehouses and underground networks; as just one example of reporting that many at the time were inclined to believe was credible, even with the mutual atrocities both sides were carrying out.
What would “winning” look like from a moral and ethical standpoint? Liberating the people of that region from the violence and suffering. Returning them to a “functioning society” with social and civic infrastructure. Fully denying major resistance and insurgency in the region for lifetimes—to the point that the hate and anger finally cooled off enough for people to “move on.”
Winning would require a multi-generational investment in humanity by humanity. It would require the buy-in of the people on the ground. It would require a United Nations coalition and boots on the ground from “responsible” countries who wanted to raise everyone above the hate. And of course, South Africa would need to be an absolute DMZ for that entire time—no armed liberation movements allowed, only peacekeeping forces sanctioned by the “international community.”
Getting from here to there? Even less popular than the hugely unpopular interventions elsewhere in the world. Don’t ask me how anyone could do it—those skilled in the art of diplomacy had tried for longer than my lifetime and probably longer than yours, and NOTHING had stuck.
———
wait; that’s not what it took.
It took the abolishment of apartheid; colonisation and oppression, peace was achieved. Your framing is flawed , it is framed as equal sides. Not the reality a colonial apartheid state.
south africa is not a good analogue since it's fate is different from that of palestine, and you are making this obtuse analogue to stir up feelings of decolonisation as a sort of nationalism
Think you are missing the point. This wasn’t an analogy about the actors , but rather the framing.
During apartheid , and towards the end plenty were making arguments for gradual control ; gradual processes which just would have further perpetuated oppression. I was highlighting the similarities to that. We also had people saying the ‘blacks’ just want to ‘kill the whites’ and it would result in violence.
Your mapping of roles is completely incorrect, Indians cannot be the Zionist since they were an oppressed minority and did not have power. Equating Afrikaners to ottomans / British is incoherent.
You, and the original comment completely ignores the power imbalance as was the case in apartheid South Africa. This framing further perpetuates oppression and is a way to prop up the apartheid state.
I won’t post all of the evidence here confirming that Israel functions as an apartheid state. Numerous reports exist that describe and draw the comparison.
> During apartheid , and towards the end plenty were making arguments for gradual control ; gradual processes which just would have further perpetuated oppression. I was highlighting the similarities to that. We also had people saying the ‘blacks’ just want to ‘kill the whites’ and it would result in violence.
If you are then making comparison to modern times instead of colonialism, then still not really applicable to gaza since gaza was not occupied Oct 7th. Therefore, Israel (colonization conspiracies aside) had no interest in gaza except for security.
I do believe the apartheid example / comparison makes sense when thinking of the west bank, and I do believe myself the west bank is experiencing settler colonization and apartheid conditions along that settler boundary.
If you do not believe that zionists in palestine were an oppressed minority until the mass immigration in the 1930s and the failed arab revolts, I suggest you restudy the history. Palestine would have easily ended up like Uganda if the Palestinians hadn't made strategic errors / failed their invasion of the newly declared state of Israel.
The Orwell link is a great read, and part of it suggests that both decolonization and underdog-centered pacifism are forms of nationalism. Here is a quote that I love, heavily relates to the troubles in ireland and some reactions to the current gazan war:
"But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough."
My concern is the politicians are suddenly flip flopping because they realize in the short term Israel is close to exterminating the entire population of Gaza. Perhaps they will let a pittance of food aid through to prolong the genocide so Netanyahu can stay in power. I have little confidence in US leadership actually having a change of heart now.
it's worth noting that joe biden lied about trying to get a ceasefire, as we now know. So it's worth being skeptical, though of course I agree that ultimately what matters are results.
Do you have a source for your claim? The Biden administration did present a ceasefire plan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_war_ceasefire>. If not that, then I don't know enough about the situation to find what you're referring to.
The Biden administration also kept publically decrying the situation in Gaza while also promising full support and increasing weapon shipments to Israel. Saying one thing and doing the exact opposite over and over again.
