DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
59% Positive
Analyzed from 1675 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#israel#palestine#hamas#don#both#genocide#state#actually#side#more
Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It is a similar situation with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
You can argue that the government of Israel isn't the will of the people of Israel (in the same way the US government isn't the will of the people of the US), but in my opinion there's more of a separation between 'Palestine' and 'Hamas' than there is between 'Israel' and 'the will of the people of Israel'.
There's a lot of wrongdoing, which means there are a lot of innocents being harmed, and the harming of innocents is the greatest wrongdoing. Harm by inaction is also wrong. Harm by preventing aid and assistance is also wrong.
None of this stuff is easily answered.
The joys of ideology, or maybe more correctly, the joys of living amongst those who take ideology so seriously that they attempt to enforce their fantasies upon the real world.
In my personal logic bubble: Protesting in support of Palestine is not protesting in support of Hamas. Declaring support for Israel is protesting against Hamas and their acts of terrorism against Israel. I can do both of these things without being hypocritical (like I said, in my personal logic bubble).
The rest is the messy middle around which negotiation is required for any form of minimal co-existence.
This is why we should just move on to EVs and stop getting involved at all in the Middle East. I see no morally right way of engaging with either side. Both positions seem to end in “let one side genocide the other side.”
1. Is Israel an apartheid state?
2. Is Israel committing a genocide?
At this point (IMHO) you need to do some serious mental gymnastics not to answer "yes" to both questions. As soon as you do, it gets real simple. The existence of Hamas doesn't justify either of these things.
The people who bring this up are engaging in respectability politics or engaging in weaponized cvility. Instead of addressing the underlying issues, the focus is on the methods and the actions of the oppressed when it is the oppressor that sets the level of violence. As Nelson Mandela put it:
> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.
People understood this quite clearly with apartheid South Africa. Can you imagine protesters having to do the performative "does apartheid South Africa have a right to exist?" pledge? No, me neither.
Does this justify what Israel is doing to the West Bank? Most people would say no. On the other hand, before the invasion normal Palestinians were chanting "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" on a daily basis, and they still refuse to recognize the existence of the nation of Israel. If your counterparty doesn't agree that you have a right to exist, there's no negotiating.
[https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/12/middleeast/report-sexual-viol...]
For example, is Palestine its own country? Is Hamas is its rightful government? Does that extend to the West Bank or only in Gaza? Palestinians seem to say that Palestine is its own country, Israelis say that Palestinians are not a part of Israel - so how can it be an apartheid state if BOTH sides say they aren't part of the same country at all?
Is Israel committing a genocide? Well, what does a genocide look like? Israel is still distributing food in Gaza, to this day. I don't think it would look like this, but at the same time, there are terrorists on both sides (Itamar ben-Gvir being the most prominent on the Israeli side, in my opinion).
There are more issues and questions and uncertainty around the problems in Israel, Palestine, the Levant as a whole, Iran's involvement and so on.
Even worse, for most Israelis (who are 70% of Arab descent), the country of Israel no longer existing could mean a real genocide for the Israel side! (A counter-genocide?) Regardless, if this issue were easy to solve, it would have been solved already.
Honestly, the situation seems to complicated to boil down to two "simple" questions and I admire that you can have such an "obvious" outlook, but the more I look at Israel and the Middle East (and read, and research), the more questions I have.
Pulled all their military out? Oh, they still controlled their airspace, critical infra, borders tho? Sounds very self determined!
Serious, bad faith or extremely reductive misrepresentation that I can't tell is borne from ignorance willful or accidental.
your comment is the equivalent of acting like cuba's economy is all their own choosing, without analyzing the immense damage sanctions (and why sanctions were there in the first place) have done to the country, or accosting haiti without knowing why their struggles exist. context matters.
Considering that about 60% of the Gaza population is age 20 or younger, that means about 18% of the current population voted for Hamas.
And of course Israel directly helped this by arresting a huge number of Hamas politicians right before the elections, and openly interfering with the election process in general.
So no, Hamas does not represent the will of the people in Gaza, and calling it "democratically elected" is at this point a straight-up lie.
At least in the 1990s and 2000s it felt they were doing some good stuff for humanity. But the 2010s and 2020s the masked pretty much slipped.
(You may disagree with the opinion of course, but "bold" is a counterintuitive adjective here)
He should step down.
Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine.
> But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.
Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI.
The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.
What does it actually look like?
I still think a two state solution is the only realistic plan.
Most "free Palestine" protestors probably don't care an awful lot about the final outcome of the conflict, they just want the mass killing of innocent people to stop.
There's a reason the movement only flared up when Israel started carpet bombing Gaza, and not during the mostly-quiet years before.