[HN Gopher] ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops...
___________________________________________________________________
ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of
ordering ceasefire
Author : xbar
Score : 269 points
Date : 2024-01-26 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Glad to see Israel face _some_ responsibility for its horrific
| acts against civilians.
|
| > _The court ruled that Israel must do all it can to prevent
| genocide, including refraining from killing Palestinians or
| causing harm to them_
|
| Sounds like a ceasefire to me. How else would they do this?
| Definitely not with any of the military tactics Israel is
| currently using.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| I believe the court reaffirmed Israel's right to defend itself.
| Presumably, the "all it can to prevent" wording is meant to
| work around things we expect a nation must do, such as
| defending itself from attack.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| It explicitly says they must stop killing Palestinians. None
| of their current military tactics satisfy this demand.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| The court referenced article II of the Genocide Convention
| here, which includes "Killing members of the group." Any
| country that commits genocide in the way outlined by the
| convention would be in violation, not just Israel.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Correct, it's very likely that Israel is committing
| genocide and the court ordered them to stop while they do
| a full investigation. Presumably that leaves room for
| targeted assassinations against individual militants and
| other actions that don't kill civilians.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| > Presumably that leaves room for targeted assassinations
|
| That's not possible given how the supposed 'Hamas-Israel'
| war has played out so far.
|
| From today's ruling, Israel would continue the genocide
| of Palestinians at its own peril.
| WhackyIdeas wrote:
| So far they've wiped out 1% of their population. The only
| reason it's not 50% (imo) is that there's hostages still
| there.
|
| If you are a Palestinian over there, don't go waving a
| white flag or you just become a target practise.
|
| Sources:
|
| https://www.itn.co.uk/news/palestinian-man-carrying-
| white-fl...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-
| hostages-k...
| mrkeen wrote:
| > From today's ruling, Israel would continue the genocide
| of Palestinians at its own peril.
|
| What peril will Israel face? More condemnation of Hamas
| by western leaders?
| byt143 wrote:
| So Israel can't enjoy the same right to self defense that
| any other state would? They can't conduct a war in an
| urban environment with an actual intentionally genocidal
| enemy, and must resort to targeted assassinations? That
| standard is absurd. Surely you can admit some middle
| ground ,if you're discussing in good faith.
| brighteyes wrote:
| Unfortunately for the Palestinians, that is not what was
| ruled. They were hoping for a full ceasefire like what
| you have interpreted, but they are very disappointed in
| the ruling because it does not say that.
|
| What it does say is
|
| 1. Israel must do more to prevent the possibility of
| genocide. Genocide is killing a people with the intent of
| killing them for the sake of destroying them, and _not_
| as collateral damage, so it does not mean stopping all
| death. Collateral damage, unfortunately, remains on the
| table.
|
| 2. Israel must report back in a month with how they are
| doing that. For example, they could show lower amounts of
| collateral damage, an increase in aid, punishments for
| officials that make statements that could be construed as
| genocidal, and so forth.
|
| That is better than nothing, to be certain, but it is far
| from a ceasefire, unfortunately.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| > Correct, it's very likely that Israel is committing
| genocide and the court ordered them to stop while they do
| a full investigation.
|
| I think there was a miscommunication. You said that the
| provisional measures said that Israel must stop killing
| Palestinians, and so there is no way to have a ceasefire.
| I was saying that what's actually in the provisional
| measures is a reiteration of the Genocide Convention, of
| which all countries must already abide, including Israel.
| Whether or not it's likely a country is commiting
| genocide or it's self defense, they haven't ruled on. I
| deliberately avoided any speculation with my comments.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| This goes beyond military tactics:
|
| > Leading propaganda machine and former Member of Knesset
| Einat Wilf suggests that the Israeli government should
| allow aid into Gaza officially, but unofficially let
| "protesters" to block all aid from entering the Strip. I
| think that's actually kinda what happened today.
|
| -- https://twitter.com/ireallyhateyou/status/17502164711526
| 3591...
|
| > The Gaon Rabbi Dov Lior Shalita in a halachic ruling:
| Citizens must prevent the entry of Hamas trucks even on
| Shabbat, because equipping and supplying the enemy is a war
| act that must be stopped from the point of view of human
| control.
|
| -- https://twitter.com/Torat_IDF/status/1750600997745959279
|
| Probably a terrible translation but the point is clear,
| incitement and impunity, and the results are predictable.
|
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/protesters-
| prev...
|
| https://www.jewishpress.com/news/eye-on-
| palestine/gaza/prote...
|
| Yesterday, 0 trucks could enter Gaza, the day before that 9
| out of 60, don't know about today. Note that under the
| convention against genocide, Israel is required to
| prosecute genocidal speech, much less such genocidal acts
| (apart from not committing them of course). Instead, as
| Yoav Gallant just posted this on Twitter:
|
| > The State of Israel does not need need to be lectured on
| morality in order to distinguish between terrorists and the
| civilian population in Gaza. The ICJ went above and beyond,
| when it granted South Africa's antisemitic request to
| discuss the claim of genocide in Gaza.
|
| ... which is as good a summary as any for what you find at
| every corner with this: not just the unwillingness to
| learn, but the inability to even _comprehend_ any of this.
| When Gideon Levy talks about the incredible depth of
| Israeli indoctrination, he isn 't kidding, and he's not
| exaggerating.
| kevingadd wrote:
| "brainwashing" is a term that's going to unavoidably turn
| this conversation in a bad direction, it might be best
| not to use it here. There are less inflammatory ways to
| describe what's happening in that tweet.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| Here's Gideon Levy explaining it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQf-YSgPto
|
| I changed it to "indoctrination". Which is a more polite
| word that doesn't really do it justice, but it's not
| really important because the result, the inability to
| even meaningfully interact with the charges, is a
| constant.
|
| As George Orwell put it, from the totalitarian
| perspective history is something to be created, rather
| than learned. Or as Robert Antelme described a
| concentration camp guard: "trapped in the machinery of
| his own myth". I just cannot find a flattering way to
| describe these things, there just is no material to work
| with for that.
| botverse wrote:
| The technicality I see here is that the ICJ can call a
| ceasefire in an armed conflict, this would carry the implicit
| message that the civilian casualties are collateral damage.
| Instead they are asking to stop the genocidal acts. In a
| genocide the civilians are the target. It's bad for the
| Palestinians in the short term, and bad for Israel in the long
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> Instead they are asking to stop the genocidal acts._
|
| No, they have ordered Israel _not to commit genocidal acts_.
| The court has made no ruling on whether Israel has or has not
| committed genocidal acts.
| shmatt wrote:
| Except SA specifically asked the court to require a ceasefire,
| which would have immediate consequences via security council
| vote and no more munitions landing in Israel. And the judges
| voted it down
|
| This isn't a read between the lines situation, because SA's
| request was specifically for the court to temporarily rule for
| a full immediate ceasefire until the larger case could be heard
|
| What is interesting here is that by mis-reading the verdict
| like yourself, and Israel assuming the worst, both sides
| immediately came out saying today was a huge win. So at least
| we have that, everyone (but the Palestinians, who aren't a side
| in this case) is happy
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Honestly I'm not trying to mis-read the verdict which is why
| I asked the question. I think all of Israel's strategies to
| date include the death of Palestinians. Since that's
| explicitly forbidden with that ruling, how will they continue
| to fight? Will they just ignore the ruling or change tactics?
| xenospn wrote:
| It's not forbidden. They just asked Israel to try hard to
| minimize damage, which they already demonstrated they do.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| [removed]
| bawolff wrote:
| No, that was from south africa's request. That wasn't the
| wording the court used in its decision
| smoothjazz wrote:
| [removed]
| layer8 wrote:
| Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146853.
| bawolff wrote:
| Do you mean from page 2? Because that is the court just
| saying what each side requested. The actual order that
| the court gave is much later in the document.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Ah ok, I see. You are correct, I did misread that part.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| > They just asked Israel to try hard to minimize damage,
| which they already demonstrated they do.
|
| Where, other than with mere hand waving? How did they
| explain away blowing courts and universities with rigged
| explosives? Soldiers bragging about "occupation,
| expulsion, settlement, annexiation"? All the talk about
| how there _are_ no civilians in Gaza? How many people who
| said that has Israel prosecuted so far?
| dang wrote:
| You've been using HN primarily* to conduct political
| battle on this topic for a long time now. You've already
| taken to doing this again, repeatedly, in this thread.
|
| That's not in the intended spirit of what we want on HN,
| and especially not the spirit which I attempted to
| describe in my pinned comment at the top. Therefore,
| please stop.
|
| * In fact, it looks like you've been doing nothing but
| that. I've already explained to you repeatedly and at
| length why that's not ok on HN. If you keep it up, we're
| going to have to ban you. (And lest anyone worry: no,
| this has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with
| your views. You're plainly breaking both HN's rules and
| intended spirit, that is all.)
| xenospn wrote:
| Sounds like you've been spending a little too much time
| on TikTok.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into flamewar, regardless of what
| anyone else is doing.
| layer8 wrote:
| The measures ordered by the UN court are in references to
| Article II of the Genocide Convention [0], which limits the
| scope to " _acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole
| or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
| group_ ", where the court identifies the group as "
| _Palestinians in Gaza_ ". So it's the intent of genocide
| towards that group which is the deciding factor. As long as
| the actions do not carry that intent (and are plausible as
| such), they are not prohibited.
|
| My reading is that the court is basically saying "You are
| presently running the risk of committing genocide, please
| take all measures in your power to prevent that."
|
| [0] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atro
| city-...
| esafak wrote:
| They will claim they are attempting to kill Hamas
| militants and any non-Hamas Palestinians deaths are
| incidental. You can do anything with this excuse. Did the
| court close this loophole?
| layer8 wrote:
| Any accusation of genocide will be for the relevant
| courts to decide. False pretexts (excuses) can be
| identified as such. The present court order is a shot
| across the bow. The court is explicitly saying that the
| intent of genocide appears plausible at this time, and
| explains the reasons for that assessment. Meaning that
| Israel will have to show with their actions if they want
| to turn it implausible.
| bawolff wrote:
| Its not really a loop hole but kind of the main intention
| of the law.
|
| Too many civilian deaths is for war crimes & crimes
| against humanity, not the crime of genocide.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't think it's really a loophole. For example, the
| Nazis could not possibly claim that the people they
| killed in death camps were merely collateral damage.
| golergka wrote:
| > I think all of Israel's strategies to date include the
| death of Palestinians.
|
| None of the actions of Israel have involved deaths of
| Palestinian civilians except as collateral damage that
| Israel have taken reasonable steps to prevent.
|
| The only Palestinians that Israel actively targets to best
| of its ability are Hamas terrorists.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| You are allowed under international law to lead war with
| significant amounts of civilian casualties. The issue being
| judged is claims of Israel committing a genocide. This is
| just a preliminary order while the full case is considered,
| and it might be bad PR to disregard it, but nothing else
| will come of it.
|
| When hearing 'genocide', most people immediately jump to
| the Holocaust, but the definition used by the ICC and IL in
| general is far more permissible:
|
| Genocide means any of the following acts committed with
| intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
| ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
|
| (a) Killing members of the group;
|
| (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
| group;
|
| (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
| calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
| or in part;
|
| (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
| group;
|
| (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another
| group.
|
| A to E are horrible acts by themselves, but what makes a
| genocide is intent, and intent is very hard to prove.
| Personally, I think SA brought a very strong case forward,
| the genocidal tendencies of key Israeli decision makers and
| exeters are well published. In the US and Europe, the
| political class and general public just ignore the evidence
| currently, and a ruling of the ICC might help people 'wake
| up', but not much tangible consequences will result from it
| otherwise.
| f6v wrote:
| > Except SA specifically asked the court to require a
| ceasefire, which would have immediate consequences via
| security council vote
|
| The US would block anything against Israel anyway. The UN has
| no power when it comes to the security council members or
| their satellites.
| bawolff wrote:
| From what i understand, the ceasefire was an extreme long
| shot by south africa and nobody really expected the icj to
| grant it. Particularly because the court cant order hamas to
| do anything and a one sided cease fire seems kind of
| unreasonable, but also the right to self defense is pretty
| fundamental in international law.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Is ICJ even able to order a ceasefire? ICJ did not
| recognize the activities of Israel as the right to self
| defense. ICJ would have recognized the activities of rebel
| force against the genocide as the right to self defense,
| but I don't think that is a question that came up.
| brighteyes wrote:
| Yes, the ICJ can order a ceasefire. It ordered Russia to
| stop its invasion of Ukraine, for example. In this case
| it decided not to, but it did order other measures (which
| hopefully will save lives, but time will tell).
| exe34 wrote:
| No, if they wanted a ceasefire they would have asked for a
| ceasefire.
| xenospn wrote:
| Not at all. It simply instructed Israel to try and hit fewer
| people. Which is what we all expect from every army.
| bawolff wrote:
| > > The court ruled that Israel must do all it can to prevent
| genocide, including refraining from killing Palestinians or
| causing harm to them
|
| > Sounds like a ceasefire to me. How else would they do this?
| Definitely not with any of the military tactics Israel is
| currently using.
|
| Reading the actual icj ruling it seems like it only forbid it
| when done with genocidial intent. The court did not forbid
| collateral damage.
|
| The specific wording included the line "...take all measures
| within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within
| the scope of Article II..."
|
| Earlier in paragraph 78 they said "The Court recalls that these
| acts fall within the scope of Article II of the Convention when
| they are committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in
| part a group as such (see paragraph 44 above)."
|
| So basically it is only forbidden if the intent is specificly
| to kill Palestinians and not if it is collateral damage to some
| other military objective.
|
| I don't think this order will affect anything israel is doing.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| The ruling is so politically ambiguous, so israel will
| probably be digesting it for awhile. Perhaps lowering the
| military activities.
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't know, that part seemed really clear. I think the
| ambigious part would more be the order about aid (how much
| aid is sufficient?)
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Because this ruling is clearly about reading between
| lines. It feels like it is simply directly chanelling US
| will.
| delecti wrote:
| That seems optimistic. It's not like they haven't already
| been made aware of their own activities by this point.
| munk-a wrote:
| I agree the ruling is politically ambiguous like pretty
| much all things political - but it does pretty clearly
| signal that the international community has soured on the
| IDF's actions. This feels like a great opportunity for the
| Isreali government to say "Oh, my bad" and start serious
| de-escalation issues while losing less face because they're
| complying with "genuine humanitarian concerns".
|
| Diplomacy isn't about hard rules - the ICJ can't say "We
| impose a cease-fire" and demand that the GM of the world
| step in an immediately cease hostilities. Everything in
| diplomacy is about posturing and implications - it's why
| the US has managed to maintain the frankly insanely
| incoherent "Strategic Ambiguity" of trying to appease the
| PRC and Taiwan simultaneously, and it works - both
| countries are happy that the US winks after every statement
| about the PRC or Taiwan and gives local politicians room to
| favorably interpret the US statements to their base and
| reinforce that "Actually they're on our side".
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| When the UN told the US not to go to war with Irak, they just
| ignored it.
|
| Those bodies have zero power and countries that want to
| massacre will kill no matter what.
| gambiting wrote:
| Quite the contrary - they have all the power, they are just
| choosing not to use it in this case. If the court ordered a
| ceasefire all weapon shipments to Israel would have to stop
| the same day.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Why? Whose the enforcer?
|
| Other countries have ignored the ICJ before.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| What does "have to" mean in this context? If the US were to
| sell another batch of weapons would other countries try to
| shoot the plane out of the air? Would they try to
| unilaterally sanction 30% of the world economy?
| smt88 wrote:
| The US absolutely would not stop shipping arms to Israel or
| anyone else because of an international body's ruling.
|
| Israel has stockpiles of arms anyway. The war wouldn't stop
| just because the arms trade stopped.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| International law regulates war, but does not entirely prohibit
| it (that would be futile; wars of aggression are specifically
| prohibited by Briand-Kellogg pact, but nowadays even aggressors
| try to dress the situation as justified defense and often get
| away with it; few wars since 1945 were tried by a competent
| tribunal and judged unlawful).
|
| It isn't unlawful _per se_ to cause civilian casualties during
| military operations; any demand that the warring parties limit
| themselves to killing combatants only would be unrealistic,
| especially in urban settings.
|
| It is unlawful to target civilians intentionally or to cause
| wanton damage to civilian infrastructure, though.
| tycho-newman wrote:
| Under the Rome Statute that set up the international criminal
| court, apartheid is defined as a crime where:
|
| >inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and
| maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any
| other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing
| them".
|
| Netanyahu's approach to the Palestinians likely fits into this
| definition.
| Qem wrote:
| > Netanyahu's approach to the Palestinians likely fits into
| this definition.
|
| Indeed that understanding is corroborated by several human
| rights organizations, like HRW and Amnesty international:
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
|
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...
| drc500free wrote:
| It's worth noting that system does not apply to 2 million
| Israeli Arabs (nearly all of whom self-identify as
| "Palestinian" from an ethnic/national perspective) of the exact
| same race as the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
|
| The overt driver of the system - and the one that is agreed to
| across the whole Jewish-Israeli population - is the security
| issue of a Palestinian population that has held since 1948 that
| they are still at war with Israel, will never accept a Jewish
| state in the region, and will one day drive the Jews into the
| sea. This belief is propped up by constant propaganda from
| other Arab states and UNRWA (which has defined itself to exist
| because of a Right of Return that applies to 750k Palestinians
| and their descendants in perpetuity, but doesn't apply to the
| 14 millions Indians & Pakistanis, 12 million Germans, or 2-3
| million Poles & Ukrainians who were also displaced by ethnic
| partitions established in 1947-1948).
|
| Israel shows every day that they are willing and able to live
| closely with the Palestinians who accept their right to exist
| and aren't trying to murder their families, without using
| apartheid-like systems of control. Israeli Arabs certainly face
| suspicion and unofficial day-to-day discrimination, but if you
| asked Israelis how they would feel about an equal two-state
| system where West Bank and Gaza were a sovereign nation
| populated by Palestinians who were like the Israeli Arabs, they
| would largely be on board. There would be friction for a while,
| but it would be tolerable for both states to survive and thrive
| without the security apparatus that needs to be in place right
| now.
|
| There is no doubt that Netanyahu's current governing coalition
| is made up of racists and religious extremists who would NOT be
| okay with that. Many of those secretaries want to use security
| issues as a pretext to fully take over "greater Israel," and
| use the border wall as much to keep their actions there hidden
| from the Israeli public as they use it to keep Hamas and IJ
| terror attacks to a minimum. But the PA - for all its
| collaboration and security partnership with the IDF - still
| pays bounties to the families of suicide bombers. And the
| reason more moderate Palestinian leaders have never been able
| to really negotiate a settlement is that they would be
| immediately overthrown by a populace who never accepted 1948 as
| the end of a decades-long attempt to throw the Jews out of
| Palestine.
|
| This has not been adjudicated in court, but I think it's
| difficult to claim that the current system is primarily an
| ethnic or racial one when it doesn't apply to the millions of
| Palestinians who are accepting of their neighbors. Even if it
| is often abused by racists.
| alan-hn wrote:
| Your claim that Israel does not use an apartheid system of
| control and discrimination is false
|
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-.
| ..
| throwaway8877 wrote:
| Amnesty is not a credible organisation.
| alan-hn wrote:
| I would ask for the evidence you have for such a claim
| r2_pilot wrote:
| Are you a credible entity to make determinations about
| credibility, throwaway8877?
| biorach wrote:
| > Israel shows every day that they are willing and able to
| live closely with the Palestinians who accept their right to
| exist and aren't trying to murder their families, without
| using apartheid-like systems of control
|
| This is very much not the case in the West Bank where
| expropriation and colonisation of Palestinian land by Israeli
| settlers continue, under the watchful eye of the Israeli
| army.
|
| The Israeli state has done it's best to ensure that there can
| be no viable Palestinian state, condemning millions of
| Palestinians to eternal military occupation and second class
| status in their own homeland.
|
| Any claim that Israel is acting in good faith towards
| Palestinians is very much undermined by these facts.
| Beefin wrote:
| West Bank settlers are overtly funded by right-wing
| christian evangelists from the U.S.
|
| The Likud turns a blind eye because its basically a free
| military. Moreover, it provides a military buffer between
| Israel's mainland population and much of the radicalized
| West Bank population.
| drc500free wrote:
| I agree that the actions in the occupied territories are
| oppressive and terrible. I was referring to the actions
| within Israel itself, towards Israeli Arab Citizens. Which
| shows that the oppressive actions is not based on ethnicity
| or religion, it's based on fear.
| biorach wrote:
| ... and an opportunistic land-grab on a huge scale at the
| expense of Palestinians.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > is the security issue of a Palestinian population that has
| held since 1948 that they are still at war with Israel, will
| never accept a Jewish state in the region
|
| Will Israelis accept a sovereign Palestinian state in the
| region? A clear NO.
|
| Even the 1990s / 2000s two-state solutions were never meant
| from Israeli side as recognizing full sovereignty of
| Palestine - it was meant to be more like an Israeli
| protectorate with its own administration but without its own
| armed forces, no control over air space etc.
|
| > and will one day drive the Jews into the sea
|
| While many Israelis are eager to drive Palestinians to the
| sea. (check Daniela Weiss as a somewhat prominent example)
|
| The current government seems to want to ethnically cleanse
| Gaza. The West Bank has to expect a similar fate, just way
| slower with expanding settlements.
|
| > but I think it's difficult to claim that the current system
| is primarily an ethnic or racial one when it doesn't apply to
| the millions of Palestinians who are accepting of their
| neighbors
|
| Still apartheid. You can't explain it away so easily.
| Beefin wrote:
| not a single country will accept a soverein Palestenian
| state, because they're ruled by terrorists. you want a
| terrorist nation having a full functioning military and
| access to nuclear weapons? really?
|
| > still apartheid
|
| 20% of the Knessest is Muslim/Arab. Have you been to
| Israel? Muslims, Jews, Christians all coexist peacefully
| you have no idea what apartheid means.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > not a single country will accept a soverein Palestenian
| state, because they're ruled by terrorists.
|
| You yourself say that Palestinians can live completely
| peacefully, why can't they have a sovereign state with a
| better government? I hope that after years of Israeli
| government / Netanyahu supporting Hamas [1], they will
| change the strategy.
|
| 1. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-
| propped-up...
|
| > 20% of the Knessest is Muslim/Arab. Have you been to
| Israel? Muslims, Jews, Christians all coexist peacefully
| you have no idea what apartheid means.
|
| The apartheid regime is instituted in Gaza and West Bank,
| not in Israel proper.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Important to understand that Israel is not a signatory to the
| Rome Statute and rejects the ICC's jurisdiction (neither is the
| USA). On the other hand, the Geneva Convention is about as
| "universal" a treaty as you can find, Israel itself ratified
| the GV without any reservations, all UN members (US and Israel
| included) are subject to the authority of the ICJ/World Court,
| and there's even a fsir consensus that the GC applies to
| everyone, even if a state weren't a UN member and signatory.
|
| (While the USA and Israel have shown immense disdain for the
| ICC and the USA has levied sanctions against it, its chief
| prosecutor, and The Hague in the past, the US officially
| sponsored Khan's nomination for the post of chief prosecutor
| this past round and Israel has been extremely chummy with him
| and the ICC compared to under Bensouda. The ICC under Khan
| hasn't done anything about Gaza.)
| voisin wrote:
| Perhaps I am unlearned in this area but I am unclear why the
| Jewish state, after its people experienced the atrocities of
| World War II, would act in this manner toward the Palestinians.
| Can anyone shed light on this? I understand completely the need
| to rid the world of Hamas terrorists, but in the process they
| have shown a reckless disregard (to put it mildly) for
| Palestinian people and their wellbeing.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| It's not about religion, it's about occupation. Zionists got
| permission to occupy the land from the British with The Balfour
| Declaration then started the invasion in full in 1948 with
| Nakba. When you occupy someone's land, there can never be peace
| until they get their land back or are fully exterminated or
| controlled militarily. This is why colonization most often
| leads to genocide or permanent apartheid.
| voisin wrote:
| I have read a bit about this and I understand the explanation
| but I still don't understand how a group of people subject to
| genocide can turn around and a few generations later be
| behaving in many (obviously not all) of the same ways toward
| another group. I would think that if anything the Israeli
| people would have some empathy and try to find a two state
| solution that exists in peace.
| Qem wrote:
| Reminds the cases of child abuse that run in families, with
| former child victims becoming perpetrators against their
| own children[1]. But on on a whole society level.
|
| [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-
| journal-...
| kevingadd wrote:
| There are many Jewish people, born in Israel and outside of
| Israel, who do long for a two-state solution or a one-state
| solution where everyone lives as equals. But sadly those
| are not the people who hold political or military power.
| gizmo wrote:
| Because propaganda works everywhere. Teach people that "the
| other" seeks their destruction and then reframe any
| violence as tragically necessary self-defense.
|
| The history books don't mention the Nakba and civilian
| casualty statistics in Gaza are dismissed as Hamas
| propaganda.
|
| And I don't mean to suggest Israel is unique in this. There
| are many parallels for instance with American "world
| police" patriotism.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Teach people that "the other" seeks their destruction
|
| I think recent events have taught this to Israel without
| any help from propagandists.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Eliminating Hamas is not genocide though. Pretending that
| war is a video game only helps their propaganda.
| voisin wrote:
| I refer in my comment to the impact to non-Hamas
| Palestinians. Eliminating the terrorist organization of
| Hamas is not controversial (at least in my mind), but the
| civilian casualties to regular Palestinians seems to be
| indefensible (again, at least in my mind)
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Problem is no one will take refugees from Gaza even
| temporarily. If countries would the death toll would be
| much less. The reason Egypt doesn't is because Hamas has
| links to and provides support for Islamic terrorists
| groups involved the Sinai Insurgency. I think that hope
| had been that over time since 2007 Hamas would moderate
| and act more rationally. Instead the opposite has
| happened.
|
| So the combination having to destroy Hamas and the
| unwillingness of other countries to take refugees is
| terrible for hapless civilians.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The Palestinians have been offered a two-state solution on
| more-or-less reasonable terms on at least two occasions. It
| isn't for me to say whether they were right to reject those
| offers, but the human cost of continued conflict has
| obviously been borne disproportionately by the
| Palestinians, particularly Palestinian civilians. Sadly,
| the actions of extremists on both sides have made the
| possibility of a two state solution increasingly remote.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan
| _...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
| skrebbel wrote:
| > When you occupy someone's land, there can never be peace
| until they get their land back or are fully exterminated or
| controlled militarily
|
| I don't understand why people think this is a good argument.
| Lots and lots of places shifted in control since 1948. Poland
| moved half a country to the left, world empires got
| decolonized, India and Pakistan split and then the latter
| split once more, all with enormous population movements, the
| list is nearly endless. "All of that should revert to how it
| was before, even if at the cost of kicking out or killing
| everybody who live there" is a pretty extreme revisionist
| take.
|
| In all these countries, "we should restore our borders to
| $maximumSizeEver" is widely understood to be a far right take
| (the Russians want Ukraine, the Greater Hungary people want
| Transylvania, the Greek neonazis want Trabzon (!), everybody
| wants Kashmir, etc etc etc). It's a far right talking point.
| But for Palestine it's somehow a mainstream opinion. I don't
| get it.
|
| I mean, there's lots of good arguments to be made for the
| Palestinian case IMO but I don't find "they once had more
| land and therefore they should get it all back no matter the
| consequences" very compelling.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Thank you for bringing some perspective to the discussion,
| because there are so many counterexamples to the GP post.
|
| Karelia is another one. Whether or not such situations are
| resolvable peacefully is entirely up to the nations
| involved.
|
| I don't see why revanchism gets a free pass in the specific
| case of the Palestinians.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Forcing people off of their land is the definition of
| ethnic cleansing and I don't think that's ever ok nor
| generally accepted in the world. I think Israel is a lot
| like apartheid South Africa. You can end the apartheid
| government and start making reparations, including land
| back to the native inhabitants.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yeah it's never OK but do you also think Finland should
| get Viipuri back? That was the second-largest city of
| Finland, the Soviets took it in WWII and kicked out all
| the Finns and that was that. It's now Vyborg, a sleepy
| Russian town of little importance. That was a catastrophe
| too.
|
| Do you also think Lviv should be Polish? And Wroclaw
| German? And Trabzon Greek? No wait I mean Armenian, which
| do we even pick, seriously _everybody_ wants Trabzon!
| Should the entire Arabian peninsula be Turkish again?
|
| Where does it stop? Why should Palestine be restored to
| its one-time borders but not the rest? All this happened
| in a time when moving populations around at the whim of a
| few imperialist rulers was considered a super normal
| thing to do. That doesn't make it _right_ , but the Nakba
| isn't a particularly unique historical event. Get over
| it, and focus on the actual current events that are _also
| bad_ , such as the settlements, decades of effective
| imprisonment of everybody in Gaza, and so on. There's
| plenty of good arguments! But "from the river to the sea"
| is a far right revisionist talking point and in my
| opinion it does an enormous disservice to the Palestinian
| case.
| biorach wrote:
| The issue is that after the Winter war there was still a
| Finland, after WWII there was still a Poland, and a
| Germany and a Turkey and a Greece and an Armenia.
|
| There is now no real Palestine state and no realistic
| prospect of one. Somewhere between 5 and 8 million
| Palestinians are now condemned to be extremely unwilling
| subjects of an endless military occupation by a hostile
| state and reduced to second class status in their own
| homeland.
|
| _That_ is the crucial difference.
| toyg wrote:
| What you forget to mention is that, in many cases, a lot
| of those moves are indeed still contested.
|
| And in fact, the Zionist argument is exactly that one:
| "because there were some Jews here 2000 years ago, this
| land must be a Jewish ethnostate". Why is that argument
| ok, but "there were Arabs here 80 years ago" is not?
|
| Because, in reality, both arguments are stupid and tribal
| to a level rarely seen after 1950. Both should join
| modernity and move to a shared state - not based on XIX
| century racism, but on XXI century respect for democracy,
| religious equality, etc etc.
|
| Unfortunately, the side with (atomic) power refuses to
| even countenance the possibility, because of a
| tribalistic ideology that shames some of their
| magnificent ancestors. And so we continue with an eye for
| an eye, like in the darkest of times.
| vladgur wrote:
| Are you aware of any laws in Israel that discriminate
| against non-Jews?
|
| Note: Gaza and West Bank are not Israel.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Yes, here's a bunch of them:
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/27/israeli-
| protests-ca...
|
| This is a huge one too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_citizenship_law
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > the Greater Hungary people want Transylvania
|
| They want vampires? That's bold
| skrebbel wrote:
| They can handle them, plenty lycans in Hungary proper.
| stefan_ wrote:
| By this logic I should be driving a tank into Polish Silesia.
| But no, some 20yo in Gaza is not a refugee of a war lost
| shortly after WW2.
| wk_end wrote:
| This isn't an accurate accounting of history.
|
| Zionists were living in the area long before British
| Mandatory Palestine or the Balfour Declaration - they bought
| land and legitimately immigrated there while it was under
| control of the Ottoman Empire. The UN chose to partition the
| region in 1947 due to ongoing violence on both sides - and
| the British actually voted against it I believe. The Arab
| states then chose to go to war against the newly formed
| Israel - not the other way around, as your comment implies.
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> Zionists got permission to occupy the land from the
| British with The Balfour Declaration_
|
| This is not an accurate representation. Jewish people were
| given _the legal ability to purchase land_ in Mandatory
| Palestine. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs were tenant
| farmers or landless labourers. Jewish land purchases
| inevitably led to the displacement of these tenants, but this
| was the lawful outcome of a lawful land sale.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_land_purchase_in_Palest.
| ..
|
| The issues surrounding occupation of land after the 1948 and
| 1967 wars are significantly more complex and arguably do
| involve violations of international law by Israel.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| So what if that's true (and it's not entirely true - there
| was forced takeovers of land, and there continues to be
| land theft in the West Bank today).
|
| If I sell you my land, does that make it right for you to
| form a separate state with it? Perhaps I would rethink that
| decision with the advance knowledge of your intentions.
| mydriasis wrote:
| If I understand what's happened elsewhere correctly, then
| we have an example of this elsewhere at the world stage
| -- the separation of Kosovo from Serbia is in a large
| part due to land purchases from Albanians, who then vied
| for independence when their population grew enough.
| jdietrich wrote:
| When Israel declared independence, that land was not
| governed by any state due to the withdrawal of the
| British Mandate. The Palestinians had previously been
| offered statehood through the 1947 UN Partition Plan, but
| had rejected it. They did not take steps to establish
| their own state in anticipation of the British
| withdrawal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_the_British_Mandate_
| for...
|
| The majority of land purchases were made by the Jewish
| National Fund. Their aspiration to form a state was
| explicit and overt.
| biorach wrote:
| > there can never be peace until they get their land back or
| are fully exterminated or controlled militarily
|
| That's very much not true.
|
| Compromises are possible and are often the only way. Do I
| need to start listing examples?
| tmnvix wrote:
| > there can never be peace until they get their land back or
| are fully exterminated or controlled militarily.
|
| I think you could add assimilation to this list. In this
| particular instance though, it looks almost entirely unlikely
| (due to Israel being fundamentally defined as a Jewish
| state).
| throwaway55479 wrote:
| Israel's tactic has always been deterrence: I will inflict you
| so much pain that you will think twice before doing this again.
| Despite being proven wrong, a "realist politician' will
| automatically think of adding more (and then some) deterrence
| as the only solution.
|
| I remember 20 years ago, during the first bombing of Gaza, they
| hit just ONE building and felt pressured enough to apologize
| for the handful of civilian deaths. Unfortunately, faced with
| larger threats (real or imaginary) and weak international
| pressure, Israel has been able to escalate the level of
| deterrence through the years to what we are witnessing now.
|
| That is why any ruling to curb that "automatic" escalation
| (like today) is wholeheartedly welcomed.
|
| IMO there are also subtler layers of racism coloring these
| policies. It's not as blatant as the far-right rhetoric, but a
| persistent undertone within elements of Israeli society
| justifies severe deterrence tactics and totally overide any
| empathy learnt from historical lessons.
| objektif wrote:
| No essentially it is as simple as how any abuser bully
| behaves. They will continue their behavior as long as they
| are allowed to. Look at US for enabling them.
| exe34 wrote:
| Doesn't really matter what you choose to call it, they will
| make sure there's no Hamas to do it again.
| objektif wrote:
| Hamas should not exist that is not the point. It is the
| civilians. They will also not exist if it goes on like
| this.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| There is no way there would be 25k deaths in Gaza this year
| had the astrocities of Oct 7th not happened.
|
| The Israel-Hamas War is entirely a response to this event.
| bsaul wrote:
| Note that the least you can say is that escalation is
| happening on both sides. Oct 7 level of atrocities has never
| been seen before in israel.
| throwaway55479 wrote:
| Yes. That is why I said: _faced with larger threats_
|
| What I can add is that this is indeed not just a "larger"
| threat for them. It "activated" a millennium-deep Jewish
| trauma (through pogroms up to the Holocaust). Deep, very
| deep.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I think any country faced with the same situation would
| act the same, or even less restrained. It's not some kind
| of esoteric jewish trauma.
| throwaway55479 wrote:
| Maybe. However, the situation itself is so special, I'm
| not sure how you would "generalize it" to others. And
| there is really nothing esoteric about the deep trauma.
| It is widely documented.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Depends of the lesson you took from it.
|
| If the lesson is "Everybody wants to kill us and the only
| solution to safety is to have a nation state and defend at all
| costs against any other group", well it just all make sense. Of
| course this is not the conclusion of every jew in the world but
| I fully expect it to be the conclusion of post WWII zionists,
| even though it was not the case for a lot of them that were
| influenced by socialist ideas but lost influence and power with
| time.
|
| Of course the strategy of always planning for aggression in
| order to come up on top is somewhat self realizing in that
| defending your dominant position will necessarily mean abuses
| of power and resistance to it.
|
| So the lesson is "Better safe than sorry" although it's not
| that simple because there is actually a safety cost to pay to
| maintain such a strategy.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| The problem with October 7th massacre was Israeli government
| with Netanyahu at the top ignored their own rules of "Better
| safe than sorry" and that led to a monster growing at their
| borders (both Hamas and Hizbollah). Well, now it's "better be
| late than never".
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > ignored ... and that led to a monster growing at their
| borders
|
| Ignored? No, most of that administration actively
| encouraged and fostered Hamas for years and years. To their
| mind, it was better for their aims to build Hamas into a
| hardline organization, and more appealing than the
| alternative, which was a Palestine which was (slowly)
| becoming more open to compromise, more diplomatic (around
| the end of Arafat).
|
| It pushed their nationalist agenda further to have a
| boogeyman in the form of Hamas, than to have to answer
| awkward questions like "Palestine is being very reasonable
| and open, so why isn't Israel?"
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Hamas and Likud - both vehemently opposed to a two state
| solution.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Zionism is an ideology that took inspiration from the British
| empire. It was intended to be "something colonial" and pre-
| dated the atrocities of WW2. The fascist atrocities in WW2 can
| be interpreted as colonial tactics applied to Europeans, after
| all the British had been doing extremely bloody concentration
| camps in Africa and starved India during WW2. For some reason,
| Africa doesn't get the same play. I wonder why.
|
| So people that engage in colonialism end up doing similar
| crimes. Israel remains probably the only old school colonial
| project in the present day with present day technology, backed
| by the U.S. empire to secure geopolitical interests in the oil-
| rich region among other things.
|
| Something to think about: America is also a genocidal settler-
| colonial project and is one of the only nations to back Israel
| in the UN. Our genocide is still ongoing: visit a native
| american reservation and witness the immense poverty. Similarly
| to Gaza, the US state will simply say that despite being an
| occupying power, these are autonomous zones and we have little
| responsibility.
| vladgur wrote:
| Modern-day Zionism to me and many others means that Israel
| has the right to exist.
|
| It does not absolve many, including self-proclaimed Zionists,
| from criticizing some of Israel policies.
|
| On other hand, my interpretation of people who are self-
| proclaimed anti-Zionists logically flows from above statement
| that they believe that the present state of Israel DOES NOT
| have a right to exist. Which implies deportation of
| extermination of 6 million Jewish Israelis
|
| In my opinion, the word Zionism has been hijacked by
| activists who know that being anti-Jewish is not good optics,
| but anti-Zionizm is still something that can be sold to the
| masses.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I'm Jewish and I believe that Palestine should be a single
| democratic state that guarantees rights to all. No one has
| a right to an ethnostate, not even us. You see directly
| where this thinking leads -- genocide.
| exe34 wrote:
| Last time the Palestinians in Gaza got a vote, they voted
| Hamas, which has a charter based on eradication of the
| Jews. Are you sure you want them voting in the same state
| as you?
| tehjoker wrote:
| You must recognize that Hamas was elected after the
| continuous failure of the PLO to win concessions after
| Oslo, which abandoned the guiding principles of
| International Law in favor of "trusting the parties", but
| Israel, the more powerful party was able to dictate
| terms. A return to root cause analysis combined with the
| just principles of international law will see a fair
| deal. Arabs do not want to fight, they just want to be
| able to go home.
|
| The fascist behavior I see coming from Israelis is
| completely repulsive and against everything I thought my
| religion stood for.
|
| From the Hamas charter (2017).
|
| "6. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist
| project not with the Jews because of their religion.
| Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because
| they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists
| who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who
| constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own
| colonial project and illegal entity."
|
| https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-
| full
| charred_patina wrote:
| As a westerner, I have never heard a single person in the
| western sphere mention a peaceful, non-occupational one
| state solution. How common is the idea of a democratic
| single state solution in Israeli politics? Do the
| advocates for it have a plan for dealing with the
| backlash from extremists on both sides? I'd like to read
| more about it. Now in the west it seems like even the
| two-state solution isn't up for discussion post-Trump.
| tehjoker wrote:
| It is a marginal opinion, but in my view the only one
| that offers a chance at real peace.
|
| Here's a piece on it:
|
| https://www.palestinechronicle.com/one-democratic-state-
| pale...
| charred_patina wrote:
| > Modern-day Zionism to me and many others means that
| Israel has the right to exist.
|
| I think the framing of this argument is so tricky, because
| states don't have any rights. States aren't human beings.
| There is so much to unpack in the statement "X state has a
| right to exist".
|
| > On other hand, my interpretation of people who are self-
| proclaimed anti-Zionists logically flows from above
| statement that they believe that the present state of
| Israel DOES NOT have a right to exist. Which implies
| deportation of extermination of 6 million Jewish Israelis
|
| I am not saying that Israel's borders should be dissolved,
| but if Israel and Palestine were integrated into a single
| state where Jews and Arabs had equal rights, would this not
| still be a home for Jews?
|
| Destruction of the state of Israel is not equivalent with
| the genocide of all Israeli Jews, unless your definition of
| genocide is the same as the one used by white supremacists
| in the US, who believe that letting non-whites into the
| country is genocide.
|
| The point I am trying to make is that is Zionism, by your
| definition, exclusionary? If so then what you are
| describing is an ethnostate, which many would argue is a
| fascist idea.
|
| Jews, Roma, Kurds, and all ethnic minorities deserve human
| rights. However, they are not entitled to statehood and
| their states are not entitled to any rights themselves.
|
| Also, I do agree there are antisemites who say "zionism" as
| a dogwhistle for "jews".
| TimPC wrote:
| Do you really think this is possible? Can you name a
| single state in the world with a majority muslim
| population that hasn't adopted any laws based on religion
| or passed any laws that discriminate against non-muslims?
|
| Do you think it's realistic that if Israel is replaced by
| a new state tomorrow that has a majority arab muslim
| population it won't quickly become somewhat theocratic
| and enforce some degree of religious law against people
| of other religions? I think this outside view of a one
| state solution pretends the entire population of Israel
| believes in some sort of Western Democratic values and
| will provide a strong foundation of individual rights. I
| just don't see good evidence for that.
| Mandain62 wrote:
| > Can you name a single state in the world with a
| majority muslim population that hasn't adopted any laws
| based on religion or passed any laws that discriminate
| against non-muslims?
|
| Ironically this can be applied on isreal which declare
| itself Jewish state and have law of return [1] which
| allow any Jewish a right to "come" to isreal but does not
| extend the same to arab who were kicked during
| establishment of isreal
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return
| TimPC wrote:
| I'm not arguing there shouldn't be two states. I see the
| best path forward as likely Israel existing as a Jewish
| state and Palestine existing as a Muslim state. I don't
| think either side has a majority population willing to
| exist in a state with absolute freedom of religion and no
| religious policies. Far fewer people live as oppressed
| minorities if there are two states than if there is one.
| charred_patina wrote:
| > Can you name a single state in the world with a
| majority muslim population that hasn't adopted any laws
| based on religion or passed any laws that discriminate
| against non-muslims?
|
| I don't know that Turkey has zero discriminatory laws
| against non-muslims, but they managed to operate as a
| secular state for almost 100 years before Erdogan.
|
| > Do you think it's realistic that if Israel is replaced
| by a new state tomorrow that has a majority arab muslim
| population it won't quickly become somewhat theocratic
| and enforce some degree of religious law against people
| of other religions?
|
| I have no way of knowing this.
|
| > I think this outside view of a one state solution
| pretends the entire population of Israel believes in some
| sort of Western Democratic values and will provide a
| strong foundation of individual rights. I just don't see
| good evidence for that.
|
| Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein both agree with you on
| this point, and I tend to agree with them. My argument
| was not that a one-state solution was viable, but I was
| trying to get the OP to say if their idea of Zionism was
| exclusionary or not.
|
| Personally I do not think that a one-state solution would
| be possible unless mass de-radicalization took place,
| because Israeli ethno-nationalists see coexistence as
| genocide. I think the most viable option is a two-state
| solution, where a competent Palestinian standing army
| could hopefully force some sort of detente.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| This is a very convenient interpretation. Lots of people
| acknowledge Israel as having that right without identifying
| as Zionists. Lots of anti-Zionists are just anti-
| colonialists.
|
| This argument is used to shutdown legitimate criticism of a
| multi-generational occupation, land theft and
| discrimination. Those things are not inherent to being
| Jewish. So the distinction holds.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| Zionism is the desire of the Jewish people to exercise their
| right to self-determination as a state in their ancestral
| homeland.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| With what borders exactly???
| hackerlight wrote:
| > after its people experienced the atrocities of World War II,
| would act in this manner toward the Palestinians.
|
| That's part of _why_ they 're acting this way. Security fears.
| I'm telling you, the median Israeli isn't motivated by
| bloodlust or a desire for land, they're motivated by a high
| level of fear that they will one day be killed by
| Hamas/Hezbollah/etc. That fear causes them to demand complete
| "security control" of the West Bank and Gaza. That fear
| explains why they would not budge on allowing Palestinians an
| army as part of previous two-state negotiations. That fear
| explains why they would give back the Sinai but not the
| geographical high ground of the Golan Heights. That fear
| explains why the Israeli Left completely collapsed after the
| Second Intifada. They're happy to give part of the West Bank
| back in two state negotiations, but they would never, ever,
| allow Palestine an army. Because of security fears. The
| Palestine-Israeli conflict is this positive feedback loop
| caused by a desire for security conflicting with a desire for
| freedom. We're in the terminal doom spiral phase of this
| feedback loop right now.
| exe34 wrote:
| Given how the west is turning against Jews again, I don't
| blame them. Hamas supporters are making life hell for Jews in
| Europe, the very ones who haven't yet been fed up enough to
| move to Israel. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite
| your face!
| johnnyworker wrote:
| It doesn't apply in this case obviously, but when you see
| this rhetoric uttered by people of import, log it here as
| defamation of protesters or activists.
|
| https://accountabilityarchive.org/
| js4ever wrote:
| @dang, can you please do something to stop propaganda
| accounts?
| dang wrote:
| (@dang doesn't work - I saw this by accident but the only
| guaranteed message delivery is hn@ycombinator.com)
|
| I wouldn't use the term propaganda account for several
| reasons, one of which is that on any divisive topic, no
| one agrees about what counts as 'propaganda'. People
| mostly use that word to refer to points they strongly
| disagree with. In that way, it's a lot like the word
| censorship. For moderation purposes, it's better to use
| different words so we don't get tangled in definitional
| arguments.
|
| But it's against HN's rules to use the site primarily for
| political battle (among other things), and when an
| account does that repeatedly and ignores our requests to
| stop, we usually end up banning it. I did that a while
| ago in this case.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39147089
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146733
| abvdasker wrote:
| [deleted by author]
| charred_patina wrote:
| To add to this, OP if you want to learn more about why Israel
| is so callous to Palestinian life you need to learn about the
| Israeli right wing and how it came to power. I mean, this
| whole thing goes back further than that but for understanding
| today it really helps to understand the movement of ultra
| nationalism in Israel from the fringe into the majority.
|
| Fascism does not "just stop". You can already hear the far
| right wingers claiming that Israel also has a right to expand
| into Lebanon and the Transjordan. Ironically looking at how
| Germany was radicalized is really useful for understanding
| how Fascism has taken hold in Israel.
| f6v wrote:
| I've been told stories of the German occupation of my
| grandparent's village. My grandfather has been a slave worker
| on the German farm.
|
| The thing is, I personally can't relate to any of that. It's
| just like reading a book or watching a movie. It's just so far
| removed from my reality. I think you greatly overestimate the
| impact of the holocaust on modern day Jews.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| _> ... the Jewish state... its people experienced..._
|
| This is your error. States and peoples are not unitary entities
| with a single coherent outlook and will. The vast majority of
| the Israeli population is far too young to have directly
| experienced the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago. There are
| plenty of people in Israel who do not want to commit atrocities
| against Palestinians. There are also people who feel that they
| have a (literally) god-given right to occupy the territories
| where Palestinians currently live. If you think of Benjamin
| Netanyahu's cabinet as being basically the same people who
| survived Nazi concentration camps in World War 2, then nothing
| Israel is doing in 2024 will make much sense.
|
| To my mind, Israel's actions toward Palestinians (both in Gaza
| and the West Bank) are powerful evidence that nationalism
| inherently leads to atrocity no matter who's involved. If the
| cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust won't stop
| an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime, what will?
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| It's not self-evident that "the cultural memory of being
| targeted by the Holocaust [should] stop an ethno-state from
| setting up an apartheid regime". In Liberia, where the freed
| American slaves were sent to, they essentially enslaved the
| native population.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's under-remarked on, but for a majority of Israeli Jewish
| people, the nakba era might have more immediate salience than
| the Holocaust. That's because they're not, as the popular
| imagination has it, all colonists from Europe; they're the
| Jewish people of the Middle East and North Africa, all of
| whom were forcefully expelled from their own homes after
| 1948.
|
| There's no question that the Holocaust has enormous salience
| to Israeli Jewish people. But if you trace your roots to
| rural Arab Jewish families from Yemen or Iraq, your more
| immediate concern would be your own family's immediate
| viability in a world without Israel. A new rise of European
| fascism wouldn't be your problem; the fact that you'd have
| literally no place to go would be. You're sure as shit not
| moving back to Yemen.
| hypeit wrote:
| Zionists worked to recruit Jewish people from Arab nations
| to populate Israel. It wasn't until Zionist intervention
| that hostilities ramped up.
|
| Zionists even false flag attacked Iraqi Jews to help spur
| immigration to Israel:
|
| https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-jews-attacks-
| zionist...
| tptacek wrote:
| This is both false and irrelevant. Anti-Jewish pograms in
| MENA following the Arab-Israeli war are well documented.
| Israel had a variety of motivations for ensuring they
| could comfortably resettle in Israeli territory, but that
| doesn't change the crisis Arab Jewish people faced in
| their home countries: they were forcibly expelled.
|
| Further, it doesn't matter. Most stats I've seen suggest
| that the Mizrahim are at least a plurality of Israelis,
| and none of those people can return to their "colonialist
| home countries". By way of example, long before the
| current Gaza war, the literal first "official" action
| Ansar Allah took when it established control of territory
| in Yemen was to expel the very few remaining Jewish
| families.
| hypeit wrote:
| > _Further, it doesn 't matter._
|
| I think it _does_ matter to the Palestinians who have
| their land taken as "payment" for other people's
| actions. That never has been and never will be
| acceptable.
| tptacek wrote:
| People can say it matters until they're blue in the face,
| but the legitimacy of Israeli popular sovereignty within
| its 1967 borders is so difficult to argue with that we
| might as well accept it as complete. We're talking about
| millions of people, well armed, with a _series_ of
| powerful historical arguments, and, of course, a nuclear
| arsenal. Their self-conception is immensely material in
| ways I don 't feel like online Palestinian activists
| understand.
|
| One reasonable way to think about Israel: their moral
| claim to Tel Aviv is _much_ stronger than our claim to
| Dallas. And yet, for all the "turtle island" talk, no
| serious person entertains the idea of rolling back
| American sovereignty.
|
| None of this legitimizes the ongoing military strategy in
| Gaza, or, for that matter, the West Bank crisis or the
| management of the 2-state process, something that the
| Israeli right has successfully and for decades worked to
| derail.
|
| I only bring this up because I feel like there's a
| tendency in message board discussions to center Israel's
| legitimacy on the Holocaust, as if that's the sum total
| of what binds Israeli Jewish people to the land. No, it's
| much more complicated and deep than that.
| hypeit wrote:
| I don't believe that might makes right and just because
| Israel is armed and backed by the West does not give them
| impunity to steal land. 1948 was _not_ hundreds of years
| ago, there are people who are still alive who were
| ethnically cleansed from their land and forced into Gaza.
| Palestinians have a _much_ stronger right of return than
| anyone who wasn 't living in Palestine prior to 1948.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think you might believe might makes right more than you
| realize, because, as I've laid out, it's easier to make a
| moral case for Israeli sovereignty over Tel Aviv than for
| American control of Texas --- you advocate against Israel
| because it seems like a plausible cause, and that
| plausibility is denominated in international military
| might. You don't advocate for the return of Texas to the
| people of Mexico because you viscerally understand it's
| never going to happen.
|
| That being the case (maybe it isn't!), there are two big
| problems with your strategy:
|
| 1. It isn't possible. They're not going anywhere.
|
| 2. It's incoherent. There are very few countries in the
| world with a morally-hygienic claim to their land.
| Certainly, with the possible exception of Egypt, none of
| Israel's neighbors can! They're all of them creations of
| France and the UK.
| hypeit wrote:
| You're making a lot of assumptions about my position. I
| most certainly _do_ think we owe both indigenous people
| and Black people massive amounts of land reparations in
| the US.
|
| Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was
| disbanded. It has less support than ever before
| politically.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was
| disbanded._
|
| South Africa wasn't disbanded, not even close. Apartheid
| ended more-or-less peacefully; non-whites were given the
| vote; and more-or-less democratic elections have been
| held ever since.
| throwaway8877 wrote:
| Cut this racist crap please. Systemic atrocities against
| Jewish population in Muslim countries are well
| documented. Around 1 million Jews were forced to flee and
| leave their belonging behind.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Cultural and religious belief that the land belongs to them by
| divine right, and was stolen. WWII enabled them to resettle in
| their "home", but the principle of ownership didn't come out of
| WWII. The treatment of the Jewish people in WWII doesn't
| mitigate these beliefs, and may even strengthen them (ie,
| persistence and survival are further evidence of divine right)
|
| (These aren't necessarily my opinions, and I am not Jewish.
| However I'm very closely connected to people who are, and I'm
| sharing the perspective I've been given)
| ajb wrote:
| If you look at the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention's
| statement [1], they call both the Hamas attack and the current
| Israeli action Genocidal. They characterise genocidal attacks
| in terms of not just their factual effect, but the intentional
| psychological effect of an "massacre of symbols of group life",
| in which the genocidaires deliberately try to symbolically
| erase the other group, in ways which are hugely traumatic:
| "inversion rituals, such as the killing of children in front of
| their family members; and desecration rituals, such as the
| massacre of entire families, the setting fire to homes with
| families still inside them, and the desecration of dead
| bodies", which they see evidence of in the Hamas attack. This
| is all magnified by the existing trauma of the Jewish people,
| in the holocaust but also events since, in living memory of
| more people - such as 9/11 (an attack on the city with the
| largest Jewish population).
|
| So you have to realise that Israelis are not thinking normally
| right now. Even though the Hamas attack has in military terms
| "culminated", and Israel's military is many times more
| powerful, their trauma leads them to believe that there is a
| real, present threat of extinction of the Israeli state and
| their own nation and families. Under such conditions, it is
| very hard for them to see the suffering of 'the enemy' as
| relevent.
|
| It also doesn't help that basically everyone else is just
| piling responsibility for a solution on the Israelis, despite
| the US, UK and Europe having enormous historic responsibility
| for setting up the situation.
|
| [please note, this is explanation, not justification]
|
| [1] https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-
| page/statemen...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > So you have to realise that Israelis are not thinking
| normally right now. Even though the Hamas attack has in
| military terms "culminated", and Israel's military is many
| times more powerful, their trauma leads them to believe that
| there is a real, present threat of extinction of the Israeli
| state and their own nation and families.
|
| I think that they think there is a real, persistent threat of
| Hamas continuing to make this kind of attack. Hamas has
| consistently said so, so Israel has reasonable grounds for
| thinking so. Hamas has even said that they won't settle for a
| two-state solution - they demand the destruction of Israel.
|
| So if you're an Israeli, that leaves you very few choices:
| stay and accept being massacred every so often, shut down the
| country and leave, or destroy Hamas. Unsurprisingly, they
| choose the third option.
| ajb wrote:
| Here we run into the difficulties of the current media
| environment. With the Ukraine war, everyone and his dog is
| offering their tactical and strategic analysis. Here, not
| so much - just moral statements and talking points. So,
| while it doesn't seem plausible to me that Hamas would be
| able to repeat its attack again and again - it managed to
| create such a large attack because the IDF (or its
| political masters) f*cked up - I don't really have the
| analysis to back that up. What actually were Israel's
| military options? What could Hamas plausibly do under
| various scenarios?
|
| I don't _think_ the attack could be repeated as
| successfully even if Israel withdrew. And Israel clearly
| had justification doing _something_ - but without an
| analysis of their options, it 's hard to know what's
| justified - which is the heart of this case.
|
| I agree that Israel's options are limited - in the absence
| of outside assistance. In fact, I don't see how Israel
| _can_ solve the situation in the absence of a neutral
| outside security force. Here 's why:
|
| For a peaceful settlement, both populations need to be
| given hope.
|
| - Israelis need hope of long term safety and security
|
| - Palestinians need hope of self-determination and civil
| rights.
|
| No deployment of Israeli forces satisfies both conditions.
| If Israel occupies Gaza, they deny the Palestinian hope. If
| they withdraw, they give up their own (which they won't
| do). Even if Hamas is destroyed, the PA is too weak to
| guarantee security for either Palestinians or Israelis, and
| Israel won't trust them enough to allow them to grow
| strong. Ergo, a neutral force is needed. But, that would
| require US co-operation, if not actual US forces, and I
| don't think Biden will risk it in an election year.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Maybe not the US. In fact, probably not the US - the
| Palestinians would (perhaps rightly) view them as likely
| biased.
|
| This sounds like the perfect task for a UN peacekeeping
| force. (Of course, after various "resolutions" over the
| years, the Israelis may view the UN as biased...)
| LegitShady wrote:
| not only resolutions, and the UN's obsession with israel,
| but also the complete failure of UN peacekeepers between
| lebanon and israel as well. Israel won't hand their
| security to the UN over in any way - the UN has
| demonstrated they aren't fair to israel and aren't
| capable of acting as peacekeepers.
| ajb wrote:
| It would likely have to be some kind of ad-hoc force,
| maybe authorised by the UN security council or general
| assembly for legal reasons, but where the composition was
| agreed by Israel and the PA. And not under the management
| of the UN.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > their trauma leads them to believe that there is a real,
| present threat of extinction of the Israeli state and their
| own nation and families.
|
| There actually is a real, present threat of extinction of the
| Israeli state, nation and all families contained within. The
| threat takes the shape of a worldwide community deciding for
| Israel that it must submit to a two-state solution where the
| other state has a military, has demonstrated willingness to
| murder, torture and rape all Israeli Jews and has the close
| physical proximity required to execute such an act with
| resistance being almost physically impossible (take a look at
| a map of Israel and imagine how many civilians will die from
| say 20 Iranian mortars stationed in the mountains of
| Shomron). Even if Israel survives such an attack, it could
| easily kill 10% of the Jewish population, and looking at
| international sentiment right now, it definitely seems like
| Israel would not be able to retaliate in such a case.
|
| Even just allowing Hamas to survive is an incredibly massive
| threat, as they have already demonstrated the ability to
| commit one October 7th and if they are allowed to they will
| have no problem executing another one after some years of
| rebuilding their strength (though next time I assume they
| will tone down the atrocities to immediately get the
| international community on their side, so you'll probably see
| less rape and genital mutilation and just the regular,
| internationally permitted, murder of Jews).
| COGlory wrote:
| You need to replace "after" with "because". Having experienced
| a mass genocide easily justifies committing one yourself in the
| name of self preservation.
| vladgur wrote:
| I was in my 20s and remember the feeling in the air after Al
| Qaeda members hijacked commercial planes and flew them into WTC
| in 2001. Fear, Anger, A bit of revenge.
|
| Many of Americans, including soviet immigrants, enlisted in the
| army driven by that feeling.
|
| Israelis lost significantly more of their population
| percentage-wise during October 7 attack perpetrated by the
| official government of Gaza AND as we know now, some Gazan
| civilians. Over 200 Israelis were taken hostage.
|
| With that in mind, its fairly simple for me to empathize with
| the Israeli public who are angry at the death of their fellow
| citizens and want Hamas to be punished.
| moogly wrote:
| > its fairly simple for me to empathize with the Israeli
| public who are angry at the death of their fellow citizens
| and want Hamas to be punished
|
| Definitely. Conversely, it should also be fairly simple to
| empathize with the Palestinian public in the (just picking
| one fairly recent example) Operation Cast Iron aftermath.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| A bit of a strange take considering every one of your points
| applies much more to Palestine than Israel.
|
| >I was in my 20s and remember the feeling in the air after Al
| Qaeda members hijacked commercial planes and flew them into
| WTC in 2001. Fear, Anger, A bit of revenge
|
| Yeah the people in Gaza feel that pretty much every day
|
| >Many of Americans, including soviet immigrants, enlisted in
| the army driven by that feeling.
|
| They also feel this, which leads to them joining Hamas and is
| part of the reason there are normal Palestinians who support
| Hamas. Terrorists don't come out of no where.
|
| >Israelis lost significantly more of their population
| percentage-wise during October 7 attack perpetrated by the
| official government of Gaza AND as we know now, some Gazan
| civilians.
|
| Yeah I mean again just flip that and the people in Gaza
| experience that at a much higher rate
|
| >With that in mind, its fairly simple for me to empathize
| with the Israeli public who are angry at the death of their
| fellow citizens and want Hamas to be punished.
|
| Same but I also empathize with all the Palestinians just
| trying to live their lives in an open air prison and want
| revenge. I think both Hamas and Israel have genocidal intent,
| but one has much more power and is actually carrying it out
| right now.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Hamas barely scraped into victory in a power sharing
| agreement it then broke. Gazan at that time did not want this
| government. Half of Gaza's present population wasn't even
| born at the time of the last election. To blame Palestinians
| generally (including in the West Bank who are effectively
| being punished too) for this is exceedingly unfair.
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/was-hamas-
| electe...
|
| Compare culpability with Israel's, which IS a functioning
| democracy, has had regular elections, a free press, a large
| population participating in the war and actively in favour of
| it - and blaming the average Gazan is even less fair.
|
| Feeling like revenge isn't good enough.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Poll showing 75% in Gaza believe the attack on Israel was
| correct.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-
| palesti...
|
| Seeing how they literally took hostages, in addition to
| targeting and killing civilians, I'm honestly not sure how
| you can argue it wasn't a terrorist attack.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| 75% of a population indoctrinated for years by a violent
| group of thugs (partially supported by the current
| Israeli PM). But that still doesn't justify slaughtering
| them in a fit of vengeance. Check the numbers for a
| gloves off response within Israel and we see the cycle of
| vengeance you seem fond of.
|
| I didn't argue it wasn't a terrorist attack.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >But that still doesn't justify slaughtering them in a
| fit of vengeance.
|
| I didn't say it did, I just wanted to show that the
| population of Gaza does seem to condone terrorism as a
| whole, and it's not a small minority as you were making
| it sound.
|
| Also if Israel wanted to slaughter everyone in Gaza they
| could do it almost over night. And it wouldn't require
| nuclear weapons, they possess more than enough
| conventional weapons to do so. Hamas has been shown to
| keep and fire their weapons in population centers, it
| makes it incredibly difficult to truly minimize
| casualties. If Israel wanted to maximize civilian
| casualties, they easily could.
|
| >cycle of vengeance you seem fond of.
|
| Seriously my comment was simple, not sure why you think I
| condoned 'vengeance'.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| Yeah it's understandable why though from your own
| article:
|
| >The PCPSR poll found that 44% of Gazans say they have
| enough food and water for a day or two, and 56% say that
| they do not. Almost two-thirds of Gazan respondents - 64%
| - said a member of their family had been killed or
| injured in the war.
|
| >Fifty-two percent of Gazans and 85% of West Bank
| respondents - or 72% of Palestinian respondents overall -
| voiced satisfaction with the role of Hamas in the war.
| Only 11% of Palestinian voiced satisfaction with PA
| President Mahmoud Abbas.
|
| I would wager that actually means they're satisfied that
| there's "someone fighting for their rights" rather than
| they're satisfied with terrorism.
|
| From another article[1]: "Israelis reject U.S. pressure
| to shift the war in Gaza to a phase with less heavy
| bombing in populated areas by a ratio of 2-1...Only 23
| percent answered that Israel should agree to the U.S.
| demand "that Israel shifts to a different phase of the
| war in Gaza, with an emphasis on reducing the heavy
| bombing of densely populated areas...A full 75 percent of
| Jewish respondents said Israel should ignore the U.S.
| pressure"
|
| So it seems the same number of Jewish respondents are ok
| with the genocide occurring right now. Like I said in
| another comment, both Hamas and Israel seem to have
| genocidal intentions but only one side is actively
| pursuing it at the moment.
|
| [1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-02/ty-
| article/75...
| Adverblessly wrote:
| Internally, denying humanitarian aid is seen as the legitimate
| and time-honoured strategy of "sieging the enemy state" though
| not all agree on how legitimate that is (I'm sure you can see
| the strangeness of sending food and medicine to enemy
| soldiers). Certainly supplying the enemy with fuel to use in
| their rockets, vehicles and armaments is seen as foolish (even
| if that would also provide fuel for the hospitals whose fuel
| was stolen by Hamas). There is zero desire in killing non-
| militants (outside of few extremists), but given the extremely
| horrible inhumane atrocities committed by Hamas (e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violen...
| ), the acceptance of collateral casualties is higher than usual
| (and Israel already went extremely out of its way to minimize
| civilian casualties before the Oct 7 attack). Hamas' tactics
| that intend to maximize the deaths of their own civilians are
| also a contributing factor to that acceptance. If you believe
| there is genuine desire or action specifically to kill
| civilians outside of that then you believe in fake news.
|
| In terms of non-homicidal genocide (i.e. genocide in the sense
| of dismantling the group without killing its members),
| certainly a lot more people are fine with something like a
| Transfer plan (for example, I've heard a proposal that Egypt
| will take Gazan Palestinians as refugees/civilians and
| similarly have Jordan absorb the Palestinians in Yehuda and
| Shomron) and don't see it as much of an atrocity, merely taking
| back the land those Arabs conquered and colonized starting at
| around 640AD, without actual harm to those individuals (in
| fact, their lives could be much improved!). There's also the
| fact that Israel is very tiny; Even from just the southern part
| of Gaza, Hamas already fires rockets at Israel's most populated
| cities, giving them the mountains of Shomron (incidentally, the
| capital of the Israeli kingdom), simple mortars could rain down
| on Israeli civilians without warning and could easily lead to
| an actual genocide of all Israeli Jews, so moving the people a
| few tens of kilometers east sounds like a peaceful resolution
| in comparison.
|
| Naturally, there's also the element of a long conflict. Arabs
| have been killing Jews in Israel during the British Mandate as
| well as the Ottoman rule of the region (in fact the IDF traces
| its roots to what are essentially local militias the Jews had
| to create to defend themselves). Israel's scroll of
| independence (a document that is considered that closest thing
| Israel has to a constitution) actually includes two paragraphs
| calling for the Arab nations surrounding Israel to work
| together in peaceful cooperation, so literally the very first
| action Israel took as a state was to call for peace, and
| literally the first thing that happened in response was an
| attempt to destroy Israel. After 76 years of war, certainly
| there's lowered sympathy for the enemy, especially one that
| elected Hamas (see above) and rejected peace (I've somewhat
| recently learned that outside of Israel almost no one knows
| that the Annapolis Conference very nearly resulted in peace via
| a two-state solution that was refused by Mahmoud Abbas [which
| I've heard he has later come to regret, not sure how reliable
| that is]).
|
| Rising anti-semitism around the world (especially how popular
| it is to call for a genocide against Israeli Jews is in the
| form of the "From the river to the sea" phrase) also creates a
| backlash - Israel must act strongly to defend itself since it
| is the only place in the world where Jews can be in charge of
| their own fate and their own defense. If the BBC publishes lies
| about what happens in Israel, and protesters in England are
| calling for a genocide unopposed, not only should we not listen
| to what the English want us to do, we should prioritize
| ourselves even further. This is why IMO something like BDS is
| counter-productive, it only causes further resentment and
| defiance in Israelis; If you want peace between Israel and
| Palestine you should instead work to make sure Israel feels
| safe enough to be able to relinquish territory to the
| Palestinians without having another October 7th instead of
| working to undermine Israel (unless your goal is the
| destruction of Israel of course).
| throwaway587 wrote:
| This is a question you need to ask Jewish people, not HN. The
| response you'll get here obviously won't answer this question,
| because the people responding are either not Jewish, or the
| format doesn't lend itself to a genuine answer.
|
| But, a mistake you make in asking the question is two-fold, one
| - the Holocaust was not a lesson taught to Jews so they'll
| learn empathy. It was something horrible and traumatic that was
| done to them. Two - comparing the Holocaust to what happens in
| Gaza means you're not aware of what the Holocaust was. Maybe
| you know highlights such as gas chambers etc, but not what it
| really was (through no fault of your own I'm sure).
|
| But, to attempt some semblance of an answer. In the same way
| you wouldn't ask Haitians why their gov did terrible things to
| the DR and their population - didn't they learn from slavery?
| Or about India/Pakistan, didn't they learn from the raj? Or any
| of the African states in conflict - didn't they learn from
| colonialism? Or Turkey and Syria, Iraq/Iran etc. Then why ask
| this from Israelis? I hope you get my rhetorical point.
| throwaway587 wrote:
| One more small point - people here mention how long ago the
| Holocaust was and far removed from memory. That's not really
| true. If you look at Pew 2013 poll of American Jews [0] they
| found:
|
| > About three-quarters (73%) of American Jews say remembering
| the Holocaust is an essential part of being Jewish
|
| that's above any other option.
|
| [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2015/08/13/70-years-...
| voisin wrote:
| > the Holocaust was not a lesson taught to Jews so they'll
| learn empathy. It was something horrible and traumatic that
| was done to them.
|
| Well of course I am not suggesting that it was a lesson to
| teach empathy. My comment was merely that people who suffer
| traumas tend to have empathy for other people suffering
| similar traumas. I don't think this is a particularly
| controversial observation.
|
| > Two - comparing the Holocaust to what happens in Gaza means
| you're not aware of what the Holocaust was. Maybe you know
| highlights such as gas chambers etc, but not what it really
| was (through no fault of your own I'm sure).
|
| Well I suppose you might be right. I've seen a number of the
| major films and documentaries and read Viktor Frankl, Eli
| Weisel and Anne Frank and visited Auschwitz, and I'll be the
| first to admit this is merely a very basic overview of the
| atrocities rather than any form of academic investigation.
| But from this overview it seems like there are common threads
| of severe oppression based on immutable racial
| characteristics, no?
|
| On your final paragraph, I probably would ask the same
| question!
| LegitShady wrote:
| >This is a question you need to ask Jewish people, not HN.
|
| Please don't tell people to harass random jews wherever they
| live about political stuff they aren't involved in. Thanks.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| The human mind isn't rational. Don't expect just because they
| very well know what genocide is, that they can't convince
| themselves they aren't committing genocide.
| locallost wrote:
| Homo homini lupus.
| envfriendly wrote:
| I think this is rooted in a strangely common misconception that
| Israelis actually want any of this violence. There's a minority
| who does, but it's no where near as being as common as on the
| Palestinian side (around 60-70% of Palestinians support the
| October 7 massacre)
|
| Urban warfare is an ugly and complicated thing. Many of the
| Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza are moderates risking their
| life to defend their home and bring back their people.
|
| When individual cases of reckless disregard are discovered
| (like in videos shared by Israeli soldiers on groups that get
| leaked out), those soldiers are disciplined.
|
| But globally, it's just not true that the IDF has complete
| disregard for Palestinians.
| throwaway8877 wrote:
| This is a very good question.
|
| My understanding is that the colossal tradegy of Holocaust made
| Jews realise that not fighting back is an existential threat
| for them.
|
| When Israel was established then Arabs did not accept its
| existence nor the existence of Jews in the region. What
| followed was a genocidal war to exterminate Jews in Palestine
| and destroy Israel. We know this war today as Israel war of
| independence.
|
| The Arabs who participated against Jews in this war fleed in
| fear of retribution and were not allowed by Israel to return.
| We know these people and their descendants today as Palestinian
| refugees (they have special inheritable status given by UN).
|
| After the war Israel was established nearly within the borders
| of UN assigned Jewish territories and UN assigned Arab
| territories were annexed by Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (West
| Bank). But it was still not tolerable for the Arabs who again
| in 1967 attempted to exterminate Jewish state with the war.
|
| After the failure Isreal took control over larger territory
| that was then inhabited largely by Palestinian refugees
| (Palestinians) - West Bank and Gaza and also part of Egypt over
| the Suez canal and part of Syria called Golan Heights. The
| reasons where twofold. First the UN assigned territory was
| clearly not realistically defendable and second the large part
| of the previously not controlled territories like Bethlehem or
| Jerusalem were believed to be Jewish lands (historically Jewish
| lands were between Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea).
| Territories belonging to Egypt were later returned by bilateral
| treatis (but Israel kept control over Gaza).
|
| Fast forward to today and it appears that Palestinians have not
| abolished the idea of genocide against Jews. It has been
| clearly established that the 7th October attack was a genocidal
| act to eliminate as many Jews as possible. Around 3000
| Palestinian men took part in it, Hamas had around 40000
| fighters. This demonstrates that they had wide support among
| Palestinians.
|
| This leads us back to Holocaust. Jews promised to themselves
| that they will not let the genocide happen against themselves
| ever again. Yet it happened.
|
| What is going on in Gaza is a systematic work to eliminate this
| threat.
|
| They do this with minimal risk to their soldiers who are mainly
| reservist e.g. common people with military training. They can't
| afford to lose thousands of people. Palestinians in contrast
| value martyrdom and are willing to take very high risks (like
| attacking an armored vehicle with a RGP within a group of
| civilians next to the hospital entrance (this has been
| documented by the video evidence)).
|
| It is not a police operation. It is a military operation
| against heavily armed and trained opponent. The weapons are
| chosen accordingly. The urban landscape makes it especially
| difficult and destructive. Regardless as far I have observed
| then Jewish military has made great efforts to systemically
| minimise civilian casualties.
|
| What they did not realise first was that in addition to the
| military operation on the ground there is also sizeable
| information war against them and when the enemy can find many
| willing sympathisers then the enemy can produce what ever
| claims they please regardless of the truth as was demonstrated
| by the al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion.
|
| I haven't observed the situation closely for months but by then
| Jewish armed forces evolved to be more open in their
| communication and to communicate more clearly the threats they
| had to fight against.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| First you need to understand that there's no genocide here.
| Genocide actually means "the murder of a large number of people
| from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of
| destroying that nation or group."[1] There is no question that
| the Israelis are not trying to kill everyone in Gaza and
| definitely not specifically because they are a part of an
| ethnic group.
|
| Additionally, they have not shown "a reckless disregard for
| Palestinian people" and they would argue that unlike other
| conflicts in the region (Syria, Yemen, Kurdistan) they've been
| incredibly efficient in trying to avoid or limit civilian
| death.
|
| Still, Gazan's have been dealt a pretty raw deal in that they
| have been ruled by a terrorist organization which has
| repeatedly stolen their aid to push their own agenda, and
| living amongst neighboring countries Egypt, Jordan, that are
| afraid to take them in lest they bring instability to those
| governments. Note that in the beginning of this conflict the
| Egyptians wouldn't open the Rafah border to allow refugees.
|
| Rather, many of the holocaust survivors would instead say that
| the Israelis are being too nice and not defending the people
| living in the country from a government in Gaza that has the
| following in it's charter: "Israel will exist and will continue
| to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated
| others before it" and "The Day of Judgement will not come about
| until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew
| will hide behind stones and
| trees."(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp)
|
| [1]https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng
| ...
| Mandain62 wrote:
| I really hoped that a submission on ICJ ruling will pass the
| aggressive flagging. At least hoped that dang will keep his
| promise about allowing a submission about the case. This one
| could be it. I understand that once allowed there will be trove
| of hard liners will make it hell to moderate. But being difficult
| doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss a potential genocide in a
| making in front of our eyes.
| cassepipe wrote:
| EDIT: The title has been changed since and the discussion has
| been unflagged
|
| The problem is that this is such a partisan issue than
| partisanship can be perceived in the smallest of details.
|
| As someone who was staunchly pro-palestinian but as of recently
| came to have a more informed and I hope a more nuanced view of
| the whole situation, I can't help to see the title as
| potentially misleading :
|
| Is the ICJ saying to prevent the Genocide (i.e recognizes that
| a genocide is happening) or to prevent a _potential_ genocide
| (that is it believes the situation could escalate towards a
| genocide) ?
|
| From what I have read this is the second option, so I believe
| the title could be misleading. The more a topic has a loaded
| emotional and symbolic value, the more careful the wording must
| be.
|
| Also I remember how annoying it was that people did not share
| my indignation and how I perceived such carefulness as a form
| of voluntary blindness.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Isn't this the kind of discussion we should be having though?
| Why flag it?
| cassepipe wrote:
| I definitely think this is a discussion we should have and
| I am actually pleasantly surprised by the kind of comments
| I have read so far in that they are not unhinged even
| though I may disagree with some of them.
|
| I have not flagged it personally but I understand why
| someone would. I was just responding on "Couldn't this be
| the one discussion ?" and I think it's not, for the reasons
| above.
| solatic wrote:
| This is Hacker News. Technology, science, business, not
| politics and certainly not geopolitics.
|
| There are many discussions worth having, not all
| discussions worth having should be on HN.
| dang wrote:
| This of course comes up a lot, but the answer has been
| stable for many years. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146184 for more
| information.
| objektif wrote:
| Please allow this. I love what pg is saying regarding
| this topic on X. He is again on the right side.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >> not politics and certainly not geopolitics.
|
| Ages ago I had a job working in online advertising. My
| comment a the time was this "Advertising is worse than
| porn, but working here I can go home to my feminist
| girlfriend and not get shit for it."
|
| Technology and politics have always had an intersection
| but unless it was part of your job, it was somewhat
| avoidable.
|
| This is no longer the case. The simple word "alignment"
| means that these sorts of classical political issues have
| direct impact on tech, platforms and what they do. We, as
| a group, who has a unique view of what freedom means
| (speech, software and that intersectioN) should be
| acutely aware of the chilling effect we're living under
| on this topic. Even here where the discourse remains
| (mostly) civil there are those who will attempt to just
| shut it down.
|
| I would be keenly interested to see how heavily this gets
| flagged and how that compares to other topics. I doubt
| dag would tell us but I could hope!
| smoothjazz wrote:
| I find this topic relative to both tech and business
| because so many venture capitalists have taken a very
| vocal and militantly pro-Israel position. People have
| been fired from our industry for speaking out for
| Palestinians and the guy who first created this site has
| taken immense heat for his pro-Palestine statements. I
| don't know that any other geo-political situations have
| quite had the impact to tech that this has, mostly driven
| by the VCs.
| throwaway260124 wrote:
| To answer your question though. It's neither. The court found
| that allegations of genocide are plausible.
|
| That is, especially some of the statements by senior
| officials could be understood as genocidal.
|
| What I gleaned from reading blogs: It is likely that the
| actus reus for genocide is there but intent will be very hard
| to prove if it exists
| dang wrote:
| All: if you're going to post in this thread, please make sure
| you're up on the site guidelines at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and that your
| comment is strictly within them.
|
| That especially means two things here: being kind, and not using
| the thread to do battle. If you're not able to stick to that,
| that's fine, but in that case please don't post.
|
| What does _be kind_ mean in a context like this? Many things, but
| here 's one in my view: it means finding a place in your heart
| for the humanity of the other--whoever the other happens to be
| for you.
|
| That isn't easy but it's the spirit we want here. If you can't
| find it in yourself, that's understandable, but on this topic,
| please only post if you can.
| ajb wrote:
| The current title "ICJ genocide case: World court demands Israel
| limit deaths " isn't very accurate. I'd suggest reverting to the
| original "Top UN court orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza
| but stops short of ordering cease-fire"
| dang wrote:
| It's the HTML doc title of the article, which is always an
| option for "original title" in the guidelines' sense of that
| term (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...).
|
| What's inaccurate about it?
|
| (Btw - thank you for posting the links in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146163. We need those.)
| ajb wrote:
| Huh, firefox no longer displays that! I didn't realize that
| before.
|
| Well, there is already discussion of the meaning of Measure
| 1) "take all measures within its power to prevent the
| commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this
| Convention, in particular" part a) "killing members of the
| group", at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143094, so
| perhaps the confusion can be worked out there. I don't think
| it's as simple as "limit deaths" but perhaps I'm wrong, not
| being a lawyer.
| ars wrote:
| Isn't there a rule about modifying inflamatory titles? The
| article title "Top UN court orders Israel to prevent genocide
| in Gaza but stops short of ordering cease-fire" is less
| inflamatory, and will help prevent comments from going
| sideways.
|
| Or you can switch to https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-
| east/israel-braces-worl... if you want the title to match the
| HTML title.
| dang wrote:
| I don't see how it's inflammatory. It seems strictly
| neutral to me, with the possible exception of the word
| 'demands'.
| ars wrote:
| Because the ceasefire was the number one demand by the
| South Africa. And they lost that, but the current title
| completely ignores that part, and instead highlights only
| the part that Israel lost.
|
| That's like exactly the definition of the opposite of
| neutral: ignoring the part Israel won and only focusing
| on the part they lost.
|
| And the fact that it ignores the major part of the case
| and focuses only on the minor part, only makes it more
| egregious.
|
| Even the actual news source themselves changed the title,
| and for some reason you consider the HTML title more
| important?
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I've changed it to the page title, shortened to fit
| HN's 80 char limit. Does that work?
| ars wrote:
| Much better, thank you.
| dang wrote:
| Ok good, and thanks for the helpful explanation.
| golf_mike wrote:
| How is this hackernews?
| dang wrote:
| HN's approach to stories with political overlap has been stable
| for many years*. I've written about it many times: https://hn.a
| lgolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
|
| If you read some of those past explanations and still have a
| question about our general approach, let me know what it is. As
| for this particular story, I turned off the flags on it because
| it clearly counts as SNI (significant new information - https:/
| /hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
|
| * as has the question "how is this hackernews", of course:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
| golf_mike wrote:
| Thanks, I guess Hackernews generally is my 'safe haven' from
| politics. Really not intending to bite or insult, just a lot
| happier reading about Dijkstra being a pedantic nano-
| Dijkstrahole or someone dumping a GBA rom through audio. The
| stuff from OP I read everywhere else. My heart cries for the
| for the world and HN generally is one of my tissues. Much
| love anyways.
| theferalrobot wrote:
| Yet you banned all the posts on Oct 7?
| eej71 wrote:
| You aren't the only one who has noticed.
| hightrix wrote:
| Like everything else on this site, you are welcome to ignore it
| if the topic does not interest you.
| golf_mike wrote:
| I guess the same goes for comments :)
| objektif wrote:
| You are ok to talk about pizza recipes on github but not about
| most important geopolitical events in the world?
| dang wrote:
| Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style? It's
| against HN's rules, and especially against the intended
| spirit that I tried to describe at the top of this thread.
|
| Obviously most of what gets discussed on HN is relatively
| unimportant in the world. If that weren't the case, HN would
| simply be a current affairs site, which it isn't. At the same
| time, that doesn't mean every political story is off topic
| here--the guidelines already make that clear by their use of
| the word "most":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| There's a long and pretty consistent history to how HN
| handles the question of political topics.
| bdcravens wrote:
| How is anything? One could argue that real estate occupancy in
| San Francisco isn't hackernews.
|
| I think there's an intellectual interest here, but the line is
| very blurry with politics. It's probably as blurry as the
| articles posted about US being a surveillance state,
| cryptocurrency articles unrelated to the technology itself,
| etc.
| Beefin wrote:
| this is the only post about Israel i've seen approved on HN and
| I've submitted several.
|
| PG is also an outright anti-semite, so i'm not surprised.
| ajb wrote:
| The actual rulings can be found at https://www.icj-
| cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
|
| and a summary is: https://www.icj-
| cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
|
| Dissents etc can be found in the case page: https://www.icj-
| cij.org/case/192 - in particular the opinion of Judge Aharon
| Barak, the Israeli ad-hoc Judge (a peculiarity of the ICJ is that
| each side gets to add a judge, but it doesn't have much effect
| since there are 17 other judges). But interestingly Judge Barak
| ruled _against_ Israel in the case of two measures, enforcement
| against Incitement and ensuring humanitarian aid.
|
| I believe it's also available in French, for those more familiar
| with that language.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| An important part of Barak's involvement is the complete
| recognition of ICJ's jurisdiction over the matter, which it
| found (and Barak didn't disagree) it had.
| shmatt wrote:
| Barak is no fan of the current Israeli government. And they
| often attacked him publicly and organized demonstrations around
| his home. They truly sent the best international law expert the
| country has to offer
| YZF wrote:
| This is more nuanced. Some people in the government respect
| Barak. I don't know that Barak is active in politics (I
| haven't really heard him opine on the current government, but
| one can imagine he's not a fan). The more extreme parties in
| the government resent/oppose Barak. The "government" doesn't
| attack Barak or protest against him but certainly some
| (extreme/right-wing) political factions in Israel blame him
| for many things. I don't think he was sent because he's
| necessarily the best international law expert, but he's a
| very sharp and widely respected. His being sent while the
| government is trying to undermine the practices Barak
| established in the supreme court is a bit weird. Politics.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > a peculiarity of the ICJ is that each side gets to add a
| judge, but it doesn't have much effect since there are 17 other
| judges
|
| There are 15 ICJ judges, plus the two ad hoc judges appointed
| by the parties.
| ajb wrote:
| Yes, my error. 17 is the total number of judges in this case.
| megous wrote:
| Notably also voted against telling Israel to follow the raw key
| prohibitions of Genocide convention as written in the
| convention, something Israel agreed to in the past. Curious.
|
| Also voted against asking Israel to preserve evidence of the
| crimes. Interesting perspective for a former judge.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Interesting perspective for a former judge_
|
| Do you have a link to Barak's dissent on those questions?
| ajb wrote:
| https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-
| related/192...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Hmm, the relevant meat appears in paragraph 43. One one
| point, he votes against because it's redundant to the
| Convention. Fair enough. On the other, a question of
| "plausibility," comes up, which seems a term of art I
| wasn't able to quickly decipher.
| layer8 wrote:
| Here is the actual court order: https://www.icj-
| cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
|
| The measures to be taken are specified in paragraphs 78-82 on
| page 23.
| throwaway260124 wrote:
| A great article from an international law prof explaining the
| finding can be found here: https://www.ejiltalk.org/icj-
| indicates-provisional-measures-...
|
| The blog has articles on the topic from both sides from numerous
| lawyers
| lostdog wrote:
| Finally, this is the first article I've seen that really
| explains the ruling.
| abdulhaq wrote:
| Over the decades I've come to realize that Israel's main goal is
| the confiscation of Palestinian land. Human losses are very
| secondary to that goal.
|
| This genocide is not just a tragedy for the women and children of
| Palestine, but also for the Jewish race in general which is being
| tarnished by the conflation of anti-political Zionism and anti-
| Semitism
| charred_patina wrote:
| A common sentiment I have heard in the US is that "TikTok
| causes antisemitism".
|
| What I believe is actually happening is that TikTok debunks a
| lot of Hasbara talking points about the Israeli occupation of
| palestine (because people can see the violence with their own
| eyes), but then people are not educated further about the
| nuances of Zionism and Judaism, the different political
| movements within Israel like Gush Emunim and how they are not
| related to Judaism at large.
|
| Because Israel has so successfully conflated Zionism (a
| political movement) with Judaism (a religious one), it
| increases the possibility that when westerners stop supporting
| Israel they can adopt antisemitic viewpoints.
| biorach wrote:
| > when westerners stop supporting Israel they adopt
| antisemitic viewpoints.
|
| That is very definately not a given. There are many, a
| majority I hope, of "westerners" who oppose the actions of
| the state of Israel without becoming anti semetic
| charred_patina wrote:
| Not all, sorry I should have qualified that statement. I
| was just trying to point out that when Israel claims that
| it stands for all jews, it can backfire and actually end up
| causing more antisemitism. I have added some qualifying
| statements.
| biorach wrote:
| thank you for the polite response and the prompt edit
| robertoandred wrote:
| TikTok convinced everyone that Israel killed 500 people in a
| hospital bombing, which was of course a lie.
|
| TikTok doesn't debunk Israeli talking points, it spreads
| Hamas propaganda that people fall for for some reason.
| charred_patina wrote:
| There is disinformation on TikTok. There are white
| supremacists and antisemites that take every Israeli
| conflict as an opportunity to spread their hate. This is
| true.
|
| What is also true is that you can clearly see Israel
| conducting a genocide live, while every news outlet in the
| west denies it or justifies it.
|
| I am not talking about fake news, I am talking about
| citizen journalists, footage of children who have been
| pulled out of rubble. Footage of leaflets dropped on a
| column of refugees. The civilian death tolls that the US
| confirms themselves. The harder Israel denies their
| atrocities, the stronger the backlash becomes when people
| see the truth with their own eyes.
|
| Israel's far right and Netanyahu bear a huge amount of
| blame for the rise of antisemitism, because they point to
| these atrocities and say "this is what Jewish people
| globally stand for".
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bisan-plestia-
| motaz-...
| robertoandred wrote:
| Are you sure you can see this genocide? Remember when
| there was footage of Israeli bulldozers crushing people
| and it turned out to be footage of Egypt from 2014? Just
| because some social media account says what you're seeing
| is the truth doesn't make it so.
| Beefin wrote:
| > confiscation of Palestinian land
|
| why would they have pulled out in 2006?
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| I usually refrain from making much political commentary.
|
| I will say this: SA is a deeply troubled country, but for once I
| think the ruling government has actually done a good thing by
| pursuing this.
| timcobb wrote:
| > South Africa asks ICC to exempt it from Putin arrest
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2YY1E6/
|
| SA does not really present itself as an earnest or true actor
| in the sphere oh human rights.
| diego_moita wrote:
| > SA does not really present itself as an earnest or true
| actor in the sphere oh human rights.
|
| Well, who does?
|
| Among the major players in world politics I can't see any
| country with a clean reputation on human rights.
|
| Disclaimer: I am Brazilian, a country with an horrible record
| of police brutality, of farmers killing indigenous people and
| environmental activists and an hypocritical ambivalence
| towards Putin's crimes. And that goes to the previous right-
| wing and current left-wing governments.
| timcobb wrote:
| I mean, sure. Personally, I'm a relativist. It's just weird
| to see the country that recently bent itself backwards--
| like no other country--to let Vladimir Putin into its
| territory (it was reported they even considering leaving
| the ICC), is now bringing suit in the ICC for arguably less
| worse crimes than Putin. SA was not just apathetic to the
| genocide/domicide in Ukraine, it basically went out of its
| way to be party to it. Now it's taking Israel to court.
| strange. Sure, many countries are still dealing with
| Russia, but only SA is dealing with Russia _and_ bringing
| countries to The Hague at the same time.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| SA is dealing with Russia, so it might want to help
| Russia's allies, and one of them is Iran who incidentally
| dreams of nothing less than, well, wiping Israel off the
| map with wiping out Jews as a cherry on top. Oops.
|
| It's all a tangled mess and I wouldn't haste to take
| everything diplomats say at face value.
| timcobb wrote:
| This is what it looks like to me too.
| protomolecule wrote:
| "for arguably less worse crimes than Putin"
|
| How many civilians have died in the Ukraine and in Gaza?
|
| "to the genocide/domicide in Ukraine"
|
| That's very frivolous use of the word 'genocide'.
|
| "Now it's taking Israel to court."
|
| Don't you think that it should have been done by the
| countries which took Russia to the court? They have done
| nothing. Strange.
| timcobb wrote:
| Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in
| Ukraine.
|
| Putin is explicitly aiming to destroy Ukrainian national
| identity, which is genocide. He has disappeared countless
| people in the occupied territories... literally,
| countless, no one knows how many because rights orgs
| don't operate there. He's indicted by the ICC for
| stealing children from occupied territories to solve the
| Russian "demographic crisis," and to remove the future
| generation of Ukrainians. There's nothing frivolous about
| this, ask a Ukrainian. See Putin's many speeches,
| including from February 24, to this effect, he doesn't
| believe Ukrainians or Ukraine has a right to exist, and
| believed that Ukrainians can be dispensed with like
| subhumans.
| jeswin wrote:
| > SA does not really present itself as an earnest or true
| actor in the sphere oh human rights.
|
| If Putin is arrested in a foreign country, you'll have the
| largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world staring down at
| the very existence of that nation. No country would do this,
| however earnest they may be about human rights. Neither will
| it be fair to expect anyone to do this.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If Putin is arrested in a foreign country, you 'll have
| the largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world staring
| down at the very existence of that nation_
|
| Eh, or not. Putin isn't Russia. Depending on timing, it
| might be a convenient time for a change in government. They
| could then demand his remittance, where he would no doubt
| get lost along the way or have a change of heart about his
| place in public policy.
|
| That said, the prudent thing to do is that which was done.
| Barring Putin from entering South Africa.
| ben_w wrote:
| > South Africa asks ICC to exempt it from Putin arrest
|
| "to avoid war with Russia" was how the rest of that headline
| went, along with two quotes about how Russia said such an
| arrest would be considered an act of war.
|
| While I would welcome Putin's arrest, I can't exactly fault
| South Africa for saying _they 'd rather not go to war_.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| They can avoid arresting Putin by not allowing a plane with
| Putin to land in South Africa.
| input_sh wrote:
| Well it didn't. Putin never ended up going there, he
| attended the BRICS summit remotely.
| mderazon wrote:
| There's 0 chance of Putin get arrested if he lands in SA.
| This is international law summarized in one sentence
| lenkite wrote:
| Arresting a head of a nuclear-armed state ? One that does not
| subscribe to the ICC ? How moronic would one have to be ?
|
| Amusingly, the Biden govt had no issues _officially_
| supporting the ICC to deliver a ruling against Russia despite
| the US not being a party to the ICC themselves. That 's like
| having your cake and eating it too.
|
| None of China, India, Russia, and the United States are
| parties to the ICC.
| worik wrote:
| True
|
| Nation states are often immoral and hypocritical
|
| The outrage from the USA at the invasion of Ukraine, when the
| invasion of Iraq is a crime of the same magnitude - both
| dreadful stains on humanity
|
| Most recently the international support for the actions of
| the IDF whilst condemning Russian actions in Ukraine
|
| SA is just normal in this regard
| nradov wrote:
| From a narrow, legalistic perspective Iraq was in material
| breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 in 2003 and
| so the invasion was justified on that basis. I am not
| arguing that the invasion was right (or even remotely a
| good idea), just that it was never firmly established as
| illegal under any treaty in force at the time. By contrast,
| there was never even a fig leaf of a legal justification
| for Russia's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
|
| https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/478123?ln=en
| mrkeen wrote:
| > The outrage from the USA at the invasion of Ukraine, when
| the invasion of Iraq is a crime of the same magnitude.
|
| I was certainly against it in 2003. The WMDs were bullshit.
| A war on "terror" is farcical. The profiteering and the
| industrial military complex, etc.
|
| But I did later come around to the idea of getting Saddam
| and his government to stop genociding the Kurds.
|
| Of course you should always assume a country like the US to
| be self-serving in its actions, but it's not as if it was
| taking additional land as its own, as is the case with
| Russia and Israel. Iraq was never going to be the 51st
| state.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > SA does not really present itself as an earnest or true
| actor in the sphere oh human rights.
|
| Adversarial justice systems are an approach to dealing with
| the fact that individual actors in a system (including states
| in the international system) tend to be self-interested
| rather than earnest or true consistent advocates of the
| notional rules of the system.
| FpUser wrote:
| And the US had threatened military force and sanctions should
| ICC ever decide to go after American. So what's your point?
| robertoandred wrote:
| Or they're just trying to gain brownie points from the people
| who support Hamas.
| kar5pt wrote:
| Have you read through their case? It's pretty weak in my
| opinion. They seem to think that any war with a high number of
| casualties and insufficient humanitarian aid counts as
| genocide. By their standard the US committed "genocide" against
| Japan in WW2, arguably Germany too.
| sydd wrote:
| By todays standard it would be a genocide. How do you think
| people would react if e.g. Russia nuked 2 large cities in
| Ukraine leading to 100K+ deaths?
| goatlover wrote:
| It would be a prelude to WW3 with an increasing likelihood
| of nuclear escalation. In which case cities in Russia,
| Europe and the US would be at risk.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I do think that their future Feb ruling is going to call for a
| ceasefire. If they called for one now, Israel & especially the US
| were just going to ignore it and reduce the power of the court.
|
| Israel has created a beast that I don't think they can control
| themselves. I do think that the court is going to get more
| legitimacy after they explicitly tell Israel to __chill__, for
| Israel not to chill, and then get the ceasefire ruling against
| them & potentially an intensification of the genocide case.
|
| Meanwhile, unfortunately, real people are suffering so these
| political games can be played.
|
| I am so deeply disappointed in the Biden administration here.
| They're throwing away a lot of the good work they've done, and
| are actively getting Trump elected. People, naturally, do not
| want to participate in an election that is giving them a choice
| between ${person_currently_helping_a_genocide} and
| ${person_that_will_intensify_genocide}. You're just going to get
| voter apathy, and the consequences from that.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Based on things I've heard people say recently, some leftists
| are going to vote for Trump under the delusion that he will
| work to scale back the Gaza war or wouldn't have supported it
| in the first place.
|
| PredictIt seems to have a 50/50 split between Biden and Trump
| in 2024 but I see basically no chance for Biden, the Republican
| propaganda machine is way too strong and the Democratic party
| has fewer and fewer supporters every year. The D party's only
| selling point to many people for several years (including me)
| has been "anything other than R" and I think it's getting old
| for many voters. We are headed for a one-party totalitarian
| state unless there is a massive D strategy shift and a
| clearing-out of the old guard.
|
| I never thought I'd miss the W Bush years.
| StriverGuy wrote:
| Does Hamas have to adhere to an ICJ ordered ceasefire?
| threeseed wrote:
| No. Because they are a terrorist organisation.
|
| Israel is expected to because they are not.
| mantas wrote:
| Hamas is democratically elected government in Gaza.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Really? Democratically elected? Elections in Gaza, over a
| decade ago, are the bar for democracy now?
| envfriendly wrote:
| While that's technically true, they were elected in 2006
| and since then no elections have been held. Not only
| that, members of the Hamas murdered Fatah rivals in the
| years that followed. Not to mention that most of the
| population today in Gaza are so young that they didn't
| even vote Hamas in.
|
| So while they have majority support, it's not like
| they've had any real alternative.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Please put some more effort into researching your talking
| points.
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/was-hamas-
| electe...
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without swipes.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| bawolff wrote:
| It doesn't matter. Hamas is not a member of the ICJ. The
| state of palestine is a member but hamas aren't
| recognized as the representive of the state of palestine.
|
| Additionally, the state of palestine is not a party to
| this case.
|
| So no, the icj cannot tell hamas to do anything. The only
| people it can give orders to in this case are israel and
| south africa.
|
| Hamas's crines are the juridsiction of the ICC.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| Not entirely true. Yes, they were elected in 2007 but
| they have not allowed the Fatah after that. The last
| election may have been 2012. So considering the amount of
| time elapsed I wouldn't consider them legitimately
| elected.
|
| Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
| pphysch wrote:
| Hamas/Al-Qassam Brigades outright said today that they would
| willingly comply with a ceasefire order.
| eej71 wrote:
| I think its reasonable to expect the same level of
| adherance to such a ceasefire that was also in place prior
| to Oct 7th.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And we should believe that why? They have also said they
| would do Oct 7th again as many times as they could.
| pphysch wrote:
| You only have to believe what you want to believe. I'm
| just answering the GP's question in the most direct
| possible way, by referencing the answer of a primary
| party.
|
| Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-
| says-it-will...
| xenospn wrote:
| I can assure you Israel will most likely ignore any resolution
| that does not involve the hostages returning.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The hostages that Israeli soldiers keep killing? I doubt that
| the return of the hostages is a bona fide goal of the
| operation -- hostage rescue looks like a police action, this
| looks like a military invasion and genocide.
| GordonS wrote:
| If they cared about the hostages, they wouldn't be bombing
| them to death on a daily basis, shooting those that escape,
| or gassing them in tunnels. The hostages are nothing more
| than political pawns to Netanyahu.
|
| Keep in mind that Hamas reiterated their ceasefire deal
| recently, which includes the release of all hostages, and
| Israel rejected it.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Hostages are undesireable for Israel, as earlier they die/be
| killed the lesser leverage hamas will have. Besides, they
| will all be dangerous to official narrative, as they seem to
| have been treated ok by the militants.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| You mean they were raped ok by the militants?
| https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/there-wasnt-a-moment-
| freed-h...
| bawolff wrote:
| Is that even possible procedurally? the preliminary hearing is
| done. They are meeting in feb to discuss the report on the
| things ordered, but i dont think they can just randomly make
| more orders at that point that aren't related to the granted
| orders.
|
| [Ianal]
| aaomidi wrote:
| From my understanding, if Israel doesn't show that they're
| able to reduce civilian deaths, they can grant South Africa's
| ask on the case which (from my understanding) is effectively
| ordering Israel to stop the attacks, and asking the world to
| help enforce it.
| bawolff wrote:
| The court didn't even order them to reduce civilian deaths.
|
| They do have to submit a report on their implementation of
| the orders, but reducing civilian deaths wasn't on the list
| of things they had to report on.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| The US, under whichever administration, is in a very difficult
| position here. If the US stops all support immediately, this
| could be the end of Israel. Would that be just? I see a
| president carefully dancing on the thin line of supporting the
| Israel state while using the US leverage to stop the war
| (latest example: sending the CIA chief to the negotiating
| table). But this needs to be done without enabling Israel's
| biggest adversaries that support a Jihad against the people of
| Israel.
| handoflixue wrote:
| > If the US stops all support immediately, this could be the
| end of Israel.
|
| How would Israel disappear? Palestine is clearly no match for
| them - who else is expected to suddenly move in?
|
| I certainly think we could stop funding their military while
| still pledging to support them if someone actually tries to
| invade.
|
| Keep in mind, Israel has it's own defense budget - it's not
| like it's military just disappears when US funding dries up
| solatic wrote:
| It's a common fallacy that money equates to purchasing
| power. That is only true so long as there continues to be a
| market with stable supply and stable prices. After
| COVID-19, many people had plenty of money, but you simply
| could not buy masks or vaccines at any price if there
| simply were no longer any to be sold.
|
| Militaries are just as interconnected as anybody else. They
| depend on supplies of weapons and munitions. If the supply
| is gone, the size of the budget doesn't matter.
| mantas wrote:
| Israel has quite a lot of domestic defense industry.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Iran is who is expected to suddenly move in under this
| scenario.
| rightbyte wrote:
| They don't even share borders. How "suddenly" could they
| possible cross Iraq and Syria?
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Iran was pretty miffed when some weapons of unspecified
| origin recently hit Iraq and Syria because they happened
| to land on the heads of Iranian operatives.
|
| The concept of nations and borders in the middle east is
| a bit... different from the western variant.
| ben_w wrote:
| > How would Israel disappear? Palestine is clearly no match
| for them - who else is expected to suddenly move in?
|
| They've had wars with all their immediate neighbours since
| the modern state was created:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab-
| Israeli_conflict#Notable_...
|
| Some of those countries are more friendly now, but loss of
| USA support would be _huge_. Such a removal of support
| would IMO be extremely unlikely due to how USA internal
| politics looks like from outside.
|
| American foreign policy wasn't parodied as "world police"
| for nothing.
|
| > I certainly think we could stop funding their military
| while still pledging to support them if someone actually
| tries to invade.
|
| Subtly and nuance? Oh how I wish any politics cared about
| that.
|
| I'm assuming, from the PoV of Israel and the Jewish
| diaspora in the USA, that because the specific attack that
| set this in motion was _much much worse_ (proportionally
| speaking) than the 9 /11 attacks were to the USA, anything
| less than 100% uncritical total support will look like "a
| betrayal" or "giving in to terrorism", to enough of the
| Jewish electorate in the USA, as to make that kind of talk
| unviable for at least a decade.
|
| Real people aren't Vulcans. Emotions are raw, and will
| remain that way for a long time. And so the cycle will
| continue until either one side or the other is dead, or
| some absolute negotiating genius steps in and manages
| something even more impressive than the Good Friday
| Agreement in Northern Ireland.
|
| (Makes me wish for Mo Mowlam to be reincarnated; good luck
| to you if she was an inspiration!)
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >If the US stops all support immediately, this could be the
| end of Israel
|
| I doubt it, Israel would nuke Iran before letting this
| happen.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| Trump wouldn't intensify the genocide. Not just because Israel
| currently has carte blanche to do what it wants, but also
| because of personal animosity with Netanyahu.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Netanyahu and Trump been best friends since the '80s.
| Netanyahu was even friends with Trump's dad.
|
| I wouldn't put too much stock in any kayfabe between them.
| Aunche wrote:
| > I am so deeply disappointed in the Biden administration here.
|
| What do you expect him to do? With or without any assistance,
| Israel has more than enough weapons completely annihilate Gaza.
| Don't forget that they likely have nuclear capabilities. Israel
| believes they are demonstrating restraint and this restraint is
| the first thing to go if Israel feels like it's being backed
| into a corner.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Things like this are bad: https://apnews.com/article/us-
| israel-gaza-arms-hamas-bypass-...
|
| More public denouncement of what Israel is doing.
|
| Get the Department of State to start sanctioning heads of
| state of Israel that are actively calling for a genocide.
|
| He's effectively done nothing other than "handling it in
| private."
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > What do you expect him to do?
|
| At least as much as Ronald Regan:
| https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/12/A-shocked-and-
| outrag...
| Aunche wrote:
| A major difference is that Israel instigated the first
| large scale attacks in the 1982 War, whereas Hamas
| instigated the ongoing war.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| This is only the interpretation if you ignore the various
| killings of palestinians and journalists prior to October
| 7th at the hands of IDF:
| https://cpj.org/reports/2023/05/deadly-
| pattern-20-journalist...
|
| Or when Israel bombed Gaza two months after the previous
| cease fire: https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-
| bombs-gaza-city-...
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Israel believes they are demonstrating restraint
|
| From the section of the ICJ ruling dealing with dehumanizing
| language used by Israeli officials:
|
| > "I have released all restraints . . . You saw what we are
| fighting against. We are fighting human animals"
|
| -- Mr Yoav Gallant, Defence Minister of Israel
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Ok but they haven't literally released all restraints
| because no nuclear weapons have been used.
| pphysch wrote:
| Why would they use nuclear weapons on territory they
| intend to annex and settle?
| arwineap wrote:
| Modern nukes don't have lasting radiation fallout
| tda wrote:
| I am not so sure. I believe Israel only exists by the mercy
| of support from their Allies. The minute they lose that
| support Israel is doomed. The country is surrounded by
| enemies on all sides. Sure their military could win a
| conventional war with their nukes against any of their
| neighbors. But on the long term a small country with a small
| population and limited natural resources needs friends to run
| an economy big enough to support the huge military it needs
| to defend itself. And Israel is running out of friends fast.
| Sympathy for Israel in the West is surely declining at
| lightning speed with the current situation, I would not be
| surprised if this conflict is the start of the end of the
| country
| zogrodea wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Trump's domestic policies, but I'm absolutely
| sure that he has the moral high-ground over Biden right now.
| Trump used to be a supporter of Israel and to some extent still
| is, but he did during his presidency see that the Palestinians
| want peace more than the other side. I can't imagine Trump
| going behind Congress' back to arm Israel as Biden has done.
|
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-i-thought-israelis-
| would....
|
| Apparently, those still supporting Biden will throw human lives
| under the bus for a more comfortable home life.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >but he did during his presidency see that the Palestinians
| want peace more than the other side.
|
| Which is why they instigated violence, primarily against
| innocent civilian targets including a peace concert, during a
| time where no open conflict existed?
| zogrodea wrote:
| The conflict didn't start on October 7th. There were still
| innocent kids being shot by IDF soldiers before then.
|
| This is before October 7th, from September 2023. ' 2023
| marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied
| West Bank"
|
| https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-
| territory/...
| Animats wrote:
| There is another player. China is interested in resolving the
| Gaza conflict.[1] China's position is that, since the existing
| world order, the International Court of Justice and the United
| States, can't resolve this, China should become involved. Chinese
| container shipping lines COSCO and OOCL have suspended trade with
| Israel. China has already provided some aid to Gaza.[2]
|
| Gaza has a sizable coastline, and China has a large number of
| amphibious assault ships available. They can defend themselves
| against Israel air attacks. If China decides to send humanitarian
| relief to Gaza, China can do it, and Israel can't stop them.[3]
| China would look like the good guys. Which their leadership
| knows.
|
| [1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-game-gaza
|
| [2] https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-
| wa...
|
| [3] https://www.newsweek.com/china-amphibious-assault-ship-
| type-...
| nickff wrote:
| Which other international conflicts has China resolved? The
| current Chinese state seems to be much better at fostering
| conflict (I.e. the ongoing Korean War) than resolving it.
| Animats wrote:
| So far, not much. Gaza is a good place to start. China wants
| more influence in the Middle East, and already owns or
| operates a large number of ports outside China.[1] Israel
| blockades the existing ports of Gaza. A China-run port in
| Gaza, protected by the PLAN, is a possibility.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/chi
| na-...
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| That assumes that Israel would allow a China-run port in
| Gaza, which is no guarantee.
| SR2Z wrote:
| It also assumes that the _US_ would allow a China-run
| port in Israel, which is so unlikely it might as well be
| impossible. Israel is a nuclear weapons state and such a
| close US ally that they basically have their own F-35
| fighter jet variant.
|
| This would NEVER happen.
| gred wrote:
| > Gaza is a good place to start.
|
| This made me chuckle :-) "Let's dip our toes into solving
| international conflicts with an easy one, like the Israeli
| / Palestine conflict!"
| pydry wrote:
| Iran and Saudi Arabia
| Qem wrote:
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/21/china-brokered-
| saud...
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| They might look like "the good guys" by doing that, but they'd
| also be dragging themselves into an open war Israel (and its
| allies). I'm not sure that would be a smart move.
|
| I'm also unsure if this move would be seen well domestically.
| They have enough problems right now, and focusing resources on
| this doesn't sound like it would be met with high praise.
| crote wrote:
| I think the idea is that they'd _genuinely_ be providing
| humanitarian aid, with military presence _genuinely_ being
| there for self-defense.
|
| They would simply be stepping into the role on the world
| stage the US and other Western countries have fulfilled for
| the last few decades. Israel probably wouldn't be foolish
| enough to attack them, and their allies _definitely_ wouldn
| 't aid them.
|
| And in the unlikely event Israel does attack their
| humanitarian convoy, it would only give China an opportunity
| to do some live-fire practice and score extra points on the
| world stage as the innocent defender.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| China may not even provide a military presence. First,
| because providing military presence could invite conflict
| since Israel would have the ability to claim the Chinese
| fired first, even if untrue. Second, because Chinese
| leadership is absolutely willing to treat the people as
| sacrificial pawns for a geopolitical goal. Trading the
| lives of couple hundred people on aid ships would be
| worthwhile in their eyes for an outcome that benefits China
| as a whole.
| biorach wrote:
| This seems far fetched given China's traditional insistence
| that countries' internal affairs should not be subject to
| external overview, it's undeclared stance that subject
| populations should be suppressed by whatever means necessary
| and the still marginal effect of the conflict on its trade.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I don't see how military operations outside of a country's
| legal territory is considered an "internal affair"
| falserum wrote:
| Gaza is kind of/maybe/sometimes/by some considered part
| ofisrael.
| shkkmo wrote:
| No, it isn't.
|
| China officially recognizes the state of Palestine.
|
| The Isreali supreme court itself has determined that Gaza
| is not Isreali territory.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Then it has no legitimate say over the affairs of Gaza.
|
| An Israeli court can say what it wants, but can't have it
| both ways.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That's nonsense.
|
| The supreme court has jurisdiction over actions taken by
| the Isreali government, regardless of where those actions
| take place.
| wharvle wrote:
| The notion that Gaza's more than some variety of closely-
| held protectorate is either aspirational or a convenient
| fiction, depending on who's stating it. They aren't even
| close to having a level of control over their own
| territory and affairs to be considered a sovereign state.
| Hell, the West Bank also can't credibly be called a
| sovereign state, taking into account only facts on the
| ground and observed behavior, and not what officials say.
| In some respects US tribal nations have more actual
| sovereignty, in ways that matter, even though they
| definitely aren't sovereign states, from an international
| relations perspective, and functionally nobody treats
| their tribal territory as meaningfully distinct from that
| of the US as a whole, in these contexts.
|
| However, situations like this, in which rhetoric and _de
| jure_ policy conflict with _de facto_ reality, open one
| up to others taking the fiction at face value. And what
| do you do then? Can 't deny it without causing other
| problems. So now this may be regarded as an international
| matter because Gaza "isn't part of Israel".
| lostdog wrote:
| Gaza is more tightly held than Taiwan.
| wharvle wrote:
| Heh--that, for fuckin' sure. The fiction there runs the
| opposite direction, where China pretends (and encourages
| others to pretend) that Taiwan's less independent than it
| is, meanwhile just about everyone _acts_ like Taiwan 's
| in fact very much distinct and independent from China,
| even if they say otherwise.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I believe parent was referring to the Uyghur genocide[1]
| not the Territorial disputes in the South China Sea[2].
|
| The line of thinking is that if Israel is subject to
| international courts/laws regarding genocide for its
| action, then China will be too. China's participation in
| judging Israel opens itself to the same judgement.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_th
| e_So...
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That line of thinking doesn't make sense since Xinjiang
| is part of China while Gaza isn't part of Israel. One is
| a domestic question, the other isn't (going by the
| international recognition).
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| China: But this is a _Domestic_ issue!
|
| I don't see folks buying that, sorry. In international
| realpolitik you play the cards you have and if your rival
| opens themselves up for criticism you play it.
|
| Rhetoric trumps logic in this one.
| maxglute wrote:
| >opens itself to the same judgement
|
| It's flawed thinking because PRC can't be legally
| attacked the same way.
|
| Plurality of UN sentiments has already, repeatedly sided
| with PRC on Uyghur/XJ as internal counter terrorism, and
| not genocide. Crimes against humanity maybe, but all the
| US/west driven efforts to get it recognized as genocide
| has failed.
|
| Same PRC actions in SCS. PRC not party to the optional
| arbituation system in UNCLOS. And there's no legal
| mechanism under UNCLOS to determine sovereignty. The PCA
| ruling is not actually international law, recognized by
| UNCLOS or UN. PRC doesn't have to worry about
| UNCLOS/ITLOS ruling against it in SCS because they
| legally can't.
|
| Sure there might be rhetorical damage, but not potential
| legal damage under UN the same way Israel, party to
| genocide convention, would legally be, if ICJ decides
| they did a genocide. Legal damage in this case, being
| actual diplomatic damage, i.e. mandetory sanctions, which
| pro-Israel parties will of course ignore, suffering
| reputational damage in turn.
| loceng wrote:
| Good cop, bad cop theatre of what I call the establishment
| division.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Amphibious landings are highly vulnerable, and almost
| impossible to pull off without air superiority. What gives the
| impression that China's amphibious landing ships are resistant
| to anti-shipping missiles? Every article on modern naval combat
| I've read highlights just how vulnerable surface vessels are to
| attack, and how crucial it is to keep them out of range. I am
| incredibly dubious that China would land military ships in
| Gaza.
| criddell wrote:
| Do you think Israel would fire on those ships?
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| If China tried to land troops in Gaza I imagine they
| absolutely would.
| xenospn wrote:
| This has exactly zero chances of happening. Israel would never
| let anyone they don't approve of get anywhere near Gaza.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| That is definitely Israel's intention, but suppose China did
| go for it.
|
| Does Israel have the stones for direct airstrike on Chinese
| fleet? It's gonna get messy. It's a big game of chicken, I am
| not sure who I would bet on.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| How is the Chinese Navy getting there? Gotta go through
| Gibraltar or Suez, and then there is the NATO naval base at
| Souda Bay. Only way their ships get close is with US
| consent.
| justrealist wrote:
| > Gaza has a sizable coastline, and China has a large number of
| amphibious assault ships available. They can defend themselves
| against Israel air attacks
|
| Sorry but this is goofy fan-fiction. No, China does not have
| the ability to forcibly land in Gaza without huge losses, and
| then being completely trapped there with no hope of resupply.
| That's an incredibly long supply line.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Indeed, anyone who knows anything about China's long-range
| logistics knows that direct military conflict would be
| suicidal for China.
|
| Their only chance would be to make a bet that attacking them
| would be politically unacceptable.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Gaza has a sizable coastline, and China has a large number of
| amphibious assault ships available. They can defend themselves
| against Israel air attacks.
|
| Chinese warships will _never_ be allowed anywhere near the
| Mediterranean in the first place - if there is one thing that
| even the split US Congress will agree on, it is that China
| already has too much influence and that they need to be
| stopped.
|
| Additionally, China's army hasn't seen actual combat in a
| loooong time. It's likely that their army is in just as bad of
| a shape as Russia's is, and getting that demonstrated on the
| world stage before they have a chance to snack a piece or the
| whole of Taiwan would be pretty foolish.
| muchosandwich wrote:
| China has been skirmishing with India pretty recently
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Chinese warships will never be allowed anywhere near the
| Mediterranean in the first place
|
| There have been Chinese navy visits to the Mediterranean. You
| can sail in on international water. (Edit: Nope, it's to
| narrow)
|
| "Chinese naval ships visit Morocco"
|
| http://eng.chinamil.com.cn/CHINA_209163/Exchanges/News_20918.
| ..
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without snark or
| swipes.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye sorry, edited.
| tomp wrote:
| Casablanca is Atlantic, not Mediterranean.
|
| You cannot get into the Mediterranean without passing
| through territorial waters.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ok the Strait of Gibraltar was way narrower than I
| thought it would be and I mixed up the location of
| Marocco and Tunisia ...
|
| Grabbing for straws: "Chinese naval escort taskforce
| visits Tunisia"
|
| http://eng.chinamil.com.cn/CHINA_209163/TopStories_209189
| /79...
| DDSDev wrote:
| While what you are saying is technically true, Chinese
| ships would be allowed to exercise their right of Transit
| Passage under UNCLOS through the Strait of Gibraltar.
| InTheArena wrote:
| China is not a signatory of the UNCLOS. See the south
| china see debacle for an easy answer as to why.
| maxglute wrote:
| PRC is a signatory to UNCLOS.
|
| PRC actions in SCS is not legally against UNCLOS. Reality
| is, everything PRC does currently in SCS is legally grey
| area until UNCLOS/ITLOS/UN actually rule against it in
| official capacity. PCA ruling is essentially a term paper
| on official looking letterhead drafted by anti PRC
| lawfare, pretending to be international law. It's one
| (strong) legal interpretation, but it's not settled case
| under UNCLOS - UN (which UNCLOS law operates under) does
| not recognize or comment on PCA ruling.
| DDSDev wrote:
| To my knowledge, China is a signatory to UNCLOS, but has
| disputes around it's "islands" in the South China Sea and
| their relation to the EEZ. I acknowledge that China's
| relationship to UNCLOS, as a minimum, is complicated and
| rapidly evolving, but I dispute that they do not have a
| right to transit passage. Or to be more specific, I would
| put forward that they would have a plausible argument to
| claim transit passage.
|
| The United States has not ratified UNCLOS, and regularly
| claims the right of Transit Passage. In fact, this fact
| is one of the reasons why Iran claims that the United
| States cannot enter into Iranian TTW while making a
| Strait of Hormuz transit - because the US has not
| ratified UNCLOS, their claim is that the US cannot claim
| transit passage. For the United States (or any Western
| Nation) to make the claim that China cannot claim Transit
| Passage would lend weight to Iran's argument, which you
| can imagine, they would not want to do.
|
| I do not want to make any assumptions around your
| specific views on this matter - you may hold the opinion
| that China could not claim transit passage, however I
| wanted to interject some perspective that:
|
| 1. That may not be universally agreed upon 2.
| Specifically, the United States and it's allies may not
| make that argument because it would put them in a
| negative position for other international disputes.
| 127 wrote:
| You really think China wants to create a precedent where a
| foreign power comes and helps a smaller region to deter a
| bigger aggressor, with military force? I find that highly
| unlikely.
| reso wrote:
| I was with you until chinese contested amphibious landing in
| occupied gaza. China's big picture strategy is to grow while
| not being drained by small conflicts the way the US is. This
| would be totally against that strategy.
| erikson wrote:
| China doesn't like things that cause revolts. Because
| rebellions can be infectious.
| bsaul wrote:
| i don't think china wants having anything to do with hamas. For
| a first experience as a military-humanitarian adventure, the
| chances of appearing as a support for hostage-taking muslim
| terrorist is way too high.
| r00fus wrote:
| China believes in soft power. So I doubt they'd come in guns
| blazing to rescue Gaza.
|
| However, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by
| brokering some kind of peace using their supply chain
| supremacy.
|
| Meanwhile US looks more and more like a paper tiger because
| they can't stop Yemen from blockading Israeli shipments and
| also refusing to do the one thing that would resolve the
| shipping issues: force Israel to the table for a ceasefire.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think its extremely unlikely that china will go to war with
| israel. That would be an extremely bloody conflict for almost
| no benefit to china.
|
| Additionally china's military currently has big corruption
| problems (e.g. the missle fuel water controversy). I doubt
| china really wants to put their reputation on the line until
| they sort that out, especially given what happened to russia in
| ukraine.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Pointlessly going to war with Israel would be so far out of
| character for China that I can't even imagine why you are
| suggesting this possibility.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| China has no ability to project much outside of its own
| territory. They might be able to invade taiwan, sure, but
| anything farther off is still out of reach for them (even if
| they wanted to, which I highly doubt). They really couldn't
| stage much from their one support base in Djibouti.
| tgv wrote:
| China would only get involved to extend their influence. China
| is very much tit-for-tat. But who will grant them anything in
| return? None of the neighboring countries likes the
| Palestinians. Egypt even holds the border closed.
| throwaway918274 wrote:
| Something tells me that Israel will just ignore them.
| moogly wrote:
| That strategy has indeed worked for Israel in the past, and it
| will work now.
| password54321 wrote:
| Stop using unguided bombs in densely populated areas. Stop using
| poison gas. Stop killing people waving a white flag. Stop sniping
| people outside of a church. Stop planning and executing
| demolitions on universities. Stop starving people. Stop cutting
| water supplies.
|
| Dang, everything I listed is widely reported on. I think I have
| the right to express this even on HN on an article about a
| genocide case.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Please share your sources
| hypeit wrote:
| Like the parent says, these have all been widely reported on.
| I think we have to come into this conversation with a base
| level of the events that are going on before commenting.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| This was a very unhelpful response to someone trying to
| understand another's viewpoint.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Church killing:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/women-
| mother-d...
|
| Killing of white flag wavers:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-palestinian-
| israel-w...
| enterprise_cog wrote:
| Bombs: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-
| assessm...
|
| White flag: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-
| palestinian-israel-w... (there is more than one instance of
| this)
|
| Poison gas is a claim from the family of a dead hostage. They
| said the pathology report of the death indicated poison gas
| was being used to clear tunnels. So not confirmed.
| https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-01-22/ty-
| arti...
|
| Destroying schools:
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/24/how-israel-has-
| dest...
|
| Everything else, including these, are pretty easily
| searchable if you desire to learn more. I'm phone posting so
| sorry if this is messy.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Did you know that Israel controls a whopping 13% of Gaza's
| water? Maybe that wasn't widely reported for some reason.
| tmnvix wrote:
| I assume this is fresh water pumped into Gaza. What of the
| desalination plants? Cutting off all fuel surely ensures that
| that water source is also cut off. I would not be surprised
| to learn that this infrastructure has been targeted for
| destruction.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Israel controls all water in the West Bank. Palestinians in
| the West Bank are not allowed to even collect rainwater
| because all water infra must be approved by Israel, and they
| don't approve much.
| password54321 wrote:
| "After October 7, the Israeli government shut off the pipes
| that supply Gaza with water. It has since only resumed piping
| water to some parts of southern Gaza while some water has
| entered via Egypt, but it's not reaching everyone and is not
| nearly enough to meet the needs of Gaza's population,
| requiring many to rely on the local water supply."
|
| https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/16/israeli-authorities-
| cutt...
| genman wrote:
| Israel is using unguided bombs in precise fashion by doing a
| diving maneuver with its fighters. Guided bombs are released
| from the distance but dropping unguided bombs like this forces
| IDF pilots to engage directly with the target and this puts
| then into considerably larger risk.
|
| US military experts have confirmed that this tactic makes
| unguided bombs similar in accuracy to the guided bombs.
|
| All the other noise about the usage of unguided bombs is usual
| antisemitic hysteria.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| ICJ didn't reach any conclusions or positions except that IDF
| needs to be careful. No call for a ceasefire.
|
| I'm curious what people in Tel Aviv see in media. In America,
| it's wall-to-wall "police say"-like IDF clips and Bill Maher
| condemnation, dehumanization, and equivocating Palestine
| supporters with Hamas terrorists. The talking heads cheerfully
| greet Netanyahu.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| > In America, it's wall-to-wall "police say"-like IDF clips and
| Bill Maher condemnation, dehumanization, and equivocating
| Palestine supporters with Hamas terrorists. The talking heads
| cheerfully greet Netanyahu.
|
| As someone who also consumes US news, this does not describe
| what I've seen.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Local news or networks? Which ones?
| albntomat0 wrote:
| Written, a combination of New York Times, Washington Post,
| and what Google News aggregates (frequently includes Fox
| and a mix of websites of local news websites)
| Sporktacular wrote:
| There's so much wiggle room within the statement. For example
|
| 78 - Israel must... take all measures within its power to prevent
| the commission of... acts... in particular: ... (d) imposing
| measures intended to prevent births within the group.
|
| Bombing or evacuating hospitals will have that effect, but it
| would be extremely difficult to prove intention. So they can keep
| doing what they say is necessary.
|
| Many governments have issued vague calls to minimise civilian
| deaths etc. If Israel rejected those, it's hard to see it
| treating this differently.
| nicup12345689 wrote:
| Stopped short of.... exposing how powerless the ICJ actually is.
| megous wrote:
| All courts are powerless. Ever seen a judge enforcing anything?
|
| Enforcement organ here is Security Council and in particular
| individual countries.
| artur_makly wrote:
| https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/south-africa-will-win-order-...
| blitz_skull wrote:
| What's the ICJ's actual ability to enforce this? "Orders" sounds
| like they have some sort of weight to throw around if Israel
| doesn't comply, but I'm not familiar with the ICJ or what
| possible consequences could arise if Israel simply decided it was
| going to do what it wanted.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| None, but what this does is create a rather significant
| pressure, one of many. If it didn't, you wouldn't see so much
| defense of Israeli state action.
| bawolff wrote:
| In theory i think they are supposed to ask the security council
| to step in if the order is ignored. Which would be unlikely to
| do anything, so nothing.
|
| I think its likely israel will comply. The order is pretty weak
| and mostly stuff israel already claims to be doing. It wouldn't
| be worth the PR hassle to ignore it.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Israel's government doesn't care about PR hassle from the
| usual suspect. We may notice that they've had plenty of that
| lately and it did not stop them at all.
|
| Even if doing what the ICJ wants is easy, there's a strong
| reason not to (from their perspective) - it implies the ICJ
| should be obeyed and legitimizes them. But why should Israel
| do that? It's just another leftie NGO from Netenyahu's
| perspective. Start following what those guys want and soon
| they will have to do nothing even as Hamas attacks again and
| again.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > I think its likely israel will comply.
|
| Comply with "Don't genocide"? At best, they'll argue
| semantics while they keep doing what they've always done.
|
| Nevermind. I read the article:
|
| > Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the fact
| that the court was willing to discuss the genocide charges
| was a "mark of shame that will not be erased for
| generations." He vowed to press ahead with the war.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What's the ICJ's actual ability to enforce this?
|
| Zero, the same as most courts.
|
| Enforcement is a matter for (ordinarily) the Security Council,
| or, in the case of deadlock, potentially the GA acting under
| Uniting for Peace. Well, decisions on enforcement; _actual_
| enforcement is left to individual UN members, acting on
| direction of those UN bodies.
|
| Note that enforcement in practice is often a problem, as with
| the provisional measures adopted against Russia in the Ukraine
| v. Russia genocide case.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Am I to understand then that a member of the UN could decide
| that intervene? Or would they need to be "allowed" to
| intervene on behalf of the ICJ?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Am I to understand then that a member of the UN could
| decide that intervene?
|
| Unilateral intervention against genocide is possible and
| arguably legal even without an ICJ ruling, but ordinarily
| the preferred method would be sanction from the UN via a
| Security Council resolution, or by a General Assembly
| resolution from an emergency special session called to
| address a Security Council deadlock.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Zero, the same as most courts_
|
| Well, Israel _is_ a treaty signatory. That means an ICJ
| ruling is executable under Israeli law.
|
| That means jack shit right now. But every action taken
| hereonforth, by leadership or command or individual soldiers,
| carries with it the burden of future prosecution.
| zhengiszen wrote:
| Israel is now a nation linked with genocide practices. Sponsors
| nations of Israel are now been warned, the global community is
| watching and this decision was necessary to bring back confidence
| in judicial institutions. The Western hypocrisy is bare nude
| against the facts and proofs which Israel advocates didn't
| succeed in preventing.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Israel is now a nation linked with genocide practices.
|
| That's where apartheid policies will always lead you and Israel
| has always been a tolerated apartheid nation.
| robertoandred wrote:
| It's not an apartheid nation. Over 20% of Israelis are Arab.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Are they represented in any way in the Knesset? Are they
| treated the same is Jewish Israeli citizens when
| travelling? What about the Arabs in East Jerusalem? Are non
| Jewish citizens actually afforded equal protections under
| the Basic Laws? Does the "Law of Return" apply to non-
| Jewish Israelis? Economically, how are the Arabs doing
| compared to the Jews?
| nsguy wrote:
| Yes, Israeli Arabs are fairly represented in the Knesset,
| and in the courts, and everywhere. They carry an Israeli
| passport and are treated the same way and have the same
| travel rights.
|
| The people not treated the same are people that live in
| the occupied territories. The status of those territories
| has not been settled since 1967. I.e. the West Bank and
| Gaza. Israel accepts that those are occupied territories
| (it has not annexed them). The parties they were taken
| from (Jordan and Egypt) do not wish to take them back. So
| "Israel" proper does not discriminate against Arabs
| (broadly speaking) but the status of the occupied
| territories, that are under military rule, according to
| international law, is different.
|
| EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Isra
| el#Politi...
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Indeed it does appear they have representation in the
| Knesset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_membe
| rs_of_the_Kn...
|
| No idea about the rest of your questions, although the
| latter two are irrelevant (find any country where every
| group is doing just as well - it doesn't exist).
| strulovich wrote:
| Yes to all but the last.
|
| (That's not to say they're not infringed implicitly in
| the same ways a minority group in the US or Europe is,
| but the law gives Israeli citizens generally the same
| rights whether they're Arab or not.)
| fathyb wrote:
| That's a weird argument: more than 60% of South Africans
| were Black during apartheid, where the term originates.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Israel also controls the lives of all Palestinians, so the
| total % of Arabs out of controlled citizens by the Israeli
| government is over 50%, but most Arabs are disenfranchised
| by Israel, that's the fundamental root of why it is an
| apartheid state
| worksonmine wrote:
| A girl I know (Jewish) told me about the time she and her
| boyfriend visited Gaza like it was a trip to the zoo (her
| words). To her it was so strange how she could come and go
| as she wished, but they couldn't leave, ever.
|
| Think about that for a moment. What would you call such a
| place? How would you feel being born on the wrong side of
| the fence?
| willio58 wrote:
| Fully agreed. That the ICJ didn't order a ceasefire in this
| matter is honestly disgusting and just shows who's lives they
| value more.
|
| As an American Jew (non-religious), I cannot express enough how
| sad this entire situation has made me. I grew up learning about
| the Holocaust and learning how important it is for people to
| stand up when a government turns in that direction. Those
| morals meant I always knew that Israel was wrong in the
| situation with Palestine but this conflict has definitely
| lifted any clouds that remained on the situation.
|
| If you don't think Israel is a pure and simple apartheid state,
| I would very much recommend looking up the word in a
| dictionary. It's horrible that anyone has died on either side,
| but the imbalance at the current time in lives lost is just..
| saddening. When it comes to genocide, it's one of those things
| where you know it when you see it and if you don't see it I say
| open your eyes.
|
| Israel and the west can continue to label millions of people as
| terrorists to justify their acts, but history will hopefully
| look at this event with more understanding and empathy for
| those people Israel have shoved into small corners and starved
| of resources for decades. October 7 was terrible and should not
| have happened, but do you blame the oppressed people or do you
| blame the powerful government that has oppressed them?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Sponsors nations of Israel are now been warned
|
| Warned of what? That's what I don't understand. What possible
| consequences could there be for the US, UK, Germany etc.?
|
| You can't economically sanction a majority of the world
| economy, you are basically just sanctioning yourself.
|
| Not to mention what a war would look like.
| hyperdunc wrote:
| This is complete nonsense. Israel isn't pursuing genocide.
| They've killed less than 100,000 Palestinians out of several
| million. That's obvious restraint compared to what they could
| do if they really wanted to.
|
| You may not like Israel but the word 'genocide' is being abused
| here, and this whole ICJ ruling is theater.
| seydor wrote:
| "prevent genocide". The Srebrenica genocide was 8000 men.
| Estimates in gaza are at least 25000
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Both of these numbers pale in comparison to the civilian losses
| of Germany in WWII, and the Allies are not generally considered
| to have performed a genocide.
|
| Clearly the absolute number of casualties (not even civilian
| casualties in this case, that is allegedly more like 15k) is
| not sufficient on its own to define a genocide.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| The raw number of people killed isn't indicative of a
| genocide, it's intent and actions against a specific
| population. Over 1.5 million (out of 2 million) Gaza
| residents are displaced and facing starvation. Almost all of
| the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed. Many would say
| Israel is committing genocide and the court today said they
| will continue the investigation because it's plausible.
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| Indeed, you don't even need to kill to commit a genocidal
| act, you can also prevent people from having children.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| That alone doesn't amount to a genocide:
|
| - They're displaced because there was active fighting in
| their homes.
|
| - Hospitals were destroyed because they were being used as
| military outposts.
|
| Neither of those violates the rules of war, though Hamas
| using hospitals as outposts is a war crime.
|
| I think it's a tragedy the government of Gaza brought this
| disaster down upon them by committing war crimes against
| their stronger neighbor and then further war crimes using
| their own population as human shields.
|
| But that's not a genocide.
|
| Gaza can surrender any time and the collateral damage isn't
| out of line with modern urban conflicts. Eg, US in Iraq.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Hamas was not using hospitals as outposts. That's been
| debunked time and time again.
| dralley wrote:
| Here's a video of an RPG being fired from the doorstep of
| a hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pka7H1aMlkQ
| smoothjazz wrote:
| That first video looks like a guy with an RPG walking
| around an already bombed out parking lot (not firing at
| anything).
|
| What the second video is supposed to show is anyone's
| guess.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I don't think it's controversial to say that the Allies did
| ethnically cleanse parts of Eastern Europe to remove as many
| Germans as possible into German borders or internment camps,
| and they weren't too fussed if they died as a result. https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...
|
| For example, look at the section for Czechoslovakia
| (selecting it since it's inarguable Germans had lived in the
| country formerly known as Bohemia for centuries) alone:
|
| > Between 700,000 and 800,000 Germans were affected by
| irregular expulsions between May and August 1945.[108] The
| expulsions were encouraged by Czechoslovak politicians and
| were generally executed by order of local authorities, mostly
| by groups of armed volunteers and the army.[109] [...]
| Transfers of population under the Potsdam agreements lasted
| from January until October 1946. 1.9 million ethnic Germans
| were expelled to the American zone, part of what would become
| West Germany. [...] More than 1 million were expelled to the
| Soviet zone, which later became East Germany.[110] The West
| German government estimated the expulsion death toll at
| 273,000 civilians,[115] and this figure is cited in
| historical literature.[116] However, in 1995, research by a
| joint German and Czech commission of historians found that
| the previous demographic estimates of 220,000 to 270,000
| deaths to be overstated and based on faulty information. They
| concluded that the death toll was between 15,000 and 30,000
| dead, assuming that not all deaths were
| reported.[117][118][119][120]
|
| It's just that 'forced population transfers' were
| historically considered not outside the bounds of propriety.
| adriand wrote:
| Don't forget that these international laws and treaties were
| born out of a desire to prevent the horrors of WWII from
| occurring again. Lots of actors in that war including the
| Allies did terrible things that are prohibited by those laws.
| The genocide laws, as I understand, came about as a result of
| the Holocaust, but the use of WMDs against civilian targets
| (eg destroying a city with nuclear weapons) would not be
| legal either.
|
| Given this historical context, we don't need to "whatabout"
| with the Allies. Surely we can agree that we do not want a
| repeat of WWII.
|
| In terms of whether Israel's actions constitute genocide, we
| have yet to find out. Are they grossly disproportionate
| compared to Oct 7, and appalling in terms of their
| destruction of civilian life and property? I believe yes, and
| whether or not that is "genocide" is, to me, somewhat besides
| the point. Making it stop NOW is the point!
| Sabinus wrote:
| Genocide isn't about kill counts, it's about goals and the way
| you go about achieving them.
| dralley wrote:
| This is an absolute joke of a comparison. The Bosniaks at
| Srebrenica were executed at point blank range by soldiers who
| were not in a warzone and were given explicit orders to kill
| civilians, who were then dumped into mass graves. Thousands of
| women were raped, and hundreds were tortured, extending so far
| as to have had fingers, ears and limbs cut off with machetes.
|
| e.g. From Wikipedia
|
| > The mass executions followed a well-established pattern. The
| men were first taken to empty schools or warehouses. After
| being detained there for some hours, they were loaded onto
| buses or trucks and taken to another site for execution.
| Usually, the execution fields were in isolated locations. The
| prisoners were unarmed and in many cases, steps had been taken
| to minimise resistance, such as blindfolding them, binding
| their wrists behind their backs with ligatures or removing
| their shoes. Once at the killing fields, the men were taken off
| the trucks in small groups, lined up and shot. Those who
| survived the initial round of shooting were individually shot
| with an extra round, though sometimes only after they had been
| left to suffer for a time.
|
| However you feel about what is going on in Gaza, there are
| serious qualitative differences between the two.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| About the 25000 Gaza figure, Many places in the media ,it
| mentions the figure from the Health Ministry includes Hamas
| fighters. Elsewhere in media reports this is said to be several
| 1000, I've seen figures 7000-9000 quoted as number of Hamas
| fighters deaths. (FROM WSJ The Palestinian health ministry's
| figures don't distinguish between combatants and civilians. )
| mikrotikker wrote:
| That's almost 1 death per bomb dropped. Pretty ineffective
| genocide?
| glass_saturn wrote:
| Respectfully, would you have made the same comment about 'finding
| a place in your heart for the humanity of the other' if we lived
| during the holocaust, where 'one side' was being maimed and
| killed by the other, more powerful side?
|
| Would you have made the same comment if we were talking about
| apartheid in South Africa?
|
| How about if we were talking about how slavery ought to be
| stopped prior to 1865?
|
| Should we _always_ be looking to find the humanity in the other
| side, or is there something fundamentally different here?
|
| Not trying to disrespect anyone here, but sometimes we need to
| ask ourselves tough questions.
| dang wrote:
| I'll try to respond to this in a minute but in the meantime
| have detached it from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146010.
|
| Edit: I guess my basic response is that I'm skeptical of
| approaching these questions from that level of abstraction.
| None of us can say what we would have done in those horrible
| situations. We can only answer out of our own imagination about
| ourselves, which is likely to be completely unreliable.
|
| What I do think is that on this site, we can and should be
| working with our own responses in a way that is more than just
| venting them onto a perceived other. That's in keeping with
| what HN is supposed to be for.
| psyfi wrote:
| > Respectfully, would you have made the same comment about
| 'finding a place in your heart for the humanity of the other'
| if we lived during the holocaust, where 'one side' was being
| maimed and killed by the other, more powerful side?
|
| Yes..
|
| > Should we _always_ be looking to find the humanity in the
| other side, or is there something fundamentally different here?
|
| Yes..
| nf3 wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. The battle of gaza is not
| fought on HN. We can only comment on the situation, and we can
| do this with equanimity and compassion even if we disagree.
|
| Shouldn't we all be opposed to Nazism? Shouldn't we all be
| against slavery? Of course. But in the present discussion, I
| can be opposed to the atrocities of October 7th, while being
| sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, just as I can be
| opposed to the destruction of Gaza while having compassion for
| the Israelis.
|
| Being critical of either side doesn't mean I'm against them.
| glass_saturn wrote:
| > Being critical of either side doesn't mean I'm against
| them.
|
| The side that's now being maimed and killed in the tens of
| thousands with no recourse, had nothing to do with October 7.
| The sides that are relevant here in the context of this ICJ
| case are the civilians of the Occupied Palestinian
| Territories and the Government of Israel.
| theferalrobot wrote:
| Why are many respectful yet pro-israel posts being flagged and
| removed, while there are vile pro-hamas posts being flagged and
| left here? Why was discussion not allowed on Oct 7 but is now?
|
| I know you are trying but it does not seem even handed. I'm
| screenshotting a whole collection of them examples if seeing them
| together would be helpful.
| dang wrote:
| (I've detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146010.)
|
| I'd need to see links to specific comments, but certainly the
| flags aren't working any differently than they usually do. The
| only difference between [flagged][dead] and just [flagged] is
| the number of flags relative to upvotes; in the former case it
| would be higher than in the latter case.
|
| Your several comments in this thread seem to be coming from a
| place of battling for one side against the other. I'm sure you
| have very good reasons for it, but it's not the intended spirit
| of discussion here, as I tried to explain at the top of the
| thread. In such cases, where people have (legitimately) strong
| feelings on a topic, the temptation to see the mods as biased
| in favor of the opposite side is almost irresistible. It
| happens from every perspective on every divisive topic, and
| this topic is one of the most divisive we've ever seen.
| anon291 wrote:
| At the end of the day, the ICJ does not matter because it has no
| military, and the only major military power in the world, the
| United States of America, doesn't recognize its jurisdiction at
| all. Next time, they should try the Supreme Court if they
| actually want to make a difference (not that it'd work)
| megous wrote:
| America recognizes ICJ. It even has a judge in it, which
| presides the court currently.
|
| https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/donoghue_en.pdf
| locallost wrote:
| My views on the situation aside, the clearest I saw anyone
| communicate the issues from a global angle was the former French
| prime minister Dominique de Villepin
|
| Translated here:
| https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1718201487132885246
|
| Viewed from the angle of the West, I think the message it needs
| to avoid isolating itself from the world is very unusual for
| Western media and important.
|
| Quote:
|
| "Westerners must open their eyes to the extent of the historical
| drama unfolding before us to find the right answers."
|
| And
|
| "This Palestinian question will not fade. And so we must address
| it and find an answer. This is where we need courage. The use of
| force is a dead end. The moral condemnation of what Hamas did -
| and there's no "but" in my words regarding the moral condemnation
| of this horror - must not prevent us from moving forward
| politically and diplomatically in an enlightened manner. The law
| of retaliation is a never-ending cycle."
| pgeorgi wrote:
| All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their
| campaign. And then?
|
| Spend tons of money on iron dome to shoot down the rockets and
| hope that Hamas won't manage to conduct another massacre, even
| if "only" half the scope of October 7?
|
| This mess features not one but two parties who currently reject
| the concept of a cease fire.
| hypeit wrote:
| Israel _must_ face the reality that is an apartheid state
| that exists on occupied land. There is no solution until that
| happens. Just like apartheid South Africa was dismantled,
| Israel has to face the same fate or forever be locked into
| warfare and oppressing Palestinians.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that is an apartheid state that exists on occupied land_
|
| I've heard this line from people who say the West Bank and
| Gaza are the occupied land, to those who say _all_ of
| Israel is occupied land. The former makes sense. The latter
| is extreme.
|
| > _like apartheid South Africa was dismantled_
|
| South Africa wasn't as militarised as the Levant has
| become, unfortunately. As long as Iran seeks the
| destruction of Israel, itself and through its proxies, any
| Mandela-type accounting is probably fruitless. (I am open
| to being convinced otherwise.)
| pphysch wrote:
| Anyone can go on Google Earth, look at the official UN
| borders of Israel, then do a search in Hebrew or
| "synagogue" (obviously not _every_ synagogue is Israeli)
| or "checkpoint" and very clearly see the Israeli
| settlements _outside Israel 's legal borders_. Search
| "Hizma" for a good example [1].
|
| To make it even more obvious, toggle the "street view"
| layer over one of these areas and see what gets
| highlighted.
|
| There is a clear _apartness_ between the neatly-planned
| Israeli settlements, often built on demolished
| Palestinian villages, and the organic scattering of
| indigenous, primarily Arab Palestinian villages. With
| militarized checkpoints in between. Anyone can see it, if
| they have the will and a web browser.
|
| [1] - https://earth.google.com/web/search/Hizma+checkpoin
| t,+Sderot...
| YZF wrote:
| I'm not sure what point are you trying to make here.
|
| Nobody, including Israelis, will argue about the status
| of Palestinians living outside of Israel's border, in
| areas that are occupied (a terminology of international
| law that Israel also agrees to,
| https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/occupation ) do
| not enjoy equal rights to Israelis (Arabs, Jews,
| Christians and other) living within Israel's borders.
| During the US occupation of Japan or Germany post WW-II
| could the Japanese or Germans travel freely to the US?
| Vote in the US elections? It's true that Americans didn't
| settle those regions (they built military bases they
| still maintain so maybe a little).
|
| "often built on demolished Palestinian villages" - I
| think this isn't generally true in the west bank, if that
| was what this statement was about. There are certainly
| demolished villages within Israel's borders (going back
| to the 1948 war).
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > During the US occupation of Japan or Germany post WW-II
| could
|
| Which was a temporary state and certainly didn't last for
| 50 years.
|
| > It's true that Americans didn't settle those regions
| (they built military bases they still maintain so maybe a
| little).
|
| There are no countries in Europe where US is maintaining
| military bases without full consent of their governments.
|
| > could the Japanese or Germans travel freely to the US?
| Vote in the US elections?
|
| How is this relevant? The people living in the occupied
| territories do not enjoy equal rights with the illegal
| Israeli settlers who have taken parts of them over. It's
| basically colonialism.
| lacker wrote:
| Isn't that exactly the view of reality that the Israeli
| right wing holds? They would agree that the choices are
| either dismantling the state of Israel, or eternal warfare.
| Since they don't want to dismantle the state of Israel,
| they elect for eternal warfare.
|
| It's funny how on some questions, the most extreme people
| on both sides agree on the answer. Hamas and the Israeli
| right wing both agree that the only viable solution is for
| one ethnic group to control all the land from the river to
| the sea.
| hypeit wrote:
| > _Hamas and the Israeli right wing both agree that the
| only viable solution is for one ethnic group to control
| all the land from the river to the sea._
|
| That's certainly not what I want and from what I gather
| also not what Hamas wants. They just want Palestinians to
| have full human rights on their land, from the river to
| the sea. They don't want to eradicate anyone, they just
| don't want to live as second class citizens. Just like
| how dismantling South Africa did not require genociding
| the Afrikaners.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _They just want Palestinians to have full human rights
| on their land, from the river to the sea_
|
| This is presumably a one-state solution?
|
| The problem here being the Jews would be a minority in
| this state. Which leads to existential concerns regarding
| their survival. That can't be easily brushed aside.
| Particularly when members of Iran's Axis sport "death to
| Israel, a curse upon Jews" [1]. (Hamas and the Houthis
| sharing a backer isn't insignificant.)
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slogan_of_the_Houthi_
| movemen...
| YZF wrote:
| I feel that's an extremely naive view. How many Jews live
| peacefully and enjoy human rights under Arab rule in the
| middle east? Zero. How many in Gaza under Hamas? Zero.
| How many live in the west bank in areas controlled by the
| Palestinian Authority? Zero.
|
| So "Hamas" only wants Tel-Aviv "returned", Jersualem
| "returned", Haifa "returned", from the river to the sea,
| but somehow in that vision all the Jewish population
| lives peacefully and enjoys human rights that don't exist
| anywhere in the middle east?
| pgeorgi wrote:
| > They just want Palestinians to have full human rights
| on their land, from the river to the sea.
|
| What's the word for word translation of the original
| slogan again? "From the river to the sea, all land shall
| be Arab" if my dictionary doesn't fail me...
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > They just want Palestinians to have full human rights
|
| Hamas certainly doesn't want Palestinians to have full
| human rights. Regardless of how unjustifiable some
| Israel's actions are or what one might think about them
| Hamas is a fundamentalist terrorist organization and they
| certainly were/are/would be unwilling to extend "full
| human rights" to Palestinians or anyone living in Gaza or
| anywhere else.
| kansface wrote:
| The charter of Hamas explicitly calls for the eradication
| of the state of Israel, the death of presumably all Jews,
| Muslim rule of all of Palestine, the explicit rejection
| of peace or any negotiated settlement (with explicit
| condemnation of the Camp David Accords), and Jihad as
| individual duty in order to achieve the aforementioned
| goals.
| cassepipe wrote:
| That's certainly what _you_ (and me) would very much like
| Hamas to want but it is certainly not what Hamas actually
| _wants_
|
| You can only ignore who they are if you don't listen to
| what they say
| gizmo wrote:
| No. The Israeli right wing is trying (and succeeding at)
| making all of the land between the river and the sea
| exclusive property of the Jewish people. A quick glance
| at how the borders have evolved since 1948 makes this
| evident.
|
| Most Palestinians (and thankfully also a good number of
| Israeli citizens) want a pluralistic solution, without
| checkpoints and borders, with equal rights and equal
| representation for all.
|
| A two-state solution was possible 20 years ago, but with
| the current settlements in the West Bank with 450k or so
| Settlers and Gaza's total dependence on Israel for water,
| internet, electricity and many other of life's
| necessities, all paths towards a two-state solution have
| been severed.
|
| Now that Gaza has been bombed and bulldozed what
| possibility is there for a Palestinian state? All records
| have been destroyed. The courts are gone. The
| universities are gone. It's all gone.
|
| Israel will accept neither a one-state or two-state
| solution. By systematically destroying everything
| Palestinian the question resolves itself. That seems to
| be the strategy. And if we can take Israeli politicians
| at their word, this seems to have been the strategy for
| the past 20 years at least.
| cassepipe wrote:
| While I mostly agree with you, your point does not seem
| to contradict at all the point of the comment you are
| responding to
| golergka wrote:
| 7th of October has, as nothing else, shown to Israelis that
| dismantling the current system will mean physical, actual
| genocide, in the most gruesome form.
|
| Why would you expect people to agree to be cruelly murdered
| together with their loved ones?
| C6JEsQeQa5fCjE wrote:
| That happened in the context of an ongoing brutal
| occupation. Dismantling the system would change the
| circumstances, so we should not extrapolate.
| locallost wrote:
| If I knew the answer to that question I would be a high
| ranked politician. But for me it's important to keep in mind
| what he is saying here and also in another part explicitly: a
| diplomatic solution is possible and history proves that. So
| what I can do is reject the notion that what is happening is
| unavoidable.
| noqc wrote:
| How does history prove any such thing? That's neither how
| history or proof work. Most of the wars that have been
| resolved to everyone's benefit have done so by the
| unconditional surrender of the aggressors, followed by
| amicable reconstruction.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| >All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their
| campaign. And then?
|
| And then everyone who wants peace invests lots of money and
| expertise over a long time to build a modern, prosperous,
| stable Palestinian society, despite whatever setbacks,
| attacks, and sabotage occur from within and without.
|
| The only way to have peace is to give people a better option
| than becoming terrorists.
| eej71 wrote:
| I think the premise of "the law of retaliation is a moral dead
| end" is just a high minded pathway to endless violence and
| anarchy.
| hypeit wrote:
| This is descriptive, not prescriptive. He's saying that as
| long as Israel is an apartheid state, there will be violence
| and that's 100% correct.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > The law of retaliation is a never-ending cycle
|
| How many wars have the US and Japan fought after WWII?
|
| Or France and Germany after WWII?
|
| How many wars have the US Government and Native Americans
| fought after 1900?
|
| Sometimes a clear, overwhelming victory ends cycles of
| violence.
| lolinder wrote:
| Germany and Japan's peaceful modern history are less due to a
| clear, overwhelming victory than they were due to the
| recognition of an absolutely _horrific_ chapter in their
| country 's respective histories and a major cultural movement
| against the possibility of those kinds of atrocities
| happening again. Either country could easily come up with
| more than enough military might to win a war if they chose,
| but the horrors that they perpetrated live on as cultural
| scar tissue.
|
| The last example is just... horrific. I don't have more to
| say on it except that we shouldn't use it as a positive
| example of _anything_.
| romwell wrote:
| >due to the recognition of an absolutely _horrific_ chapter
|
| You mean, the absolutely _horrific_ military defeat.
| goatlover wrote:
| Once their WW2 militaries were utterly defeated and their
| leadership was forced into unconditional surrender,
| followed by Allied occupation and rebuilding.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| To say it more succinctly, Axis countries clearly had a lot
| to gain from peace (namely stable happy lives again) and
| nothing to gain from further violence.
|
| Whereas you might say that many Palestinians (specifically
| the ones who joined Hamas) had little to gain from the
| status quo, and little to lose from violence. When you are
| born locked in the world's largest prison, becoming a
| terrorist might seem appealing.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| The Marshall Plan and favorable trade agreements the allies
| gave Japan would never be extended by Israel the way it is
| and acts now, so there has to be another solution.
| Destruction didn't turn Germany and Japan around, the ability
| to uplift themselves did. The very thing which has been
| denied to Gaza since 2005 at least (and likely much longer)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Marshall Plan and favorable trade agreements the allies
| gave Japan would never be extended by Israel the way it is
| and acts now_
|
| Between America and the oil-rich Gulf, I think we can
| figure it out.
| mjcohen wrote:
| Germany and Japan did not have anything in their
| constitutions advocating the destruction of the allies.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| The US Government continues to employ militarized forces to
| suppress Indigenous resistance to this very day.
| munk-a wrote:
| Yea, I think it's pretty odd how little awareness of tribal
| councils, discussions of self-governance, and resistance
| from Native Americans there is in the modern America but it
| feels like the US almost wants to forget it has
| reservations.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| This is intentional. It is a piece of a type of cultural
| warfare that extends from residential schools to the
| naming of sports teams. It is the reason the US military
| uses names of tribal groups for machines of war. It is
| the reason popular media refers to indigenous people
| exclusively in the past tense.
| munk-a wrote:
| That's exactly the point, at least how I'm reading it.
| Between the US and Japan peace and diplomacy was allowed to
| rule instead of constant violent retaliation. With France and
| Germany the same - the two countries have, in a pretty
| meaningful way, simply merged into a single country along
| with a lot of the rest of Europe.
|
| When it comes to the US Government and Native Americans it's
| a far less good example - there have been militarized Native
| resistance groups at times since the 1900s and there has been
| open violence (see, for instance, Leonard Peltier and AIM)...
| in a large way America succeeded with erasing native peoples
| from their lands - and ditto with Canada - to the point where
| the groups are too fragmented to form any serious claims at
| independence. I also think Nixon (yes that Nixon) helped cool
| things off pretty seriously by, essentially, starting
| reparation programs to help reinject economic health into
| reservations - while those have had very underwhelming
| success at fully solving the problem America has been trying
| to uplift instead of suppress those communities.
|
| All this stuff is really, really complicated - what defines a
| culture and a nation is extremely nebulous and subject to
| heavy revision as time passes. But we're all people and we
| need to be able to talk about peace even if we have deep
| historical wounds.
| locallost wrote:
| The US has fought many wars since WW2 and has basically
| failed to win any of them. Again from the interview:
|
| The second thing is a targeted response. Let's define
| realistic political objectives. And the third thing is a
| combined response. Because there is no effective use of force
| without a political strategy. We are not in 1973 or in 1967.
| There are things no army in the world knows how to do, which
| is to win in an asymmetrical battle against terrorists. The
| war on terror has never been won anywhere. And it instead
| triggers extremely dramatic misdeeds, cycles, and
| escalations. If America lost in Afghanistan, if America lost
| in Iraq, if we lost in the Sahel, it's because it's a battle
| that can't be won simply, it's not like you have a hammer
| that strikes a nail and the problem is solved. So we need to
| mobilize the international community, get out of this Western
| entrapment in which we are.
| svara wrote:
| That France and Germany are now good neighbors is a miracle.
|
| It's possible because wise humans on both sides realized that
| the law of retaliation would cause a never ending cycle.
|
| I worry that this sort of wisdom might be in short supply
| these days.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| No. The fundamental flaw in this reasoning is the assumption
| that overwhelming victory is what established the current
| world order.
|
| Rebuilding Europe via the Marshall plan, which involved
| humanization of individuals who fought on behalf of evil, is
| why there is peace in Europe. Likewise, the US reconstruction
| of Japan is why the US and Japan are at peace.
|
| The US held the position of power and chose not to exercise
| it tyrannically. That is why there is peace.
|
| The native American case is much closer to supporting your
| argument because genoicdal efforts were made against them and
| they were forced to submit, and then tyrannical power was
| exercised over them, maybe even to this day. However again,
| Native Americans participate in American civil society, there
| have been (probably insufficient) efforts for reparations,
| they do have land where they administer their own laws. In
| some locations native American heritage is celebrated and
| native American culture is promoted.
|
| There is relative peace with native Americans because we are
| not particularly tyrannical, and I would say for the most
| part, modern Americans see Native Americans as humans not
| "savages."
|
| Seeing your enemies as equally valid humans, who might have
| done things you would do if you grew up under their
| conditions, is what creates peace.
|
| Peace is a function of humanization, not a function of
| victory. Victory without humanization does not end the cycle
| of violence.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > The law of retaliation is a never-ending cycle.
|
| Well, there _are_ ways to end it. Historically there have been
| thousands of cyclical conflicts that eventually ended without a
| diplomatic solution.
| locallost wrote:
| In this situation I disagree. The world is overwhelmingly pro
| Palestine, and the Arab world obviously. They will not go
| away. Israel will not go away either.
| eej71 wrote:
| They don't have to go away.
|
| But, I think its reasonable to assert that the Arab world
| desperately needs to become more secularized. Most of the
| Arab world is deeply anti-semitic, deeply tribal (even
| amongst themselves), and deeply backwards in their
| orientation to what makes a free society possible.
|
| In that sense, the palestinians need a big cultural change.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > The world is overwhelmingly pro Palestine
|
| That's arguable, certainly in the west at least. Even if
| most people oppose the current war/atrocities that doesn't
| mean that they generally favour Palestine (or especially
| Hamas..) over Israel (.e.g. like you didn't have to be pro-
| Sadam to oppose the war in Iraq).
| jmyeet wrote:
| It's worth noting that the ICJ like pretty much all international
| bodies has no enforcement power and countries will routinely
| ingore the rulings they don't like.
|
| Still, things like this matter. It adds to public pressure.
|
| Another thing is that how judges rule will often align with
| national interests rather than any facts in any case. So in a
| case against Israel you might expect the US to side with Israel
| regardless of the facts. Likewise, China might side against a
| genocide case because it doesn't want to set a precedent given
| the history with the Uyghurs. Likewise, Turkey will be aware of
| how any precedent may affect their treatment of Kurds, and so on.
|
| So what do you do if you're one of these countries and the facts
| are against you? You go through this dance of trying to bypass
| the facts and get your desired outcome on procedural grounds.
|
| I mention this because regular courts (eg in the US) do _the
| exact same thing_. The Supreme Court may grant standing on
| tenuous grounds for a case they want to rule on or deny standing
| on procedural grounds to avoid making a ruling when the facts are
| "against" them. Likewise, they may make a narrow ruling to avoid
| a broad precedent or seek a broad precedent if it's the desired
| outcome.
|
| "Standing" here means you're an affected party who is allowed to
| bring an action to court. There are lots of rules depending on
| the action to decide if you have standing. There's also
| historical tradition. For example, SCOTUS will tend to favor
| granting standing in First Amendment cases because government
| restraint on speech is viewed as having a chilling effect on
| freedom of expression.
|
| Courts are political. They have always been political. The idea
| that judges are impartial scholars isolated from the world is a
| myth. This is what I want people to understand. I'm not even
| agreeing with or dismissing the ICJ's conclusions here. I'm
| talking about the judicial process.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| The US judge seemed to go with the majority here. The Israeli
| judge concurred on some of the charges plausibility but not
| all. Only one judge disagreed with the court on all charges.
|
| I don't think the judges had the kind of bias alleged by your
| comment (it's certainly possible they could have but their
| opinions don't seem to reflect that)
| thsksbd wrote:
| The ICJ punted.
|
| The ruling is a joke, how can you rule against the defendant and
| yet order the defendant to monitor themselves?
|
| The ICJ knew if it found against Israel it would loose all
| credibility outside the West, but it also had too much political
| pressure from the West to rule for Israel.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _ICJ punted_
|
| Yes. But this isn't the final ruling.
|
| South Africa asked for something analogous to a preliminary
| injunction. The ICJ declined to order a preliminary ceasefire.
| Instead, the case will be tried as usual.
| thsksbd wrote:
| Which will take years that the Palestinians do not have
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _take years that the Palestinians do not have_
|
| Sure. I don't think the ICJ was envisioned as an
| incapacitating body. Instead its existence is a deterrent.
| A venue for retribution and possibly even restitution.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The ICJ punted.
|
| No, it didn't. It ruled on what amounts to (in the parlance of
| the US legal system) a preliminary injunction, ordering one
| because the pleadings and supporting evidence on initial review
| warrant it, while the process of a trial on the merits will
| take longer.
|
| > The ruling is a joke, how can you rule against the defendant
| and yet order the defendant to monitor themselves?
|
| The only people the ICJ can order are the parties. External
| monitoring and enforcement is a matter for, primarily, the UN
| Security Council.
|
| > The ICJ knew if it found against Israel it would loose all
| credibility outside the West, but it also had too much
| political pressure from the West to rule for Israel.
|
| The process by which the ICJ might rule for or against Israel,
| rather than ordering provisional measures, is much longer. This
| is just an early part of the case.
| thsksbd wrote:
| The ICJ could, however, order a ceasefire that is a freezing
| of the conflict.
|
| This process will take years that the Palestinians do not
| have.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The ICJ could, however, order a ceasefire that is a
| freezing of the conflict.
|
| It could, as it did against Russia in Ukraine v. Russia
| (2022). But note that in Ukraine v. Russia it specifically
| cited the resolution adopted by the General Assembly under
| Uniting for Peace addressing the Russia invasion as a
| violation of the UN Charter as a violation of the
| sovereignty and territorial integrity of another UN member,
| that is, it was addressing an operation already declared
| illegal independent of the issue before the Court.
|
| Ordering a halt to an operation that otherwise might fall
| within the recognized UN Charter right if individual or
| collective self-defense is, especially when the allegedly
| aggressing party is not subject to the order, seems pretty
| hard to justify as a provisional measure.
|
| (One might also note the absence of an effect of that order
| in Ukraine v. Russia.)
| thsksbd wrote:
| It did order Hamas to release its prisoners and not
| Israel, even though Hamas wasn't on trial and Israel has
| multiple times more children [1] in jail than all Hamas'
| prisoners.
|
| Its a punt by an organization that has always been
| useless except to tut tut people and regimes the West
| doesn't like.
|
| [1] I mean child as is used colloquially, not as "under
| 18" in the manner is often disingenuously used.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It did order Hamas to release its prisoners
|
| No, it didn't order Hamas to do anything, as it has no
| authority to order non-state actors. It, in the last of
| the paragraphs that are part of the discussion and not
| part of the provisional measures that constitute the
| binding orders, "calls on" Hamas and other armed groups
| to release all hostages immediately and unconditionally.
| w0mbat wrote:
| The ruling also ordered Hamas to release all hostages, and Hamas
| has previously claimed they would abide by any ruling of the
| court. I find it unlikely though that they will comply.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The ruling didn't, abd couldn't, order Hamas to do anything:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39149823
|
| > Hamas has previously claimed they would abide by any ruling
| of the court
|
| No, Hamas previously claimed that they would observe a
| ceasefire if the court imposed one on Israel, conditioned on
| Israeli compliance with the same. They didn't say they would do
| anything related to anything other than an ceasefire order.
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