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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

This thread is about this sentence from another commenter:

> 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 advocating for destroying an entire country and deporting or killing the people in it. This is the context in which I read your comment, because you came to their defense. I read your comment as explaining why you thought their comment was a perfectly OK one.

I'm happy to read you don't actually agree on this with them, and I think we pretty much agree.

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You're misreading what I said (might be my fault for not being clear enough!). I mean that the occupier would have to genocide all of the occupied to have peace. Essentially there will be permanent resistance unless the occupied are given full rights or completely oppressed. Clearly the former is desirable and the latter very undesirable.

Right! I did indeed misunderstand that. And I agree with @biorach's point in response to yours: of course there are compromises and middle grounds and ways forward that hurt for everybody (but less than perpetual war would). It's how this stuff usually goes.

I think that's a honest rebuttal to my point even if I don't agree. I don't though because I think Nakba was egregious, asymmetric and recent enough that I believe the damage can be undone.

> you came to their defense

not to argue, but I want to be really really really clear on this. I did not come to their defense. Please see my direct reply to their comment.

Yeah indeed, and in fact I just edited that out because I realized I had it wrong. EDIT: turns out I edited the next thing out, the "defense" thing is still in. Keeping it on because otherwise this gets even more messy.

ANYWAY I think you made your point clear and we agree, sorry for messy edit commenting here :)

FWIW I clicked "vouch" on your response to them, I have no idea why it got flagged into oblivion, it's the kind of nice concise nuanced point that I wish I could make :D

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