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Comment by glass_saturn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

> 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..

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