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Comment by bbqfog | Hacker News Reader

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Israel was massively radicalized by October 7th. Prior to October 7th, a lot of Israelis believed that if Palestinians had a better economy and could afford a comfortable life, peace would be possible. October 7th was not just a surprise to many Israelis, but also the atrocities were so horrible that it radically changed how Israelis view the situation. This is hard to grasp, but a lot of people don't really understand what happened on October 7th, because this was stuff was obviously not shown on mainstream media.

The entire situation is very tragic. But ultimately, October 7th killed any chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, for a long long time. The current population in Israel will never forget October 7th, there are some seriously cannot-be-unseen NSFL atrocities.

> Israel was massively radicalized by October 7th

Israel had been locking Gaza in a total blockade for 17 years (with talk of "keeping them on a diet"), plus had bombed Gaza multiple times resulting in more than 5000 deaths (= 5 October 7ths- they called this "mowing the lawn". During these bombing campaigns we have pictures of Israelis enjoying the show from afar from observation points with food and drinks).

In the meanwhile they enforced an apartheid regime in the West Bank, building new settlements for hundreds of thousands of residents, and launching pogroms to drive away the Palestinian population.

So no, it wasn't Oct 7th that radicalised them.

It is telling that you also mention "better economy" and "comfortable life", but not "equal rights" or "self-government" or any such thing. Even with animals in the zoo one doesn't think that all they need is being well-fed.

This talk of "better economy" and "comfortable life" is pure self-deception on the part of Israelis. They liked to think that they would like peace with the Palestinians, while at the same time making no significant objection to their country implementing an apartheid regime and building settlements and imprisoning millions under an airtight blockade.

Such is the level of self-deception that they are genuinely surprised and angry each time the Palestinians hit back- they see these as unprovoked- worse, ungrateful- attacks.

Myself, I have no sense of what it's like in Israel right now, but I have noted several times that the October 7th attack was proportionally worse to Israel than 9/11 was to the US, so I can easily believe that this had a similar impact on the national psyche.

That said, I do often read comments and news articles claiming that Netanyahu's government is unpopular within Israel, and that he only maintains his position by the support of the… well, there's not a polite way to describe the attitudes of the settlers who take land that isn't in Israel and then demand Israel defend them, nor those who demand violence while claiming their religious beliefs prohibit serving in the armed forces even though everyone else has conscription.

Not confident of that popularity though, as Googling gets me an extraordinarily broad range of popularity scores.

That said:

> But ultimately, October 7th killed any chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, for a long long time.

Did any chance of a peace live before?

The Israeli PM who signed the Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Rabin, was shot by a far-right-wing Israeli extremist for signing them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords

A large portion of the Palestinian population also opposed it.

I agree that what the IDF is doing to Palestinians, now and for a long time is very tragic, and it's also tragic how many of their own people and fellow soldiers they (IDF) killed on Oct 7th.

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Which atrocities? What wasn't shown on mainstream media?

In my experience, most of what mainstream media claimed initially around atrocities was proven to be categorically false - up to and including the president of the USA going on live TV and lying about having seen evidence of baby killing, with staffers having to sheepishly and quietly release a "that didn't happen" statement later.

Of course these retractions happened later, and Israel's explicit and planned messaging of atrocities, inhuman animal behavior, etc had its desired effect of riling people up to support a genocidal assault after a single successful counterattack from an impoverished people at war for generations.

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You can't post like this here, and you've been breaking the site guidelines in other places too. If this keeps up, we're going to have to ban your account. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

I don't necessarily think you're wrong, but drawing any conclusions from random people on Twitter seems like a mistake. They might not be human, they might not be Israeli, and they might not be representative of Israel's 9 million people. I wouldn't want anybody to judge me based on how English-speaking Twitter accounts behave.

The IDF and elected islraelis officials were openly genicidal and bragged about killing civilians. It wasn't just random people.

In fairness to Israel, they have a peace movement and human rights movement and so on. It’s just that even before October 7th, they were getting increasingly outnumbered.

The situation is very heterogeneous: not all Israelis are okay with what their government does, and are increasingly outspoken against it.

Not all Israelis are Jewish: note also that substantial numbers of Israelis are of Arab background, some with relatives (or fellow Muslims) in Palestine. Most of non-Jewish Israelis oppose the military measures. (But there are even a few that are upset that they cannot serve in the IDF because Arab Israeli citizens are not trusted enough to serve in Israel's military - in violation of equal treatment of cizitens.)

Not all Jews are in favor of Israels military action: in particular among the most religious people, there is a division between those disgusted by Israel's own military action (c.f. Rabbi David Weiss at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNtMV2i8-8 ) and those right-wingers that even volunteer to become settlers in areas cleared by bulldozers from Palestinian homes in violation of the law (UN resolution 2334, Fourth Geneva Convention).

What is clear and undisputable is the power asymmetry between Israel and Palestine.

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