Hacker News Reader

Comment by nielsbot | Hacker News Reader

> Engadget frames Israel’s surveillance of Palestinian telecommunications as extraordinary, but such practices are common in national security contexts

It's still bad

> Israel faces real and ongoing threats from groups such as Hamas

Israel helped put Hamas in power, FWIW. Maybe instead of stealing Palestians' land, Israel should give them citizenship and voting rights. It's the moral thing to do.

> Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context

Criticism of Israeli policy should account for their colonialism and war crimes. It's a moral issue. The rest be damned.

View on HN

Israel did not “put Hamas in power.” Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. These were monitored by international observers, including the Carter Center, who confirmed the vote was largely fair: https://cartercenter.org/news/pr/palestine_013006.html. The idea that Israel created Hamas is a misrepresentation of historic tactical decisions in the 1980s, when Israel tolerated some Islamist activity as a counterweight to the PLO. That is not the same as “putting Hamas in power,” and certainly not a reason to ignore Hamas’s current actions.

As for land and citizenship, roughly 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab, including Muslims and Christians, with full voting rights. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not Israeli citizens because they are governed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas respectively, per the Oslo Accords. Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed. See: https://ecf.org.il/issues/issue/153.

Calling the situation “colonialism” ignores the fact that both sides claim historic ties to the land and have engaged in multiple rounds of negotiations. That includes offers of statehood rejected by Palestinian leadership, notably in 2000 and 2008. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28israel-t.html.

Security and morality are not mutually exclusive. Both sides deserve accountability and safety.

Talk of colonialism often descends into semantics. I think the main issue with Israeli policy in this regard is that Israelis are attempting and succeeding to expel people from their homes. That is happening on the west bank now.

> Israel did not “put Hamas in power.”

I said helped put Hamas in power. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

> not a reason to ignore Hamas’s current actions

The problematic actions under discussion are the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

> Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed

So you're saying they wouldn't go for it? Let's ask them.

> both sides claim historic ties to the land

You act as if the land was empty when the Zionists showed up.

> Security and morality are not mutually exclusive

Depends how you define security. Israel is defining it as genocide. And we're not even mentioning the horrible actions happening in the West Bank. Or in Syria and Lebanon for that matter.

> Both sides deserve accountability and safety

This is not symmetrical. One side has modern weapons, surveillance, air power, an modern army and an embargo on the other with the backing of the US (and other Western states.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com