Deep Zionism
scottaaronson.blog
scottaaronson.blog
The Palestinians through years of Israeli reinforcements have chosen Hamas, an organization that thinks that sacrificing them all is beneficial, and it is actually partially working for them on international opinion.
Unfortunately both sides now needs to pay for their choices
Unfortunately actual chronology shows that whenever Israel downsized its occupation, it has been attacked by the Palestinians, leading to more occupation (such as now)
What's Gaza? Gaza is just a region of Palestine. Gazans have the full right to fight against the occupier of Palestine. Besides, Gaza was still considered occupied due to the complete control Israel exercised in it (you confuse occupation with colonisation).
> whenever Israel downsized its occupation, it has been attacked by the Palestinians
Israel doesn't need to downsize its occupation. It needs to end it. Whatever consequences it suffers while still occupying land that it doesn't have a right to, are just consequences and it can't complain. How is this not clear?
No I do not, I don't know anywhere else in the world where occupation was defined as a blockade. Occupation is troops on the ground. Gaza was only considered occupied by Hamas and related propaganda, internationally it was not considered occupied, in fact it was the only time and place in history where Palestinians had full sovereignty
Israel previously had civilian population settled in Gaza, military bases and military government (hence occupation). It then retreated to the internationally recognized borders and removed all civilians from their homes, in a deeply expensive internal political effort.
Naively expecting the international community to give it the needed backing. However as was discovered it was never about occupation all along.
> Israel doesn't need to downsize its occupation. It needs to end it. Whatever consequences it suffers while still occupying land that it doesn't have a right to, are just consequences and it can't complain. How is this not clear?
Oslo accords was a process of progression towards Palestinian independence. This was derailed by Hamas suicide bombings in Israeli towns and PLO rejecting peace offers and initiating the second intifada. Just as the Gazan independence was removed due to Palestinian actions. It is quite clear to me that the Palestinians are ironically doing anything within their power to prevent independence.
This is false, all relevant international organisations (the UN, the ICC, the ICJ, the WHO, the Red Cross, all the human rights organisations), an overwhelming majority of legal experts considered Gaza still occupied because of the amount of control Israel exercised on it. What you think in this respect, or your ignorance of the facts, has no relevance on the matter.
> Oslo accords was a process of progression towards Palestinian independence
There is no "process of progression" (LOL). Israel has to abandon all its settlements and East Jerusalem and retreat within the 1967 borders. They are free to build a steel wall 100 metres high between them and the Palestinians, if they so desire- within their own territory of course. What is not clear about this?
So can you please tell me what control Israel exerted? I see a land where Palestinians had an elected government, police, health system, army and so forth. That's exactly the definition of independence. What I do not see is Israeli troops anywhere in Gaza, which is the meaning of the English word "Occupation".
I think this is a perfect example of how Palestinian propaganda works. In order to ignore facts so egregiously you have to redefine words: Therefore you get occupation without troops, apartheid without racism, genocide with a majority of militant casualties and colonizers who are the original population
> They are free to build a steel wall 100 metres high between them and the Palestinians, if they so desire- within their own territory of course. What is not clear about this?
As was tried word for word in Gaza and ended in a bloodbath, mass executing Israeli citizens by death squads within the 1967 borders. While the occupied part of Palestine is relatively peaceful, so why do you think Israel should try what was just tried and so hopelessly failed?
I believe that a just solution is a two state solution, but it doesn't seem like your idea of complete withdrawal tomorrow (as was done) is workable
Haha, no. The international community, international organisations and law experts have already established the consensus that Gaza was still under occupation. If you have a problem with this, it's a problem between you and, well, reality- I'm not wasting my time discussing it here.
> As was tried word for word in Gaza
No. I said "retreat within the 1967 borders"- did Israel retreat within the 1967 borders? No. It still occupies the West Bank and Gaza, expanding illegal settlements in the West bank, occupying East Jerusalem, implementing apartheid, periodically bombing Gaza and killing, displacing, imprisoning people in the West Bank.
> While the occupied part of Palestine is relatively peaceful
No. Dated September 2023:
"2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank"
"At least 38 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began, said Save the Children."
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/...
And this is- the murder of children- just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm sorry, you can quote the UN human rights commission claiming that the sky is red as everyone perceive color differently but that doesn't change anything.
Quoted from the 1907 Hague Convention
Art. 42. Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.
> No. I said "retreat within the 1967 borders"- did Israel retreat within the 1967 borders?
And when this happens again who will prevent a massacre? Would you come help?
I know debating this conflict is worldwide entertainment by now, but seriously do you think that is acceptable to anyone living there?
> "2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank"
Surely hundreds of dead is more peaceful for both sides than the 10ks in Gaza, and you are focusing on a specific very bloody outlier year, you can compare other years (how many died in 2020?)
Like it or not, but the west bank has been far less dangerous for both Israelis and Palestinians even though both live in sometimes extreme proximity and with some very extreme elements on both sides
The reason is that because Israel has troops on the ground (occupation) it is able to prevent attacks and the extreme Palestinian organizations could never muster an army-sized force like in Gaza.
When Israel started retreating in Oslo is exactly when mass-killings started in Israeli towns. A sacrifice Israelis were willing to make, until it was proven that the Palestinian leadership was hardly interested in peace (repeated rejections of peace offers and initiation of hostilities)
>if
Please provide evidence for your conclusion that it’s not an occupation;
My source was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_occupation_of_the_Gaza...
Full quote being:
>The United Nations, international human rights organizations,[1] International Court of Justice, European Union, International Criminal Court, some of the international community and some legal academics and experts regard the Gaza Strip to still be under military occupation by Israel, as Israel still maintains direct control over Gaza's air and maritime space, six of Gaza's seven land crossings, a no-go buffer zone within the territory, and the Palestinian population registry.[2][3] Israel, the United States, and other legal,[4] military, and foreign policy experts otherwise contend that Israel "ceded the effective control needed under the legal definition of occupation" upon its disengagement in 2005.[3] Israel continues to maintain a blockade of the Gaza Strip, limiting the movement of goods and people in and out of the Gaza Strip.
None of the Wikipedia reference links support the idea that Israel has stopped occupying Palestine; they simply comment on whether that affects the conflicts international legal status and argue that it doesn’t.
The importance from Israel’s perspective of them officially “not occupying “ Palestine is that they are then justified in more ruthless offensive attacks. Are you taking this position in order to defend Israel’s continued offensive against civilians in Palestine?
Your appeal to authority does not matter as this is a matter that was not never resolved in courts, and the reasons Israel has withdrawn in the first place was due to international support, which also included the western countries you mention.
Generally, Anyone who can read the definition of occupation in both international law and English knows it will be very hard to prove what went in Gaza previous to the war was occupation.
The fact that this, similar to other axioms in the conflict are considered truism while no one stops to thinks on whether they even make sense, is a good example of prejudices at play.
Another recent example, the UN having to redefine famine in order to declare famine in Gaza. Do you see the pattern?
In 2005-2023, which is the time I was talking about:
1. Israeli troops were not anywhere inside Gaza
2. There was Hamas, a force that actually controlled Gaza, with its police, army, hospitals, schools, public servants and tendency to shoot opposing Palestinians in the knees
> the Court is of the view that Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has not entirely released it of its obligations under the law of occupation. Israel’s obligations have remained commensurate with the degree of its effective control over the Gaza Strip.
Clearly "regard[ing] the Gaza Strip to still be under military occupation by Israel" is not an accurate characterization of the court's finding. Marko Milanovic had a nice post [1] about possible interpretations of the court's ambiguous wording.
There's no way the court would have had a consensus for a finding that Gaza was plainly occupied; even this advisory opinion was opposed by 3 of 15 judges.
There have been plenty of attempts to correct inaccurate info like this on Wikipedia, but in the last few years it's become rather futile since editors with an anti-Israeli agenda are a strong majority. (See e.g. the updated definition of Zionism they pushed through: "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible".)
[1] https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-occupation-of-gaza-in-the-icj-p...
From the article: Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I was very wrong.
In his latest blog posting, he explains that the current situation in Gaza is analogous to an evil murderer kidnapping your child and strapping her to train tracks before an oncoming train. If you pull a lever to divert the train it will instead kill five of the murderer’s children. This situation provides for him a definition of Zionism:
> Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob…
> Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have.
Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.
Source: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15191
And how do you even know that there have been 60k deaths in Gaza? That number is likely a vast underestimate.
Elsewhere in the thread, I supplied data showing 130 births/day in April 2025, the most recent month for which data is available. No matter how you slice it, (100 births/day, 130 births/day, 150 births/day, or 180 births/day) there have been at least 70,000 births in Gaza since the war started, though likely many, many more. This exceeds the number of known deaths by any measure. Were you familiar with these figures previously? Can you supply alternative data showing a lower birth rate? No and no.
As for the deaths, you asked if I know there have been ~60k deaths. The truth is I don't know there have been 60k deaths in gaza, and neither do you - that figure comes from Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization and belligerent to the war, and it includes natural deaths, deaths reported in google forms,terrorist deaths, palestinian deaths caused by Hamas, and has had to be downward revised (including cutting the known number of female and child deaths by half) several times in the conflict - so for most of the conflict at least, people citing these figures would have been wrong. But I'm willing to use this figure here because I consider it an upper limit.
Source: "About 130 children are being born daily in Gaza as Israeli authorities' total siege on supplies enters its second month, putting mothers and newborns at risk as medical and food supplies run out and a lack of flour closes all bakeries" https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
Yes, conditions are bad in Gaza, and yes there have been many deaths, but it's not a genocide if the population is rising.
You may think data.techforpalestine.org is a biased source, but their total identified death count roughly agrees with every other source I could find.
- the survey recorded a surprisingly small excess of nonviolent deaths (in excess of what's demographically expected), this is discussed in the preprint. The much larger number of violent deaths is almost matched by births, so the total balance is somewhat towards shrinking, in that cohort
- however, it is well known that the violent deaths occurred overwhelmingly early in the war (so far) - according to the official Hamas statistics, something like 50% of all casualties are in the first 4 months of the war, out of 22 so far. Whether these statistics are over- or under-counted is not likely to make a dent in this huge imbalance. So as the war is ongoing - and it's already been another 8 months since the 14 covered by the survey - the death rate is still "collapsing" compared to average rate so far.
- at the same time, the birth rate has evidently not seen such a huge collapse since the first 4 months of the war; this can't be gleaned from the survey, but enough plausible reports (e.g. what @richardfeynman quoted) exist that point in that direction.
So if we consider the survey relatively representative of the entire population, the imbalance towards shrinking population after 14 months is already almost certainly repaired towards growing after another 8 months, because so few civilians are violently killed (again, compared to the first 4 months of the war) in 2025.
Additionally, your argument hinges on a single preprint paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed.
And finally, we don't even need to play these games counting up death tolls in different, increasingly creative ways. There are already reports from the UN and others directly confirming that Gaza's population has decreased: <https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...>
There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.
There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.
I would also like to note that you found a study looking at birth/death rates, but after realizing it suggested a shrinking population, decided to combine information from that study with information from a separate dataset so that the population could be argued to be growing.
And none of this actually takes nonviolent deaths into account, however small you believe that number may be.
This... is not good science.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/senior-hamas-of...
https://www.memri.org/tv/sami-abu-zuhri-hamas-gaza-war-babie... (Around 00:40)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_humanitarian_crisis_%2820...
"On 18 January 2024, Natalia Kanem, the executive director of the UN Population Fund, spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, stating the situation was the "worst nightmare" the UNPF representative had ever witnessed, as there were 180 women giving birth daily, sometimes on the streets of Gaza, as the territory's health system collapsed"
Source: https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born... "About 130 babies will be born in Gaza every day over a month into a healthcare system driven to the verge of collapse, where some may not survive complications at birth. "
The 60k death count is likely an overcount, not an undercount, but this one I won't google for you. However you cut the numbers, and even if you believe in nameless ghosts under the rubble, there's been no population collapse.
As for the 60k count, every single source I have found suggests that 60k is a massive underestimate. You'll need to provide some very strong evidence to back up your claim to the contrary.
Regardless of the balance of birth and death rates, multiple sources have reported a significant decline in Gaza's population this year. So far, all evidence you have provided contradicts your own initial claim.
Whether you believe there have been 100 births a day or 140 or 150 or 180, I have demonstrated that there were tens of thousands of births during the war in gaza, using credible sources like the UNOCHA and WHO. But even if you assume ZERO births, the gazan population will have only collapsed by roughly 60k people. I may be wrong about this, but I think this is an OVERESTIMATE, not an underestimate. While you don't have to believe me, I at least can make this claim without appealing to nameless ghosts under the rubble and can provide credible sources.
- The hamas figures are not an independent registry. The numbers are produced by a Hamas-run Ministry of Health—i.e., a belligerent party—without external audit. The UN, etc. do not independently verify these numbers; they simply repeat them. Even sympathetic explainers acknowledge the ministry is governed by Hamas and its routine updates aren’t independently verified.
- The system accepts public self-reports (initially via Google Forms, later an MoH web portal). That alone invites duplicates, misclassification, and bad data. Washington Institute documents the Google Form; it also cites the current MoH “report a death/missing” portal.
- The public reporting portal explicitly allows “natural death” submissions. When the same pipeline feeds the headline tally, non-combat, non-IDF deaths can (and did) get swept in. The live MoH form literally offers “martyr,” “missing,” or “natural death.” Mainstream reporting later noted removals where entries turned out to be natural deaths.
- the gaza ministry of health uses opaque and unreliable methods to count deaths (“media reports” + family notifications) with weak validation. Beyond hospital records, the MoH has relied on poorly specified “media reports” and family submissions; AP also notes names often come via the Hamas government media office—not hospital documentation. That’s not a chain of custody you can audit. It included the known false figures from the al ahli hospital incident.
- Totals and demographics are unstable and there have big retroactive corrections. The UN/OCHA famously halved its women/children figures in May 2024, and months later the MoH removed thousands of previously listed “victims,” with officials conceding some were natural deaths or living detainees. That volatility is incompatible with “hard” totals.
- The overall figure doesn’t separate civilians from combatants or assign cause of death. By design it bundles Hamas fighters, civilians, misfire casualties, indirect war deaths, and (as above) even natural deaths—so it cannot answer the key question “how many Gazans were killed by Israel.”
Sources: Source: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/untangli...
Source: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/sites/default/files/pdf/...
Source: https://sehatty.ps/moh-registration/public/add-order
Source: https://news.sky.com/story/hundreds-of-names-removed-from-of...
Source: https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/hamas-run-health-ministr...
Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-gaza-death...
Source: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-mini...
But maybe you're right! Maybe the very sources you're relying on are wrong, and only 50,000 or so Gazans have died. That still doesn't mean this isn't a genocide.
The argument is that Gaza is currently undergoing a genocide, not that the genocide is already complete. If we were to have this argument about the Holocaust in 1942 or so, you could similarly say that only a small percentage of European Jews have died so far, therefore it can't be a genocide. In the case of Palestine, give Israel another decade of unchecked brutality and I'm sure they can attain your high standards for human extermination.
The bottom line is that whether you believe 60k people died or 100k people died, and whether you believe 60k people were born or 100k people were born, there has been nothing close to a population collapse in Gaza. Indeed, the population appears to have risen. Therefore, if you're going to make the argument that there is an ongoing genocide, you're going to have to also admit (as it appears you now do) that Gaza's population has either risen during this alleged genocide, or decreased by a small amount.
There are additional hurdles for those claming a genocide: (1) why has Israel dropped millions of leaflets to warn of impending attacks?; (2) why has israel sent millions of text messages warning of impending attacks?; (3) why has israel ordered evacuations of combat zones prior to attacking; (4) why has israel set up refugee camps/ safe zones; (5) why has Israel supplied so much aid to a civilian population you claim it's trying to kill; (6) why has its genocide been so incompetent and long-lasting if it could accomplish its alleged genocidal goal in a week; (7) what % of those killed are terrorists?; (8) why is the civilian:combatant death ratio so low; and I can go on forever. You may have respones to some of these questions, and we can debate these, but perhaps it's not necessary. The argument for genocide is one of those "emperor has no clothes" issues. People say it with such confidence, as though it's common knowledge (and indeed it is widely believed), but that doesn't mean it's true, or that the emperor has clothing.
Finally, by the end of 1942, the Nazis had killed 30% of european jewry, 3 million innocent civilians. There was already a clear genocide, which the world ignored. The inverse is true today: there is no clear genocide, but most of the world maintains it is.
These are the kinds of leaflets dropped by Israel: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250220-israel-drops-leaf... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/israel-opt-is...
"The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist. No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you. You have been left alone to face your inevitable fate. Iran cannot even protect itself, let alone protect you, and you have seen with your own eyes what has happened. Neither America nor Europe care about Gaza in any way. Even your Arab countries, which are now our allies, provide us with money and weapons while sending you only shrouds.
"There is little time left — the game is almost over."
So, to your question, the primary purpose of these leaflets is to terrorize and threaten the population. The secondary purpose is to have hasbarists like yourself pretend that they are evidence of humanitarian magnanimity.
> (3) why has israel ordered evacuations of combat zones prior to attacking; (4) why has israel set up refugee camps/ safe zones;
"[Forensic Architecture] has documented a pattern in which civilians have been directed to move to certain areas by official evacuation orders, only for the Israeli military to attack those same areas shortly afterwards, either on the same day as the evacuation order, or the day after.
"The incidents documented here are representative, not exhaustive." - https://frames.forensic-architecture.org/gaza/updates/attack...
> (5) why has Israel supplied so much aid to a civilian population you claim it's trying to kill;
Even rhetorically this question makes no sense, considering that it is very well-documented that Israel has been and is actively preventing real humanitarian aid. The Israeli-sanctioned "aid" via the GHF is a "killing field" of desperate Palestinians: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-ma...
> (6) why has its genocide been so incompetent and long-lasting if it could accomplish its alleged genocidal goal in a week;
Because then there would be even fewer of those alongside you willing to defend the indefensible.
> (7) what % of those killed are terrorists?; (8) why is the civilian:combatant death ratio so low;
The postulate required for this pair of questions to not be self-defeating is to expand the meaning of "terrorist" to encompass, at the least, every male in Gaza. In other words, "Gaza deserves death. The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death! … Men, women, and children – in every way possible, we must simply carry out a Holocaust on them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! For me, gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel forms of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without hesitation – simply crush, eradicate, slaughter, flatten, dismantle, smash, shatter …. Gaza deserves death. Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza." - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel...
>The leaflets read: “For your safety, you need to evacuate your places of residence immediately and head to known shelters … Anyone near terrorists or their facilities puts their life at risk, and every house used by terrorists will be targeted.”
And yet it's Israel that is illegally occupying parts of Palestine, not the other way around; it's Israel that has closed Gaza in a total blockade for twenty years and bombarded it any time it liked, claiming many more civilian lives that Oct 7 did; it's Israel that imposes apartheid on Palestinians in the West Bank. It's Israel that constantly builds new illegal settlements in other people's territory. It's Jewish colonists that invaded a land to build an ethno-religious state that excludes the natives.
It's the whole victimhood narrative that justifies the apparently immoral solution to the ethical dilemma: "fuck it, I'm done being a victim, I will not uphold high moral principles when I'm constantly being beaten by others"- except that Israel is a nuclear power that has enjoyed for the past 50 years at least the complete economic, military and diplomatic support of the US and the West, is illegally occupying other people's land, implementing apartheid and building new settlements with the obvious long-term goal of ethnically cleansing the whole land. And has obviously no trouble whatsoever reducing to rubble all of Palestine and the capitals of a few neighbouring countries- at the same time.
Whenever someone says "I'm done being a victim, I will only look after my own interest from now on" remember- that's exactly how Nazism justified itself.
Even if this war continues in the exact same trajectory for another two years, do you see an obvious destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza?
"Never Again!" - really, Israelis? It's only okay if it's you doing the killing?
The entire goal of the holocaust was destroying all Jewish people (and many who weren't). This was exactly why this was dubbed "The final solution to the jewish problem". You might want to educate yourself a bit more on the subject
> The whole world, outside of the US (thanks AIPAC!) and maybe the UK is convinced that Israeli atrocities on Palestinians is clearly genocide.
The whole world was convinced that the Germans were mere victims who only need one more concession, Hitler was merely trying to fix the injustice of Versailles. Further, there was wide support for the German efforts to solve their "Jewish problem", As Jews of course have caused World War 1 through bond trading and caused millions of deaths, famine in Germany as well as Communism and its subsequent millions.
That may sound funny to you now, but that was a popular opinion in elite universities. When words lose meaning and truth become second, all kind of stories seem true
Because Hamas as the governing political party in Gaza, decided to use all of their resources to build fortifications below civilian neighborhoods, this endeavour entails the destruction of entire Gazan neighborhoods. Not unlike the Battle of Berlin or the bombings of Dresden.
It's cliche to say war is terrible, but it is, that's why you don't start one, and that's why Israel always tried to do quick operations which amounted to nothing ('mowing the lawn' as you incorrectly quoted out of context). An advice Gazans have surely needed.
If you finally do start a war, you should really start a war you have a chance at winning. If even that isn't true, at the very least you don't go on such a barbaric rampage making your enemy extremely determined at removing your force completely, at great expense at your civilian population which elected you
Regarding starvation in Gaza, due to racism, media rage bating and general long cultural tradition in the west to scape goat a certain ethnicity, the perception is far different than reality. For example, a recent Gazan instagram account:
...the fact that you have walled him and everyone he knows into an open-air prison, where nothing goes in or out without your approval, systematically keeping him, his family, his friends, his children, and everyone around him just this side of starvation, with no hope of release, for decades on end?
If I were him, I'd hurt you as hard as I possibly could, at every opportunity, with any means I could come by.
Second, area is a red herring. Cross-border mobility is driven by policy, permits, visas, income, and border agency capacity—not square kilometers. Manhattan is integrated into a national customs/transport network; Gaza isn’t. Despite severe restrictions, Gaza still had hundreds of thousands of recorded border crossings annually.
That’s why the literal “open-air prison” claim fails. Prisons don’t run departure counters. If the term is metaphorical for harsh movement controls, say that. But if it’s meant literally, the exit data contradicts it.
Also, I didn't mention the 10/7 attack either. The narrative that gaza is an open-air prison has existed for years, and it has been manifestly wrong for years; that hasn't stopped anyone from claiming it.
Webster's dictionary defines "mention" as:
> the act or an instance of citing or calling attention to someone or something especially in a casual or incidental manner
Thanks for defining the word "mention," brother, knowing this definition really addresses the central issue and refutes my central point.
You’re so deep in propaganda you don’t even see how this sentence demonstrates the entire issue huh?
You have posted the same authors links before.
You consume hacker news at all.
Your implicit assertion that you consume no propaganda itself belies your naïveté to politics as a subject.
"In 2022, the Egyptian authorities allowed more exits of people through their border. The 144,899 exits recorded during the year are 44 per cent more than in 2021, representing the highest figure since 2014."
That's 6.6% of the gaza population travelling out of gaza per year, higher than the percent of Indians who travel abroad each year. This statistic also doesn't reflect the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year.
The "open air prison" is a lie. You can impute whatever motive you want to them leaving. I'm sure escaping Hamas persecution was a part of it for many of them. Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing and the "mowing the lawn" narrative is propaganda.
Nice selective quoting.
The acknowledgments. "Thanks for this comment. I'd like to acknowledge that as you point out the 6.6% figure refers to exits from Gaza via Egypt using documented means, and may include people who exited multiple times, so the actual people exiting would be slightly lower. Similarly, it'd be nice for you to acknowledge that this figure doesn't include undocumented exits via tunnels in Rafah, or the 424,000 documented exits from Gaza via Israel." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45084323
"My claim is that it wasn't because people could get in and out. I have already acknowledged that the 6.6% figure refers to documented exits via the official Rafah crossing rather than indivudual people, and that this includes people who cross multiple times."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45091288
Also, this is data you appear to have been totally unaware of (as evidenced by your skepticism and repeated demand for sources), so it is you who should acknowledge you were wrong and stop spreading misinformation.
I think oscaracso makes a very good point as well. In a country as vast as India, you can find almost anything you need without leaving its borders. Less so with Gaza.
As for the 500k figure, I'm not interested in disputing it since it's just as irrelevant as your 6.6% figure, for reasons I've already mentioned. But since you insist, I'll list them out again:
1. That figure is listing total exits, not distinct exiting individuals. Since most of those exits were made by workers and traders (who might cross very frequently, maybe daily), there is good reason to believe that the number of distinct exiting individuals is vastly lower. For example, if everyone crossing was a daily trader, the true number of exiting individuals would be smaller by a factor of 365. Of course, not everyone making the crossing is a worker or trader, only most of them, and we don't know how often they cross.
2. That figure does not distinguish exits by Palestinians, Israelis, or other citizens, so it has no bearing on whether Palestinians are trapped in Gaza or not. Many Israeli workers also cross into and out of Gaza constantly.
3. This figure is from before October 7, and movement is more restricted now. But, since you are focusing on the use of the term "open-air prison" before the massacre, I won't count that against you.
By the way, I certainly don't insist on calling Gaza an "open-air prison", that's far too imprecise for me. I simply object to the way that you misinterpret facts to support your argument.
I don't believe Israelis entered Gaza in 2022. In fact, cases where mentally ill Israelis entered Gaza ended in them being held as hostages by Hamas
Similarly, I'm glad you now know that there are somewhere between 100 and 180 births per day in Gaza, depending on the month and source you trust. (I did provide 2025 data, you just overlooked it.) Whichever figure you choose--100 births/day or 180 births/day--you're now reduced to accepting that there were tens of thousands of births in Gaza, something you hadn't even considered before. And I know you didn't consider this before given how incredulous you were of this basic fact that you asked for sources multiple times. You also have no counter-proposal or alternative source on how many births there were. But it doesn't matter to me.
When it comes to the death count, you need this to remain higher than the official health ministry count (which includes natural deaths and has other problems), so you offer the widely debunked theory that there are thousands of nameless, faceless, odorless bodies under the rubble - something for which there is no primary evidence. Your skepticism goes in one direction. Exercise for you: try treating the pro-palestinian narrative with that attitude and see how far you get.
For my own part, I used to lead pro-palestine rallies, and at the beginning of the war I even paid to help smuggle a Gazan out through one of the Rafah crossings some commenters here say don't exist, but then I tried to... y'know... apply equal skepticism to both sides.
No you didn’t. Or you’re saying you cared enough to hold rallies but now you just so happened to have developed “skepticism” once Israel started the genocide. And now you parrot hasbara talking points. Yeah nah.
Israel started the genocide not later than 1968. Pretending that the genocide is a novel phenomenon starting after the Oct. 7 attacks is a propaganda point actively pushed by those under the sway of Iranian propaganda that is designed to align with and subtly reinforce, among those not already aligned with the Palestinian cause, Israeli propaganda that what is described as genocide is a response to the Oct. 7 attacks, because Iran's interest is not in ending the genocide, but in ensuring that it continues while leveraging it for propaganda cover for its own geopolitical interests in the region.
Whether or not I was part of the pro Palestine movement is completely irrelevant to the thread and I have no obligation to prove it to you. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter to me and iota. But tell you what, if we can put some stakes on this (e.g. $10k if I have the goods), I'll do it for money. I'll be happy to donate to your $ to the idf.
If it is irrelevant, why did you bring it up? It is obvious you are lying, like you have been in every other post in this thread.
And you had to fall back to the usual baseless accusations of antisemitism. Typical hasbara troll.
The fact that I led pro Palestine rallies is irrelevant to the central point we're discussing, which is whether Gaza was an open air prison and whether the was a genocide. It's relevant to my own personal journey from the pro Palestine movement, which I left because of people like you.
"In 2022, more people were let out of Gaza; however, their movement remained the exception rather than the rule, with the vast majority of residents, over 2 million people, virtually ‘locked in.’"
Additionally, that's 144,899 exits, not 144,899 distinct people exiting, nor is it even 144,899 exits made by Palestinians. So your interpretation is multiply incorrect.
Would you like to clarify what you mean by "Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing"?
(The statistic I quoted also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year, or the undocumented exits through tunnels under rafah, so the exits were indeed much higher, not lower, than the official ocha figures.)
What I mean when I say that Israel persecution wasn't really a thing is that the men with guns in Gaza were Hamas, not the idf. If you were shot in the knee or thrown off a building for being queer, it was Hamas that was persecuting you, not the idf.
Again, could you provide a source for that figure of 6.6% of Gazans "travelling abroad" each year? As I previously mentioned, that article does not actually support that figure at all, so I'm not sure why you insist upon it. We could obtain a better estimate for the number of distinct exiting Gazans by counting the number of exit permits issued, since those are ostensibly required to leave. The article does say 18,000 permits were issued to workers and traders in 2022, but since it doesn't include permits to other civilians, nor does it mention the expiration period for these permits, I won't commit the intellectually dishonest act of trying to turn that into a percentage.
As for your claim about Israeli persecution, that's trivially false. There are too many instances of Palestinians being shot by IDF forces to list here, but there are casualty databases freely available online. Yes, Hamas persecutes Palestinians as well, I'm not defending them.
In those conditions, it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but whatever the precise figure is--5%, 6.6%, 10%--it's clearly higher than zero, which is what one would expect in an "open air prison," the central point I was arguing against.
Aside from the exit rate, the "open air prison" claim is a lie for many other reasons, not least of which is that the guards patrolling the so-called prison (Hamas) are also the people who were claimed to be inmates, something one doesn't see in prisons.
The claim for Israeli persecution is not false (or "trivially false" as you put it). The odds of a gazan dying from an israeli weapon in 2022 was essentially zero: hamas claims 49 were killed that year, of which 22 are verifiable. The odds of a gazan dying from Hamas on the other hand was appreciable, in the thousands. After hamas's genocidal massacre on october 7, obviously this changed.
Secondly, when people refer to Gaza as an "open air prison" they are employing metaphor. I have never understood it to mean that literally no one leaves, and I don't think any reasonable person understands it that way.
Finally, you have provided more figures about Gazan deaths. Would you care to provide a source for those figures? Even if they are accurate (and so far, none of your figures have been accurate) they still contradict your previous post, that the "only men with guns in Gaza are Hamas". The point of my questioning was to arrive upon a common definition for the word "persecution". Your offered definition was indeed trivially false, since you just admitted that the IDF shot innocent civilians in that time frame. Perhaps you would like to amend your statement and pick a definition more suitable for your arguments, such as Amnesty International's definition. In that case, I offer this report detailing the many ways Palestinians were persecuted under Israel's rule prior to October 7: <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/>
But these tunnels weren't secret and they did exist. "To mitigate the impact of the blockade on Gaza, a tunnel economy evolved and peaked between 2007 and 2013, with more than 1,532 underground tunnels running under the 12 km border between Gaza and Egypt. "
Source: https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tdb62d3_en...
That's just one source and likely an underestimate on the number of tunnels. You claim you were unable to find the easily-findable stats on the birth-rate in Gaza; this should be an easy one for you as there are multiple documentaries about these tunnels you can find freely on youtube, and you can see video evidence of the tunnels.
I am glad you now say that when people refer to Gaza as an open-air prison, they don't actually mean what they say, but are instead referring to a situation where there were hundreds of thousands (indeed more than half a million) documented exits each year between Egypt and Israel; to a place where the men with guns patrolling the prison were Hamas, not the IDF; to a place where if you were going to get killed, your killers were most likely to be Hamas, not the IDF.
Likewise, I appreciate you acknowledging that this is a special kind of genocide where the population hasn't really been reduced much.
And I also appreciate your deep skepticism of everything I say, despite the many credible sources I provide, and your complete failure to provide any primary evidence for your claims of tons of nameless, faceless, odorless corpses under rubble; your evidence-free claims that people born in Gaza today have a low chance of living; and your prediction that if you give Israel 10 more years, it will eradicate the population of Gaza. I look at population charts; this will be an interesting one to watch - care to make a bet on polymarket with me?
Also, let's pretend the tunnels didn't exist (they did). How in the world would that invalidate my point that Gaza wasn't an open air prison because there were more than 500k documented exits in 2022?
That is what you said. That report didn't support that claim. Which was obvious if you read the part you omitted. Which is why you didn't bother to quote it. It is the second article you linked where you deliberately misrepresented the data. Like your claim of 500k people exiting, when that article said 83% are laborers who go to Israel and back. You realize prisons allow work release too, right?
> There is photographic and video evidence of Israel destroying
There is plenty of video evidence of Israel destroying pretty much everything in Gaza. They have claimed many things, most of them not true. Like those supposedly hidden Hamas C&C facilities in the basements of hospitals (they weren't there, Israel just wanted to destroy the health system).
Thanks for all your thoughtful, level-headed and incredibly patient replies!