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Comment by sporkxrocket | Hacker News Reader

Israel would still be committing genocide regardless of how the resistance dresses. They’re literally ethnically cleansing the West Bank and that has nothing to do with Hamas. They ethically cleansed all of Palestine during the Nakba and Hamas didn’t exist for another 50 years.

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Hamas is carrying on the activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The PLO renounced those tactics and is now (more or less) successfully running the West Bank as the Palestinian Authority.

Which Israel is screwing up by building more and more settlements, making a two-state solution impossible. It isn't ethnic cleansing, but it is certainly a bad idea and probably a crime.

Israel is annexing the West Bank so it's safe to say the PLO made the wrong call. It's 100% ethnic cleansing. That's all Israel is, ethnically cleansed Palestine, since Nakba.

You could potentially meet me where I am, trying to cover the entire range of events, considering both sets of people who have done good and bad things.

Or you could continue to spout nationalist propaganda. Your call.

Being against ethnic cleansing and land theft isn't "nationalist propaganda". Let's stick to historical facts, starting with Nakba and the Balfour Declaration, both of which were egregious human rights violations.

> Let's stick to historical facts, starting with Nakba

What's the logic for starting with the Nakba versus something earlier or later?

Part of what I think makes this conflict intractable is everyone has a litany of historical grievances they can readily pull up to justify just about any claim.

Everyone wants the cutoff to be when their grievances begin - where they were wronged unprovoked and unwaranted - as we must start from that point and ignore all priors.

> Everyone wants the cutoff to be when their grievances begin

Not everyone. Plenty of nations across history forgave, or at least tolerated and moved on. (America, Germany and Japan. Hell, America and Britain. India and Britain. Pretty much every member of the EU.)

The ones that don't, the ones that hold onto multigenerational gripes, tend to be consumed by them. (I'm not arguing that the Israelis or Palestinians or Armenians should give up because it's more peaceful. These are complicated fractures. But I'll stand by this feature, alone, making their conflicts intractable. Particularly by outsiders. The best you can do is permanent stalemate.)

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