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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

Japanese civilians experienced far worse in WW2, and they forgot pretty quickly. The war against the Tamil Tigers would be another case study. Once the radicalism is dealt with by force, the ratcheting of violence is reduced, and people move on.

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Japanese had it bad for 2-3 years. After that they were allowed to live in their country with their own leadership. Palestinians have it bad for 80 years, they are not allowed to return to their homeland, and we expect them to live in closely monitored concentration camps.

A persecuted minority was granted independence from a previously colonial, totalitarian, theocratic state. Since then they have been engaged in an perpetual war of terror.

Japan and Germany had it 'easy' because their defeat was so brutal, and their de-radicalization was so thorough.

Israel's real crime was being too lenient after the 6 days war, exposing themselves and radicalized Palestinians to the violence that's lasted to this day.

> they forgot pretty quickly

There was a huge Allied reconstruction effort in Japan (and Germany, and a lot of Europe, and elsewhere). I very much doubt there would be something similar for Palestine. Or Syria. Or, like in Iraq and Afghanistan, there would be an effort which spent a huge amount of money for zero effect outside the US compound.

> Japanese civilians experienced far worse in WW2, and they forgot pretty quickly

Because the vast majority of the Japanese people barely faced any kind of obstacles in the same way Palestinians are facing. Yes, they had food shortages and their wooden homes were bombed constantly to oblivion, and they suffered a couple of nuclear blasts, but that was because their history lessons teach their WW2 as something in which they were the aggressor (with Pearl Harbor, not the invasions of China and Korea). In Palestine's case, it will take much longer to wipe out that resentment. Besides, Palestinians aren't the "radicals" here.

Before Japan was defeated, their military propaganda was that they were victims of encirclement and an oil blockade, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was a justified response to this victimhood. They started teaching a different story only because the allies forced them to change their curriculum. The same process of deradicalization will be forced onto Gaza after the defeat of Hamas. And why did you overlook the Tamil Tigers case study? And why would you euphemize nuclear bombs onto civilian cities like this, as if it isn't significantly more brutal than anything the Palestinians have been subjected to?

> Besides, Palestinians aren't the "radicals" here.

A luxury belief that's only possible to hold because Israel is militarily dominant to the point that the radical views prevalent in Palestinian culture cannot be acted out. The Israelis know this luxury belief is factually false, that's why they are the way they are.

> and why would you euphemize nuclear bombs onto civilian cities like this, as if it isn't significantly more brutal than anything the Palestinians have been subjected to?

https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...

> Gaza bombing ‘equivalent to six Hiroshimas’

How can six Hiroshimas kill less civilians than the actual Hiroshima (let alone the fire bombings) despite much higher density? The answer to this question might unlock something in your mind.

We don't have anhthing like a complete count of the dead yet. The 60k number the media still reports has barely moved in a year because Israel destroyed almost all of the health infrastructure that used to report deaths, and even before that people trapped in the rubble and not identified by anyone weren't counted.

That's true, but that 60k number isn't just civilians, and even if the total civilian count is higher than 60k, it's still likely lower than the civilians killed in Hiroshima, which is an inconvenient fact best left unmentioned by those who say that Israel has unleashed six Hiroshimas onto a location that's over 10x higher density than 1945 Hiroshima. How do you resolve this discrepancy?

There's no discrepancy because there aren't numbers. The 60,000 number is a dramatic undercount. The fatalities were being undercounted even before Israel had attacked every hospital in Gaza multiple times. There are mass graves occasionally found in Gaza but nobody is able to go through and document everything while they're still being genocided. In any situation like this it takes decades of research to try to reach an accurate count and even then there are is huge uncertainty, particularly when whole extended families are murdered all at once. Look at the Hiroshima death toll estimates - between 90,000 and 166,000 people killed. And this is the best estimate after decades of research. Almost none of that can take place now in Gaza.

But of course I'm talking to someone who pretends to believe you can carpet bomb an entire city of 2 million people relentlessly, cut off food and water, and kill fewer than 60,000 civilians.

I mean, there is a discrepancy, because even if I grant you your wildest guess as the base case, it is still going to be vastly lower than 6 Hiroshimas, despite 10x higher density, which makes no sense. So maybe it is not "carpet bombing", at least not how it was done in WW2 or Vietnam, and maybe such vague, loaded words are being deployed more for rhetorical effect than for descriptive accuracy. It kind of looks like ... a war?

That article states that the equivalent explosive power of the bomds dropped on Gaza were equal to six times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Yet despite all that firepower having been dropped in one of the most densely populated places on Earth, the death toll in Gaza is an order of magnitude less than that in Hiroshima.

This makes it very clear that Israel is doing an excellent job of protecting civilians in Gaza, by warning civilians away from the targeted military infrastructure. Unless you want to argue that Hamas (who famously forbids civilians to flee bombings and has been recorded shooting at fleeing civilians) is somehow protecting the civilians in Gaza.

The analogy would be if the allies plan for ending WW2 was to ethnically cleanse the Japanese archipelago and expel Japanese people into, say, camps in Xinjiang. I imagine if they had consistently telegraphed such a plan for years during the war, the resistance might have continued longer.

You appear to be unaware of the multiple genocidal statements made by the allies towards the Japanese.

> Once the radicalism is dealt with by force, the ratcheting of violence is reduced, and people move on.

If the radicalism is the product of decades of force, how could the further use of force possibly result in the reduction of radicalism?

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