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Comment by _factor | Hacker News Reader

My best friend since childhood is Jewish and has a difficult time even acknowledging there is an issue. My other friend works for an Israeli company and the jokes are about what they’re going to do with the flattened Gaza land.

I’m not sure which is worse. In one case ignoring it and pretending your morality is in tact, on the other being crass but knowing full well no one will stop this until it’s too late (as planned).

Do we really need a “Human Lives Matter” movement? Are our leaders space lizards? How much blackmail has the Israeli intelligence community accumulated? How much blackmail has it generated by clandestinely helping foreign politicians?

There is a reason the world is silent, and it’s rotten.

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I suppose the question is why do they remain your friends? What is the threshold at which you'd stop calling them that?

Him cutting off his relationships won’t help anyone, nor change any minds. I understand the impulse, but everyone loses from that.

If they were going to change their mind, they likely would have already. If you're watching people starve to death, and defending it as normal politics, you don't care about others. You don't get out of harmful relationships for them, you do it for you.

If you find something morally reprehensible then staying friends is harmful to you surely?

It is eye opening remaining friends with people who's views and actions are completely opposed to ones own. There's no point attempting to educate them (often it makes them go harder against you). But by finding out about their lives and understanding where fear has replaced love one can learn a lot. And hopefully use that knowledge to find ways to speak out and create a society that aligns with ones ethics.

I agree to an extent, but supporting genocide is a crossed Rubicon.

Can they be called a "friend"? Or is it a case of friends close, enemies closer?

I have two close friends with extremely pro-Zionist views, Friend A and Friend B. The recent number of atrocities has been so atrocious that Friend A has reconsidered their views, they've started yelling at Friend B for their unrequited support of Israel's policies in all things.

I think it was the recent double tap missile strike of the hospital workers, journalist and first-responders that did it.

How are these people your friends in the first place

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