Comment by sebastos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebastos | Hacker News Reader

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The conversation is about trying to do everyday activities inside of a combat zone. The international community's opinion about the war is, I should think this is obvious, not the relevant factor. It doesn't matter what people think of the war, only that _there is war_. I think it's safe to say that Ukraine and Gaza are both plenty distracting places to work.

That said, even though it's totally off-topic, I can't help but respond to this:

>those same governments have been enabling and arming the occupier in Palestine/Gaza, and its media has pontificated that occupation, continuous ethnic cleansing and the hundreds of massacres and hostages - sorry, prisoners - is actually somehow justified

I think Western governments have been quite consistent: they condemn people who start wars. If you want to be supported by the international community, don't start a war. Finishing a war is different: those governments are perfectly happy to provide arms and support to anybody — be they white and European, like the Ukrainians, or non-white and non-European, like the Israelis — so long as it's in service of fighting back against a belligerent aggressor.

It's convenient that your knowledge of what "started" begins on October 7th and all the events of history prior since 1948 never happened, or you just don't care they did. Average Westerner knowledge of Western history, I understand.

Yes, they have consistently toppled governments, meddled in the affairs of other countries, and enabled and funded colonalism and imperialism wherever they went. Although the good news is that Israel is and will be the last true Western colonial state. Also, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just forgot the wars they themselves started, like Iraq over the lie that was WMD and the small matter of 500,000 dead Iraqis - I can assure you the Western governments involved have not condemned it, but they did give Blair a Nobel Peace Prize, so that's something.

Your last sentence is laughable and too historically ignorant to bother responding to, but since its AI-generated I thankfully don't need to give it that courtesy.

> Although the good news is that Israel is and will be the last true Western colonial state.

What do you think Russia is?

You think Russia is a Western power and ally?

I'm Russian myself, and I think Russia is a Western (white European) colonial empire, and the largest one in terms of the sheer number of peoples and amount of territory it still occupies. Just look at the map of its administrative regions.

And yes, it is indeed opposed to other Western powers. That isn't new - at the height of colonialism, European colonial powers were constantly fighting each other. That didn't make any of them any less Western.

> It's convenient that your knowledge of what "started" begins on October 7th and all the events of history prior since 1948 never happened

What it comes down to is whether you can admit that the events of October 7th provoked a new military campaign that would not otherwise have happened. You can either admit that, or you can admit that you’re just going to what-about no matter what happens, and never speak honestly about the asymmetry between the way these two sides have conducted themselves (and can be expected to continue conducting themselves).

No, what it comes down to is whether you can admit that Palestine and Gaza are being occupied by a colonial power that doesn't have the right to be there, has consistently engaged in ethnic cleansing, genocide of entire villages and war crimes since its foundation, and that resistance to it will continue until that fact changes considerably. No-one living in a Western bubble, least of all Israel, gets to set the terms by which a people who Westerners have helped occupy for the last 70 years resist - just ask the Viet Cong. Whataboutism is the fallacy of pointing to irrelevant examples, so no, pointing out hypocrisy is not that. As for asymmetry, I assume you're talking about the fact that one is a heavily armed Western-funded superpower and the other is a handful of militias using the few arms they can get hold of from the only real ally they have in Iran, and not much stronger than they were in 1948 and 1967 when they were villagers being waged "war" on by said superpower.

The asymmetry is that Hamas uses human shields to great effect, whereas the IDF doesn’t and couldn’t because their foe wouldn’t care. It’s all you really need to know.

>resistance to it will continue

‘Resistance’ is an incredible word to summarize October 7th. Is it possible you haven’t looked into the full sordid details of that day? It is beyond comprehension. If you’re disturbed by hate-fueled violence perpetrated purely for the sake of exterminating an ethnic / religious group you hate, then Oct 7th is the genuine article.

The fact is that this conflict is not about resistance, and this is easily seen because the majority of Palestinians have no good faith interest in a two state solution. Go read poll results if you doubt me. Support for Hamas and its actions is robust, even in the West Bank (~70% at one count). The goal here is not merely resisting the occupier. The show’s not over until the Jews are dead and gone. The only real fix is to de-program the people in the region (both sides) from building their identity around a border dispute, and that’s not going to happen until the volume is turned down on the religious element.

Genuine question, are you an LLM bot or are typical Western liberals just this bad at reading comprehension? Everything I've written has already addressed your NPC-like "response" to it. Yes, they support Hamas and want a one-state solution, for the reasons spelled out to you in several paragraphs at length, to which your ultimate response was essentially "whatever idc Hamas does hostages that's aLl I nEeD tO KnoW". Since you've already decided that the little you already know is everything you'll ever need to know on the history of Palestine, and consider Oct 7 "beyond comprehension" but the countless examples of the same atrocities committed by Israelis since the 19th century elicited no such response, you are therefore both proudly ignorant and proudly racist, and should simply drop the act of pretending to care about Palestinians. But then I suppose that's the part of the liberal conceit that sets you apart from conservatives, that you have to at least feign sympathy so you can spend the next few decades behaving in the exact same way as they do. Because when it comes to Israel, the only real difference between right-left is in how much you need to pretend to care about occupied/dead brown people. I suggest you go back to doing what you know best, virtue-signalling about Ukrainian occupation and how much the Ukrainian people need to be saved from Russia.

Almost as convenient as your suggestion that the only relevant history started in 1948.

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