Hacker News Reader

I'm going back to Oct 7 for my argument. You can go back to Oct 8 for yours but you'd be arguing in bad faith.

How is it bad faith? This whole situation is a cycle of revenge going back at least to the 1920s with conflicts between Arabs and Jewish settlers in Mandatory Palestine. Israel is killing civilians, but Hamas attacked them, but the IDF was enforcing segregation, but they had to show force after the intifadas...

And you can trace that back to the Balfour declaration being unclear, and rabbis who started religious Zionism feeling entitled to the land, and antisemitic massacres in Europe that inspired Theodor Herzl to campaign for a Jewish state. Or even further back until you end up in Biblical times.

You can't just pick a start date and decide who is responsible for all this.

I wouldn't call Palestinian resistance "revenge". If someone stole your land, trying to get it back isn't really revenge imho. I think going back to the creation of Zionism is the best starting point. Ashkenazis are mostly European, so it doesn't make sense to go back to biblical times (which were mostly fictional anyway). This is a pretty textbook case of European colonization.

It's bad faith because no sane person would willfully ignore the cause of the current conflict when making an argument about who started it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com