I Will Not Support Y Combinator in Israel | Hacker News Reader

I Will Not Support Y Combinator in Israel

roicarthy.com

7 pointsdvirsky13 comments

With "criticizing a nation", you probably mean criticizing a nation illegally occupying another Nation's territory, repeatedly breaking international human rights conventions, and indiscriminately killing civilians (with a particularly predilection for children).

I'm part of a large, and growing, international community not supporting anything Israel.

There's nothing illegal about the occupation per se, although it is clearly a bad situation for the local population.

As far as the current conflict is concerned, Israel is one of the more moral armies around. It is fighting against Hamas, which houses weapon stores among densely-populated civilian areas and builds tunnels under civilian areas to launch terror attacks, leaving Israel no choice but to fight among urban populations. As if that were not enough - Hamas tells its own people to ignore Israel's warnings to leave town, because they know that civilians are their best defence. As opposed to occupying, using human shields is actually a crime under international law. See http://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_cha_chapter32_..., for instance.

Disclaimer: I'm not the author of the post, just linked to it.

And yet you're happy to get all the karma from it (as you said on Roi Carthy's FB wall).

I will too criticize a nation that just spent the last few days bombing children and civilians, breaking basically most of international conventions. My baseline for criticizing a nation is, and i hope we can all agree to that, killing children.

When Hamas stores missiles in schools, I think it's pretty clear where the problem lies in this conflict.

I was thinking about this conflict ( I'm neither Israelian nor Palestinian ) and my personal opinion is that if you have more advanced military forces than your opponent you definitely should take responsibility for all casualties ( civilians and military ).

I think terrorism is the worst thing that takes lives on our planet right now, but I'm not sure the way to fight with it is killing so many people.

I'm keen on covert ops, intelligence, special operations, etc. But when you do massive bombarding of a city with thousands of innocent people I think you are going the wrong way.

I tend to agree with you.

"You should be sympathetic to our decision to kill civilians because it's the only way to favorably engage the terrorists!"

seems exactly on-par (morally speaking) with

"You should be sympathetic to our decision to get civilians killed because it's the only way to favorably engage the oppressive occupation!"

It's a prisoner's dilemma through and through. The only way I can see to break the symmetry is to note that one side stands to lose less by appeasing the other.

Do you really, genuinely, believe the problem lies just on one side of this conflict? I'm sure you're smarter than that.

OK, if that's the case, it's not good - but how many people did it kill? The Israelis can argue as long as they like that Hamas' actions are the cause, but there's absolutely no doubt that it's Israeli bombs and bullets doing the killing. Even when a "fighter" is targeted, the Israelis may sincerely regret killing 2-3 civilians bystanders as well - but they're undoubtedly innocent civilians killed by Israel all the same.

I had no idea Paul Graham had made any statements about Israel until this post mentioned it, and I follow HN and Y Combinator daily. So at least to me, it appears PG has kept his views pretty separate from Y Combinator's business.

That said, I just gained a lot more respect for Paul Graham.

NSFL* Album of genocide in Gaza http://imgur.com/a/gtc9T

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