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stanfordkid • today at 4:09 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

This is a false equivalence. 9/11 is not Oct 7 and the US is nothing like Israel, in fact the US was attacked for (amongst other things) it's support of Israel. America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.

Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception. Gaza is a refugee camp of descendents of people displaced from their homes during the Nakba. There's a saying there: "My Grandmother is older than Israel" -- and it is true.

To look at Oct. 7 as some sort of isolated incident ignores the history of the project: After the holocaust Western Jews decided to move to an area already occupied by other people based on some loose notion of having claim to it millennia ago. They used western governments to push this concept forward. Sure, America displaced Native Americans, but Israel did it during modernity... and those natives also happen to have access to modern heavy weaponry... what did they expect to happen?

I think Israeli people are ingenious and talented but they picked the wrong patch of land to occupy -- the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is as sacred as the Vatican and you have 1.5 billion (often crazy) Muslim people revolving around this sacred conceptualization. This is why the common people even of places like UAE/Saudi all back Palestine despite the political actions of such states. It is a recipe destined for disaster, especially with the Iran war de-coupling the Gulf States from the USA. It seems to me there is no way out.


Replies

soperj • today at 4:36 AM

> America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.

First Nations

> Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception.

What do they call it in the US? Manifest Destiny?

alterom • today at 4:49 AM

Did Native Americans also pick "the wrong patch of land to occupy"?

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avazhi • today at 4:43 AM

You seem to be confused about what genocide means, and your nonchalant careless use of it denigrates those who were actually victims of it, like those in Rwanda or Burma, where governments expressly systemically sought to murder and eradicate all members of particular ethnic groups.

What Hamas clearly aspired to was genocide in the formal definition (ie, their stated end goal was and is the destruction of Israel and murder of all Jews). To my knowledge Israel has never expressed any desire to eradicate all Palestinians, nor can such a desire be imputed.

Just because you don’t like what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t make it genocide, and you (and others) would be taken slightly more seriously if you saved that term for appropriately serious situations (with the requisite mens rea), which Gaza is not.

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