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Reflections on Palantir

(nabeelqu.substack.com)
479 points freditup | 36 comments | | HN request time: 2.765s | source | bottom
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giraffe_lady[dead post] ◴[] No.41861626[source]
[flagged]
1. torlok ◴[] No.41861850[source]
How can you type something like this after the numerous independent reports of IDF behaviour, civilian casualties in Gaza, and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank? I can't believe anybody can just ignore reality like that.
replies(1): >>41861957 #
2. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41861957[source]
Can you define the term "genocide"?
replies(2): >>41862034 #>>41862126 #
3. dagw ◴[] No.41861966[source]
Without getting into the debate about whether or not what is happening is a "genocide" or not, your data proves nothing since it cuts off before the events in questions started. Why not post an updated graph and include the number up through end of September 2024 so that it would at least be a relevant data point to the discussion?
replies(1): >>41861979 #
4. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41861979[source]
Even the most pessimistic estimates of casualties in Gaza are on the order of tens of thousands. That is not going to appreciably change the population.
replies(2): >>41861993 #>>41862007 #
5. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41861983[source]
What does this historical population trend have to do with the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza in retaliation for October 7th, 2023?
replies(1): >>41862030 #
6. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41861993{3}[source]
No, the most pessimistic casualty numbers are in the 180k+ range, including all of the missing people hidden in the rubble. The 45+k numbers include only people confirmed killed.
replies(1): >>41862076 #
7. dagw ◴[] No.41862007{3}[source]
So why did you even post that graph if it has nothing to do with anything?
replies(1): >>41862038 #
8. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41862034{3}[source]
The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica. Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza.
replies(2): >>41862125 #>>41862133 #
9. FactKnower69 ◴[] No.41862048{3}[source]
>Even the most pessimistic estimates of civilian casualties are on the order of tens of thousands.

blatant lie, as has been pointed out to you multiple times now

replies(1): >>41862218 #
10. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41862076{4}[source]
Even the Palstinian Health Ministry's own count is 45,000: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-death-toll-ho...
replies(1): >>41862158 #
11. dagw ◴[] No.41862086{5}[source]
[flagged]
replies(1): >>41863312 #
12. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41862125{4}[source]
> The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica.

All of these conflicts saw large (upwards of 30% of the population) killed.

> Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza.

Even if we trust the Palestinian government's own estimates, the death toll in Gaza has been under 2% of the population.

One of these is an order of magnitude less than the others. Furthermore, it's an incredibly inconsistent application of the term. Did we invoke the word "genocide" in the Iran-Iraq conflict? In the Syrian civil war? In the American Civil War? Was Germany a victim of "genocide" at the hands of the Allies in WWII? All of these involved proportional loss of life greater than the conflict in Gaza. I, and most people, do not regard these as genocide.

The term "genocide" apparently has a vastly different thresholds when it involves Israel.

replies(1): >>41862704 #
13. InsideOutSanta ◴[] No.41862126{3}[source]
Genocide is violence that targets individuals due to their membership in a group, and has the goal of destroying that group.

"They're not killing them fast enough" does not make it not genocide.

I also think it's a bit odd to argue about the definition of the word. During this last escalation, Israel's government has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, including almost 17,000 children, and injured about 100'000 people in Gaza. Even if you come to the conclusion that this does not technically qualify as a genocide, that doesn't help any of the people living in Gaza. It doesn't help the Israelis, either, most of whom would probably prefer to live in peace.

It seems callous and pointless to look at what is currently happening and take that as an opportunity to start arguing about the definition of a word.

replies(1): >>41862164 #
14. dagw ◴[] No.41862158{5}[source]
The 180k number people cite includes deaths from starvation, disease and other causes that can be attributed to secondary effects of the military campaign.
replies(1): >>41862199 #
15. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41862199{6}[source]
You do remember what event kicked off this military campaign just over a year ago, right? The blockade is part of the effort to press Hamas into releasing the remaining hostages. If the bulk of the deaths are due to starvation and disease stemming from the blockade, then the culpability of this "genocide" lies with Hamas.
replies(2): >>41862451 #>>41862860 #
16. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41862218{4}[source]
The figure comes from the Palestinian Health Ministry: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-death-toll-ho...

What incentive would the Palestinian government have to deceive people into thinking there's fewer casualties than the real figure?

replies(1): >>41862953 #
17. dagw ◴[] No.41862451{7}[source]
then the culpability of this "genocide" lies with Hamas.

And that is a perfectly reasonable argument to make. There are lots of valid arguments for why Israel isn't committing genocide on the Palestinians. Irrelevant population graphs that don't cover the timespan in question are absolutely not one of them.

18. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41862704{5}[source]
> Even if we trust the Palestinian government's own estimates, the death toll in Gaza has been under 2% of the population.

In one year, and only counting direct deaths. By your logic, Hitler wasn't a monster in the first year or two since the beginning of the Holocaust, since not that many people had died yet, right? We should have kept selling arms to Germany, since it wasn't yet a genocide, only 2% of the population had been killed.

The government of Israel is telling everyone exactly what they are planning to do - rid Gaza of Hamas and anyone supporting them, including people "supporting Hamas" by, say, using and paying for hospitals sponsored by Hamas (as in, the government of Gaza). They are telling everyone that they believe Palestinians are collectively responsible for October 7th, not just those who did the killing, not just those who provided logistics, but all those who stood by and did nothing to stop it. They are leveling virtually every piece of infrastructure in Gaza: every single hospital in Gaza has been bombed and destroyed, every university, every high-school, most schools and kindergartens, vast swaths of apartment blocks. American doctors have spoken about how many toddlers they have seen shot in the head or chest by IDF soldiers.

Sure, it's taking a while to kill 1.5 million people. But all indications, of all kinds, from actions, to words, to assassinating peace negotiatiors, UN forces, Red Cross forces, journalists, aid workers of all kinds: Israel is making its intentions for Gaza extremely clear, and the genocide is mounting every single day.

You truly have to not want to see it to say all of these things.

And your other examples are misguided. Civil wars completely blur the line between combatants and non-combatants, so it gets much harder to distinguish bloody battles from one-sided slaughter that can amount to genocide. Even so, Syria's president has definitely been accused of war crimes, even though his actions were never so systematic to amount to genocide. In the Iran-Iraq conflict, we were on the side carrying out the aggression, and access to information about how the war was going was not that easy; even so, nothing like the systematic wide scale wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure happened, though there were clear war crimes committed during that conflict, and many who cried out against them. Germany was the aggressor in WWII; but the (mutual) carpet bombing that leveled large parts of cities and killed civilians intentionally and indiscriminately could be called genocide by today's standards, and many look back with a critical eye at Allied actions towards the end of the war (even more so in Japan, with the fire bombing of Tokyo often being called an atrocity).

And except for WWII, none of these resulted in this many casualties in so short a time frame, not even close. Especially when you consider how one-sided the slaughter in Gaza is, with Israel having almost no losses whatsoever since their invasion started, at least not from Gaza.

replies(1): >>41862881 #
19. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41862829{5}[source]
What ethnic cleansing of the Arab world's entire Jewish population are you talking about, specifically? Just like in Europe, there have been many waves of better and worse relationships, from relative acceptance to Nazi-like persecution, in various places and at various times, even looking just at the last hundred years.

Still, to a great extent, the biggest contributing factor to the current extremely low Jewish populations in the Middle East outside Israel has been migration or flight to Israel. For example, in Iran, even before the Islamic Revolution and the wave of antisemitic persecution that followed it, which could be described at least as ethnic cleansing if not outright genocide, there had been significant migration of Iranian Jews to Israel.

replies(3): >>41863264 #>>41863519 #>>41865394 #
20. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41862860{7}[source]
Israel saying "we're going to kill and starve civilians until you give us what we want" does not make Hamas responsible for the civilian deaths any more than Hamas saying "we did October 7th and we'll do another unless you stop occupying us" makes Israel responsible for the murders perpetrated on that night.
replies(1): >>41862906 #
21. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41862906{8}[source]
If someone kidnaps people and holds them hostage in a building, it's totally within the realm of reasonable response for the police to surround and isolate the building. If one of the kidnappers does of dehydration during the standoff, the police did not kill him. His own stubbornness and refusal to surrender is what killed him.
replies(1): >>41862972 #
22. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41862937{3}[source]
First of all, this is just the beginning of the war. Israel has been very explicit that they have no intention whatsoever to negotiate any kind of peace (at most a temporary reprieve in exchange for the hostages that they haven't already buried with their own bombs), so this will continue. And the 45k number is almost exclusively confirmed casualties. Before the Ministry of Health was completely decimated itself, around the time the number was 30k, these were all people whose names were known.

But there are many, many more people buried in the rubble or otherwise missing, who are almost certainly dead, but are not included in this. And then there are indirect deaths, from starvation, injuries, lack of medicine: those already amount to some 100k+, almost 10% of Gaza's population.

Not to mention, virtually the entirety of the population of Norther Gaza has been displaced by now, which is another form of genocide, especially if they will not be permitted to return. This is already being planned by some in Israel, with some coveting parts of Gaza as prime real estate.

replies(1): >>41864252 #
23. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41862953{5}[source]
From the very article you quote:

> IS THE GAZA DEATH TOLL COMPREHENSIVE?

> The numbers do not necessarily reflect all victims, as many are still under rubble, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. It estimates some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.

> The Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health has said that the true figures are likely higher than those published, without giving specifics.

> The U.N. human rights office also says the Palestinian authorities' figure is probably an undercount. In past Israel-Hamas conflicts, its own tally has sometimes exceeded theirs.

> It declined to share its toll for this war since it is incomplete but confirmed to Reuters that the deaths it has verified so far show that the majority are women and children.

24. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41862972{9}[source]
Agreed. But if the police then go and bomb the kidnappers's family homes, it's the police who are responsible for all those dead families, not the kidnappers.
replies(2): >>41863404 #>>41870318 #
25. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41863087{7}[source]
No. Let's look just at the Iran-Iraq war.

First of all, the war lasted for almost 8 years. In those 8 years, Iraq (the aggressor) killed approximately 200k-260k Iranians (including soldiers and civilians). In the 1980s, Iran's population was on average, say, 45 million (37 million in 1980, 52 million in 1988). So, in 8 years of war, Iraq killed 0.5% of Iran's population. Civilian casualties are estimated at 10-16k.

By the lowest estimate of deaths in Gaza, 45k, in 1 year of war, Israel has killed 2% of Gaza's population. And, according multiple sources including the UN sources cited in the Reuters article you yourself shared, likely more than a half of these are women and children, so confirmed civilians. And this is not even looking at the displacement of population, or the loss of civilian infrastructure (Iraq did not destroy every single hospital in Iran, I can tell you that much).

Your own criteria show just how much worse the genocide in Gaza is compared to those other conflicts. Please educate yourself more on the magnitude of the massacre being committed, and that we can still stop.

replies(1): >>41863263 #
26. dang ◴[] No.41863309{5}[source]
Please stop, and if you'd please review the site guidelines and stick to them, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
27. dang ◴[] No.41863312{6}[source]
Please stop, and if you'd please review the site guidelines and stick to them, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
28. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41863327{7}[source]
You later added this part, so I will respond to it as well:

> And what indications are this? Israel partially demobilized and scaled back military operations just a few months after the initial campaign. The majority of casualties in the last year happened the first couple months of Israel's response.

This is completely wrong, the death toll has been steadily rising every day since October 7th till today. Here is a graph lasting until August this year [0]. The slope decreases somewhat with time, but the majority of the 40k dead by August, the 20k died after December.

> The Gazan conflict is decelerating not escalating. Can you elaborate on what you see is an indication that Israel's goal is to kill 1.5 million Gazans?

Here is a Times of Israel article discussing Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security minister), Shlomo Karhi (communications minister), and Zvi Sukkot (member of the Knesset) talking about the "voluntary" resettlement of Gaza [0].

Here is a European Union condemnation of Bezalel Smotrich's (finance minister) declarations that it might be acceptable to let 2 million Palestinians starve to death if this brings back the Israeli hostages [2].

Here is a HuffPost article quoting a press conference with Isaac Herzog (president of Israel) assigning collective blame to the people of Gaza [3] for October 7th (this same declaration was also cited in the ICJ determination of the plausibility of genocide happening in Gaza).

Here is a Times of Israel article quoting Yoav Gallant (defense minister) calling the population of Gaza "human animals" [4].

Here is a tweet from Israel Katz (energy and infrastructure minister) announcing that the people of Gaza will be left without water and electricity until every single Hamas member is killed [5].

And these are all only top officials of Israel. If we looked at declarations from various members of the Knesset or from people in the more extreme parties, we'd see far worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80...

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-calls-to-encourage-em...

[2] https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/israelgaza-statement-high-re...

[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-gaza-isaac-herzog_n_65...

[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...

[5] https://x.com/Israel_katz/status/1712876230762967222

replies(1): >>41863346 #
29. Manuel_D ◴[] No.41863346{8}[source]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80...

This graph clearly shows a decelerating rate of death. This is exactly proving my point: most Gazans died in the conflict by the end of 2023, and the violence is decelerating not growing.

None of the other links you spammed give any indication that Israel aims to kill 1.5 million Gazans as per your previous comment.

replies(1): >>41863451 #
30. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41863401{9}[source]
Yes, the fact that it happened in 4 years is significant. I would love to share your optimism that the worse has passed in Gaza and say this doesn't matter.

Now on to the case of France. In WWI, France lost ~1.4 million people directly, of which the vast majority were soldiers. The civilian population loss was less than the total killed in Gaza in this one year (40k civilians directly killed in the war). Given that many of those 1.4 million soldiers died abroad, in coordinated attacks and so on, it is very much clear that this is completely different from the genocide happening in Gaza. Plus, nothing even remotely similar to the destruction of civilian infrastructure and displacement of the civilian population happened in WWI - other things that clearly demarcate a war from a genocide.

31. ◴[] No.41863404{10}[source]
32. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41863422{7}[source]
I agree that the line can sometimes be blurry.

But when you directly tell the vast majority of the population of a region (>80%) to flee their homes and migrate south on foot or be killed in bombings, and then still kill more than 20 000 women and children, there is no equivocation. This is genocide.

33. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41863451{9}[source]
No, most Gazans died after the end of 2023, even if the rate has decelerated somewhat. The death toll by December 2023 was maybe 22 000. Today it is more than 45 000. And again, these are only direct killings. The death toll from lack of access to medicine, food, and water is only mounting day by day.

And I showed you the explicit declared intentions and outlook on the population of Gaza of Israel's leadership. They want to kill, hurt, and displace the population, in retaliation for October 7th and other crimes.

34. jedimind ◴[] No.41863519{6}[source]
The situation described in Iran after the Islamic Revolution did not even remotely constitute genocide or similar. Genocide is defined as the intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. While the Jewish community in Iran has faced discrimination, emigration, and instances of harassment and persecution, these conditions do not amount to genocide. The term genocide involves deliberate acts aimed at the physical extermination of a group, and this has not been the case with the Jewish community in Iran, despite the difficulties they have faced. The Iranian government officially recognizes Judaism, allows for Jewish religious practices, and Jews also have a reserved seat in Parliament. There has never been widespread killings or any organized campaign targeting Jews specifically for eradication in Iran, except for isolated cases against jews accused of spying for America and/or Israel. None of this was ethnic-cleansing or genocide.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 and its Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide, made Israel an appealing destination for many Jewish emigrants from Iran, that's why the overwhelming majority emigrated, but there were also substantial numbers who resettled in the United States, particularly in cities like Los Angeles and New York.

35. sebastos ◴[] No.41870318{10}[source]
Ok, now imagine the kidnappers escape with the hostages, and hole up in their family homes. The family members will answer the phone and they insist they are totally 100% innocent: they haven’t seen their scumbag kidnapper uncle in years! The family sure doesn’t seem to be very cooperative in helping authorities apprehend their uncle though…
replies(1): >>41871590 #
36. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41871590{11}[source]
Are you suggesting that this then makes it ok to bomb the family home, killing women, children, unknowing neighbours, and the hostage together? And that it's entirely the kidnapper's fault when this happens?

If so, I certainly wouldn't want to meet the gods that approve of such a thing, if any existed.