I will expect to be downvoted to hell for this.
What makes you say that? Plenty of people express support for the Palestinian people, including plenty of governments and heads of state, etc.
I personally think that being pro-Palestine means you should be anti-Hamas, since they are a brutal dictatorship that's plundered its people's resources to engage in a war with Israel that has destroyed their lives.
The main worrying thing is when someone is not pro-Palestinian, they're either pro-Hamas or anti-Israel.
As for the first para, I have very close friends who have been harassed for expressing support for plight. If you are a university student in the US today and said exactly what I have said, you can be found guilty as a terrorist-sympathizer. I have been downvoted to hell on reddit and elsewhere for putting it as mildly as I did here.
I agree with the sentiment, but I wouldn't go quite so far, neither in the goals nor the tactics. Also, "Israeli leadership" is a pretty broad term - there are specific very bad actors, but the most extremist actors are largely a minority (with, unfortunately, far more political power than their minority support should give them).
Hamas is bad - current Israeli leadership is bad. But there are degrees of badness and I don't think it's correct to equate them.
It's also, tactically speaking, a pretty bad way to discuss these things, as most on the pro-Israel side will not really be receptive to arguments made from people who equate the two. Assuming your goal is to actually persuade people on the pro-Israeli side.
> As for the first para, I have very close friends who have been harassed for expressing support for plight. If you are a university student in the US today and said exactly what I have said, you can be found guilty as a terrorist-sympathizer.
That's pretty awful that that's the case. What can I say? I'm against it. Both in the broader sense of supporting free speech, and in the specific case here in which statements in support of the Palestinian people are obviously totally fine (and, IMO, the only moral stance).
Personally, I don't use Reddit much, but this is definitely not the sense I get from seeing reading e.g. Twitter, in which there are plenty of extremely anti-Israel voices.
Remember - we're all seeing our own personal echo chamber of content.
There is also an easy but not perfect way to check, you look at the account age and post history. If you check a normal user account like mine you will see it ha many years long, that I post say on average 3 comments a day, some days nothing and maybe soem days more. That I also have low activity and different sections like Star trek, or some video game I was into at that time, or soem TV show, With paid accounts they are all very new, they all post on the same topic like defending Ruzzia or Israel, they are very active only on this topic.
Also there is known that Ruzzia and Israel have paid cyber worriors so for sure they have scripts that will alert when something about their regime is posted and they worriors will pop up and repeat their propaganda to excuse the war crimes.
The most common comments used to drown out actual criticism of israel and how to address its actions are actually the "aren't you glad we didn't vote for biden because he was bad for palestine" type. They will often be 4-5 of the top comments. Similar tactics are sadly used when discussing the crimes of the attack by emphasising the vileness of the acts in detail (despite both groups having plenty, and the world knowing both) and twisting the knife to make it too painful for people to engage with the discussion to exhaust them.
Let us not forget Israel has had a citizen driven hasbarah app which gives citizens "goals" (pre pasted propaganda messaged they are expected to post on their accounts) every morning to carry out online for over 7 years (reported by haaretz) https://youtu.be/iYzVOlcENZ4?si=IrN3FALmKVvIYkNJ I imagine it is much more discreet and efficient now.
In other words, you assume that people that disagree with you must be bots or paid trolls? That certainly explains why you think Reddit is full of them :)
I will often write stuff that you would probably consider pro-Israeli. I'm not a troll and don't get paid for it. Do you simply dismiss anything I say because you assume I'm either a bot or a "Israeli paid cyber warrior"? That makes you wrong, and makes you unable to ever learn new things or new perspectives.
(I'm not disputing, btw, that there are a lot of trolls. From my perspective, 90% of people posting anything about the conflict, including some major accounts, are absolutely trolls - they have no skin in the game and little real knowledge of the situation, and simply want to post provocative things, whether pro or anti, to get engagement.)
Read those hints again, is your account a f ew days old, do you only post about Israel? do you comments appear super fast in response to my comments like it was triggered by alarms? If those are yes then you are a bot, can't be 100% sure if you are paid, could be someone doing is mandatory unpaid military service.
You're putting a bunch of barriers between hearing someone else's opinion and accepting it as valid.
> Read those hints again, is your account a f ew days old, do you only post about Israel?
In my case, no and no.
> do you comments appear super fast in response to my comments like it was triggered by alarms?
I do what plenty of other HN users do - I use a 3rd party service that notifies me when someone replies to any of my posts.
> can't be 100% sure if you are paid, could be someone doing is mandatory unpaid military service.
Which is exactly the problem with your approach. You can write off anyone, including me, as "well they are actually being paid". How can I prove that I'm not?
Also, most Israelis between the ages of 18-21 are doing their mandatory military service, that in itself isn't a reason not to listen to them.
Btw, military service is not unpaid; IDF soldiers receive a salary, though it's much lower than almost any market wage.
But do you get notified when I chat with Bob about Israel? Or get a notification when someone says something bad about Israel?
OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel killing civilian including children a war crime. Also explain why the recent war crime of killing red cross members (again) is not a war crime . The assholes denied it until video evidence was shown. (very , very shitty behaviour, the same like Ruzzian bots claiming the Azerbaijan airplane was downed by birds and still denying until today that it was Ruzzia).
This is other clue to detect a paid bot, denies evidence until their Mistry pof Invazions confirm it with a spin why it was not them or it was a excusable .
No. I'm not trying to prove myself to you - I'm sure that someone is actively monitoring mentions of Israel, though I doubt the Israeli government particularly cares what happens on HN - it's fairly niche.
I do sometimes search for mentions of Israel in HN search, sometimes including comments, but I don't do it that often.
> OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel killing civilian including children a war crime.
I think any decent person mourns innocent people being killed, on either side. I personally also mourn for non-civilians being killed - it's not like Israeli soldiers trying to defend their country are people that should be killed, and it's not like most Hamas militants who (in their mind) are defending themselves from a foreign occupier deserve death either. I have far less sympathy for the leaders who know better.
But to your question - killing civilian, both morally and in a legal sense, is not in general a war crime unless those civilians were directly targeted, or unless their targeting was disproportionate to valid military aims.
Whatever you may think of Israel, Hamas has custom-designed their war to make it extremely difficult to rescue Israeli hostages, and extremely difficult to get to Hamas, without killing civilians. Btw, the more "evil" you think Israel is, the more evil and cynical this makes Hamas - since they knowingly protect themselves with the lives of the civilians under their care.
So Israel killing civilians is not, in itself, proof of a war crime. It's a sad fact of reality that civilians die in war. Especially ones in which one side is exploiting their civilians to save themselves.
That all said, there is no doubt that many war crimes have been committed. Some are documented and Israel has investigated them and taken steps to stop the people committing them. Some are swept under the rug. I imagine many are never reported. I don't think Israel is especially moral or especially immoral - this is just true of any war.
> Also explain why the recent war crime of killing red cross members (again) is not a war crime .
I don't have all the facts and neither do you. From what we've seen so far - it definitely seems like a war crime. I reserve judgement because I have some faith in the IDF - you rush to condemn Israel for the opposite reason, I imagine. I've also seen many stories turn out to be far more complicated after investigation than any immediate, attention-grabbing headline would suggest.
In any case, I think this should be investigated and, if it was a war crime, for the perpetrators to be prosecuted.
What I see from pro-Israel gov accounts is bullshit like 1 we have video of war crimes, like killing red cross 2 pro Israel bots(I told you the clues ) come and deny the news is real,video appears so deny the video is real, then they claim that for sure there must have been some weapons or Hamas leader hiding there.
Also what is your opinion on Trump and Israel cleaning up Gaza of Palestinians and making building soem comercial crap there? Genocide does not always mean killings.
I have an issue with extremists too.
> What I see from pro-Israel gov accounts is bullshit like 1 we have video of war crimes, like killing red cross 2 pro Israel bots(I told you the clues ) come and deny the news is real,video appears so deny the video is real, then they claim that for sure there must have been some weapons or Hamas leader hiding there.
I'm sure there are plenty of bots/trolls/whatever. There are also a lot of genuine people who are pro-Israelis who will reflexively just not believe any video or reporting at first. It's unfortunately true that there have been many cases of bias against Israel and misreporting; but it's also true (and frankly undeniable) that war crimes have been committed by Israel.
This goes the other way - lots of pro-Palestine (or just anti-Israel) people will just answer any statement made by Israel with "Zionists always lie" or various memes to that effect.
I wish I were as confident as you that these are all bots; I think my (far more pessimistic) belief is true though, that many of these are real people just posting reflexively without thinking anything through.
> Also what is your opinion on Trump and Israel cleaning up Gaza of Palestinians and making building soem comercial crap there? Genocide does not always mean killings.
First, genocide does mean killing, or at least acting to make a population disappear via other means. And for the record, I completely disagree with categorizing the Gaza war as a genocide. It's a horrible war, but not at all a genocide, by any definition that any real person uses.
Their plan could be ethnic cleansing, depending on whether the eventual plan is to forcibly remove Gazans from Gaza, or whether it's to allow Gazans to leave on a voluntary basis. Of course, I don't think there's any way for Gazans who choose now to be doing it voluntarily - since Israel has destroyed much of the physical infrastructure of Gaza, and the war is still raging.
Needless to say (or maybe not needless nowadays), I'm against ethnic cleansing. I think the morally correct thing is for Israel to allow any Gazan that wants to leave for the duration of the war to do so, but make real assurances that they will be allowed to come back at the end of the war. That way the war could truly be against Hamas, and not against the Gazan population that is living through hell right now.
This is what happens in every other conflict btw - the world urges the combatants to allow civilians to flee and they become refugees, hopefully returning one day to their home.
Other than that, I think that long term, Hamas must be removed from power, and unfortunately given the current reality, no one is going to do that except for Israel. Until Hamas loses power, the Gazan population will continue to suffer, and Israel will continue to be attacked, as Hamas has made clear. I don't know who could plausibly rule afterwards, probably the PA, and of course I support an eventual two-state solution to the conflict.