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724 points simonw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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0points ◴[] No.44529722[source]
> Israel ranks high on democracy indicies

Those rankings must be rigged.

Nethanyahu should be locked up in jail now for the corruption charges he was facing before the Hamas attack.

He literally stopped elections in Israel since then and there's been protests against his government daily for some years now.

And now, even taco tries to have the corruption charges dropped for Nethanyahu, then you must know he's guilty.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/29/world-news/israeli-court-postp...

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-corrupti...

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Asafp ◴[] No.44529811[source]
Almost none of what you wrote above is true, no idea how is this a top comment. Israel is a democracy. Netanyahu's trail is still ongoing, the war did not stop the trails and until he is proven guilty (and if) he should not go to jail. He did not stop any elections, Israel have elections every 4 years, it still did not pass 4 years since last elections. Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy. Source: Lives in Israel.
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DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.44530008[source]
Israel is a democracy (albeit increasingly authoritarian) only if you belong to one ethnicity. There are 5 million Palestinians living under permanent Israeli rule who have no rights at all. No citizenship. No civil rights. Not even the most basic human rights. They can be imprisoned indefinitely without charges. They can be shot, and nothing will happen. This has been the situation for nearly 60 years now. No other country like this would be called a democracy.
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thyristan ◴[] No.44530079[source]
Afaik those 5 million Palestinians are not Israeli citizens because they don't want to be, and rather would have their refugee and Palestinian citizen status. There are also Palestinians who have chosen to be Israeli citizens, with the usual democratic rights and representation, with their own people in the Knesset, etc.

And shooting enemies in a war is unfortunately not something you would investigate, it isn't even murder, it is just a consequence of war under the articles of war. In cases where civilians are shot (what Israel defines to be civilians), there are investigations and sometimes even punishments for the perpetrators. Now you may (sometimes rightfully) claim that those investigations and punishments are too few, one-sided and not done by a neutral party. But those do happen, which by far isn't "nothing".

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McDyver ◴[] No.44530236{3}[source]
It makes sense that people don't want to become citizens and legitimise the entity occupying their country and committing genocide, no?

> In cases where civilians are shot (what Israel defines to be civilians), there are investigations and sometimes even punishments for the perpetrators.

Obviously Israel doesn't consider children to be civilians

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gd01g1gxro

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reliabilityguy ◴[] No.44530598{4}[source]
> legitimise the entity occupying their country

What’s country? Palestine never existed as independent country.

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McDyver ◴[] No.44530672{5}[source]
Exactly, what's a country?

Israel never existed either, until it was administratively created in 1948. Maybe it shouldn't have been created where other people were already living?

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reliabilityguy ◴[] No.44530683{6}[source]
You started with “occupying their country”. Can you tell me what country is that?
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DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.44531733{7}[source]
If it's not a different country from Israel, then give them Israeli citizenship.

There's a very simple reason Israel doesn't give the Palestinians citizenship: Israel wants to make sure the large majority of voters are Jewish. It wants the land, but not the people who live there.

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reliabilityguy ◴[] No.44531955{8}[source]
> If it's not a different country from Israel, then give them Israeli citizenship.

The period we are talking about had no Israel either, so I am not sure what was supposed to happen there in your view.

> There's a very simple reason Israel doesn't give the Palestinians citizenship: Israel wants to make sure the large majority of voters are Jewish.

Of course. We all (1) see what happens to non-muslims in other middle eastern countries, and (2) saw what happened to the middle eastern jewry after 1948. I doubt that Iraqi jews living in Israel want to live under Islamic rule again.

> It wants the land, but not the people who live there.

This is false. Israel multiple times traded land for peace. The latest one was leaving Gaza in 2005.

Why are you keeping twisting the facts to suit your narrative?

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DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.44538376{9}[source]
> Of course.

And you think that's legitimate? Keeping millions of people under permanent rule of a state with no rights whatsoever?

I'm not going to get into your historical claims, except to note that the reason why the situation for Middle Eastern Jews changed so drastically after 1948 was because a bunch of people claiming to represent all Jews conquered a strip of land in the Middle East and expelled the native population. That did not go down well elsewhere in the Middle East, and the fact that the new state was proclaimed "the Jewish state" painted a target on the back of Jews throughout the region, who had had nothing to do with the founding of Israel.

> Israel multiple times traded land for peace. The latest one was leaving Gaza in 2005.

Israel left Gaza in 2005 so that it could concentrate on the settlement of the West Bank. It was a strategic move to conserve their forces.

The only "land for peace" deal that Israel has made is with Egypt. Israel did that because it did not want to risk another war like 1973 with a serious military opponent.

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reliabilityguy ◴[] No.44550986{10}[source]
> And you think that's legitimate? Keeping millions of people under permanent rule of a state with no rights whatsoever?

They do have rights. Why are you lying? They have PA, and they have all their rights there as determined by the PA.

> I'm not going to get into your historical claims, except to note that the reason why the situation for Middle Eastern Jews changed so drastically after 1948 was because a bunch of people claiming to represent all Jews conquered a strip of land in the Middle East and expelled the native population.

I see. So if some Jews in Israel do something, then the Arabs everywhere else are allowed to ethnically cleanse the Jews in other places. Thank you for clarifying this. Well, now we know where you stand on collective punishment :)

> Israel left Gaza in 2005 so that it could concentrate on the settlement of the West Bank. It was a strategic move to conserve their forces.

How does it change the choice that Palestinians made in Gaza?

> The only "land for peace" deal that Israel has made is with Egypt. Israel did that because it did not want to risk another war like 1973 with a serious military opponent.

So? It was a smart move, and proved itself.

Like man, you just showed with this reply alone that you don’t care about human rights, you just don’t like Jews.

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DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.44569060{11}[source]
> They do have rights. Why are you lying?

I'd actually turn that around and ask you the very same question. You know that Palestinians in the West Bank have no rights whatsoever, and I don't understand what you're playing at with your obvious gambit here.

> They have PA, and they have all their rights there as determined by the PA.

The PA is totally powerless, as I'm sure you know. It gets to take out the trash and run the schools. The Israelis hold all the real power in the West Bank, and they do whatever they want, wherever they want. The IDF wants to invade a Palestinian city nominally under PA jurisdiction? No problem. The IDF wants to cut off the tax revenue of the PA? No problem. The IDF wants to nab someone in the middle of a Palestinian city? No problem. The PA is just as powerless as the Warsaw Judenrat was.

> So if some Jews in Israel do something, then the Arabs everywhere else are allowed to ethnically cleanse the Jews in other places.

I never said anything of the sort. The Jews of the Arab world were treated horribly after the founding of Israel. They suffered because of what people they had no control over (European and American Zionists) did.

> How does it change the choice that Palestinians made in Gaza?

It directly contradicts your claim that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza was an attempt to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. You're just changing the subject now.

> So? It was a smart move, and proved itself.

The "So what?" is that this undermines your claim that Israel is willing to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. They only traded land for peace with Egypt because Egypt was a credible military threat (which the Palestinians are not).

> Like man, you just showed with this reply alone that you don’t care about human rights, you just don’t like Jews.

I'm Jewish.

But this is how every conversation with a Zionist ends, in my experience. After they pull out all the talking points they learned at summer camp, they fall back to their last line of defense: "You just hate Jews." Or its cousin: "You're just a self-hating Jew." As if loving oneself requires one to support a little ultranationalist state on the other side of the world that's currently carrying out a genocide.

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1. msgodel ◴[] No.44569088{12}[source]
I think if you're jewish it is healthy and acceptable to concern yourself with the well being of Israel the same way it's healthy for anglo Americans to concern themselves with the state of the UK.

The problem is when people drag the rest of the country into it. And that's mostly a problem because the US is this weird international country now so we have to make all these compromises.