In no way does Hezbollah "occupy" Lebanon. It is drawn entirely from Lebanese society. Truly a bizarre thing to keep repeating so stridently! Its also absurd to deny the literal origins of the group, as a militia that was attempting to defend southern Lebanon from an actual occupation? This isn't hidden, there are shelves of books in english on the origins of Hezbollah? The first sentence of the second paragraph of the wikipedia article on them, just to show what level of consensus there is, states the fact of its origins as a response to an Israeli invasion, and its source for this is....wait for it....the BBC.
Hey! I'm glad to see you. Hezbollah was a Khomeinist response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. If you want to argue that Israel bears some responsibility for the destabilization of Lebanon, I won't argue. But it was trained and guided by the IRGC from its inception; the modern incarnation of Hezbollah is directed by the IRGC Quds Force. If you want to argue that the two organizations (QF and Hezbollah) are separable, you have two simple fact patterns to contend with:
* Hezbollah fully mobilized to engage, on behalf of the Syrian Baathists, during the Syrian civil war. By some accounts Hezbollah was the most effective fighting force in the entire conflict. There was no clear ideological reason Hezbollah should have committed itself and other Lebanese militia to that conflict; it did so because Iran and the Baathist leadership of Syria are aligned politically. It's striking, reviewing the entire history of Hezbollah's military conflict, that the Syrian theater accounts for a plurality of all military casualties ever taken by Hezbollah. I'd like to understand your explanation for Hezbollah taking over 2,000 infantry casualties in Syria that excludes the IRGC directing them to do so.
* The Mossad pager attack struck Iran's foreign envoy to Lebanon (that's reported in the story we're commenting on) and dozens of Iranian Quds Force operatives in the Bekaa valley. I'm curious what your explanation of those casualties would be, apart from the obvious and widely reported suggestion that Hezbollah under Nasrallah was an instrument of the QF.
The claim that Hezbollah is directed by and is in essence an instrument of the Quds Force fits into a context of Iran's strategy of engaging militarily through a network of proxies --- the claim I'm making is one Iran itself makes. Iran's proxies include not just Hezbollah but Kata'ib Hezbollah in Iraq, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza --- Hamas being noteworthy because they had a falling out with the IRGC because they supported the Sunni insurgency in Syria.
It's wild to me, as a westerner, that on the leaderboard of "most salient military conflicts in the Middle East", Israel/Palestine ranks at best #3, behind the Saudi/Persian rivalry (which claimed hundreds of thousands of noncombatant lives in Yemen) and the Sunni/Alawite conflict in Syria (which claimed hundreds of thousands of noncombatant lives in Syria).
Are you going to respond to my point about the "occupy" "fact" or...not? Plenty of resistance groups are trained by other state (and non-state) powers who have an interest in their success? Vietnam comes to mind! I don't know, maybe you would, but I'd be pretty shocked if you described the North Vietnamese army as "occupying" ....North Vietnam. Similar dynamics apply across pretty much any ideological axis you could name. The level of support that a resistance group gets for a militia which I haven't seen you deny (yet!) is made up entirely of Lebanese people does not somehow negate that that force is indigenous to its location/state/region/etc and is operating from a motivation to repel a state that had already actually occupied Lebanon for 20 years during a previous invasion. None of what Hezbollah did in Syria negates its origins or in anyway makes it an "occupier" of its own land. This is the point I made in my reply, nothing that I'm seeing in yours in anyway addresses that, if you think it does, please, feel free to explain it to me.
To the extent that it is the dominant military power in Lebanon and it is directed by a foreign power, while enjoying something like 8% public support outside the Shia minority in Lebanon, I do feel comfortable referring to it as an occupying power. The Syria thing is not a small deal.
I feel like if I have a stake in any part of these cursed threads, it's the notion that just because you oppose Israel --- a deeply problematic state, I agree with you preemptively --- doesn't make you justifiable. You saw the same thing with people talking up Ansar Allah when they were deterring shipping in the Red Sea. Literally a minoritarian racialist supremacist group!
To the extent that it is the dominant military power in Lebanon and it is directed by a foreign power, while enjoying something like 8% public support outside the Shia minority in Lebanon, I do feel comfortable referring to it as an occupying power.
Except that extent is tempered greatly by Hezbollah's broader social and political significance (providing government services in some areas, and being a leading party in the previous ruling coalition). Also, if we go by its standing in the polls, its support clocks in at 18.56 percent, and its broader coalition block came in with an additional 20 percent (which has quite a different ring from the "8 percent outside of the Shia majority" figure you were touting).
Point being - it's not simply a proxy of Iran, and (since the definition of a "military occupier", going by Wikipedia, explicitly requires a foreign power as a referent) that's where the assertion "Hezbollah occupies Lebanon" starts to lose structural coherence.
1) There hasn't been an official census in Lebanon in nearly a century[1], precisely because such statistics would upset a fragile balance of power between competing minority groups. So I'm not sure where you are getting the 8% public support outside the Shia minority line but if you have access to census data that literally the entire rest of the world, including and most prominently the Lebanese, do not have, perhaps you should share it! Not that that matters because even if you were correct about the support levels, given that Hezbollah is a genuine Lebanese political movement, made up entirely of Lebanese people, it cannot, ipso facto be an "occupying power". There are a number of different words to describe when an indigenous minority rules over an indigenous majority but "occupier" is not one of them, and the political function that that word performs in your argument is the reason I think maybe your doubling down on it, substance free.
2) I did not at any point say that the actions of Hezbollah in Syria are "a small deal". The actions of Hezbollah in Syria however, while truly heinous, have zero to do with whether or not it is accurate to call Hezbollah an "occupying power". You often try to draw in extraneous aspects to a particular point in these threads which are salacious or horrifying and seem to believe that these buttress your argument without ever actually illuminating the link, I feel like this is a perfect example of that. Maybe we're talking past one another, I don't know, but as I said, nothing that Hezbollah did in Syria in anyway makes it an occupying power in Lebanon.
3) I have never, here or at any time in any of these threads, held to some kind of childlike mentality that simply by virtue of "oppos[ing] Israel...makes you justifiable."
4) Plenty of resistance groups engage in ugly tactics or are either authoritarian from the beginning or become so over time. None of that makes those groups somehow an "occupier", or negates that they are resisting a real oppressor. Which, again, is my entire reason for jumping in this thread.
5) If your only reason to jump in these threads is to perform some kind of intellectual policing action, scolding and sneering at your interlocutors, presuming that their motivation is a kind of shallow reflexive opposition to Israel, I think maybe you lose the ability to claim that you are attempting to preserve an environment for "curiosity". I have tangled with you probably half a dozen times or more over this last year, not once have I felt you are in anyway "curious" or seeking to understand. Just the opposite. Do you think I support any and all opposition to Israel, simply because....it is opposition to Israel? You would be quite wrong stranger! I have prayed at more synagogues, just in Chicago, then you have probably, probably, set foot in in your entire life. I was a zionist for many years. None of this really needs to be said, and given you are unwilling to defend your own statements, commenting that you are "not going to litigate your politics" and that you "blame message boards" for other people "misunderstanding" your statements, I kind of feel like its a charity and gesture you are unwilling to extend yourself and do not deserve! But again, its worth putting out there, so at least other people can see it.
EDIT: Just to respond directly to a point you raised in your initial reply which I missed on first read, the amount of casualties that Hezbollah sustained in Syria, again, does not make it an occupying power of Lebanon, I can't think of a single reason why that would somehow make them occupiers. As to why they did that, I would assume for the guns! The guns and other military support that they receive from Iran overwhelmingly passes through Syria and had the Assad regime fallen that would have been a pretty bad day for Hezbollah! Seems like a powerful reason. The idea that the relationship to Iran can be reduced to one of puppet and puppeteer by gesturing at the number of Iranians killed or wounded in the pager attack is a strange one.
I'm sorry but my lived experience of this thread is that you're the one who jumped in. I'm happy you did so, but maybe we just leave this at "we disagree and our premises are too far apart for it to make sense to litigate".
My contention is that Hezbollah is a literal arm of the IRGC Quds Force, integrated into Iranian military command and control, operating in Iran's regional strategic interests, to the point of dragging Lebanon into another regional war for no apparent benefit to Lebanon itself; it is further the most powerful military organization in Lebanon and largely outside the reach of internal law in Lebanon. Ergo: I would say that Hezbollah is evidence of Iranian occupation of Lebanon.
If you want to dispute the definitions I'm using, that's fine; it's just about the most boring thing we could possible argue about. What I strongly object to is the notion that Hezbollah under Nasrallah has functioned as a "resistance movement", as has been claimed elsewhere on this thread. Ask a Sunni in Homs what they think about that claim.
That Sunni in Homs that you want to ventriloquize (do...do you actually know any Sunnis from Homs? Seriously dude. Do you get why its extremely gross to use their suffering for point scoring?) wasn't under Hezbollahs boot in 1982, when it was formed to resist an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. This is what I mean when I say your definition of "occupation" is doing an incredible amount of ideological lifting, and why it is, in fact, a resistance movement. You haven't responded to the link I provided nor provided any of your own to buttress an part of your own argument, which is pretty telling I think. Do you actually know anything, literally anything at all about the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon? Thats a serious question and if you want to respond to me I'd ask you to respond, in detail, to that. Because the idea that the Lebanese were just peachy keen over their country being invaded and brutalized, for years and years, until the Iranians planted an occupation force in their midst is... its kind of gross man! The idea that the Lebanese right now were just fine with the slaughter in Gaza and its only the evil Persians and their scheming who are whipping up antizionist sentiment...that kind of argument has a history. You can point to the horror show of the Syrian Civil War all you want, that came literally two plus decades after Hezbollah was formed. I'm not sure if its intentional or not, but I see you have now tightened your argument to say "Hezbollah under Nasrallah". Kind of looks like a shifting goalpost to me. Do you believe it was a resistance movement and then degenerated under Nasrallah? Seems germane!
I don't know what point you're trying to make here, sorry. The Hezbollah siege of Madaya didn't occur in 1982. You've jumped onto a thread about what Hezbollah is; I don't know that it's reasonable to object to comments pointing out what it isn't. By all means, rebut them if you can.
You seem to have adopted a very convenient definition of “resistance movement”. In almost all colonial warfare throughout history, the colonized received international support. Sometimes this was just weapons and aid, sometimes these were international volunteer bridges, and sometimes whole armies of a supporting nation. For example, in Rhodesian bush war, not only were the main Zimbabwe resistance groups armed and supplied by China and the Soviet Union, but they also had fighters and armed groups coming from Mozambique, ANC (South Africa) and Zambia.
During the Gaza genocide Hezbollah has been one of only two international groups who have fought with the Palestinian resistance (the other being the Huthis). Not even Iran has fought to help Palestine (they merely sent a nominal amount of missiles for reasons other than the liberation of Palestine). The ANC, and Mozambique fighters surely were armed and supplied by e.g. the Soviet Union, who probably event gave them intelligence, military advice, etc. But at no point were they a vessel or otherwise integrated into any military unit of the Soviet Union. And they fought the Rhodesian Government on ideological grounds and in solidarity with their colonized partners on the continent, but also of self preservation as e.g. the Mozambique resistance probably saw an independent Rhodesian Government would be a thread to their own liberation.
To claim e.g. that the ANC were evidence of a Soviet occupation in Africa would be very ahistorical (and I don’t thing anybody would do that), but still (and I haven’t checked, so I may be wrong) it wouldn’t surprise me that many contemporary apologists of African apartheid did just that.
Was Hezbollah an active ideological adversary of Israel, a participant in the conflict between Israel and Hamas/PIJ? Absolutely. Does that mean it participated in what Iran calls "resistance" to the state of Israel? Absolutely. Is that Hezbollah's core function? Absolutely not. Hezbollah is a service branch of the Iranian military. In every conflict Hezbollah has fought with Israel, it has incurred fewer losses and contested less territory than it did in Syria.
Empirically, Hezbollah's function is to serve Iran's regional strategic interests. When those interests align against Israel, as they so often do, Hezbollah "resists" Israel. When they involve killing Lebanese Sunni political adversaries, they do otherwise. When they involve projecting Iranian military power in other foreign conflicts, that's what they do.
I walk down the street, and someone sitting down the side of the road asks for some spare change. I give them a couple bucks and keep walking. Am I a philanthropist? Maybe in that moment? But I am in reality a software developer.
If you want to argue that Hezbollah is both a resistance movement and a foreign military occupier of Lebanon, we might find a place to agree. But, obviously, us agreeing isn't important. I'm comfortable with what this thread says about our respective positions!
With that line of reasoning you could claim that the American Indian Movement is a foreign occupying power within the USA, as they receive support from and serve the strategic interests of other indigenous liberation movements around the Americas (including Nicaragua and Bolivia); Or you could flip the script and claim that the Nicaraguan Contras were a US backed foreign occupying power in Nicaragua.
That is simply not what a foreign occupying power means. Let’s take the contras for example. They weren’t just mindless drones of the US empire, they had their own strategic interest which happened to align with US interest in the region. Would they have been active without US backing, for sure, they just wouldn’t have been so successful (and therefore not as brutal).
The Contras main interest were to reinstate the pre-revolution powerstructure, and to make sure no wealth and land redistribution occurred, they adopted whichever strategy they saw fit, including a heavy anti-communism in order to secure US backing.
This feels like an argument about definitions. Substitute whatever term you prefer. Though: I don't find it plausible that the American aboriginal rights movement is directed by foreign powers.
Hezbollah was a Khomeinist response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
This "response" being armed resistance to that invasion, specifically. Eventually not only forcing the latter's withdrawal, but handing it a decisive strategic defeat (from which it is still licking its wounds). As a neat little side bonus, the US was forced to leave with its tail between its legs as well.
Which makes it not only a you-know-what movement - but (by the end of that conflict at least) a very successful one at that.
according to who? A little girl was killed today precisely because she picked up someones pager. On top of that solar panels (!!!) are blowing up across Lebanon right now, do those count? Are those somehow incontrovertibly "associated" with a combatant?
I think the solar panel thing isn't confirmed? And so far as I've seen, it's only reported to have happened in on place in Dahieh. If it is confirmed, you'll also be waiting for reporting and evidence that it was a supply chain attack on solar panels (seems unlikely), or a direct attack on that building.
(It seems unlikely to me because we have reason to believe the handsets and pagers shared a contract manufacturer or distributor. Mossad isn't like Gambit from the X-Men; they can't just make random things blow up.)
Pretty cool how you have now ignored the part of the comment about the murder of a child, multiple times, from multiple commenters. Also, and relatedly, you seem to think that this can be....legitimated?...by making noises about the "value of the target", I'm curious how many of the dead or injured do you think are "high value" enough to carry out an attack like this? Seems kind of important for your "argument"! If quite a few of the dead and injured are merely couriers, or simply contractors, as a parent commenter pointed out, that sort of undermines the legal basis your relying to celebrate a terror attack. And as other reporting has brought up, if the mossad is so good at what they do, why did they do it now, with zero evidence that this will in any way affect the strategic posture of Hezbollah? Specifically, Hezbollah (and other outlets) are pointing out that very many of these injured are not, in fact, militant combatants.
The comment about gambit is about as puerile as I would expect at this point.
You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, as well as using HN primarily for political battle over recent months. We have to ban accounts that do those things, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of how other commenters are behaving. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Pretty telling that it is me, and not your top karma poster, who is getting this reprimand. You are welcome to ban me, and I'm not going to appeal or beg to stay here, its your site after all. But if all I had to do to make my account more palatable to you was mix in the occasional comment on a js framework, or cooking, or exploit development, while continuing to pour out anti-arab racism, as Thomas here has done, repeatedly, for months, than maybe you are doing me the favor. I have yet to see a single comment from you about that. For the record I have reviewed your the guidelines, and I stand by everything I've posted here. I don't use this site "primarily for political battle", in fact I have avoided "political" threads for years. If posting things like "all Palestinians belong in Jordan" as Thomas has done, in threads just like this, for months, isn't something worth responding to directly by you than your rules don't mean much. Or simply apply to less useful people.
EDIT:
I forgot about the part where Thomas here tells pacifist jews they are "getting close to the blood libel". That didn't merit a response from you either. Classy stuff dang.
Brother, I can link you to your own comments.
For example here's your "blood libel" comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067633
I'm actually working, and just logged in to see if I have actually been banned, but I can absolutely go through your own comment history in the last 11 months and pull out each and every example I mentioned.
I used to respect you man, and if you read my responses to you, over these last 11 months, they start off annoyed but charitable, attempting to push you to examine your own position, exactly as you and 'dang and whoever are asking and expecting of commenters to do here, and you just keep posting absurd, racist statements and so they have deteriorated to today. I don't expect you to actually do anything about it at this point, but I want to leave a record on this site that I did what I said I've been doing, and you've been doing what I said you've been doing. Maybe you'll surprise me, I don't know.
EDIT:
I'm actually really really glad I linked this exact comment, because right beneath it is one of the other highest karma posters on this site, who is of Jewish descent, making my point for me in the best way possible, in opposition to you, and you are continuing in the thread to do exactly what it is I've been telling you you are doing; speaking out of your own ignorance and giving it a patina of authority for example here by gesturing at the ADL and saying "just google it" which is absurd.
You've misunderstood that comment. I blame message boards. I'm comfortable with what that thread says.
I'm not going to litigate my political beliefs with you here, because I don't think it'll work. But I'll tell you what: if you want to know more about what I actually believe, please feel free to email me and ask. My only warning to you is that my beliefs are a lot more boring than you might think they are.
I don't have any beef with you. For what it's worth: I didn't mean anything personal by the X-Men thing. I don't know who you are or really anything about you. If that read personally snarky, I get it, and will try to be more careful.
it was a shipment of pagers paid for by heznobollas to communicate because they thought mossad was able to listen and track everything else. it was never a general Lebanese market pager that happens to be used by heznobollas occasionally. they bought in bulk and handed them out to their soldiers.
Cool man, checked in on the story lately? Because literal solar panels are now exploding across Lebanon. I'm sure everyone within 20 yards of them is clearly a terrorist.
the news that I can find reasonable sources for is that the terrorists stopped using phones because Israel could track them and send spicy suppositories, so they switched to pagers - and the pagers immediately blew off things they were fond of. At this point, they panicked and went to their 2way radios to ask for instructions from their terrorist leadership..... and their f*cking radios blew up.
I love that now there's completely random stories of things blowing up (which aren't actually happening, otherwise there would be more serious reports and evidence).
So it sounds like they already have ptsd from evil western infidel technology - it's pretty much biblical in its magnitude - can you really trust that electric toothbrush? what about those hair clippers? those Nike shoes? shoelaces next?
it sounds like Israel achieved their objective, these people are now reduced to trusting only stone age technology. their attacks on Israel will now be much less organised and easier to defend against.
it's sad that Israel had to burn this phenomenal trump card, it sounds like they were saving it for a ground invasion?
Were the children militants? What about hospital staff? And, how do you know who these people are? You don't, but you're all over this thread running cover for a terrorist attack. I've already seen plenty of reporting that many of these targeted people were not, in fact, militants, but simply political members of Hezbollah. Would you be running the same cover if Hezbollah, or Iran had targeted Knesset staff? Disgusting stuff man, truly odious.
You realize these went off in supermarkets, right? In hospitals? In homes where children were near by? There has already been reporting on at least two dead children.
What alternative do you suggest? It's not as though a 250, 500lb bomb is less prone to collateral damage.
Hezbollah willingly joined with Hamas into a war. As far as war goes, this is just about the most precise form of targeting possible, especially in an urban area.
"Many Jewish people" according to....who, you? Seriously! Who is the "many Jewish people"??! Do you regularly poll the jewish diaspora? Israel? Specifically on the collective jewish opinions of JVP? Man if I wanted to write up an example breakdown on how to structure a weasel word contradiction ridden filled post I could start a lot worse than here!
"They tread pretty close to the line on things like the Blood Libel in their rhetoric" sure seems like something I'd want to substantiate! Claiming one of the most venerable peace organizations in American Jewish communal life is "treading the line on Blood Libel" (love that capitalization, great stuff) is disgusting, full stop. Maybe if you recognize that you're "not qualified to render that judgement" you should....not do it. Which is exactly what a cowardly "they come close to blood libel" type of a claim is. A claim about antisemitism. Really really gross and frankly beggars belief that you, a gentile, who is a self-professed catholic (I've been on this board almost as long as you have homie, and up until recently I read your posts with interest) feels the need to accuse a bunch of pacifist jews of capital B capital L Blood Libel.
As for US police training in Israel, once again, you show your own profound ignorance, or outright dishonesty, by stating this is a "risible" claim. US police training in Israel has been well documented, and pretending that there aren't any carryover effects of that training is itself the "risible" claim.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/with-whom-are-many-u-s-po...
In no way is the ability to get citizenship via religious conversion comparable to anything in the US, and as far as I am aware, neither in Europe. You are indeed "writing off Gazan journalism" when saying "Hamas-controlled Gaza", which at this point is ludicrous given that Hamas controls literally nothing in Gaza, and certainly didn't control the Al-jazeera reporters, reuters reporters, Washington post reporters, and so on who have been killed by Israeli airstrikes so far. Also pretty weird argument to make when Israel is one of the only "democracies" in the world whose press operates under military censorship laws and has for decades.
To the extent you believe there is (or was) a meaningful institution of journalism that operates apart from Hamas in Gaza, we just don't have anything to argue about.
Almost the only issue I personally have with any of these discussions is that the tend to back out into some notion of Hamas being comparably legitimate (or, more often, comparably illegitimate) to Israel. This is why I keep saying that the argument I've made here is very narrow.
If it simplifies things for you: rewind the clock to October 6th. Israel has some measure of state control over the media. So does Hamas. Israel and Hamas are not comparable: Hamas is far, far worse. That's it, that's the whole argument. That this argument doesn't prove a bunch of other points (like, "Israel is therefore a liberal democracy") doesn't matter: I'm not making those points, and probably don't believe them.
I understand how message boards work but you're really going to have to take my word for it that this isn't some elliptical way to lay the groundwork for an argument that legitimizes Israel's current occupation of the Gaza Strip.
You say you are making a narrow argument, but how? You cannot shape the reality of the argument such that it conveniently fits the narrative. The world is complex, and if there is an important nuance to be added, we cannot just ignore it because the initial argument is narrow. That is not how debating works. Like, we cannot just rewind to October 6th and ignore everything since then. There is important context in events that have unfolded since.
You say: “Hamas is far, far worse” but how? Israel has litterally just banned al Jazeera, I’m not aware that Hamas has e.g. banned the BBC. If your earlier point was that there was no Haaretz operating in Gaza, but how? Gaza is under occupation and a sever blockade, any media operation is bound to suffer under such circumstances. Free journals without state subsidies are hard in most economies, in impoverished regions like Gaza, much more so. And even if such press could thrive, Israel has been targeting journalists in Palestine even before Oct 7, this includes detention and even assassinations.
The state control which Hamas imposes upon journalism in Gaza is minute next to the state control which Israel imposes upon the same population. Hamas’s control is negligible. Yes they operate their own TV station and Radio. But they do not target journalists operating in Gaza, they do not detain and assassinate journalists, they do no not bomb offices of foreign media operators, they do not ban international media from broadcasting in their territory. Israel does all these things.
The state control which Hamas imposes upon journalism in Gaza is minute next to the state control which Israel imposes upon the same population
This is a rhetorical sleight of hand. I agree: Israel is far more repressive of Gazan journalism than is Hamas. The comparison is between Israel's own journalistic institutions in Israel and Hamas' in Gaza.
Pretty telling you stepped right past my point about conversion! Funny how you cherry picked the parts of my comment to respond to and then couched virtually your entire message in hedges! Also Al-Jazzeera has been operating in Gaza for nearly 20 years at this point, they have run pieces and interviews extremely critical of Hamas. As to the "I'm not legitimizing this" final sentence I'm not sure what you think your argument and others you've been dropping in these threads, are supposed to be doing given you sure do love to come in and drop some really gross generalizations and anti-arab racism in the way you paint Palestinian society. You are free to continually reference things like Hamas "throwing PA supporters off roofs", and consequently people are free to wonder and comment on why it is you only seem to pop up in these threads to make interventions like that, and not, say, literally anything at all about atrocities being committed by Israel.
many many people can and do and correctly deny that "many critics of Israel" "weaponize antisemitism against Israel". Lots of weasel words on that post! Which just so happen to themselves de-legitimize very necessary criticism of both Zionism writ large and Israel itself! And calls to "globalize the Intifadah" are overwhelming about a popular revolution you know nothing about but love to post about with some very racist certainty. The intifadah was a popular revolution that caught much of the self anointed Palestinian leadership by surprise, and has been consistently criticized for selling it (the popular organizing committees) out for Oslo. This isn't particularly hidden and isn't some kind of wild take but in fact quite well understood outside of a media landscape that endlessly portrays all attempts at Palestinian self-determination as necessarily violent. I suggest maybe taking a step back from these threads, you are very clearly speaking about a thing you don't understand while and ongoing campaign of mass murder is being conducted and you are defending the murdering. That isn't a value statement, whatever downvoters may feel, its a fact.
Well, they have a losing argument, because it's easy to present clear evidence of antisemitism delivered by Palestinian advocates (just like it's easy to present Kahanist rhetoric from Israeli advocates). I gave an undeniable specific example from Harvard's faculty SJP. There is stuff being said that is indefensible, and angrily denying it isn't going to get you anywhere; it just discredits your cause.
I would suggest maybe not lecturing others on how to "help the cause" from a ycombinator thread in which you described the Intifada, a popular uprising that was nonviolent for years, including tax resistance and boycotts, as a dyed-in-the-wool-this-is-what-it-is "call to murder civilians". I think you either don't care or don't realize how much you don't know and are absolutely trotting out wide generalizations yourself that are the mirror image of antisemitism, directed at Palestinians. The Kahanist comparison is also an incredibly poor one given that a literal Kahanist (Ben-Gvir), who is on video waving the stolen hood ornament of Rabin's car, saying "we can get to Rabin", is now the minister in charge of national security and has handed out thousands of rifles to settlers, independent of the militia he was given by Netanyahu to not bring down the far right coalition. Seems a bit more important to me than clucking about a harvard faculty advisor to a student group, and especially wrapping that in "well it only hurts your side" message board rhetoric! Israeli soldiers fired on crowds queuing for food from aid trucks yesterday, again. Every single hospital in Gaza has been bombed with some utterly destroyed. You are welcome to snipe in these threads as much as you want but this is a thing you are pretty clearly out of your depth on and should devote some time, which I know you are able to do, to following up. That is simply the most charitable way I can put it.
I agree that Ben-Gvir is a Kahanist (and a monster) and have said as much on HN. I don't know who you're arguing with here, but I get the sense that it probably isn't me. If you are, it appears to be your claim that any critique of Palestinian activism, in any form that it or the criticism takes, equates to support for Israel. No.
No, I am speaking directly to your castigation of "calls to globalize the Intifada". So, don't do that Tom. Its right there in my thread, in both of my comments. I could go back and find other examples from other threads in the last couple of months, but I'm pretty clearly talking about this thread, right here.
Edit:
Can't reply to you for some reason, and no, you don't know me, though we have met, and corresponded via email a few times, but attempting to make my reply about "being angry" is really gross dude. I responded substantively to both of your comments and your reply appears to be to simply ignore that; so be it!
This was actually a good piece on my hometown and bitcoin mining, lots more that could have been written just about this installation and this town but glad to see this bit of journalism
interestingly enough I was at the county commissioners (I from this town) when this exact installation was originally debated precisely because the company was the recipent of a tax break and the court was doing its diligence on whether or not that was appropriate. I spoke against it at the time and am not surprised that other issues have come up since.
