There have been massive (unprecedented in Israeli history) demonstrations in Israel for the last 10 months against this terrible government that formed and their attempts at destroying the country.

The protests were not about the genocide and apartheid. They were mostly about the interal power struggle, which is all well and good, but not protesting against genocide and apartheid per se.

The protests were against the government as a whole and many of their actions including their messianic ambitions which include settlements (was a main point of discussion, though sometimes overshadowed by their attempt to weaken the legal institutions).

I really don't want to get into politics on HN, but there is no genocide nor apartheid, this is just Hammas propaganda. Israel has the means to kill Palestinians and it doesn't. There are Muslims and Arabs in the Israeli legislative body, including ones that say that Israel shouldn't exist. How is this apartheid? Anyhow, even with the above, there were in fact a lot of pro Palestinian and anti settlement demonstrations during these demonstrations. How do I know? I've been to these demonstrations and saw the signs and Palestinian flags.

There were indeed some Palestinian flags in the protests, but they weren't exactly warmly welcomed. I'm of course relying on what I read.

https://archive.is/pgh1S

The UN still hasn't condemned the October 7th attack nor Hammas's use of civilians as human shields. Not sure about the rest. So I wouldn't call them an unbiased authority.

Politicians in Israel have called for ethnic cleansing, fringe crazy politicians. Marjorie Taylor green blamed California wildfires on Jewish space lasers. I hope you don't let that paint your views on the US legislative bodies.

As for different laws about ethnicities (probably the source for calls of apartheid): it's very limited, the main thing is that diaspora Jews can get citizenship automatically. This law is to help Jews anywhere escape from antisemitism. If you're an Israeli citizen however (muslim, jewish, christian or whatever), you have equal rights under the law.

It's easy to parrot things like apartheid, but it's more like 0.001% apartheid in the most technical sense, and not what people mean it when they say this word.

As for the comparison to western democracies: I think Israel is doing very well, even compared to some of the world's oldest democracies (France/Swiss multiple Muslim related bans, US during the trump administration, etc.), but the people drawing this comparison usually advocate for replacing it with Hammas which is a proper terrorist organization that advocates for killing all non Muslims, killing lgbt, etc. It's a classic Utopia fallacy gone to the extreme.

Whether one calls it apartheid or not, Israelis and their government should find a way to resolve the problem of protecting settlers at the cost of others. Otherwise, it can create a huge backlash across the world: (a) Al Jazeera and social media have showed these to the outside world (b) support for Israel is waning in the West--especially among liberals (c) there is even less support for Israel among the younger generation in the West, so expect more backlash from the future policy makers.

But Gaza is not the West Bank. They are geographically and politically separate. Gaza is in the opposite position: Israel withdrew its settlements. They allowed Hamas to take over the government. Some claim that was a deliberate choice by that same right-wing government, to make it seem as if Palestinians were incapable of governing themselves. (I cannot vouch for the truth of that, but it's clear that Israel did not approach its abandonment of Gaza entirely in good faith.)

Nonetheless, there's no way to justify Hamas' attack on October 7 in terms of the West Bank situation. It has nothing to do with sympathy over settlers. It's entirely due to a dedicated campaign of genocide against Jews, explicitly referenced in the Hamas charter.

What's happening in the West Bank might be described as apartheid. But the situation in Gaza makes it clear that it's not mere racism. There is a genuine threat, not just of attack but of atrocities. I think that makes it harder to justify comparisons to South Africa, which deliberately gloss over real horrors. It's hard to attribute that deliberate ignorance to anything other than antisemitism.

I am not justifying Hamas' attack on Israeli people. What does a justification do, anyway? It transforms unjust acts into just acts using some or another theory, ideology, etc. With this side comment out of the way, how do you explain Hamas' attacks, major support for Hamas from Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem? One explanation most people seem to accept is that folks in Gaza are bottled up, such a pressure cooker just blew up. Another related explanation: Israel has subverted two-state solution, leading to pressure cooker situation.

I have no problems in accepting the claim that they are anti-Jewish and that they don't want a Jewish state in the Middle East. That's what many a muslim would say in private conversations. This discussion can't be had in the West today, due to political correctness: when Islam is power or when Islam dominates a society, they have problems with non-Islamic people (history of Islam shows that). When Islam is in minority or lacks the power, different tunes are sung.

I think the settlements are terrible, and we should destroy all of them, but this is just classic PR switcheroo. As I said, West Bank is not Gaza, they have a different government, the West Bank is flourishing and the quality of life there is great. Leaving Gaza and removing all the Israeli forces from there ended up being worst, not better for the people of Gaza.

There are so many people out there who explain Hamas' attack in terms of these: (a) Israel subverting two-state solution (b) apartheid in the West bank in order to protect settlers. This view point has many supporters even among non-Muslims in the West. What do you say about that to those who condemn Hamas' attack on Oct 7 and who also subscribe to the foregoing explanation?

The UN does not seem to have condemned many of the actions of the Irish Republicans Army either.

Some commenters use terminology like “apartheid” and “civil unrest” to describe this situation, so perhaps people in the UN also view this as a internal issue and they don’t want to comment on domestic terror?

Unfortunately, that's kind of the point. The UN has issued twice as many condemnations of Israel as of the rest of the world combined.

Some parts of the UN do important work -- UNESCO, WHO, FAO, etc. But they are unreliable when it comes to matters of justice. They had to retire the predecessor to the Human Rights Commission because it was dominated by countries who commit lots of abuses, and the new version isn't really any better.

In particular the UN can't be trusted when it comes to Israel. There are a lot of Islamic countries, and they have made a lot of allies for the specific purpose of condemning Israel. And since Israel is a key ally of the US, it becomes the focus of anti-UN sentiment as well.

That's not to justify everything Israel does. Far from it. It would be better if there were an organization capable of evaluating the situation objectively, to sort out the truth under a barrage of propaganda from all sides. Instead, we get the UN offering meaningless and predictable condemnations.

Even if it was the case though, the UN has condemned Israel multiple times, why the difference? Shouldn't they avoid condemning Israel too as it's an internal dispute?

For an examples, look at how many commenters on this thread are calling this an “internal dispute” even though they fully support Palestine.

Some Palestinian supporters don’t even recognize Hamas as the government of the Gaza Strip. How can a country exist without a government? People are just in support of the people.

Let’s take as a hypothetical, some Waco style paramilitary starts terrorist sticks in the US, and in response the US military begins shelling Chicago night and day killing thousands more civilians and the terrorists ever did.

Should the UN come out and censure both sides? The terrorists are just domestic criminals, and the UN doesn’t have a particular interest in that. However turning your military against helpless civilians is something the UN does care about.

I’m not sure this fits 100% but it’s the logic I’m following.

This has to be one of the most startling claims I've ever seen on HN. Here's a graph that slightly contradicts your claim. https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/charts/

This makes it very hard to take anything else you say at face value.

If their goal was to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties, it would be a lot worse.

Gaza is an incredibly densely populated area, within range of Israeli artillery, with complete Israeli air and naval superiority.

If Israel wanted to, it likely has the conventional means to flatten every structure in Gaza. Given there are ~2.5M people there, that would produce orders of magnitude greater casualties.

Right now... they're definitely not doing that.

At the same time, civilian collateral deaths apparently aren't a hard line for them, if they believe they're attacking a Hamas target.

So, somewhere in the middle.

Let us assume that Israel is truthful about every claim they made about Hamas being inside or under pretty much every school, hospital, religious object, and other building that is normally protected from being attacked by the international law of war, and let us assume that their indiscriminate destruction of such objects is legitimate. Does that naturally extend to also include over 45% residential housing units (from the article) absolutely needing to be destroyed or damaged?

From the article: "An Israeli reporter who was taken to see the Gazan town of Beit Hanoun by the Israeli military reported on Sunday that "barely a single inhabitable building remains standing". More than 52,000 people had lived there before the war."

Was the killing of more than 4500 children also absolutely unavoidable, and not just a part of a campaign of vengeful destruction and killing to satisfy bloodlust that is bordering on genocide?

The reports from the ground just don't match the stated goals of the Israeli government and military, nor their stated excuses for so much bloodshed. Let us for the moment pretend that naming killed innocent civilians 'collateral damage' somehow makes their killing okay, and that saying that "Hamas hides among civilians and uses them as human shields" somehow makes it okay to just bomb all those civilians, hoping to also get some militants in the process. We can all make a very good guess that had Hamas fled inside an Israeli city and hid among that city's population, there wouldn't have been indiscriminate bombing of that city with all the killed Israeli citizens being merely proclaimed collateral damage and "oh well, hamas used them as human shield, so we had to bomb them to death". There would have been very precise military action involving a lot of ground fighting, in order to actually minimize civilian deaths, because then it would be civilians that they actually care about. Palestinians, on the other hand... unfortunate human shields and all. Their deaths seem welcome, if anything. And that's genocidal intent.

Edit: I looked at this source closer, this is a random blog by an obvious biased source (general credibility aside). Using pictures of Palestinians in the header, saying that there's strong evidence that Israel is behind the bombing at the hospital parking lot, and still claiming that there were ~500 casualties there. Again, going back to the lame death machine argument: on one hand Israel is bad and using precise bombs that take down building, but on the other they somehow attacked a hospital parking lot with a weak bomb that caused little to no damage? Nevermind the ample evidence to the contrary of these claims, just this should give you a hint by how unlikely it is.

This is the full quote you originally cut. It is obvious that this refers to killing in the context genocide (the same way the rest of the text refers to apartheid).

Even if you originally thought in earnest that I meant any killing (which is obviously ridiculous), I made it clear multiple times that this was not what I meant.

Is there room for them being viewed as loyal opposition? Or does the current climate make all-people-have-rights viewpoints rub folks the wrong way?

During the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war in the US, there was a marked shift to "It may be bad... but now isn't the time to say anything. Be patriotic." And that wasn't even directly linked to an attack on national soil, like Israel faced!

It's always good to have an aspirational mission statement, lest our worst selves be absolved from responsibility for decisions we let them make.