> The blockade only started after Hamas was elected into power
Israel has been restricting Gaza's economic viability since the 90s, much before the official blockade. (source: UN, wikileaks about Gaza economic policy)
> The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons
Is this a joke ? The humanitarian Israel that does not let international flotillas with aid reach Gaza ? Or the humanitarian Israel that kills children ?
> The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years
The spin of the century. They gave back uninhabitable desert, while continuing expansion all over Palestine.
> Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
Firstly, it has nothing to do with religion. Secondly, migration is quite different than a formation of a military state that constantly occupies land and expands, attacking its neighbours that has been there for millennia.
What they blocked was a sailboat carrying a bag of oranges and anti-Israel activists trying to carry out a media stunt for attention and virtue-signalling.
You obviously have an agenda here and are being disingenuous. I will disengage and leave you spewing your lies.
You have to be very careful when looking at this sort of data, from my understanding UN data only tracks UN 2720 Mechanism aid deliveries. I think you need to look at COGAT data to see total aid deliveries as there are non-UN aid deliveries as well that won't show up in the UN data.
> An Israeli military unit (COGAT) is not a trustworthy source of data for the aid they provide to an area they are actively blockading and starving.
From my understanding no organization other than COGAT even has the ability to track the total aid deliveries, there is no evidence of mass starvation or that COGAT data is unreliable from what I've seen.
> No but it is like taking Russia's word for how many troops they lost.
Russia mostly just doesn't publish those figures at all last I checked. OSINT researchers however following the Russia/Ukraine war will typically use data from Russian, Ukrainian and independent sources where available however so it also wouldn't be advisable to completely ignore the Russian data either. Even extremely biased/limited data can sometimes be used to identify trends, at least for cases where the bias factor tends to be consistent.
Israel also isn't a dictatorship and has what most would consider to be a relatively free press that is not afraid to criticize the government(i.e. Haaretz) so it would be rather difficult for Israel to deliberately publish outright fabricated data on a large scale without getting caught doing so.
I'm also not saying you should blindly trust any specific sources, however much of the COGAT data can also be corroborated via independent sources such as satellite imagery.
Keep in mind it's also not the case that the UN data meaningfully contradicts the COGAT data either, it's entirely possible for both to be reasonably accurate. In general I would say both COGAT and UN data are both likely reasonably accurate once factoring in the published limitations on that data.
The reason the numbers are different is simply because they are measuring different things. In the case of COGAT they generally measure total aid going through border crossings while the UN measures aid reaching only a subset of distributions points within Gaza.
So if you want to estimate per capita food aid going into Gaza you would want to use the COGAT figures since that data is collected at all border crossings and can be used to get a rough per capita figure on aid entering Gaza. On the other hand if you want to measure something like aid reaching UN system aid distribution points within Gaza then you would want to use the UN data.
Attempting to use UN data to calculate per capita food aid going into Gaza would clearly be wrong as the UN's own published data collection methodology clearly shows they are not measuring total aid entering Gaza.
The UN often seems to publish reports analyzing their own data while clearly failing factor in their own published data limitations into their calculations which results in inaccurate conclusions in their analysis. Usually these sort of analysis mistakes are very obvious as the UN generally publishes the math behind their calculations.
You shouldn't blindly discard data simply because you think the source might be biased in one direction, rather you should try to understand the limitations of the data and corroborate it against secondary sources where possibly while also trying to factor in bias where feasible.
Essentially it's not the raw data where there is disagreement, it's the various interpretations of what the data actually means.
> How is comparing a state that is conducting a genocide to another group that did so too against the Jewish people ?
A war is not the same thing as a genocide. The Jews did not start a war with the Nazi's. Hamas started a war with Israel with openly genocidal goals, Hamas simply did not have the military capability to accomplish their genocidal goals.
Edit: I've unbanned the account for reasons discussed downthread, but please stop breaking the site guidelines.
---
We've banned this account because it has been using HN primarily (even exclusively?) for political/national/etc. battle for many months. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're for or against. (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(and I suppose I'd better add: (1) yes, this would be the same if the person were arguing exactly the opposite; and (2) yes, I'm sure there are others doing just as badly which we haven't banned yet. If so, the reason is that we haven't seen them yet. We read HN pretty randomly, and can't come close to seeing everything.)
> What about that jameshilliard guy that has tens of flagged dead comments about Israel ?
I think overall most of my comments are positive. Some people seem to flag comments as a way of disagreeing I guess.
> Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
I don't think that's really an accurate characterization, it's certainly not 99%, are comments correcting factual inaccuracies/misinformation in threads related to Israel considered political just because the surrounding topic is politically contentious?
Most of my comments on threads involving Israel are me just correcting some of the more obvious misinformation/conspiracy theories and/or trying to provide more factual background context/nuance to the discussions. I try not to push a specific political agenda/ideology for the most part. It's not like I'm trying to start political/ideological discussions either, there just seems to be more factual misinformation around topics involving Israel and that happens to be something where I know a lot of the history.
I don't feel comfortable with "what about that X guy" responses to moderation comments, but in fairness the GP has a point: your account has overwhelmingly been posting in political flamewars for quite some time, and that's not allowed here.
I had to go back 79 days and what felt like hundreds of posts to find any exception (something about heat pumps I think!), but then scrolling further back just led through reams more of the same. That means your account is definitely on the wrong side of the "primarily" test (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
To say that you're simply correcting inaccuracies and misinformation doesn't really work because the question of what counts as accurate vs. misinformation is hotly disputed. It is basically the entirety of the battle.
On the other hand, your comments have mostly (though not entirely) been avoiding the more degraded forms of guidelines breakage that people resort to in these threads - things like snark, name-calling, and from there into personal attacks, slurs, and so on. That's good, but it's not enough—if you want to keep posting on HN we need you not to use the site primarily for political battle (broadly construed).
Why ban the other account and not yours? The primary difference is that your account does have a history of using HN as intended. I had to go (too) far back to find it, but it was there. In such a case we prefer to warn first, not ban outright. The other difference is that I saw a lot more cases of the other account breaking the site guidelines egregiously. That combination (no history of using HN as intended + breaking the guidelines egregiously) is what tends to push us across the warn/ban line.
But no—to address the question that people often wonder about—this is not about either person's views about the underlying topic. Moderation would be exactly the same if the positions were flipped, and indeed often has been.
If you looked at the comments of the banned account that were older than a year ago, they were not political.
While jameshilliard has hundreds of comments (in your own words) almost entirely on the topic for the past two years, with a huge number of them flagged/dead.
Ok, if I look back far enough then indeed there are comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43934794 which match your description, so I take your point and have unbanned that account.
> I had to go back 79 days and what felt like hundreds of posts to find any exception (something about heat pumps I think!), but then scrolling further back just led through reams more of the same.
I went and checked myself and it's not exactly quite that bad, I quite regularly comment on posts unrelated to Israel/politics, these are comments of mine newer than 79 days that seem entirely unrelated for example:
79 days ago(the supposedly non-political one you found about heat pumps is quite ironically titled "The politics of air conditioning in Switzerland"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915330
> To say that you're simply correcting inaccuracies and misinformation doesn't really work because the question of what counts as accurate vs. misinformation is hotly disputed. It is basically the entirety of the battle.
I think it's more complex than that, for example in this thread I was pointing out that one shouldn't use UN aid delivery data to justify that sufficient aid is reaching Gaza, because UN aid data doesn't support that conclusion by itself, I then pointed out what data does support the conclusion that sufficient aid is being delivered. So I think there are cases where it's entirely possible to correct misinformation without even challenging the conclusion.:
> On the other hand, your comments have mostly (though not entirely) been avoiding the more degraded forms of guidelines breakage that people resort to in these threads - things like snark, name-calling, and from there into personal attacks, slurs, and so on.
Yeah, I try and avoid that in general.
> That's good, but it's not enough—if you want to keep posting on HN we need you not to use the site primarily for political battle (broadly construed).
I guess the main issue is that I tend to get more replies to my comments in Israel related threads and I get drawn in responding back if I think there's more to be said on the topic, most of my Israel related comments(in terms of absolute numbers) seem be from these super deep back and forth threads and not top level comments.
It's okay to have an agenda, just be honest about it please. Anti-Zionists tend to be pretty open about their agenda: opposing colonialism, ethno-states, genocide etc. It's telling that modern Zionists often seem less willing to express theirs.
Israel has been restricting Gaza's economic viability since the 90s, much before the official blockade. (source: UN, wikileaks about Gaza economic policy)
> The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons
Is this a joke ? The humanitarian Israel that does not let international flotillas with aid reach Gaza ? Or the humanitarian Israel that kills children ?
> The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years
The spin of the century. They gave back uninhabitable desert, while continuing expansion all over Palestine.
> Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
Firstly, it has nothing to do with religion. Secondly, migration is quite different than a formation of a military state that constantly occupies land and expands, attacking its neighbours that has been there for millennia.
You are spewing propaganda.