by YZF | 2025-06-29 17:15:51+00:00
> In the future, please begin your posts with this, so people can save time engaging.

I'm sorry but you're the one who is not engaging.

I just used AI at the end of this conversation as a sanity check. I looked at my own arguments and said hey, maybe I am wrong. It wouldn't hurt you to consider this to. I think LLMs are a good tool for this.

Maybe you should consider why many well-meaning rational people take a different position than you on this issue as well. This "state" was formed out of thin air, without meeting any normal criteria for statehood, as a legal weapon against Israel. It does not meet any requirement for an actual state, it does not look like a state, it is not a state. Maybe you should give me your definition of a state.

Ask yourself how come there's no Kurdish state? How come there's no Baloch state? How come there's no state for the Sikhs? What makes Palestinians more deserving? The ethnic minorities in Iran would also love statehood...

EDIT: I'm always open to the possibility of being wrong. I.e. I'm open to look at facts that contradict my theories. Right now my theory is that Israel is being unjustly targeted as a result of antisemitism and world politics. There is a massive, well funded, PR campaign against Israel (primarily by Qatar but also with interests from China and Russia). There is a clear pattern of propaganda messaging here, including the one you're echoing. This doesn't mean Israel is always right. It doesn't mean there aren't war crimes (there are in any war). But it should be clear if you dig deeper there are different standards applied and there is a concerted effort to e.g. equate Jews/Israelis to Nazis, strip Israel of its legitimacy, not allow it to defend itself to the level that other countries are allowed to, excuse Hamas (and Iran e.g.) genocidal attempts and war crimes towards Israel, rewrite history, redefine language. Excuse and normalize human rights violations. This campaign is decades long. Again, I would really love to see Israel behave better but that campaign doesn't need or care about Israel's behavior here. This campaign isn't strictly against Israel, it's also against the west and western values. This campaign also directly translates into higher rates of antisemitism and violence against Jewish people worldwide.

The UN as a body, and the adjacent entities, mostly represents oppressive non-democratic regimes where people do not enjoy the freedoms we enjoy in the west. Ignoring the various outright lies, leveraging what the UN says or doesn't say as a way of supporting a moral, or factual, argument is problematic. UN (UNRWA) workers are documented to have participated in the Oct 7th attack on Israeli civilians. You would have a higher chance of making me change my mind by addressing the question of Palestinian statehood from first principles. Do they control territory? Do they control their borders? Do they have their own currency? Passports? What is the history of their state? What exactly makes them a state other than the political scheming to try and force Israel to accept a two state solution that Palestinians themselves reject today, rejected numerous times in the past, going back to the partition plan, and everyone knows has no chance in hell of succeeding. It's true that international recognition is an important part of being a state, but one can't make a state out of thin air solely with international recognition. Historical precedence is that a state needs to exist and then be recognized, not the other way around.

https://libertascouncil.org/only-20-percent-of-people-live-i...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatari_involvement_in_US_highe...

https://forward.com/opinion/574346/freepalestine-tiktok-isra...

Palestinians deserve what every other human being deserves. This is not it. This is not the way. This is regression in freedom and norms. This is a post-truth world.