Although personally in favor of Palestinian independence and critical of war crimes committed by Israel in its siege of Gaza, I attempted to explain in a back-and-forth discussion with a user (only afterwards learning was one of the community’s two moderators) why protest voting in the 2024 election to “punish” the democrats in favor of the republicans harmed the ultimate interest of reigning in Israeli violence in Palestine.

To further emphasize the damage caused by such a protest vote, I argued that not only is Palestine worse off with Trump elected instead of Harris, but as are a myriad of other social issues. The other user disagreed, arguing that Trump’s return to office facilitated the ceasefire, rather than my argument that Netanyahu deliberately delayed it to help Trump get elected.

After my fourth reply post in a reply chain that stemmed from my initial reply to the moderator’s comment, I was banned from !palestine@lemm.ee. Having at no point advocated in favor of the violence perpetuated by Israel in Gaza, I think the ban was unjustified, and demonstrates a bad precedent for maintaining echo chambers of moderator opinions, rather than communities that foster discussion.

  • مهما طال الليل@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    If it is worth anything I acknowledge that I can’t mod the community on my own anymore and I am looking for mods. The thread that lead to the massive bans had users tacitly or blatantly celebrating the genocide and how worse it might get for Palestinians in the future.

    Apply here: https://lemm.ee/post/53822281

    I am also willing to handover the community entirely and become a normal member. I’m too emotionally invested in the cause. Not sure how to do this though.

    I will not be seeing the responses here. I am temporarily blocking the community to save [what’s left of] my sanity.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    4 days ago

    You’re presenting a selective history.

    And yes, although the Israeli army has plenty of war criminals that should be sent to The Hague along with Netanyahu for their actions in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, Hamas was never justified in kidnapping Israeli citizens in the first place. Terrorism is never justified, and terrorists on both sides deserve to be tried for their war crimes, as should be the case in any war.

    I suspect that is why you were banned. Nothing about Trump. People like to do this, present one complimentary fact about their case and pretend that innocent thing was the whole reason for the response, instead of the less complimentary things they also did.

    You are not by any means wrong in that statement. Hamas has no right to kill, rape, and kidnap a bunch of young Israeli civilians who have nothing to do with the occupation except having happened to be born in a country whose government is committing atrocities, and no amount of war crimes by the IDF would give them that right. However, I will have to say that trying to say that true fact in a Palestine community specifically, is probably a tactical error, and will lead to no good outcome and often to a ban.

    PTB, I guess, technically, but asking people whose family members are being killed to sit still while you to tell them their side is also the bad guys is quite a lot to ask.

    If it were me, I would focus more specifically on the fact that letting Trump get elected has now absolutely doomed everyone in Gaza and quite a lot of people in the West Bank. With Biden it was already a genocide. Under Trump, it’s now going to be an accelerated genocide, with much grander scope and ambition.

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      If it were me, I would focus more specifically on the fact that letting Trump get elected has now absolutely doomed everyone in Gaza and quite a lot of people in the West Bank.

      Yup. Trump just started pressuring Jordan and Egypt to take more Palestinian “refugees”. I never saw the Democrats advocating for forced deportations despite all their other enablement.

    • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      Israel had intel of the October 7 attack at least 3 days before it from Egypt and internal sources and allowed it to happen.

      Fuck Israel. A genocidal colonial settler state deserves the violence it receives.

      You’ve had awful takes on this, constantly defending Israel’s genocidal actions, and I’m sick of reading them. Armed resistance is warranted in the face of genocide. Blocking your dumbass.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        4 days ago

        Israel had intel of the October 7 attack at least 3 days before it from Egypt and internal sources and allowed it to happen.

        Correct. They’ve also been arranging for funding for Hamas, going to bat for them against their domestic opponents, because having a more violent organization representing Palestine gives them excuses for what they wanted to do anyway. They’ve been pretty explicit about this. They love having Hamas around killing Israelis, because it makes it look a lot more justified when they feel like killing Palestinians, which is always.

        You’ve had awful takes on this, constantly defending Israel’s genocidal actions, and I’m sick of reading them.

        Ah yes, who could forget all the times I defended Israel’s genocidal actions. Which ones though? Which messages defending Israel’s actions were your favorites?

        Edit: Typo

      • asymmetric@slrpnk.net
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        3 days ago

        Israel had intel of the October 7 attack at least 3 days before it from Egypt and internal sources and allowed it to happen.

        Do you have source(s) on this? Would be interested in learning more.

    • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      4 days ago

      If that was indeed the reason, then that only serves to support the notion that general disagreement, rather than just extremism, is what is being banned from that community. They have every right to ban advocates of genocide for extremism, but in no way do I think that supporting Palestine without supporting Hamas is a position worthy of a ban.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        4 days ago

        Well… you might have a point. Supporting Palestine without supporting Hamas isn’t precisely what you said, though. You said “terrorism” from the Palestinian side. I think without carefully qualifying that to mean that you’re only talking about events like October 7th, it’s easy for someone to assume you’re using the Israeli definition, where any type of resistance at all is “terrorism.”

        Like I say, I agree with you on this. In any other community I think it would be a clear-cut PTB case of censorship. I’m just saying that when dead family members are involved you have to be extremely careful what you present and how, because it’s going to be the easiest thing in the world for people to get heated at you for it.

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      I would consider protest non-votes also protest votes, and there’s no statistic on their amount.

      Most people that protested against Democrats because they aren’t left enough wouldn’t just vote republican or third party, they would just abstain.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      4 days ago

      Also he literally sent his golf buddy to tell Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire. This is a power that America has had over Israel all along, and Trump wielded it before he even got inaugurated, while Biden refused to use it.

      What, the power to make a meaningless performative gesture while he allows the killing to continue unabated? Biden had that power too, and used it frequently. Trump also undid even some of the pitifully weak things Biden actually had done to oppose Israel’s slaughter, like pausing shipments of 2,000 pound bombs or putting sanctions on settlers. And Israel has continued happily killing people in both Gaza and the West Bank during the “cease fire,” with no sign of concern from the State Department.

      This alternate reality where Trump is a skilled enough diplomacist to effect a change in Israel’s behavior, and cares enough about the Palestinians that he would want to use it if he did, is a very bizarre thing to see on Lemmy. I think people are buying into it because they want badly enough to criticize Biden that they’re willing to believe absolute nonsense about Trump if it makes Biden look bad by comparison.

  • Diva (she/her)
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    4 days ago

    you were drawing an equivalence between actions of occupied people resisting their occupation and the people responsible. Saying that they were both terrorists. On the comm for the occupied people.

    Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself, YDI

    • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      4 days ago

      the idea that Israel was ‘waiting for Trump’ is ridiculous

      I disagree; Netanyahu wants to settle the rest of Palestine, and Trump’s actions demonstrate that he is far and away more in favor of that than Biden or Harris ever were or would have been if re-elected themselves.

      Regardless of whether we agree or not, the point of my post here was to emphasize that disagreement should not in and of itself be the basis for a moderator to ban someone from a community.

      • BrainInABox
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        3 days ago

        So far the cleansing of Palestine has been far less intense under Trump than it was under Biden. But I understand that American genocide apologists like you are more than willing to ignore factual reality and make up a new one to defend your genocidal sports team of choice.

  • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    YDI. I like the whitewashing of your own actions here. To go into the comm for an occupied people in the middle of a genocide and start telling them they deserved it is disgusting, and you’re filth for doing so.

    • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      2 days ago

      Never in anything I wrote did I say that any Palestinian deserves the horrors that Israel has inflicted and continues to inflict upon them.

      While I am against the actions of Hamas, since terrorism won’t solve anything, Israel has committed crimes far worse in comparison (approximately 60,000 Palestinians killed versus approximately 1,000 Israelis). There’s no doubt that Israel has gone far and beyond their stated goal of terrorism prevention to instead make progress towards their goal of clearing Gaza out for Israeli settlement.

      The problem is that most Americans don’t share my view on the issue of Palestine, and still view the Palestinians as instigators of violence, which is among the reasons why neither the republicans nor democrats were ever going to drop support for Israel. The best course of action, in my opinion, would have been to pick Harris to at least get the better long-term course of action for Palestine, rather than the increased risk of Israeli expansionism after Trump’s re-election.

    • L3ft_F13ld!@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      People who voted third party, Republican, or simply refused to vote (basically helping the Republicans win in some way) because they disagreed with the Democrats. That’s my interpretation of it anyway.

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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        4 days ago

        You prolly right but I want to clarify a bit more.

        Voting Trump is not a protest vote, you would be still voting the regime.

        This ain’t about who is the president this is about owner class picking the president, it doesn’t matter to them who wins as long as this person will do their bidding.

        Last time we had president get to pro pedon class, he got wacked like a CEO.

        Carter was a decent dude but they cucked him pretty strong.

        Ever since then we have been getting progressively more impotent cucks in the white house. Obedient lap dogs of the owner class.

        Who would have thought that Obama was the end of hope…

        • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          4 days ago

          Don’t mean to turn this thread into a mirrored version of the other one, since that’s not its purpose, but do at least want to clarify my point.

          In the context of the single-issue voting behavior I was trying to argue against with my comments on the thread (to further compound the fact that voting for Trump only worsened the one issue that mattered to them), voting for Trump would still be a “protest vote”, given that their sole goal was to remove the democrats from office for not taking an anti-Israeli stance from the get go.

          I agree wholeheartedly that such people supported Trump’s extremist policies in the process, given that—aside from not being pragmatic in recognizing that things would have been worse for Palestine had Trump been elected in 2020, and will still get worse, ceasefire or not—doing so disregards the millions that will suffer in the US and abroad more under a Trump presidency than would have under a Harris one.

          Ultimately, I didn’t mind disagreeing with the moderator in the slightest (albeit not knowing they were the moderator at the time, only seeing an OP tag on their comments in the thread in Arctic), but think that being banned for doing so somewhat defeats the point of having a discussion thread in the first place.

  • DashboTreeFrog@discuss.online
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    4 days ago

    I’ve been on the angry end of that mod. I can tell they’re passionate about the cause but yeah, feels like they’re quick to assume the worse of others in a disagreement.

    As much as I support the Palestinian cause as a POC raised Muslim (and simply being a person with basic observation skills), I avoid interacting with that particular community because of them.

    A lot of good stuff is shared there, so I don’t block them but man, not great with the community building…

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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      4 days ago

      I can tell they’re passionate about the cause but yeah, feels like they’re quick to assume the worse of others in a disagreement.

      As someone with many hot/slightly unpopular takes around here, this is very common on the Fediverse. Probably more so than Reddit.

  • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    You can do mental gymnastics all you want but the fact is that under Biden there was no ceasefire and under Trump there is

    Edit: now trump is saying gazans shouldn’t be allowed back in so looks like we both eat crow

  • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 days ago

    I’ve interacted before with that mod and I don’t remember how it went down but I ended up adding the tag to their username “Potential Tankie”.

  • bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    PTB just like many other extremist anti Israel activist mods all over Lemmy.

    There’s no place on Lemmy where this conflict can be discussed openly. r/israelpalestine and r/israel_palestine on Reddit aren’t particularly great, but better than anything here.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    You know the libs are definitely losing hard when they waste all their time nostradamusing the future and arguing about imaginary scenarios.