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From the beginning I always thought this had an extremely high chance of resolving YES, much in the same way that the question “Will I support Flat Earth theories after talking to Manifold?” would also probably resolve YES. Not because it’s true, but by communicating that you’re entertaining the question when the question is so lopsided, you are also communicating your beliefs on the subject.

@Balasar Polls on Manifold showed 2:1 in support of Israel.

@nathanwei lol do you just make things up https://manifold.markets/TheAllMemeingEye/do-you-support-israel-or-palestine

This resolution is actually a great reminder of why utilitarian consequentialism fails; people just make up whatever reason why it's better in the long run to murder children.

@TiredCliche Still no evidence of Israel* murdering† children, but Palestinian resistance groups routinely do‡.

* ie the state, which prosecutes Israelis who do murder innocents and designates Israeli groups which support murder as terrorist organizations.

† as in violence targeting non combatants. This excludes non combatants killed in the course of operations targeting combatants, which is legal under IHL.

‡ this is somehow a controversial claim nowadays, but it's pretty hard to deny given that these groups claim responsibility for these attacks.

@TiredCliche Legal under IHL? Perhaps. But I would say that there's a higher law involved, God's law.

Choosing to kill children as a means to an end is always murder, and murder is always wrong. I understand that it may be impossible to attack an enemy without killing large numbers of innocent people. In that case, it should not be done. They cannot be said to have been killed on accident. Hence, that killing is murder.

We should never do evil that good might come of it, (Rom 3:8), and murder is among the worst sins, an offense that cries to heaven. (Genesis 4:10).

@TiredCliche Guess you better support Imperial Japan over the US. Did they murder American children? No, Pearl Harbor was a military attack. We murdered tons of their children.

@nathanwei What a diabolical thing to say. Imperial Japan was certainly murdering children long before Pearl Harbor, and the idea that I ought to only care about American children is, well...

In any case, they weren't practicing jus in bello, nor did they have jus ad bellum for their surprise attack on our Navy. Whatever you think of sanctions, war is only ever just as a means of last resort and self defense, and Hirohito certainly did not avail himself of all other options.

When a war is not just in motive nor in conduct, it is simply mass murder. (Augustine.) It does not matter that they attacked a military target, because they had no right to attack in the first place. They were heathens engaged in murder, and there's no more to it than that.

Do we get a final statement of your newly formed opinion?

@TheSmilingBraniac people seem to have more passion about their virtual points than about keeping the conversation civil. I quit.

@Henry38hw FWIW, I lost money on this market and I still feel good about it and appreciate your approach to it. I think it's an interesting experiment, and I'm sorry that (it sounds like) it's been a bad experience for you.

In hindsight, I should've read the comments before betting, but this was just a routine exercise of what a confirmation bias looks like; this wasn't entirely due to OP, as this market was designed poorly. If the parameters were well defined - i.e., what it means to be pro-Palestine or pro-Israel and what it depends on, like if there are war crimes then being pro-Palestine is reasonable, etc - maybe the resolution could've been better thought that would not have fixed the cognitive bias.

I bet believing that pro-Palestine meant something entirely different. I thought just committing war crimes and crimes against humanity (apartheid) was bad enough for you to be pro-Palestine which is entirely different from pro-Hamas btw.

A bit more on the confirmation bias, OP does not find the UN or any other adjacent international source credible and relies on anecdotal evidence (YouTube videos, one-off statements, self-reported IDF investigations but not those from the Gaza Ministry!) as well as Haartz for some odd reason (even they have multiple articles somewhat corroborating the claims made by aid agencies and the UN).

I would even bet that if the entire comment section were fed to an LLM, it would resolve this market ‘No’ (pro-Palestine) rather than ‘Yes’.

RIP my mana.

@Trazyn What point are you trying to make about LLMs? Do you believe that LLMs are neutral observers that use logic to come to a conclusion?

@ShawnReynolds I'm not sure if they entirely do but I meant it more in a way that this questions, to me, was meant to be a "debate" where OP "might" update priors based on new information and my point about LLMs was echoing the assumption that this comment box supports a pro-Palestine side and that LLMs could be a better and closer approximation to a neutral observer than OP and thus would resolve this as "No" because: (i) they are more neutral than OP; and (ii) More logical than OP.

This might not apply to ALL LLMs but that is besides the point. Its simply about OP being inconsiderate and biased.

@Trazyn LLMs are trained primarily on Reddit and Wikipedia, and they reflect the biases of these platforms. They do not use logic or any sort of thinking process at all - they use predictive text algorithms. It is alarming that people think LLMs engage in any sort of thinking or logical processing. They perform the steps of logic in their output, but these steps are shown based on a predetermined outcome, rather than the other way around.

@ShawnReynolds So you can't program or prompt an LLM to only rely on the evidence / arguments provided by one side and rule on what's more persuasive?

Either way, the point wasn't about LLMs being good (I was ostensibly wrong on that), it was about OP.

@Trazyn No you can’t with the current state of the art. “Hallucinations” are basically the normal way LLMs work, parroting statistically plausible text from the corpus they got trained on. You can do something called a RAG (retrieval augmented generation) or use related methods where you have some structure such as a vector database that can be queried in structured ways to perform e.g. deductions. As of now this does not really work well in my opinion and at any rate you would be basically relying on external constraints, not the LLM itself.

At any rate I get your point on OP. There seemed to be an initial window where he could be persuaded in either direction but it seems that in reality his mind was already made up, which makes this market a pointless exercise. On the other hand the concept of this market is very interesting.

@Trazyn I think it says more about your bias that you are so incredulous that someone would have more trust in the IDF than Hamas agencies. I'd say both should not be trusted on face value.

And yes, if Henry was someone who just accepted whatever the UN says as fact, then he would have been pro-Palestine long ago. The fact that he was undecided says that, at least in that respect, he is a critical thinker who would not blindly trust such an obviously biased institution. (It is an objective fact that the UN has had a fixation with Israel for decades that far outstrips its importance in any concrete way.)

@ShawnReynolds For reference, I was not pro-Palestinian before this market and was merely on the fence about it.

My point was that if you don't trust the non-Hamas Gaza Health Agency and other agencies operating within Gaza (now calling them Hamas is a generalisation which is a fallacy last I checked) then why trust the IDF with their claims. It's outrageous and hypocritical. Hamas is a terrorist actor and is very evil but i'd say anyone GUILTY of apartheid, war crimes, and crimes against humanity isn't that far from Hamas so it is not so incredulous to believe that actor as malicious either. OP did in fact trust the IDF, which is pretty oxymoronic to critical thinking.

If being good at critical thinking implies rejecting the consensus of numerous (not just the UN if that makes your fallacious argument less weaker) international aid agencies, legal experts, witnesses, journalists, news agencies, and etc., then count me out of this utter buffoonery.

The UN is not biased for calling apartheid apartheid nor has it claimed there to be a genocide officially. There is little to no evidence for your claim. Perhaps it may biased and I am not aware of this but I doubt the UN and all these other organisations are all biased and incorrect at the same time and even then, for your claim of bias to be significant in considering to be pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, one would have to reject a lot of legal verdicts.

@Trazyn The US was also accused of a lot of war crimes during their wars in the middle east. I wouldn't compare them to Hamas though.

I'd also argue that the UN is biased. Iran is the Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council – Asia-Pacific Group. And Iran isn't particularly known for its respect of human rights.

@RichardKnoche I still wouldn't assign more weight to US claims made in 2003 about WMDs, or other claims made during the war on terror over the other parties to the conflict. But yes, the problem here is that moral equivalence is hard to determine but I don't think the IDF should be trusted more because they are not that far away from Hamas. I do not know of the intentions but the actions (apartheid, and other crimes) are extremely egregious and are not an indicator of trust.

The UN does not base its opinions on what Iran says in UNHRC. The implication of your claim is to literally to boot Iran out on the basis of its lack of human rights protection but that would apply to Israel and a lot of other countries to, which is not good for diplomacy. Ultimately, the chair of UNHRC Asia-Pacific Group is not an indication of that Iran is "controlling" the UN or any significant resolution / statement made by the UN is based on what Iran says. It certainly says nothing about the multiple aid workers in Gaza, the findings and reports made about Palestine, and years of legal precedents and resolutions about the state of Palestine.

@Trazyn Apartheid isn't wrong in this context. What's Israel supposed to do? Can't withdraw without a peace treaty; we've seen how that's gone in Gaza. Can't make a peace treaty; they've tried and failed. Can't lift apartheid conditions without enabling terrorist attacks on Israelis; these were instituted as security measures during the second intifada. Israel is about as humane as possible without enabling Palestinians to butcher Israelis.

@ElmerFudd

1) On Apartheid

Apartheid does not have a "security exception." This is where states claim that an act that literally violates human rights is "necessary" because duh national security. For starters, where is the evidence? Why hasn't Israel at least tried to make this legally plausible or provided evidence of Hamas staying inside those houses in Israel or Hamas teaching the civilians to attack Israelis (its because there is barely any, not that there isn't any, but it isn't on a scale large enough to justify apartheid). If my neighbour was from Hamas and the government deported him and the entire block who didn't know to a war-zone where the danger to life is quite significant, then (since IDF doesn't sue / investigate the people they kick or allow settler violence against) that would be collective punishment and is not "right" in the moral sense. They also don't compensate victims even though they have legal mechanisms for Pals to make claims (jaded process and largely inaccessible)! Are all Palestinians who are kicked out without due process working with Hamas? Is it right to kick innocent people?

There's also a problem with apartheid as a system because its not just relocation, it also refers to jaded and discriminatory law and policing practices, as well as military law for Palestinians in the West Bank etc. Surely, creating grievances that are exploited by violent actors like Hamas to radicalise civilians isn't an optimal and necessary strategy and even if it is, where is the due process, what purpose do discriminatory laws and hiring practices serve? There are a lot of regulations under this system that can be lifted and may not be necessary for what you think is the objective. Regardless of necessity, no law allows for an exception that can justify apartheid, it is quite literally a crime against humanity and the same argument you tout has been rejected by the ICJ and legal experts for a long time.

2) On Peace

It's not as simple as the Pals didn't want it. I wonder who rejected the 2002 Arab Peace Plan. The major issue with peace treaties is that there are commitment problems and some of these pre-date Hamas though the Pals also have some commitment problems. For instance, illegal settlements and such are serious reasons why Pals reject peace which is totally reasonable, not to mention their rejection of Palestinian recognition.

It's not so simple as the blame being just on one side and I am not that well versed in the history of peace negotiations to say anything more meaningful.

@ElmerFudd I don't like the use of the term "apartheid" here. It's based on citizenship, not race. Apartheid is like the Jim Crow south or South Africa where it's explicitly based on race. It's not like the West Bank where it's citizenship or Rhodesia or the olden days in the US where it was about owning property. These things are correlated with race, but if it's not racial I don't think it's "apartheid".

@Trazyn Apartheid was defined as a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute of the ICC, which the US and Israel as well as China etc have not signed. SOME countries consider it a "crime against humanity".

@nathanwei

It is not only defined as a crime under the Rome Statute (reply to its legitimacy further down) as it is mentioned in ICERD art(3): "Article 3 condemns apartheid and racial segregation and obliges parties to "prevent, prohibit and eradicate" these practices in territories under their jurisdiction." This is what the ICJ found Israel in violation of in their 2024 opinion, so it is certainly a crime because interpretation by legal authorities implies it is broad enough to cover citizenship etc. Also see:

"This definition does not make any difference between discrimination based on ethnicity and race, in part because the distinction between the two remains debatable among anthropologists.[18] Similarly, in British law the phrase racial group means "any group of people who are defined by reference to their race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origin".

So clearly, according to the most significant use of the term there is apartheid and it can be based on nationality. The individual opinions of the judges do differ a bit on whether it is apartheid (most of them agree there is) but they are all of the consensus that there was racial segregation so it is literally apartheid not xenophobia. The opinion also considered that CERD does not refer to the "crime" of apartheid as interpreted to entail state responsibility and definitionally should be informed by the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention to prove intent:

"Patrick Thornberry’s ICERD Commentary provides a gradated understanding of both terms, viewing racial segregation as ‘a concentrated form of discrimination through exclusion’, with apartheid representing ‘a further concentration’, displaying additional characteristics of domination integrated into a determinate public policy. Judge Nolte also considered that ‘[r]acial segregation is the broader term, apartheid being the gravest form of racial segregation’."

If not apartheid, it is at minimum systematic racial segregation and can be interpreted as not apartheid due to politicised legal proceedings (the ICJ has not ruled on it despite being asked for at least a decade now) however a literal reading of art(3) entail it to be apartheid and a majority of judges held it to be apartheid a year ago and it has only worsened. Other judges who did not explicitly state it was apartheid merely mentioned that the Court had not ruled on it not that there was no apartheid though Judge Nolte simply said that more evidence for proving special intent is required not that the act had not occurred.

This report does a good job going over the argument proving apartheid and how the entire system (denial of political and civil rights, dual legal system, denial of infrastructure, security state behaviour, settlement expansion, and intent to maintain that land as one caveat to proving apartheid)

Now on "some states do not ratify/recognise the Rome Statute and do not classify apartheid as a crime against humanity." Here it is important to know that certain norms in international law are peremptory norms and thus are foundational to the law, apartheid counts as one of these as mentioned in the ICJ report and it is affirmed as a crime against humanity in the 1976 Apartheid Convention:

"The States Parties to the present Convention declare that apartheid is a crime against humanity and that inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination, as defined in article II of the Convention, are crimes violating the principles of international law, in particular the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and constituting a serious threat to international peace and security."

Therefore, it does not matter what "some" states say because some law is above the states (peremptory norms) and their ratification of a treaty does not matter as it is legally binding on all (the crime, not the part of state responsibility for it because the ICJ has not ruled on it)

@Trazyn Regarding the UN's bias, I posed my claim to chatgpt and here is what they said https://chatgpt.com/share/68a64906-e818-8010-a3d8-4d60da215a87 You can read it and judge for yourself. By any objective metric, the UN is extremely biased and obsessed with Israel. I can share more evidence if you'd like, but I think what chatgpt wrote suffices here.

You mentioned "other organizations" and how you doubt they are all biased "at the same time." If I told you that the Chinese government, Chinese academics, Chinese NGOs, and Chinese lawyers all said that China was not committing crimes in Xinjiang, you would understandably point out that they are all biased at the same time. NGOs like HRW, Amnesty International, and IPC are all the same group of people who are subject to the same anti-Israel biases as the UN and for the same reasons. They all fall into an ideological echo chamber where Israel will always be villainized in an extremely disproportionate way.

The Gaza Health Ministry is in fact under the control of Hamas.

You wrote "I'd say anyone GUILTY of apartheid, war crimes, and crimes against humanity isn't that far from Hamas." As Richard pointed out, this is absolutely ridiculous. Almost every nation that goes to war commits war crimes. There are massive differences in the types of war crimes that people can commit. It is a war crime to tolerate a somewhat disproportionate level of collateral damage when targeting a legitimate target, and it also a war crime to deliberately massacre a village just for the goal of killing civilians, but these war crimes are not in any way equivalent.

Regarding apartheid, it actually does arguably have a "security exception." The criteria for the crime of apartheid are:

1. Inhuman acts similar to other crimes against humanity must be committed.

2. These acts must be committed in the context of systematic oppression and domination by one group over another group.

3. Both groups must be racial groups.

4. The oppression and domination must be part of an institutionalized regime.

5. The intention of the acts must be to maintain that institutionalized regime of racial oppression and domination.

So the security exception is that, if the acts are committed to maintain security and NOT to maintain racial domination, then it is not apartheid. This is the strongest argument against the claim that Israel is committing apartheid. Another strong argument is that if we are loosening the definition of "racial group" to include national and citizenship-based groups, then it opens up a can of worms to say that apartheid is happening all the time, all over the world (Palestinians in Lebanon, Kurds in Kurdish areas, Tigrayans in Ethiopia, Chechens in Russia, Kashmiris in India, etc). If that is the case, it becomes harder to say that it is actually fundamentally a bad thing rather than rational behavior by governments looking out for their citizens. Lastly, "inhuman acts" and "oppression" are loaded words that require a strong burden of proof.

ChatGPT - UN fixation on Israel

ChatGPT helps you get answers, find inspiration and be more productive. It is free to use and easy to try. Just ask and ChatGPT can help with writing, learning, brainstorming and more.

@ElmerFudd They could allow Palestinians to leave, and pay them to do so. You're acting like they've exhausted all possible options, but that's an option that hasn't been tried.

@TiredCliche leave where?

@RichardKnoche Gaza.

@TiredCliche sorry I meant which country they would move to

I have no opinion on that. Ideally the country of their choice. Somewhere safe, I would hope.

@TiredCliche I think the issue is that no country wants the large scale immigration of Palestinians. Egypt and Jordan have repeatedly rejected them. Some Western countries have accepted ~1000 of them, but nothing “large”. Basically israel is blocking the exit and at the same time no country (especially the neighboring Arab neighbors ) want to take them in.

@RichardKnoche They have rejected the offer for free. AFAIK Israel has never offered them, or any country, large amounts of money to take the refugees, and large amounts of money for them to leave.

Sure, money isn't everything, and the offer might be refused. But until tis has been tried, it's incorrect to say that she has tried every diplomatic option and failed. I have a high school GED and I thought of that. Seems kind of an obvious idea to me

@RichardKnoche Like, Netanyahu offered safe passage out and $5 mil to anyone who frees a hostage. https://share.google/PDEatxHXEnawT9VMj

The existence of this offer indicates that safe passage out is not freely available, but is within Israel's power. What if the offer was $5,000 and a safe passage out?

It would certainly be more moral than the current strategy, and probably cost less too

@TiredCliche I agree that israel should allow this.