Maybe it is time to enforce the no Israel/Palestine Rule?

[Jacson6]

People are calling for massacres of Palestinian civilians by denying them food and water. Just a thought.

[marybourg]

1. That's the worst thing that has happened recently?

This call.

[elleng]

2. Not a bad thought.

I avoid such threads.

[Frasier Balzov]

3. How long ago was such a rule in place on DU?

Did you formerly post here but lost your posting privileges?

[EYESORE 9001]

4. It's been awhile, a decade or longer

Discussion was relegated to a specific forum, which I believe had ‘Israel/Palestine’ in the title. I did not frequent that forum, nor would I now.

[The Magistrate]

5. When The Rules were Fully In Force, Sir

They permitted current events of great scale, such as this, to be discussed in the upper forums.

What you say you are seeing would be against the general rules of the place. Alert if you wish and see if the jury agrees.

[MOMFUDSKI]

6. We are all overwrought

about this subject. As well we should be

[SpankMe]

8. For a sec, I thought this said "We are all overweight"

I was thinking - how'd they know?

[SpankMe]

7. The Israel/Palestine post rule isn't being ignored

The rule is no Israel/Palestine posts...unless there is really big news. Since this is the dominant story, DU is allowing discussion outside of the Israel/Palestine group for a time.

It sucks that the subject has divided DU'ers so much. Any thread on the subject deteriorates into name-calling and ad-hominem attacks within the first 4 replies to an OP. Sometimes it more closely resembles Truth Social than DU!

[EarlG]

9. That's not what the rule was intended for

The Israel/Palestine rule was originally put into place because, very early on in the history of DU, the General Discussion forum filled up with too many general debates about the decades-long conflict, and they were crowding out other discussions. So we decided to create a separate forum specifically for those debates and told people to post in there instead of in GD.

But that rule was not intended to block discussion of anything related to Israel/Palestine whenever big news is occurring. If you visit the About page in General Discussion and check out the Statement of Purpose, it says that "Posts about Israel/Palestine, religion, guns, showbiz, or sports are restricted in this forum," but it also provides a link to more information. At that link you will find this:

Threads about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are not permitted under normal circumstances and should be posted in the Israel/Palestine Group.

Open discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is permitted during very high-profile news events which are heavily covered across all newsmedia.

The "very high-profile news events" clause is in effect right now.

EDITED TO ADD: The page I've linked to is pretty old, and some of the information on it is outdated; I will be revising some Statements of Purpose to bring them up to date when we move to DU4. But as of right now, my current position is that the I/P the "very high-profile news events" clause is the way to go, and so posts about the Israel/Palestine situation are currently okay in GD.

[Elessar Zappa]

10. This is major news.

It’s going to get attention on DU.