alt Hacker NewsThere is nothing obvious about that statement. In fact it's catastrophically wrong.
Palestinians in Gaza have been governed by Hamas since 2006. Before that, they had been governed by the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) since 1994.
Palestinians in Judea and Samaria ("West bank") have been governed by the Palestinian Authority continuously since 1994, with the exception of Area C.
Palestinians who live there are NOT "de facto governed" by Israel. They pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority; receive birth certificates, IDs, business licenses and social security payments from the P.A.; Go to schools, hospitals, courts, police stations and jails run by the P.A. And most importantly, they vote in elections run by the P.A. To say that they are "de facto governed" by Israel is ridiculous, and shows a lack of basic understanding of Israel and Palestine, and the conflict between them.
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I shouldn’t even have to argue here. Access to the West Bank is controlled by Israel. That is de facto governance.
At best the Palestinian Territories have “quasi-governmental control.” I’m saying this as someone who isn’t particularly pro-Palestine. Pretending that Israel isn’t de facto the government of the Palestinian Territories is an unserious position.
By de facto I mean explicitly not de jure.
The person you're responding to said they were unable to vote in Israeli elections. You said "no, they're able to, uhh, not vote in the case of those under Hamas and they're able to vote in elections held by the Palestinian authority in the case of those in the west bank." I don't know a ton about this, but I don't believe the Palestinian authority elections are the same as the Israeli elections. As I understand it, the right to vote is gated behind a citizenship process that is restrictive enough to generally prevent Palestinians from obtaining it.
Counterpoint, Palestinians (many of whom were not alive in 2006, as they are children) are not exactly drenched in sovereignty at the moment.
Nakba.
"The exception of Area C" is doing a lot of work in this argument. That's 61% of the territory of the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria") (those scare quotes also doing a lot of work).
To counter your list of things that the PA does de facto control, I will add: who controls the criminal court system? The checkpoints which lead to the outside world? The airspace? The ability to import and export goods? The roads? The territorial contiguity of Areas A and B? The decisions on building new settlements?
Aside from the municipal things you mentioned, which in most places in the world are controlled by subnational entities, Israel is in de facto control of the lives and futures of all 15 million people "from the river to the sea", roughly half of them Jews and half of them Arabs, while only one of those groups has what anyone in the West could consider to be a normal existence.