Once the method exists. i'd just assume its everywhere
We know about Pegasus/NSO and its a fun subject to follow, but in all honesty, every engineer privy to the 0-day bank that powers it could build one of their own, or sell it to another group, and no one would know
Most of their Zero Days are probably short lived and in any case the challenge of running an outfit like NSO isn’t only or even primarily in finding Zero Days.
This isn’t a business model you bootstrap by publishing to an appstore and paying influencer to promote - this isn’t “Raid of Warduty Call of Legends”. You need high level government contacts that can open doors as these deals don’t usually come up on public tenders, and you need people that can manage a relationship with both your host government and client governments especially if either or both are unstable and falling out of favor with a specific regime would result in high legal risk or even actual risk to the safety of you or your employees.
A couple of engineers taking a bag of goodies are more likely than not to end up in prison like the former NSA folks that took up freelancing for Saudi Arabia.
Imagine some group that duplicates Pegasus/NSO -- compromises it but sells it AS Pegasus/NSO to unsuspecting, less-savvy nation-states and effectively uses /IT/ to infiltrate/backdoor the intelligence/LEO ops of said customer state...
Or is that what Pegasus/NSO basically already provide, as a feature?
> Or is that what Pegasus/NSO basically already provide, as a feature?
considering shell are mainly used for deeply corrupt ends, this isn't a far stretch. similarly, things that seem like duopolies today might well be revealed to be monopolies in reality if actual ownership records became public. i imagine the false public perception of a market that has fair competition is very valuable as it maintains the illusion of choice. similarly, regarding spying by USA; i imagine Crypto AG was/isn't the only CIA front.
And dont forget to look into the Maxwell Twins - the sisters of Ghislane --> They made initial DB software for the intel community for "tracking financial fraud" and other tracking...
They sold this to .gov and supposedly it was in use in the early '00s - and it provided ostensibly access to tracking financial and human trafficking data..
Think of it as a precurser to palantir and such - and there was a bunch of shady shit around this.
but apparently they made counter-terrorism software and that this software was in use in the US intel comm and that it was also compromised...
Regardless of the truth of how it was used - the fact that the most notorious human trafficking/blackmailing operation yet exposed was directly related to providing counter-terrorism software to the USG is.... interesting.
"In other cases, NSO’s spyware was installed in the phone of citizens to try to find and collect data and information that isn’t necessarily connected to an investigation or suspicions but simply for investigators to use this data later on as a means of pressure on people being interrogated."
And anyone who thinks their own country isnt doing the same is deluded! The Security Services has to protect a country which means getting involved in everything, organised crime as well as business, and then when they feel things need to change direction, the security services have the tools aka blackmail information to make that change happen... in most cases!
I'm only aware of one case where the US government, without warrant, actively hacked its own citizens using a 0day, which was when the FBI exploited a 0day to compromise users of TOR who, as I recall, were looking to access CSAM. Even when going after a bunch of pedophiles I think there was a good bit of controversy there.
I think there may actually have been a warrant for some part of the access, idk.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen but it would be quite a scandal to find that the government was performing warrantless exploitation of citizen's personal devices. Maybe someone can correct me here and show that this has been the case.
The adversarial judicial system is supposed to restrict that by having the defendant's lawyers challenge the evidence and how it was obtained.
The prosecution and police can't simply use inappropriate evidence. In some cases it's possible (and worth the effort) to do 'parallel construction' by getting a warrant for some other evidence confirming the same thing, but it's not something that can be done at scale without it being obvious.
In the name of national security, often behind closed doors. Even if the funds are there to hire competent defense, which most of the time they're not, you're fighting an uphill battle.
That simply is not true. In most "Terrorism" cases there is always major restrictions on defence lawyers both accessing and challenging prosecution evidence. From the bullshit of Gitmo to Secret Trials in most Liberal Democracies, in the field of "National Security" lies are the norm.
Of course it is, it's called "plea bargain" - defendants choose between pleading guilty for a pre-arranged punishment or the DA putting up a boatload of charges with the expected punishment excessively above the plea deal [1].
> I'm only aware of one case where the US government, without warrant, actively hacked its own citizens using a 0day
It’s perhaps a bit broader than your definition there, but illegal exploitation and subsequent whitewashing of personal data by law enforcement is common enough that is has a name. Parallel construction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Another point. For me, being caught zero times doing an illegal thing is a world apart from being caught one time. The chances on you being caught the only time you ever did s specific illegal act is so small that you pretty much go from assumed innocent if you’ve never been caught, to probably guilty if you’ve been caught even once before.
(That’s not an “assumed innocent “ in its legal context, I 100% agree a court should assume 2nd, 3rd, and 100th time convicted people are “innocent until proven guilty” and the prosecution should need to bring a strong enough case ignoring previous conviction to get a fair judgement. But if you’ve been caught using illegal methods before, I’m going to assume it’s something you have convinced yourself is ok, and you’ll do it whenever it suits you so long as you consider the chance of getting caught is low enough.)
This Wikipedia article is awful. It says it can be used to hide illegal evidence collection, but then only gives examples of it being used to hide sources and methods. I don't think there is a problem hiding a source if there is sufficient evidence from other sources and the first source is not illegal.
I also like how they are basically admitting that the drug lords can basically use police force to bully their own opponents by acting "as if" they were the anonymous informers of drug trafficking.
Testing in court is not the way to enforce legality for police departments. Having someone let go from a crime years after they are arrested based on court proceedings would 1) be too far removed from the illegal behaviour to change that behavior, 2) not catch most illegal behaviour because, as the most likely response would be for the police department to lie about it, 3) not catch behaviour that is illegal but never makes it to court. I would much rather have police departments have strong training about appropriate evidence collection, third party oversight over police behaviour, and technical monitors of behavior such as body cams.
Edit: I just want to point out there should be court cases about it, but they should be focused on repercussions for the offending officers instead. With a model where illegal police behaviour is punished by releasing a defendant doesn't actually punish the police and forces the non-police individual pay for illegal police behaviour by being put on trial.
"Using an 0day" is carrying a lot of weight there. The Snowden leaks revealed active hacking of American private citizens and companies, e.g. tapping Google's dark fiber lines, intentionally inserting cryptographic vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel, social engineering to end up with control of security standards bodies, etc.
In my opinion, it doesn't matter whether the country used an 0day or not when it's willing to actively, warrantlessly wiretap its citizens en masse. And the fact that the NSA is at this point known to have spent enormous money and effort to insert NSA-designed vulnerabilities into commonly-used cryptographic systems means it's pretty hard to believe it didn't use them — and if that's not an "0day," what is?
"Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.
"Eventually, NSA became the sole editor," the document states."
Wouldn't this likely mean US is much better than other countries to hide such scandals? E.g. maybe because they spend more money on it?
It could also mean that US media cares less about this than Israel media ([1]). Maybe Israel media has significantly more investigative-journalist manpower than US media. This way we, US citizens, would have fewer people researching such scandals.
[1] EDIT: By "cares less" I meant, as in, US media finds such stories less profitable and thus deprioritizes.
Yeah, no, this is bullshit. People don’t just have agencies (Mossad, CIA), they also have agency as in: the power to change reality. And the vast majority of democratic countries are run by people who have a decent appreciation of the rule of law, which is what stands between your actual freedom and your gloomy fantasies.
Then, there’s also a group of countries that simply cannot afford / don’t have the people to do these things.
How do I know? Consider the usual suspects for these operations: the US, Israel, Russia, and China. For every single one of them, we also have examples of their work that got leaked or otherwise exposed.
What are the chances that Belgium happens to be the country that manages to run such a program and keep it secret? Or Equatorial Guinea?
Then, there’s also the growing list of known customers of NSO: if two dozens of them decided to buy this software, chances are they do not have homegrown solutions with similar capabilities. Nor does it seem as if there were any other sellers at NSO’s scale. Meaning: if we successively learn about all of NSO’s business, we might be getting close to knowing everything there is to know about the sector, with the exception of the large countries mentioned above.
I mean the NSA literally admitted in 2013[0] that the NSA had employees doing stuff like this just for personal reasons. The only real difference is where the data was gathered from and I'm not even sure it's worth differentiating:
> At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.
> The practice [...] was disclosed by the NSA Office of the Inspector General
I feel like the distinction between "employees at the NSA using tools to look up stuff for personal issues" and things like "the FBI actively looking up dirt on civil rights leaders to try and blackmail them" like with MLK is extremely important!
One is a case of employees abusing a system for personal gain. Another is establishing a system of abuse in service of the security service. Absolutely night and day in terms of the implications, even if in both you have people with access to private information.
The NSA employees weren't trying to advance the goals of the State by stalking their exes.
I don't understand your argument: if the shady things they're doing have gotten leaked, isn't this because they were doing those shady things in the first place? Can you conclude one way or the other that the net is so loose that bad things will always see the light of day? Don't forget that with PRISM taking 6 years to be disclosed and MKUltra having taken 22, a lot of people rightly don't have such idealized views anymore.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that any, much less the vast majority of democratic countries are run by people who have a decent appreciation of the rule of law.
There are certainly plenty of states that cannot afford these programs, or that may choose to spend their resources in other ways, but the big powers are more than willing to assist when their interests align. I think the case of Denmark shows that it's very difficult to anticipate when interests will align, because we sometimes don't even know the identities of the people whose interests matter.
100% sure that they have spy software, of course, bought abroad. Equatorial Guinea has oil money and it is one of the most authoritarian countries in the world.
Implied is the statement that the end justifies the means. But how do you weigh the proportionality of measures taken? Do you adopt a utilitarian point of view, looking at, say, deaths prevented? Is anything game, or should agencies be expected to uphold a code of conduct, bill of rights or exclude entire categories of information? How do you assess what is or isn't a threat to a country and thereby something it needs to be protected from? What is a country - the president, the party, the government, its citizenry, businesses?
Second, with the popularity of invoking "national security" as an authority argument, how can these agencies ever be accountable? Who watches the watchmen? Are we to trust agencies reporting on the number of e.g. terrorist incidents prevented, especially if the information sources are opaque and there's an obvious conflict of interest?
Third, given the existence of programs like MK Ultra and Cointelpro, is it really safe to say agencies won't try to overreach? With examples like the Stargate program ("Men Who Stare At Goats"), should we have faith they know what they're doing?
Of the roughly dozen questions, I'll try and hit a few points directly to sum up where I believe we ought to be, based on my relatively narrow understanding of US political sciences - please note that many answers to your questions will vary by country and their own democratic maturity.
While I don't agree that there was an implication of the end justifying any type of means, it seems we have already taken a utilitarian point of view. In short, the intelligence community is not allowed to circumvent the constitution and relevant laws (i.e. deprive citizens of their established rights); this is largely in part from the Fourth Amendment (unlawful search or seizure). As legal precedent is an inherently moving goalpost vis-a-vis judicial interpretation, this is a continuous battle in which citizens are aided by transparency and scrutiny of ongoing government programs.
One need not look any farther than the Snowden cases to realize that there is still a strong clinging to this ideal of public transparency, as well as the mountain of evidence that the government ought to be audited to prevent, or at least cease, illegal operations such as PRISM. Judges watch the watchmen - largely in closed-door FISA court hearings, it seems. This bothers me.
However, to think that there is zero benefit to these programs is parallel to naively thinking they are wholly good. I'm willing to wager that there are physical / kinetic and digital events that occur every week which would terrify the average citizen. Transparency is good, don't get me wrong - but there is only so much that some can stomach before feeling ill.
Stay involved in local / state / federal politics. Make noise about things you feel are unjust. Asking good questions is a good thing, but action is what makes the gears turn.
I think we're basically in agreement: neither of us thinks we should be naive about these agencies, as they definitely aren't. Intelligence/security agencies have a purpose, but shouldn't become zealots. And they should be trusted, but verified as the KGB used to say.
> Stay involved in local / state / federal politics.
Not an option for me - I'm geographically challenged. One thing to be envious of with the American system is you guys can affect a great deal, from judge and sheriff appointments to the president. Your post is a good reminder not to take it for granted.
Can we stop pretending like Pegasus is not virtually everywhere?If it's not Pegasus is another tool, worse or better, foreign or domestic, from NSA,CIA,etc.Who exactly cares which entity does it as long as it's happening and laws & principles are being broken?
Vault7 was the first leak de facto proving these things existed, why the f#ck are we still surprised now, almost 5 years later, that these things are being used and there is a market here opened for politicians,private individuals, governments, etc.?
Awareness is good, but who(or better said: what institutions, what parties, etc) are you seeing advocating for more privacy, security, transparency in software and hardware, etc?
I will go one step further here beyond the simple "more privacy, security,etc." rhetoric, which i'm sure every HN user has heard to the point of ears bleeding, and I hate to say this but one cannot fully understand something until either s/he makes it, he hacks it(for the purpose of at least understanding) or becomes subject to the tool's effects.Far too many times people use something without even reading the TOS, let alone understanding the mechanisms behind the technology.At this point i have little sympathy for people who do not take the time and putting in the work of understanding a technology >for their own benefit<.
Because nobody who is at least semi-literate in this field was born with the knowledge, and while arguably it's our duty to point less knowledgeable people to inform themselves, we cannot tire ourselves to death by promoting (or allowing others who promote) this "usable-first, hussle-free, happy jolly" tech ecosystem and then also act surprised when the masses don't have a f*cking clue what's going on, because effectively we trained humans to become dumb monkeys with a smartphone, arguably worse.
It's nice to see the rare comment I can relate to. I hardly know anyone IRL who sees the horrorshow for what it is. Snowden was 9 years ago and for that we now get "privacy advocates sounding the alarm". The surveillance complex waited for the waters to clear and doubled down, with spy devices dripping off of every pole, 12 cameras staring down at every city intersection, blank-faced electronic boxes pointed down at the phone, car, watch, and whatever ridiculous consumer gadget du jour takes us one step closer to Total Information Awareness. How much hype has 5G gotten, and for what? So you can download movies fast. So you can plug into the metaverse and pay even less mind to your surroundings. There will come a time in the near future when privacy is effectively outlawed. Radio signals watching you move about your home. Facial recognition fridge (to keep kids out of that chocolate!). Smart technology keeping us safe. Drone swarms patrolling the neighborhood. The anxiety and paranoia will drive people even further into their clutches, into the virtual world where the surveillance is baked in from the ground up, and not affixed to existing physical infrastructure. Still we act like our words can foment change. Woke children change their facebook profile pic in "support". Nobody's listening but to hyperbole and disinformation, as if that's a new concept. Since the dawn of civilization there has been a war on information. The only difference is that each of us now holds our own dazzling propaganda machine in the palm of our hand. Cheers friend.
In Poland there was a sort of similar story. Politicians from the opposition, lawyers, “difficult” prosecutors have been spied. A few days ago a special commission started investigation but it consists only from opposition politicians. The ruling far-right party pretends this topic does not exist. It’s a farce.
Some of the companies in the field, in contrast to NSO, do have ethics committees to filter out obviously bad clients.
Once when guidelines were described to engineers a question was asked: Would Israel itself pass the ethics committee check?
Whenever Israel is involved in anything unfortunately the discussion becomes about anti semitism (sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly). Maybe it helps if we imagined it was another nation and then see what we think about it.
If it was Russia/china or UK/France/Germany would you still think or feel the same?
In India it has been used extensively against social activist, victims of court cases, journalists etc. List goes on and on. It is prime example of how power and money corrupts a system.
It's interesting to me why spying on citizens is like this foundational goal of all modern nation states. I get why a state might want to do this but its not clear to me why it seems to be the only stable path for modern democracies.
Governments enjoy having power and control over their subjects. The only reason they didn't do this before is the technology didn't exist in previous centuries. The use of spies was more or less limited to high value targets in times of war. It's not like they could have assigned a spy to every citizen in the country.
Things are different now. Espionage is now automatic and large scale, there's no longer any practical limit on the number of people they can spy on. This is alluring to all kinds of people, from the well-intentioned to the malicious. To them, total surveillance is simply an efficient way to accomplish some goal such as catching some heinous criminal or figuring out what your political opposition is planning. They generally couldn't care less that global surveillance destroys freedom and enables apalling abuses of power at unprecedented scales.
The truth is they would very much enjoy the ability to manage "their" citizens the same way we manage running processes in our computers: total visibility at all times into everything they're doing and the ability to kill them if they become problematic. Traditional police investigations are too hard and time consuming, they want the ability to push a button to reveal the entire life of a suspect.
So it would be like domestic law enforcement (the FBI? state patrol?) using NSA-developed spyware, secretly, without court orders, against US citizens, including protestors.
Whether this should surprise you I guess depends on your worldview; whether it should alarm or disturb you, especially if you are an Israeli or in Israel, I guess depends on your view of individual rights and the police.
> So it would be like domestic law enforcement (the FBI? state patrol?) using NSA-developed spyware, secretly, without court orders, against US citizens, including protestors.
In the US, we already have police using Stingray interceptors without warrants (and in a similar vein but less problematic, sweeping dragnet warrants issued to cell providers), which are slightly less invasive, but relatively comparable in terms of abuse potential.
I certainly don't like it, but I'm not surprised by it. I sort of have to file it under people voting for the Leopards Eating Faces Party getting terribly shocked and appalled when the leopard eats their face.
Like yeah, you jerks all said it was "smolani masriach boged" (stinking traitor lefty) to not vote for transparently sleazy political parties and their STRONG LEADER. Well, I stuck with my stinking lefty treason and now your guy is facing jail time and my party are in charge of the Health Ministry tackling vaccine distribution. So there.
Yes, it's like this. But in general, Mossad and Isreali intelligence have done whatever they wanted with no repercussions for a long time now. This is, IMO, nothing new.
If we learned nothing from STUXNET/DUQU.... Israel has literally the most advanced capabilities in this area that we are aware of...
I mean - do you recall, as a part of the Snowden leaks, there was a small amount of information that came out that there was some channel/mechanism by which israel was effectively given a firehose of data from the collective five-eyes...
I don't quite recall the details, but it was a revelation because via that firehose they were getting more data than was thought to be 'allowed'/previously known...
It was not, no matter how the company tries to market itself to foreign clients. Israeli intel has more important work to do than develop software to spy on journalists and others persons of interest for big ego dictators.
People used to quip that Prussia is an army with a country rather than the other way around, it seems like if you add the modern intelligence sector that describes Israel. With all the concerns about 'Military-civil fusion ' as it's called in China or Russia I always found it funny that Israel might as well be the country that has merged both spheres most successfully but nobody really seems to care at all.
This is ignoring some minor details, like that Israel had to fight some real frigging wars over its bare existence, and is still facing a regional power that calls for its extinction. Looks like Israel isn't getting too much love, at least not here at HN.
I maintain that we in Israel are still a very normal, western type society, if you take all these rather extreme circumstances into consideration (and, in addition, we are getting quite a lot of tech done ;-) )
Your justification is fully compatible with the observed phenomenon as described. The comment didn’t criticize Israel, although the possible criticism so obviously follows from the description that your mind added it all by itself.
That, in a way, is also quite telling.
I’m not sure if the definition of democracy is flexible enough to include non-democracies as long as they bring a note to class giving a good reason. If Israel’s situation does really require essentially doing away with democratic norms, it’s somewhat delusional to still afford it that label, as a sort of temporarily-but-forever-slightly-embarrassed-democracy that protects its citizens’ rights as long as it’s convenient to do so.
But I doubt that state is actually necessary. There has just been too much Austrian-style corruption in the last decade not to suspect some of that to be also in play here.
Let’s wait and see how many politicians of the opposition were targeted in these programs. Because that would be the immediate end to any claims of justification.
Edit: and just to be sure: nobody doubts that Israel is far better than the usual comparisons, i. e. its neighbors and China. It’s just because Israel is considered to be among “the good ones” that it gets criticized more readily. Both because the distance b/w expectations and reality is larger than elsewhere, and because criticism among peers is usually more effective than it is among strangers.
> It’s just because Israel is considered to be among “the good ones” that it gets criticized more readily
... or because "the good ones" have a guilt conscience with regards to Israel, especially the European ones. Nothing better than shaming your victims to wash your conscience.
“Europeans” is doing a lot of work in that sentence… Subjectively, criticism of Israel seems to be more widespread in the US and Britain than Germany? I don’t doubt the continuing existence here in Germany (and called it the “seedy underbelly” of local politics just a few hours ago right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29977132). But my impression is that these are very distinct groups.
> If Israel’s situation does really require essentially doing away with democratic norms, it’s somewhat delusional to still afford it that label
That's a bit of a stretch, I didn't claim any such exemption, and the state of affairs that you describe is not true either.
The facts described by the article were published by independent newspapers, and are now the subject of an investigation by the State Comptroller. See https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-693834
I wasn't suggesting any value judgement in my post, I'm not really anti-China or anti-Russia either or anything. But I think the notion that Israel is a Western country is largely owed due to geopolitical alliance, not culture or how its state operates.
I think what does away with that illusion quickly is the fact that Israel has no civil marriage. In Israel, a Jew cannot marry a Muslim, or a Christian. In the US you can find me someone who is more right-wing than Genghis Khan and yet they probably would still find that surprising. Israel is cosmopolitan, in the way the UAE is, but it is not a secular Western state. It doesn't need to be because not being 'Western' doesn't imply being bad at all.
Yes and no, with the marriages. Marriages in foreign jurisdictions are recognized, so people just take the hop to Cyprus and marry there, if they need to. This is just a technicality, in practical terms.
We are not a state that is governed by clergy, there is a free press and independent courts, there is a competitive political process, therefore your assertion that we are not a 'secular western state' isn't true either.
It is not an exclusively secular state, like France; but other, more mixed models do exist, in practice.
Sure, you can go to Cyprus. but what if an Israeli want to marry a person from the West Bank... will the state of Israel approve of that person from the West Bank to fly to Cyprus? Nope. Not a chance in hell.
I've been to Israel a bunch of times. I've also been to Palestine and Lebanon. Israel isn't a "secular western state." For one, Israel does not have a written constitution, even though according to the Proclamation of Independence a constituent assembly should have prepared a constitution by October 1, 1948. That delay in the preparation of a constitution resulted primarily from problems that emerged against the background of the alleged clash between a secular constitution and the Halacha (the Jewish religious law).
So even from a legal perspective, Israel can't decide whether it's a secular or religious state.
It's funny how we define "secular" by monogamous, pair marriage, which is a religious construct. By that metric, Israel is roughly as secular as Iran and USA.
If it's any consolation, these comments here do not reflect a general opinion and liberal leaning places seem to have this anti-Israel agenda, and it seems to be more prominent recently. Maybe I'm just paying more attention.
That's not to say everything is perfect, no country is. But in perspective of everyone's actions in the region I support Israel overall.
I don't want to get into a political flamewar, just wanted to offer my support. I disagree with the premise of many opinions here about Israel.
Note that I'm not talking about people that are talking objectively about this specific event, I'm talking about the comments calling Israel an apartheid state, marriage, etc.
Do you have any international sources on this? I'm a little sceptical of the partisan angle of those posts and note they're essentially from a rival Israeli political outlook. I'm open to the idea that B'Tselem are unreliable, but highly politicised criticisms like those aren't really persuasive.
> I'm open to the idea that B'Tselem are unreliable
You linked an article from organization B'Tselem claiming Israel is an Apartheid state.
I dont like the "angle of their post" to use your words.
> note they're essentially from a rival Israeli political outlook
Yes, my that's my point. B'Tselem is a political organization, simply linking to their political rant is not helpful.
Unless you want to debate out what you found so convincing that B'Tselem said that PROVES Israel is an "apartheid" state this conversation is going nowhere.
I cannot prove a negative. You are insuating Israel is an apartheid state, it's a bold claim with no facts.
You have to have concrete reasoning to assert so, I don't have to scrum up some "international sourced" articles to shoot down propaganda from B'Tselem.
I can see I've given some offence and would like to reiterate that's not my intention. I'd continue asking questions as I remain fairly curious, but will pick another time and place. Thank you for responding, and again, apologies for any offence caused.
No offense taken, I was simply responding to you and clarified the conversation.
Whatever emotions you perceived me to have were in your head.
Possibly it was the emphasis on "proves", which was simply an emphasis with the goal of highlighting you need to prove Israel is an apartheid state if you claim as such.
A lot of people voice their concerns, including a lot of Israelis, but what can you do? Israel is a democracy and the majority votes for far right militaristic candidates and parties. Whether or not you hear about these concerns in public discourse in your country's media depends on your current foreign policy.
I fail to see how Bennett is far right in any sense of the word. Conservative yes, but the far right is inhabited by nut jobs like Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Whether you define support for an active military as militaristic versus actually taking aggressive military action is also another issue - they cannot be militaristic if you accept the second definition.
Isn't Bennett's big issue, for most of his political career, seizing the West Bank? He and his political party have been routinely described as far right.
We could define 'far' relatively, and say there are people further right, but I think the word stops being meaningful at that point.
There are few countries on Earth that have (a) directly officially threatened military action against another state, or (b) routinely bomb another state they are not officially at war with, the way Israel has. How are they not "taking aggressive military action"?
> (b) routinely bomb another state they are not officially at war with
In what sense are we not officially at war with Palestine? Nobody ever signed an armistice, ceasefire, or peace deal to end the War of 1948. Nobody even wants to. The official policies of both the PLO and Hamas remain "struggle until victory". There are internal political reasons for this that any knowledgeable person can describe, but as far as anyone who lacks inside influence is concerned, that's their policy and they're sticking to it.
> In what sense are we not officially at war with Palestine?
In the literal sense. The territories that form Palestine and the West Bank today were part of Egypt and Jordan before the six-day war. Israel occupied these territories during the war, then signed peace treaties with the countries it defeated. The three Arab countries (including Syria) attempted to recapture their territories again in 1973, but failed, and peace treaties were again signed between all four countries involved.
In the meantime, people living in the territories occupied by the Israeli military forces continued their fight for freedom, as all occupied people do. They made some strides in this direction with the Oslo accords, where they gained official recognition as a separate country under their own authority.
While open hostility existed on both sides since the beginning, there has never been an official war declaration between the PLO and Israel. Both have been routinely attacking and killing civilians and destroying infrastructure in each other's country forma long time - though Israel now has a vast upper hand and the killing and destruction has become more and more one sided against the people of Palestine.
That's like saying after d-day, the killing and destruction has become more one sided against the Axis Powers. Nobody takes that as a serious argument that the Allies shouldn't have done it (and please, no Nazi comparisons).
I mostly just don't like the rather extreme metaphysical claims involved in simply denying that there exists a state of war. If there is no war, what were the Oslo Accords for? To formalize terms of a post-war occupation? But then when was the war? Who surrendered?
To talk of a "peace process", or even of an entrenchment of the Occupation, you need to acknowledge the existence of a second party to the conflict, who in any practical point of view are in a military struggle, that being a war, with the other party. Maybe you agree with their military-political demands, maybe you disagree. But certainly they exist, and are in fact fighting.
If I were to treat it as reasoning rather than polemic, I would say it's projecting an expected - and feared - possible future backwards into the present. The idea seems to be, "we don't want the Palestinian Arabs to end up as a conquered, dispersed, exiled, or killed former nation, so we treat them as already dead, then cheer for them, being already dead, to rise up and prevent their own deaths ahead of time." That's getting a bit speculative and psychoanalytic, but it does sort of explain the grim, dark "rage against the dying of the light" attitude people display when trying to argue simultaneously that there's no war and that the Palestinian side of the war needs more support.
My objection to the whole complex is: there is no dying of the light. Millions of people are right there, year after year, dealing with various endemic problems because, by and large, the peculiar factionalization of their political system forbids them to do anything else. There's no dramatic moment to wait for. They're just gonna suffer more as long as everyone keeps cheering for them to put victory over coexistence.
> If there is no war, what were the Oslo Accords for? To formalize terms of a post-war occupation? But then when was the war? Who surrendered?
I explained my perspective on this: after the six-day war, Israel conquered the lands currently forming today's Palestinian territories and occupied them. As with any occupying force anywhere in the world, the occupied people started resisting this occupation.
The Oslo accords happened between the occupying force, Israel; and (representatives of) the resistance movement - represented by the PLO at the time, mostly. The accords marked the beginning of the modern Palestinian state (the "official" beginning was Yasser Arafat's 1988 declaration of independence, but that couldn't even happen in Palestine). They were maybe closer to the Good Friday deal in Ireland than to any kind of inter-state peace treaty.
So again, any regular war ended a loooong time ago (basically after the six-day war, but that was re-attempted in the 1973 Yom Kippur war); it ended with Israel de facto ruling all of the territory of modern Israel + all of the Palestinian territories. However, there are two aspects that prevented the fighting stopping there: (1) Israel wants to be a Jewish state, so they did not want to officially incorporate the Palestinian territories, since especially in 1967 they would have meant that the vast majority of Israel's population would have been Arabic; and (2) the people in the occupied territories started a bloody resistance movement against the occupation - fueled by historic religious hatred and concerns, but also by item (1) - the knowledge that they would not be allowed to be full citizens of Israel, even if they wanted to.
3) The Palestinians, both officially and according to opinion polls, want the land inside the Green Line, and refuse to end their "irregular militancy" (aka: war but you want to pretend their hands are clean) until they get it. This issue becomes more urgent after Israel withdrew all its forces and civilians unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, with a plan to do the same in the West Bank, and gets in return a militarized statelet that maintains a state of war with Israel. Worse, Hamas, the PLO, and their Western supporters start moving the goalpost of what constitutes "occupation", so that it stops meaning the presence of active military force and starts referring to the simple state of war between neighbors. Then you can keep telling Israel to "end the occupation of Gaza" so that "ending the occupation" becomes solely defined as meeting the demands of Gaza's ruling government.
Now, I'll bite my political bullets and say that I still think the Gaza Withdrawal was the right thing to do, but I also find it totally obvious and sensible that Israeli voters don't want to repeat the experience with the West Bank, which has high ground from which a rocketeer or a sniper can take easy pot-shots at Israeli civilians down below. I can especially see why most voters don't want to repeat the experience, given that even our supposed Western "friends" and "allies" are willing to redefine words so that we somehow become the perpetrators of a crime whose commission is entirely in someone else's control.
To wit, if someone is accused of assault, it is in fact an alibi to have been a hundred miles away when the supposed assault took place. If Israel is accused of "occupation", an alibi becomes a contradiction-in-terms: "occupation" is now when you have no troops on the "occupied" soil but your neighbor keeps up a state of war with you for their own political reasons.
Israel maintains control of all Palestinian airspace and the Gaza coast. Israel maintains the right to march its military or police inside the West Bank or Gaza or to bomb them without considering this an act of war. They have regularly arrested Palestinian elected officials. They control all resources entering Gaza and the West Bank, particularly water, food and construction materials, and punish people by reducing rations if they feel they are not complying with some decision.
The withdrawal from Gaza was also not some gesture of autonomy towards Palestine as you make it out to be. It was a demographic calculation, again going back to the problem of the Jewish state - the balance of Jewish people and Arabs in Israel was getting too low, so the leadership at the time decided it was more important to stop the colonization effort and bring the Jewish population back into Israel. This was widely reported and the official public reason given at the time.
This policy has also been illegally reversed recently, so new illegal Israeli colonies are again popping up, though I believe mostly in the West Bank.
So, by all possible measures, even if they do not have permanently stationed troops there anymore, Israel is occupying Gaza.
Imagine if China were flying fighter jets over Taiwan, refusing entry to any ships they didn't inspect, refusing to allow concrete or food to be delivered, and had a tight grip on water resources. Further imagine if Chinese troops were freely entering Taiwan and arresting people the regime deemed "terrorists" or simply "problematic", and they were regularly bombing Taiwanese buildings in retaliation for terrorist acts, or just in response to democratic choices they didn't like. Would you not say that China was occupying Taiwan, or at least doing something very very close to it?
It's also important to note that Israel itself does not recognize Palestine as a state, so it is very hard to see by what measure Israel could claim that it is at war with Palestine.
>Israel maintains the right to march its military or police inside the West Bank or Gaza or to bomb them without considering this an act of war.
No we don't. These are acts of war. We're at war with Palestine.
>The withdrawal from Gaza was also not some gesture of autonomy towards Palestine as you make it out to be.
I didn't say anything about motives. I said we took our soldiers and settlers out of Gaza. That is a material fact.
>Would you not say that China was occupying Taiwan, or at least doing something very very close to it?
I would say that China was blockading or besieging Taiwan, with which it was at war, and would apply the same terms for Israel's war against Gaza.
>It's also important to note that Israel itself does not recognize Palestine as a state, so it is very hard to see by what measure Israel could claim that it is at war with Palestine.
> No we don't. These are acts of war. We're at war with Palestine.
You keep insisting on this historical revisionism. When did this war start? Between which two states is it happening? When did the declaration of war happen? At most, you can call this is a civil war, since it is taking place entirely on Israel's territory (according to Israel's own definition!).
The more historically correct way to look at it is that there is a resistance movement fighting against Israel's occupation. This is the simple, undeniable historical truth.
Israel is, undeniably, the original aggressor against the people of Gaza and the West Bank, though over the years there have been many heinous acts committed by all parties.
If the Allies had started bombing German civilian targets more as they were gaining an upper hand, or even had they not subsided in their bombing of civilian targets, then yes, it would be the same, and it would not be excusable.
When fighting against a dirty enemy, it is mostly acceptable to be dirty in turn. But as your enemy is close to defeat and is losing any power to harm you, you're supposed to stop the dirty tactics that were necessary and (somewhat) justified earlier.
>But as your enemy is close to defeat and is losing any power to harm you, you're supposed to stop the dirty tactics that were necessary and (somewhat) justified earlier.
That is:
1) Not how international law actually works,
2) Not how anyone actually behaved in World War II,
3) Not remotely applicable before an official surrender is issued.
The law says that you have to call off military action and start releasing POWs into civilian life once their government surrenders. There is absolutely no legal or moral requirement to "let up" or "go easy" on a government that is strategically losing but refuses to surrender. This is especially so when the enemy has repeatedly invoked conditions of total war by violating the typical soldier/civilian distinction (eg: storing weapons in civilian dwellings, sending soldiers to attack without uniform or serial numbers, and various other tactics commonly labeled "terrorism" for lack of a unified legal category).
That's ok then, as the government of Gaza was created by Israel's own accord - so at least in 2005, we can both agree that there could have been no state of war between occupied Gaza and Israel. Then, in 2006 the Israeli backed government held free elections, in which the people of Gaza voted for Hamas. The immediate result, before Hamas had even formed a government (but after someone kidnapped 1 Israeli soldier), was intense hostility from Israel, bombing civilian infrastructure (a war crime, if indeed there is a war), arresting elected Hamas officials, denying Hamas members transit between Gaza and the West Bank, and other acts.
So, if you really want to claim there is an actual war, then this war can only be the one started in 2006 by Israel in a surprise attack in retaliation for the democratic vote of the people of Gaza. The war started then with a surprise attack and immediately resorting to war crimes by Israel (Gaza would follow suit with their own attack on Israeli civilians).
> In what sense are we not officially at war with Palestine?
Israel is a part of Palestine. Palestine has never been a state. How can "we" (Israel, I presume) have ever been officially at war with a territory they are occupying? How can you sign an armistice to end a war that was never declared?
This is not grounded in reality. Arab citizens can vote and participate, and there are Arab parties in Israeli government. If you want to see an apartheid, go look at any other country in the middle east. Let's see how Jewish representation looks there...?
> Arab citizens can vote and participate, and there are Arab parties in Israeli government.
This point is scarcely more than a deflection; the fulcrum of Israel's apartheid regime consists primarily in which Arabs are permitted to be citizens, and in particular those whose parents and grandparents were violently driven from Israel's current territory in what Palestinian Arabs call the Nakba [1]. The Israeli government blatantly wants to both claim the right to authorize violence in the occupied territories and blame the nominal governments of those territories for that violence. And however you want to frame the conflict philosophically, the practical reality is that the IDF has vastly more capacity to enact violence than do Hezbollah or Hamas. When was the last time either of them leveled a 10+-story apartment building in Israel [2]?
How many Arab nations allow Jews that migrated to Israel back to their countries? Or are Arabs allowed exclusionary policies and only Israel has to be different to not be labelled as "apartheid" by the woke ones?
Well, largely because the Arab countries are not. They do bad things, yes. They did a one-time expulsion of Jews, which is now no longer on going. They have highly discriminatory immigration policies. They have abusive "guest worker" programs that end up as de-facto slavery for many. These are pretty bad things (though discriminatory immigration policies is pretty uniform, the world over), but these things are not generally what people mean by apartheid.
It's not fully fair to describe Israel as apartheid either. Its actual citizens largely have the same rights on paper no matter ethnicity or religion (though the religious marriage laws are an oddity, and the inability to intermarry does make it comparable to those prohibiting interracial marriage in South Africa).
But it is actually somewhat fair to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa. They have an active, ongoing separation of populations into segregated areas and even nominally independent states, that have no effective autonomy due to the overwhelming power and actual physical control of Israel. The Gaza strip and the West Bank are nearly direct equivalents of South Africa's bantustans. If you accept that Israel does have real sovereignty over all the territory it occupies, the differences in how it treats different people really don't seem just.
That likely would have spared them comparison to Apartheid, yes, but would instead have been an ethnic cleansing.
The unfortunate matter is that the Arab states were not criticized harshly enough. And that is almost certainly due to a combination of antisemitism and realpolitik over their oil resources. And this relative lack of criticism continues to this day.
Nonetheless, it's still not a responsive defense to bad behavior to point out other bad behavior that is less criticized. By all means do what you can criticize these states and surface their bad behavior (and do so individually; they're not a monolith). But a thread talking about Israel isn't the place to do it. First of all, it's ineffective, second of all it's derailing to the thread.
When rules are applied selectively and one nation is singled out for bulk of the vitriol, it's 100% valid to ask why someone else wasn't penalized for doing something much much worse. And you're right, most of Israel bashing is antisemitism.
Many countries in the Middle East are islamic theocracies, so they limit religious freedom by their very constitution. However, even in Iran, a person of Jewish heritage who converts to Islam should not have any (official legal) barriers to entry in political life. In a country ruled by a church, that seems relatively reasonable.
Yes, but that is essentially like complaining that a Hindu believer can't become Pope. Iran is a country that, by its own constitution, is controlled by the Church. I don't agree and would hate to live in such a country, but that is their chosen form of government. I don't know of any Church that accepts people of other religions as members or especially church leadership. But, most Churches accept anyone who converts.
They can't even dispose of their own territory, given that Israel builds settlements inside the West Bank. Gaza is totally closed off to the World: Israel decides what comes in or out.
It can be argued, therefore, that Israel is de facto the state.
More like after Hamas fighters took control of the Gaza Strip and removed Fatah officials [0]. So who destroyed their government and effectively haven't allowed any election since? Hamas.
That's not what happened. There was a fair election in Gaza, which was won by Hamas. The new government was perfectly within its rights to remove Fatah officials. Fatah launched an armed rebellion in Gaza.
Wikipedia is hopelessly unreliable on anything to do with the Middle East. -> Didn't read.
They removed-removed them. As violently murdered many. You don't have to trust Wikipedia it was covered by many news site at the time. Even aljazheera.
Hamas won by a landslide an election in the entire occupied territories. Fatah didn't like the result, and took up arms against their new leadership. The Hamas government succeeded in retaining control in Gaza, but failed in the West Bank. In essence, there was a successful coup in the West Bank. Fatah is not the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
Does Aljazeera disagree with this account? All the contemporary accounts in the Western media at the time agreed on this. Even Wikipedia seems to agree, in its weasely way.
I'm not responding here to get into an hopeless post-truth argument and I'm not going to reply any further.
The reason I'm posting is to ask the readers to go search themselves and be very very skeptic about what they read hear. There are quite a few news stories and videos from that period.
Yep, like that disgusting incident on 2005 where they gave up their land... and their control... they are the worst. Who else is at fault to what happened in Gaza? The apartheid of curse. Disgusting!
You do know this is a Conflict? Never denied both parties are fighting. Here is of course the counter list [1]. But while I'm just against the commenter one-siding of the situation. You are trying to make it a one-side crime again... which again... very wrong. Here is a quote just to show how not one sided it is:
[1] "... A February 2008 suicide bombing that killed one Israeli woman in Dimona was supported by 77% and opposed by 19%"
How many people have been killed by Palestinians in Israel since, say, 2011 (the last ten years?) How many has Israel killed in Palestine in the same time frame?
I will not even go into the difference between lone gunmen and state-sanctioned killings. Let's accept that any Palestinian killing an Isareli should be treated the same as an officer of the Israeli military or police, acting in their official capacity, killing a Palestinian. Even so, which way has the balance turned in the last 10-20 years?
According to the UN (since 1/1/10): [1] x18 in favor of Israelis... 220-vs-4032.
Most of the Palestinians (3000) were killed in Gaza. Which bring me back to my original point. Israel gave Gaza control to the Palestinians in 2005 only to wake up the next year to find Hamas taking control and later starting to shoot rockets at Israeli civilians. All the power and support they gain only mounted to terror.
I will acknowledge Israel is stronger. But I also acknowledge what happens in Gaza is 85% due to the Hamas terroristic organization being terroristic. How the hell does that even imply Israel as an apartheid. Who knows.
Is the fact the Egypt also closes the border with Gaza, Make them also an apartheid state? I guess the problem here is not Israel.
Is Egypt occupying the Gaza strip, and controlling what enters the strip over water or air? Are they allowing one nationality to cross the border and not another (not that there are too many people of Jewish decent left in the Gaza strip)?
And, how is the fact that for every Palestinian terrorist Israel killed 10 civilians Palestine's fault?
Also, Israel didn't "give Gaza control to the Palestinians" in 2005, they only gave them limited self-government power. They still couldn't control their own border, didn't have access to a source of water etc. And none of the people who fled their homes in Israel during the previous wars was allowed to return home, unless they were of Jewish descent.
Unironically Yes!!!! Egypt do! Happy you see how mind boggling it is that there are others who deny access to the Gaza strip. (Again, because of their gov - Hamas)
> x10 Palestine's fault?
Who said that? It was during a war. It is because Israel has stronger weapons. A war that shouldn't ever started. Why did Hamas start it? You are really dodging the question here...
> Also, Israel didn't "give Gaza control to the Palestinians" in 2005,
They gave them military control and government control. So you are wrong, read Wikipedia again. Otherwise how do they get rockets if the are so limited? Looks like they could get anything but choses to get terror related assets... which again. Is their fault.
> Unironically Yes!!!! Egypt do! Happy you see how mind boggling it is that there are others who deny access to the Gaza strip. (Again, because of their gov - Hamas)
No, Egypt has closed its own border with Gaza, but it is not enforcing a naval or airspace blockade, which Israel is.
> Who said that? It was during a war. It is because Israel has stronger weapons. A war that shouldn't ever started. Why did Hamas start it? You are really dodging the question here...
Israel occupied Egyptian/Jordanian territories. Hamas is a resistance movement of the people living in these territories under Israeli military occupation. The war was between Israel and Egypt, and it has long since ended. Hamas didn't start anything - they were being oppressed by Israel occupation forces and they fought back.
Saying Hamas started a war is like saying that, should Ukrainian citizens of Crimea started attacking Russia, they are "starting a war" against Russia. People who live under military occupation have a right to defend themselves from their occupiers. The occupiers need only leave if they want this resistance to stop.
> They gave them military control and government control. So you are wrong, read Wikipedia again. Otherwise how do they get rockets if the are so limited? Looks like they could get anything but choses to get terror related assets... which again. Is their fault.
Palestine is still under embargo. That resistance fighters need weapons as well as other supplies is normal. The fact that the embargo is not perfect doesn't prove that it doesn't exist. And rockets aren't the only goods being smuggled past the embargo - there is also medicine, food, construction materials etc.
But make no mistake - had there not been an armed resistance movement defending the rights of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, the current limited independence would never have been reached.
I have no idea what your map is supposed to show. Yes, Egypt has one land border with Gaza, and is often closing it, helping to maintain the blockade. But on all other routes - sea, air and other land borders, it is Israel that maintains the blockade. Egypt is not stopping any sea vessels from reaching Gaza - it is the Israeli navy that is doing so, since it controls the entire coast of Gaza. Even if a ship were to move through Egyptian waters into the Gaza coast, it would be intercepted by Israeli ships patrolling the coast.
Yes, that's the first sentence. Reading more of the article, here is the "Naval Blockade" section:
> The Israeli Navy enforces a maritime blockade of the Port of Gaza and the coastline.
and the "Control of Gazan airspace" section:
> The Oslo Accords interim peace agreements expressly give Israel security control over Gazan airspace and coastal waters.
Also, Egypt being complicit in depriving Gaza of resources (to a MUCH lesser extent than Israel, to be fair) does in no way prove that Hamas is the problem, or has a "HUGE NEGATIVE" effect on Gaza. I will let the people of Gaza who keep electing Hamas in free elections (despite brutal Israeli reprisals for their wrong vote) decide how bad Hamas is for them.
> Also, Egypt being complicit in depriving Gaza of resources (to a MUCH lesser extent than Israel, to be fair) does in no way prove that Hamas is the problem,
> How many people have been killed by Palestinians in Israel since, say, 2011 (the last ten years?) How many has Israel killed in Palestine in the same time frame?
It will only be proportional if Israel agrees to let Hamas and the PLO be armed with as good weapons as it has. Or in other words if Israel commits suicide. It's unclear to me what you're actually arguing for.
The official position from Israel is that it must control all sorts of things because the huge threat that Hamas and others pose to its national security. Their official position is also that they only target Gaza in proportional retaliation, and even then only against combatants.
What we see instead is that Hammas has less and less ability to harm Israel, but Israel is still systematically killing Palestinian civilians - an almost 20:1 ratio is not a sign of a democratic state defending itself from terrorism, by any reasonable measure.
> What we see instead is that Hammas has less and less ability to harm Israel
Well yes, that's why the proportion is like it is. Once/if it gets the ability to harm Israel, many more Israelis will die. This has nothing much to do with "systematically killing Palestinians" or Hamas being merciful. It's just a possibly temporary balance of power.
Interesting that Hamas fired the first shots in the last conflict, that's not really the behavior of a regime trying to save lives.
The point is this: for whatever reason (mostly, as you say, simple military inferiority), Hamas is no longer harming Israel to a great extent, and hasn't been in the last decade. Why then is Israel still harming Palestinians at the same rate it was back when Hamas was a major threat?
The only reasonable conclusion is that Israel's attacks on Palestinian people are not related to Hamas attacks on Israeli people, they are coming from a desire to harm the people or state of Palestine.
This desire is of course corroborated by other actions - most notably, the illegal colonization of Palestinian territories with Israeli citizens of Jewish descent.
> The point is this: for whatever reason (mostly, as you say, simple military inferiority), Hamas is no longer harming Israel to a great extent, and hasn't been in the last decade. Why then is Israel still harming Palestinians at the same rate it was back when Hamas was a major threat?
Hamas can't get a lot of kills because Israelis run to shelters, they have a very advanced bomb sirens and radars. Without this I'm sure Hamas' kills would have skyrocketed.
So it's not that Hamas isn't trying. BTW a lot of Israeli cities live under unbearable conditions, it has been shown the psychological trauma running for shelters (for years on years) is doing to young kids. I'm not denying Palestinian kids live under an even greater trauma, I'm only saying this is affecting both sides. I wonder what the UK or US would do if the kids in London and NY would need to run to shelters a few times a week because of missile attacks. I'm sure they would seek to proportionally kill just as many terrorists right?
It's not as if Israel can just decide to absorb this and do nothing, what country would do nothing in such a state? You seem to have no words of criticism towards Hamas for some reason - because yes colonialism and white privilege, gotcha.
Do you think that if Hamas and all the other militant/terrorist organizations in Gaza surrendered all of their weapons to Israel tomorrow, conditions would improve for Palestinians? Do you think Israel would accept mass Palestinian (Arab) immigration? Do you think Israel would release its control of Palestine's borders? Do you think Israel would stop evicting Arabs and establishing Jewish colonies in Palestine?
If you think all of these things, then you should look at the history of occupied territories much more closely.
> I wonder what the UK or US would do if the kids in London and NY would need to run to shelters a few times a week because of missile attacks. I'm sure they would seek to proportionally kill just as many terrorists right?
The US and UK are farthest from my mind in terms of potential models of good behavior in such situations. They have been some of the worse offenders in history in terms of unequal retaliation - the US's ongoing twenty-year plus war in the Middle East as punishment for 9/11 being one of the prime examples of unacceptable behavior in recent memory.
> It's not as if Israel can just decide to absorb this and do nothing, what country would do nothing in such a state?
Again, Israel is the original aggressor here. This fact is of utmost importance - Hamas was born in response to Israeli aggression, not the other way around. Israel could have chosen not to occupy the Gaza strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem in 1967. Even once they chose to occupy these territories, they could have chosen to integrate them as parts of Israel, and offer citizenship to their occupants - but of course, this would have meant that Israel was no longer a Jewish state, having a majority Arab population, which was deemed (and is still deemed) unacceptable.
Would the world be a better place had the Palestinians chosen to sacrifice their own interests and accepted to live as sub-humans under Israeli military rule, without retaliating against Israelis (remember, this was the state of Gaza and the other Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1994)? Yes, undoubtedly. Is it fair and reasonable to ask such a thing of an entire people? I certainly don't believe so.
> Do you think that if Hamas and all the other militant/terrorist organizations in Gaza surrendered all of their weapons to Israel tomorrow, conditions would improve for Palestinians?
Yes, absolutely. Conditions have been much much better before Hamas came to power. In fact Israelis and Gazans used to visit each other freely in the 80s and lots of Gazans worked in Israel.
> Do you think Israel would accept mass Palestinian (Arab) immigration?
No, I don't. That's the crux of the matter and also deals with your comment about who the "main aggressor" is. Israel wants to remain a Jewish country, that means settle the descendants of Palestinian refugees in their current countries. Given what Jews have been through it should be clear why Jews feel like they need a country of their own. Given the fact that Palestinians don't really want to live in a binational state with Jews, or in a democracy, and all the bad blood between the two peoples, it should be clear why allowing uncontrolled immigration to Israel is not a solution but a creation of a new problem (probably a new wave of jewish refugees)
> Yes, absolutely. Conditions have been much much better before Hamas came to power. In fact Israelis and Gazans used to visit each other freely in the 80s and lots of Gazans worked in Israel.
Those are some spectacular rose tinted goggles. Gaza was a refugee camp entirely under Israeli control, and Palestinians were almost entirely doing unskilled labor in Israel. Israel decided where and if new housing could be built in Gaza, new farms, anything. They instituted a police state in Gaza, with curfews, collective punishment and other methods. People in Gaza were kept poor to work unwanted jobs for Israel. The current situation of people in Gaza is significantly better than it was then. Hamas and the PLO appeared because of the poor situation in Gaza, and Israel's iron fist, not out of the evilness of Palestinians.
> That's the crux of the matter and also deals with your comment about who the "main aggressor" is. Israel wants to remain a Jewish country, that means settle the descendants of Palestinian refugees in their current countries.
There are two problems with this line of thinking. One is, the land of Palestine is simply not a majority Jewish area. It had been a majority Arab area for hundreds of years before 1949. It is today a 50/50 Arab/Jewish area (approximately). But Israel wants to be a Jewish ethno-state, Arab Palestinians be damned. The two-state (or three-state) solution would already be a massive compromise for the Arab population, given the relative land-mass and resources vs population of the potential Palestine (or Gaza and West Bank) compared to Israel. But, Israel is not even content with that.
Your assertion that Palestinians don't want to live in a democracy is bizarre, given that they already live in one. Whether they want to live in a 50/50 Jewish/Arab Israel is irrelevant, as that is not an option Israel will ever contemplate, at least in the current framework.
The only option that remains, and what seems most likely to happen, is that Israel will continue to demoralize, kill, and harass the people of Gaza and the West Bank until such a time as the remaining Arab population will be small enough compared to the Jewish population of Israel, and then it will annex these territories into a single Israeli state with a minority (<20% ?) Arab population enjoying full rights. I don't honestly see any other end to this conflict that Israel would accept.
> Given what Jews have been through it should be clear why Jews feel like they need a country of their own.
This is partly understandable, partly disingenuous. While there are obvious reasons after the horrors of the Holocaust that the Jewish survivors would want to have a country of their own, there is no non-religious reason this country should have been in Palestine. A chunk of the defeated Germany, for example, would have been a much more natural and easier to create space. The region of Palestine was already inhabited in the 1940s, and the people living there had no fault or implication in the horrors of the Holocaust. But, it was impossible to create a Jewish majority state there without displacing hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
Nevertheless, history is what it is. Dissolving the state of Israel today would be at least as unjust as creating it was in the first place, and would lead to even more misery - I would not advocate for that in the slightest. Dismantling the idea of a Jewish ethno-state would be much more just, but that is a complete fantasy at this point, akin to saying that North Korea should just become a democracy. Still, Israel can't claim it's not an apartheid state while stoking a conflict on the sole reason of not wanting a significant amount of Arabs to live on its territory with full rights.
> The only option that remains, and what seems most likely to happen, is that Israel will continue to demoralize, kill, and harass the people of Gaza and the West Bank until such a time as the remaining Arab population will be small enough compared to the Jewish population of Israel, and then it will annex these territories into a single Israeli state with a minority (<20% ?) Arab population enjoying full rights. I don't honestly see any other end to this conflict that Israel would accept.
Many options remain: peace, Palestinian refugees settled where they're living in now, an Iranian nuclear attack on TLV and flight of all the Jews from there, who knows. The area is unpredictable, I'm not gonna try to predict anything.
> peace, Palestinian refugees settled where they're living in now
These two are dependent on one another, and every evidence so far suggests that the Gaza strip and West Bank simply aren't big enough and don't have enough resources (water and arable land especially) to sustain their population. This could work with massive resource commitments from Israel, Jordan and Egypt, but that doesn't seem to me like a realistic stable possibility for the long term.
> While there are obvious reasons after the horrors of the Holocaust that the Jewish survivors would want to have a country of their own,
Actually Zionism started about 50 years before the holocaust because of massacres of Jews in East Europe in the Dreyfus trial which was the last straw. Turns out Zionism was right, couldn't be more right.
> A chunk of the defeated Germany, for example, would have been a much more natural and easier to create space
No one offered, and as I say above Jews needed a place well before the holocaust. Also you're talking as if there's some just policeman who runs the world and thinks of "just" and practical solutions for everyone. There isn't any. Jews found out the hard way what could happen to them, no one offered them jack s**. Almost all countries restricted Jewish immigration before and during the holocaust.
The Palestinian predicament can be solved with fair compensation to the refugees and resettlement, a Palestinian state beside Israel in the 67 border and an end to hostilities. But they have to give up the will to destroy Israel and they can't do that it seems to me.
> Also you're talking as if there's some just policeman who runs the world and thinks of "just" and practical solutions for everyone. There isn't any. Jews found out the hard way what could happen to them, no one offered them jack s*.
The partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state was designed by the UN and the British Empire, which retreated from the territory and let the dice fall where they may. Just another in the long series of insane borders the British Empire traced all over the Middle East, the cause of so much bloodshed over the years.
Of course, this wouldn't have happened if the Zionist movement hadn't lobbied for it, so I do agree with you that it was ultimately every man for himself. But had they petitioned for a piece of Germany, and had the European and American and Russian powers who re-drew the world been more wise, this entire situation could have been avoided. Alas, history can't be re-written, and who knows what other problems would have occurred.
He gave up his own life trying to fight an unwinnable war against genocidal colonising europeans who had taken over his motherland, forced his people into barely habitable camps, and crushed their souls in a decades-long campaign of violence.
There's nothing beautiful about it. It's all ugly.
Now back to reality. They waited to suicide bomb themselves near the maximum available innocent bystanders, to kill as much people. while their leaders hide in their mansions.
They are the scum of the earth. And thankfully, Israel stopped them.
[1] "...The group [Lehi] referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out terrorist attacks."
[2] "... The Irgun has been viewed as a terrorist organization ... , In particular, the Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by ... the 1946 Zionist Congress and the Jewish Agency"
Seems like everyone agreed they are terrorists... But, even then:
[2] " However, Bruce Hoffman and Max Abrahms [claims] ... the Irgun went to considerable lengths to avoid harming civilians, such as issuing pre-attack warnings;"
So turns out it very easy to separate terrorist from freedom fighter. Just see if civilians are one of their targets. Multiple suicide bombing in public buses in the past and Rockets on civilians [3] in the present tells us all the story we need about the org that sent them. (See the "Motives" section in [3])
>(32) 5 Israelis working for an Israeli Company "Urban Moving" were arrested on 9/11 after being seen "documenting" (their own words during an Israeli interview) and celebrating the attack on the WTC. Owner of the company, Dominik Suter, fled to Israel after the incident. His name appeared on the May 2002 FBI Suspect List, along with the 9/11 hijackers and other suspected extremists. Israel has yet to extradiate him (2001):
The FBI released them [1].. as they were found out to be spies but not with any pre-knowledge about 9/11 so why even include that in the list? Unless you want to do a little dog-whistling. This is Anti-Semitism 101 (Jews controls the world).
Haha, what a huge oversight on my part, of course citizens and non-citizens have different rights.
One of the legal principles of Israel is:
> The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people. [0]
There's also a legal path from citizenship to legal-residency, which I would surmise is used almost exclusively on non-Jewish citizens, as well as the blanket permission for all Jewish people (and no one else) to become citizens of Israel.
Equal rights apart from not being able to "lease" ~15% of the total land area in the country which is owned by a religious organization that does not lease land to non-Jewish people.
Private religious organisation != the state of Israel.
While we are on the subject, did you know that it's illegal for an Arab in the self-governed parts of West Bank to sell land to a Jew? And that the official penalty for doing so is death?
Also, take a look at the awful governments in West Bank and Gaza and how they abuse their citizens. You don't see hordes of opressed Israeli Arabs fleeing to the Gaza Strip do you?
Well because it's a Jewish country. And one of the only countries in the world threatened with annihilation by some of its neighbors. When 77 years ago Jews were indeed being exterminated all over the world.
This very unique situation warrants someone to at least be careful with the tone and choice of words he uses when criticizing Israel.
Can residents of Gaza and the occupied West Bank vote in Israeli elections, when they are under Israeli rule? If the answer is no, then that's apartheid.
You're statement is incorrect. In the last elections that were held in March 2021 the results were as follows:
Likud - Center right - 24%
Yesh Atid - Center Left 14%
Shas - Religious - 7%
Kahol Lavan - Center left - 6%
Yamina - Center right - 6% (They've made a coalition with the Arab parties and formed a government eventually, and the leader became the prime minister)
Avoda - Social left -6%
Yahadot Tora - Religious - 6%
Israel Beytenu - right - 5%
Zionot Datit - Far right - 5%
Meshutefet - Joined Arab party - Far left - 4%
Tikva Hadash - Center Left - 4%
Merez - Far left -4%
Mehuedet- Joined Arab party - Far Left - 3%
I don't know if I'd consider Yesh Atid or Kahol Lavan to be center left. Nor would I necessarily describe Yamina as cetner right, though that's a bit more fair.
Its a bit easier for Israel - if you are an outsider (99.9% of mankind) and dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic or b) supporting islamic terrorism, or some mix of those. Nobody wants to touch that with 10 foot pole in woke era.
It's a bad situation: we don't currently have a good litmus test for good-faith criticisms of Israel (of which there are an overwhelming number) versus treatments of Israel as coextensive with and the mouthpiece of the Jewish diaspora (which it certainly isn't). The former is righteous criticism; the latter is gussied up antisemitism.
Edit: and, to be absolutely clear, it is in Israel's continued interest for us to not have a good litmus test for the two. I believe that most international messaging and the intentional obfuscation of Israeli foreign policy behind Jewish identity demonstrates that keeping the two murky is a continued policy goal of Israel's leadership.
IMHO, it's hard to come up with a litmus test because both sides of the debate kinda like the standard motte-and-bailey structure of "criticisms of Israel". In fact, not only are the arguments often motte-and-baileys, there's often a super-bailey, a bailey for the bailey that basically invokes some kind of "I win either way" gotcha. For example:
Motte: Israel's use of Palestinian "guest workers" who have no opportunity to participate in either a robust Palestinian economy or a neighboring Arab economy, even when those workers receive the Israeli minimum wage or higher, does fit into an analogy to the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid as captive cheap labor. If Israel wants to avoid being subjected to this analogy, it should simply stop exploiting Palestinian labor this way.
Bailey: Israel is an apartheid state, and not exploiting Palestinian labor would just be covering it up. The only way for Israel to stop being an apartheid state is to stop being Jewish-Israeli: dissolve itself into a single state of Palestine ruled by its natural Arab majority.
Super-bailey: Israel is so apartheid, white-supremacist, and settler-colonial that not exploiting Palestinian labor, were it possible or even implemented at some point in existing history, would only make it more racist (see: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-ber...). Israel owes these jobs to the Palestinians, as a precursor to the genocide reparations it will pay when it dissolves itself into a single state of Palestine ruled by its natural Arab majority.
So yeah. The people who could just lay down the motte as a serious moral charge don't want to. They want the bailey, or preferably the super-bailey. Likewise, the people who could just admit to the motte and fix the problem are assured that, were they to actually do so, the goalposts would only be moved to the bailey. Then the bailey will be moved to the super-bailey.
Who could have guessed that one of the world's oldest ethnoreligious territorial debates could be so pernicious ;)?
I agree with your analysis: it's very easy to play the trump card at the onset and rest safely knowing that your position is insurmountable. Argumentatively, it's the equivalent of two opposing armies refusing to leave their respective high grounds to get down to the dirty business of war (or peace, in this case).
I am not an Israeli and I have never been to Israel, so I'll spare the world from another opinion on how to solve the problem. It is only my perspective, as a diaspora Jew, that many of Israel's actions qua sovereign state are not defensible on the basic plane of human rights.
I think there's a bit of distance between that motte and the initial ("standard") bailey. It isn't just the status of 'guest worker's but also the ongoing asymmetric violence, theft & active bulldozing of homes, harassment/hacking of activists' phones, military checkpoints & other core indicators of an occupied land, etc.
I heard someone point out that Israel can't help but kill children in Palestine because the median age there is 20. Like what do you even say to something like that? The conversation is just totally hosed at this point.
I think you're right though in a lot of ways - critics of Israel tend to fall into a trap of over-exaggeration which does their arguments no favors in some highly educated circles. Subtlety doesn't spread fervor though, and I don't think it's ever toppled regimes.
>I think there's a bit of distance between that motte and the initial ("standard") bailey.
Isn't that the point of a motte and bailey? The motte is what you think you can defend to an outgroup member without prior convictions, or even an actively skeptical outgroup member. The bailey is what you and your ingroup believe and act upon when nobody's asking you to justify yourselves. They're very different.
Note how nobody at the OP made his comment has mentioned a) or b) except those 'critical' of Israel, and how 'nobody wants to touch that' accurately describes how every thread about NSO has the same Israel-Arab conflict comments.
Furthermore, if we look at these past related threads, we can almost always find some person with the same opinions crying victim before anything has been said.
This absurd victimhood - one that places some imaginary nonexistent hurt to some outsider before either side's actual hurt - describes very effectively the mentality and connection to reality of those 'critical' voices.
> Its a bit easier for Israel - if you are an outsider (99.9% of mankind) and dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic or b) supporting islamic terrorism, or some mix of those. Nobody wants to touch that with 10 foot pole in woke era.
I don't know about that connection with 'wokeness'. Progressives are frequently tagged as anti-semitic for criticizing Israel.
Oh yeah its so hard to criticize Israel, never read something bad about Israel. It's all praise and compliments in the media.
Did you know most religious Jews around the world are afraid to walk with religious clothes because they're afraid to get beat up? They don't wanna be called child killers or dirty jews or something of that sort.
This is happening now even in very woke cities like NY or London.
How does your (dubious) claim that most jews live in such fear have anything to do with how criticism of Israel is treated? You're not really contradicting GP's claim, and to back it up, I've encountered what seem to be bad faith arguments in defense of Israel (including flavors A and B) in probably every public-facing online discussion of it. I think the only way to be sure you're having an honest conversation about Israel is to have it in person where you can better tell biased rhetoric (either for or against) from honest analysis. Though, honest analysis is also undermined ahead of time by bias and dishonesty further "upstream".
> How does your (dubious) claim that most jews live in such fear
There are many research groups that confirmed the feeling of fear by Jews in Europe and more recently in the U.S as well, there is nothing dubious about what I said. It's become very common for Jews to not leave the house with any Jewish identity (skullcaps for instance) in Germany, France, Netherlands and now in the U.S as well. This is also confirmed by a substantial increase in antisemitic incidents throughout the Western world. In fact only a few days ago there was one in Texas that luckily didn't end in deaths.
Honestly it feels ridiculous to keep adding links here, this is so well researched and written about I think it's beyond debate. Now does what I say here apply to all Jews equally? Obviously if you are non religious and wear no identifying clothes, and never mention your judaism, you will be exposed to less anti semitism (if any). But that's not saying there is no problem is it?
> dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic
I don't think this is a good representation of anti-anti-Israel debate.
The opposite of antisemitism is equality, where there is no "special" treatment of either Jews or Israel. Anyone can criticize Israel for its policies, provided they also criticize other states that have similar policies and not "single out" Israel as such. If only Israel is criticized for certain policies and other states aren't, this brings up the question of inequality. This may be perceived a sort of thinly-veiled antisemitism.
Whataboutism has its limits. When the far left, specifically Tankies, and left communities online, are literally being China apologists while calling Israel a genocide-apartheid-colonial country... you kind of know the logic fallacies are the other way around.
Can you point any fingers? I have not heard any of the positions you mention from any leftist place I frequent - not from Jacobin, not from leftist YouTube, not from any member of "the squad" or any other leftist member of Congress. Who exactly are you accusing of being anti-Israel but pro-China?
Please go to [1] + [2] searches, while not a big channel on YouTube, ~200K subscribers in politics is kind of big for alternative-media with the top videos getting ~500K views.
And now, please note that every video on China is something like "China is actually doing more for Climate-Change", or "Is China to Blame For Covid-19?" all suggesting China has so many good parts that we missed...
While Israel search result are all about the conflict, ".. The [Media] BIAS", ".. The Death Toll".
While Israel is dominant enough to deserve such critics. The Bias of the channel against Israel and Pro China is a spectacle to be hold.
There is some bias in their choice of covering Israel's crimes much more often than China's, but I don't see the China apologism. They have a more nuanced view on China's global warming actions than you often see, but that view is quite realistic. I have also found one article [0] covering China's appalling treatment of Uighurs - that is little coverage, but it at least proves that they are not entirely covering China's crimes. They also mention Mao's atrocities in another article [1], though more in passing.
When you say "China apologism" I expect to see people praising China's "wonderful socialist state", talk about how free and happy the Chinese are, defend China's treatment of Uighurs (or deny it's happening) etc. Explaining that China, while being the top country by GHG total emissions, is not even in top 10 by per capita emissions is not China apologism - it is simply stating an uncomfortable fact.
Sure. Look no further. The co-founder [0], Aaron Bastani, has a lot to say about Israel (nothing less than onslaught
ofcourse [1]) But according to some of his twitter, we get all that you wanted:
* praising China's "wonderful socialist state" [2] (more like its totalaric structure)
* how ... happy the Chinese are [3]
* defend China's treatment of Uighurs [4] (downplay it a lot)
And after I looked, that one article you gave ([0] in your comment) is the only time they say anything about it, no mentions on their youtube or twitter. Furthermore, in the opening statement of the article, they described what the Uighur experienced as ".. have long faced discrimination". Wow... such strong words for what happend [5]. Brave and not apologetic.
Again, these are not the "smoking gun" examples you make them out to be. Item [3] in particular is a widely accepted opinion - you will find it expressed enthusiastically by such "tankies" as Bill Gates [0] and The Economist [1].
For item [4], his opinion seems rather complex. Here he is praising a thread that condemns China's treatment of Uyghurs in no uncertain terms [2]. Here he is again mentioning the U(i/y)ghur problem and China's authoritarian surveillance state [3].
(Note that if you want to see real honest-to-god tankies, there are plenty in the replies to his tweets. It seems an outlet called Gray Media, that they cite, is also a good example of actual tankies, directly claiming the Uyghur crisis is a "Western fabrication").
It's also important to remember that there is a major difference between Israel and China speaking from a UK/US/EU journalist: our countries are generally pouring billions of dollars of direct support, and heaps of diplomatic support, for Israel. They are doing no such thing for China. So, we have a much better reason to criticize Israel compared to China: we are partly responsible for Israel's crimes; while we bear little to no responsibility for China's (with some exceptions, such as slave labour for the production of export goods, or the status of Hong Kong). We can huff and puff all we want at China, it won't budge. Israel will.
What you're doing here is similar to people complaining that Chomsky criticized the USA without criticizing the USSR as much or more. His point was simple: he lived in the USA and had some measure of say on its direction. He had no such measure of say on the USSR's behavior, so he was naturally more silent on it.
[2] https://twitter.com/aaronbastani/status/1285358145003556864 - "Great thread Ammar.", in response to a thread that says things like "This repression is widely documented: it’s difficult to cover-up concentration camps. It’s also hard to argue against the statements of escapees who describe being ‘brainwashed’, as well as being tortured for speaking the Uyghur language and reciting the Qur’an."
Yeah.. you are being dishonest right now. He clearly said in my [3] image it doesn't qualify as genocide since the economist said so. And the thread he endorse is so bizarre. Because the USA hurt Muslim before they need to keep silent now when other do it? Who would say that other than people who doesn't care.. if it isn't the best giveaway of all. So I gave you a clear proof that a person, a cofounder of a big left alternative media, is clearly a inconsistent tankie who endorse China fully while criticize Israel.
I don't care some fact are true. There are a lot of nice facts about Israel too. And I don't care if there are honest tankies. In the original comment you said you don't know anybody like that. Now you know. and still ignore him.
> He clearly said in my [3] image it doesn't qualify as genocide since the economist said so.
So parroting the line of the Economist and US state department makes you a tankie?
> Because the USA hurt Muslim before they need to keep silent now when other do it?
The thread doesn't say they should keep silent, it says they should not apply sanctions (and obviously should not use military force) against China.
> So I gave you a clear proof that a person, a cofounder of a big left alternative media, is clearly a inconsistent tankie who endorse China fully while criticize Israel.
I still don't see him as endorsing China.
Anyway, I concede that the people he attracted in his comments are indeed examples of tankies, and I also found this Gray Media site that fulfills the description you gave.
Still, I will not concede that this is in any way a mainstream opinion in leftist circles. It is a fringe position, and the vast majority of Leftists in Europe and the Americas are generally against all oppressive regimes, including China and Israel occupation of Palestine. Most are much more vocal against human rights abuses than industrialists and billionaires, who could care less as long as their pockets are secure.
The only exception is global warming, where the left realistically sees that China is doing about as well as most industrial countries, and much, much better than the USA. To be fair, I think Israel is also decent on this front, but that is much easier for such a tiny country.
That's just 'What about China', with a sprinkling of assuming that the entire left is one homogeneous group. (They're not, and most of the left makes fun of tankies too.)
No, Because you can simply answer "China bad too, so back to you..". If you can't say it, welp, we got you, It's not the Israel government\policies you hate...
It’s pretty absurd to declare that “tankies” (presumably meaning “Western European communist party members who explicitly supported the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe”) is co-extensive with “the far left”, when most of the left considered Soviet foreign policy abhorrent.
Beyond that, here in the USA, I don’t know anyone who I would consider both a “China apologist” and a “leftist” (“far” or otherwise) – China has not been anything remotely resembling socialist for at least a generation, and the China apologists I know all vote GOP (or would if they could vote).
Unless by “apologist” you just mean “has a low expectation that China’s political system is going to collapse or radically democratize in the near future, and thinks that some level of economic and diplomatic engagement is necessary despite China’s human rights record”.
In modern parlance 'Tankie' is generally used to refer to people on the left who support authoritarian governments. (see second paragraph in definition section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie#Definition)
So yeah basically the intersection of "left wing" and "thinks the Chinese government is great" (which as you point out is not a particularly large group of people, at least in the USA).
"Why do that woman receive half of what that straight white dude gets?"
- "Why are you asking? Why aren't you asking about the black dude get only a quarter?"
THAT is whataboutism. Implying you shouldn't make remarks (about a woman's wage, about Israel, ...) without also taking other cases (transgenders, blacks, China) into account is whataboutism: using a claim to fair and equal treatment as a way to avoid having to answer an isolated question.
In this case, I think it is reasonable to demand that a white guy, a black guy, and a female all receive same wages. But the situation where a black guy is hired by a rich and powerful boss, so nobody dares questioning his wages for the fear of his boss, and so everyone should pretend to only discuss an isolated question (woman's wages), is untenable.
Selective application of a principle (or a law) to some, may be considered as a form of oppression, like in the US, when white guys caught with a small amount of marijuana get sent home, but black guys with the same amount get sent to prison; or in Russia, where the laws are extremely strict, but are rarely applied to rich or powerful or well-connected.
Maybe in the people, but AIPAC is the most feared lobby group across both sides of the isle for politicians. Russiagate is a joke compared to how much influence they have on our foreign policy, and its a travesty that their activities and heavy-handed influence is spoken of so quietly if at all.
Signed, Iraq war vet (it was more for Israels interests than ours!)
That article only says Sharon (who was only a part of the government) opposed occupation, and even then was quiet about it. Also the article is completely unsourced.
Sharon was the Prime Minister in 2003 which is some 'part of the government'. Author is well-connected judging by his resume. Also see this where the reporter says he talked with "three sources with direct knowledge":
Please do not conflate opposition to the Israeli state with anti-Jewishness. There are millions of diaspora Jews living in the US who do not accept that conflation and are not fans of Israel.
This is factually incorrect. Every poll of the US Jewish community has shown that between 80% to 90% are supporters of Israel. At most a few thousand US Jews are not fans of Israel, and they are very vocal about it.
Polls of the “US Jewish community” tend to really be polls of people who read Israeli newspapers that do US polling. There’s a manifest bias in that.
Here’s the source I usually use[1]: 45% of American Jews consider Israel essential to them. Another disjoint minority consider it “important but not essential.” Neither of these imply support for the Israeli state, and neither separates the importance of Israel qua state or political institution from Israel qua the family our loved ones of the people being polled.
Most of the polls in the US tend to be done by American Jewish organizations such as the AJC. The AJC polls actually specifically ask about support for Israel.
Regardless all of the major Jewish denominations in the US (reform movement, conservative movement, modern orthodox and even most of the heredi movements these days) officially support Zionism. Now you have individuals in each group who may describe themselves as anti-Zionist, but it is a very small minority (although growing in the reform movement).
Among non affiliated Jews the percentage of anti Israel/anti Zionist Jews may be a bit higher but it is still pretty low. It’s no where near millions (you only have 6.5 Million Jews in the US).
Now none of the above means that there is not a large segment of pro Israel, American Zionist Jews who are against a lot of the current and previous governments policies when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza (or in general).
Heck I am a Canadian born Israeli, who is personally against a lot of the policies of the Israeli government. I quite often cringe at some of the comments and actions of some of our politicians. On the bright side it helps me chose who not to vote for
No, that's not what I meant at all. Being opposed to Israel and the impact they have on their neighbours !== being antisemitic.
It's my understanding that pro-Israeli sentiment on the right is somewhat rooted in antisemitism in the first place. They love the idea of Jews having their own country away from everyone else.
Besides, the whole Q conspiracy wing currently taking over the American right is blatantly antisemitic.
> being pro Israel at least in the USA is a right wing thing, at least from my perspective as an outsider.
There are a few things going on: Jewish Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, there is a powerful (and loud) conservative pro-Israel lobby, and hardline conservative Christians overwhelmingly support Israel - likely Israel's most powerful American constituency.
Maybe if they let us call it left-wing to have literally any politics other than unilateral surrender to the people still at war with us (even as we achieve normalization with more and more countries!), we'd vote more left-wing.
I think you are grossly overestimating the interconnectedness of it all. Yes the defense sector is large. NSO employs what, 300 people? The Israeli tech sector as a whole employs about a million, including tens of thousands working for Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Google, Apple, Amazon, IBM, Oracle, Facebook, Dropbox among others.
The cloak and dagger people are a drop in the bucket.
The mandatory military service is likely a big part of it. Young people get trained in the intelligence units for ~1-2 years, some stay, some join the industry with high-level experience.
This is breaking news, and not yet confirmed. And yet everyone even slightly tech-related in Israel is currently talking about this. It even sparked intense arguments in some security related forums that I shall not name. To say "nobody really seems to care at all" is just ignorant.
Nah, you need to modify the diagram to take Religions out. The religious establishment considers the military, corporate sector, and non-parliamentary government agencies to be captive to "the seculars", which they basically consider to be evil and devoted to destroying religion. We seculars, in contrast, think we mostly just don't want to give the religious big heaps of free money.
In most of Europe this sentence is considered basic education (European history is part of basic education). It is in the same category as the French revolution, Napoleonic wars, etc.
Israel is its own nation and it isn't America's business what it does to its own citizens. However, their tools are used on American without warrants. It would be in our interests as citizens to flag all employees of NSO as spies and try them.
> The spread of anti-BDS laws in U.S. states is largely due to the lobbying of the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF), an umbrella group of Israel lobbies headquartered in Jerusalem that has received funding from the Israeli government
BDS != The only way to criticize Israel. Lobbing against BDS has a pretty simple cause...
From the same page:
> ... A dozen local and national parliaments have passed symbolic resolutions condemning BDS. Most of these condemnations have alleged that BDS is anti-Semitic.
Boycotting doesn't seem to me to be a form of speech. It's just people choosing where to spend their money. Divestment is similar - people choose what to invest in and what not to invest in.
Campaigning for BDS does seem to be speech, and regrettably institutions seem to have gathered around the view that it's antisemitic speech.
anti-BDS regulations, implemented through either legislation or a governor’s order, require businesses contracting with the state to affirm that they are not participating in a boycott of Israel. I don't know of any laws that have attempted to silence individual citizens or direct their ability to protest as individuals (not businesses who also want government contracts).
Anti-BDS "laws" are the most idiotic culture-war bullshit the American political system has come up with in the past five years. Secondary boycotts imposed by contract terms were illegal decades ago, and so all these new "laws" are entirely symbolic. It's the worst kind of political red meat, too, because both sides take the bait as if something was actually happening.
I agree. I think the argument that there is some infringement on constitutionally protected speech is unfounded. The issues to argue over (and context) is complicated enough as it is.
"Boycott Israel because of their treatment of Palestinians." A perfectly acceptable political statement.
"Boycott Israel because they are a bunch of greedy Jews." An obviously anti-Semitic statement.
The problem is that people who believe the latter will often say the former. This causes opponents of the latter to doubt the authenticity of people who say the former. Some people who oppose the former might also accuse people of the latter to discredit them. It becomes can quickly become confusing, but it should be clear that a boycott can clearly have both appropriate and inappropriate motivations.
>Boycott Israel because they are a bunch of greedy Jews.
There's no evidence of any BDS leaders saying this.
On the other hand, there's a bundle of evidence of vehement racism in the highest levels of the Israeli government (calls for "racial purity", collective punishment against arabs, "all arabs grow up to be terrorists", etc).
The fact that apartheid south africa was closely allied with israel, shared a nuclear project and was taken down by a BDS movement is, of course, not a coincidence.
The veneer of anti-racism has seemingly been co-opted to support a white european colonialist project behind an apartheid state
that purports to represent a race (again, like apartheid South Africa).
>it should be clear that a boycott can clearly have both appropriate and inappropriate motivations.
It should be clear that evidence-wise, being anti boycott most likely indicates at the very least stark naiveté and perhaps darker, more racist motives.
Equally, dismissing various criticisms (including boycotts) about the illegal military occupation of Palestine as "anti-semitic" is exactly what groups as JIDF (defunct), ACT.IL and many others are experts at doing.
Yes, I specifically pointed that out when I said "Some people who oppose the former might also accuse people of the latter to discredit them." However that neither exonerates the people who are doing it for truly anti-Semitic reasons or proves that those people don't exist.
Yet they all tend to be grouped into that category when a phrase like "anti-semitic" is used. If jews criticize Israel, they're labelled as self-hating. Whitewashing in the name of holocaust victims is doing a disservice, to say the least, IMHO. Religious zealots on one side are treated with white gloves, while any dissent or uproar (unrelated to Religion, even) on the other side is seen as justification to take any action in the name of security.
When the descendants of victims from places like the Warsaw Ghetto justify and defend their operations of the modern-day ghetto in Gaza...
When you compare Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, you're doing violence to history. The Warsaw Ghetto did not have elections to vote in a terrorist group. It was not offered its own nation-state. It didn't receive billions in foreign aid to build bombs. It did not have a charter, nor was the annihilation of German civilians in its charter. Moreover, it existed as a way to round people up in order to exterminate them. That is not the "purpose" of Gaza. Gaza should by now be a successful part of a successful Palestinian state, and the reason it is not has a lot to do with Hamas.
In any case, where you have actual genocide - e.g. the systematic murder of a Muslim minority in China - no one is calling for boycotts or comparing it to the Holocaust, or even labeling it a genocide. Tesla opens a dealership in Xinjiang and the same exact people who want to boycott Israel go out and buy Teslas. Teslas they can charge up at the casinos on Indian reservations between LA and Phoenix. Chatting on their iPhones made by slave labor in China.
But then, where you have nothing remotely similar to systematic murder, as in the Palestinian territories, people call it "genocide" and call for a boycott. Ain't that funny?
You just mentioned a number of the double standards that exist netween the US and countries with immoral policies. There were uprisings in the ghettos. Granted, they didn't have enough time to form a democratically elected government. I am pointing out the irony of using anything similar as the Germans against a people who live in the most densely-populated, walled off land on earth...to say the least. Prolonging that with impunity and pride will certainly not make things better for anyone. You are casting aspersions against what I said, with no reason.
Yes. There was an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. You know what happened? The Germans leveled the ghetto and killed everyone. Because they wanted them dead. There was an uprising in Xinjiang. Know what happened? China put millions of people into forced labor camps. Because they want them dead.
There was an uprising in Gaza. Guess what happened. Israel withdrew its own settlers unilaterally at gunpoint and handed over the territory, leaving greenhouses which were then leveled by Hamas.
Israel is also an extremely small, densely populated place surrounded by people who want to kill it.
To respond more directly, I didn't mention any double standards between the US and countries with immoral policies. I'm not even sure what that means; it's a nonsensical statement, as double standards don't exist "between" countries, they only exist in terms of criticism. Specifically, they only exist where criticism is biased.
To your second point, you say the Warsaw Ghetto wasn't able to hold elections to form a democratic government because they "didn't have enough time"? It had absolutely nothing to do with not having enough time. The Ghetto was a transit point for people to be gassed, nothing more. Imagine if they were encouraged to form a democratically elected government and hold elections, like Gaza, and if those elections were backed and monitored by international human rights organizations, like Gaza's elections were. And imagine if what they voted in was a theocratic dictatorship who proudly proclaimed that their winning would signal the final democratic election, ever.
Finally, you might have misunderstood what I said. The Germans in my scenario are the Israelis - that is what the BDS people think. They think the Israelis are Germans, and the Palestinians are Jews. The only irony in the situation is that the people who think this are Germans and/or other Europeans who did not give a flying fuck about the Holocaust when it was happening, and now suddenly are gripped by conscience when one is not happening - insofar as they can still be antisemitic in polite company.
Again, not disputing the history. Nevertheless, drawing a comparison to showcase the irony. Especially as the situation in Gaza and West Bank has been ongoing across multiple generations. Forgive the simplistic, cheeky remarks about not having enough time for elections. That's meant, once again, to draw attention to the length of time that Palestinians have endured this onslaught.
Go back to the beginning of Israel, check the terrorist activities of jewish groups. Ongoing settlements, landgrab, indiscriminate retaliatory measures--military or otherwise systemic in nature. Yet time and time again, no measure of accountability for a regional superpower.
Hamas was declared a terrorist organization by the EU in 2001, five years before they won elections in Gaza.
Palestine declared statehood in 1988 when Jordan renounced the West Bank. In 1993, the Oslo Accords would have granted statehood to Gaza and the West Bank. This was rejected by the PA leadership under Arafat because it would have foreclosed the possibility of a return to land within Israel proper, and they didn't have the political strength to make that palatable when most of their power rested on raising the street in anger. The fact remains that a free Palestinian state was offered to the PA, which would have included all of Gaza and most of the West Bank.
Should all opinions based on bad reasons be banned? Should people be compelled to explain their beliefs? Who decides if these opinions are good or illegal?
I don't believe fairly arbitrating expression based on beliefs is feasible, and I do believe it is actively harmful
Everyone is free to their own opinions. Actions can and should be banned depending on their motivations. We already apply this to other forms of restriction on speech like defamation. Often defamation will require negligence to harm or intent to harm. Someone who is factually incorrect through an honest mistake generally isn't considered to have committed defamation. I don't know why we are okay trying to ascertain the motive behind speech in one instance and not another.
We do this with plenty of crimes. Murdering your spouse to collect their life insurance policy is punished harsher than murdering your spouse after you come home to find them having an affair. Motivations and intent matter.
That was one example of the law no acting based purely on result. If you want specifically an example of motivation what about killing in self defense? That is a motivation and not an intent. It can also be what decides guilt or innocence.
Defamation has a singular victim. Hate speech has a class of victim. Why should we allow one and not the other? Why can't we just scale up our defamation laws to also apply to groups of people?
I don't think you can justly punish people for an unquanitifiable "group harm" with regards to speech
You could easily use such a justification to ban anti-war speech (something that has been done before), or ban speech against whatever you favorite political view is
I'm not sure why we need to quantify the harm, but even if we did, how does that harm change? Why is it illegal to lie about an individual but it is legal to make that exact same lie about the group in which that individual belongs? Wouldn't you be equally harmed if I said "ForgotMyPwOops drinks the blood of babies" compared to if I said "Everyone of ForgotMyPwOops's ethnic group drinks the blood of babies"?
Also we could just limit this to protected groups as they are currently defined for discrimination. That solves your problem with anti-war speech or generic political views.
Should all speech be up for vote? Should all opinions that the majority disagree with be banned?
I believe weakening protections such as free speech, which are used by the vulnerable to call attention to their plights, is much more likely to hurt Jewish people than allowing ostensibly antisemitic expression to exist
At one point, in my home land (Aotearoa) it was considered perfectly reasonable by the majority to bring teams of white South Africans into the country to play games. They were whit South Africans because they would not allow black South Africans in their teams.
The minority here fought long and hard to stop it, lost the battle (the team came and played their games against our local teams) but now are recognised as heros.
No. It is not the majority who decides what is right and wrong.
Nope, if majority believe A, doesn't make A true. It just means majority believe A.
Public opinion is very malleable.
Hence the existence of marketing.
I do, but, If it also happened in Germany and France which frequently criticize Israel, seems like it anti-BDS has nothing to do with silencing criticizing Israel... because they haven't stopped since.
Israel is pretty tolerant of meek criticism and regular old antisemitism (e.g. like that employed by their allies Orban and evangelicals/southern baptists).
BDS constitutes much more of an existential threat to the state - they're keenly aware of its pivotal role in taking down apartheid South Africa.
That is, it's the explicit anti-racist grass roots and history of the movement that they object to so vehemently.
This is why they routunely throw out unfounded accusations of antisemitism & throw all the quite considerable lobbying firepower they have in key countries to try and stamp it out.
Support for killing BDS in other countries is as a result, indirectly, an accurate bellwether of which politicians will support/tolerate racism and which politicians can be bought (e.g. Trump - big ally, easily bought, largely pro-racism). There are some in most countries.
Another way to look at it is that it isn’t about stopping criticism if the criticism has no effect. Serious boycotts can be very effective, but “criticism” from politicians can be meaningless.
Israel is the 3rd largest recipient of US foreign aid receiving 3.2 Billion in US tax dollars in 2017 with only Iraq and Afghanistan receiving more. Reducing foreign aid while America is floundering would be a small step to the road of recovery.
That $3.2 billion works out to roughly 0.01% of the federal budget. Plus much of that money just comes right back to the US economy when it is used to purchase American military equipment.
Israeli aid has nothing to do with why the US is "floundering". If anything, bickering over small potatoes like our foreign military aid budget instead of focusing on larger issues like the necessity of our own military budget likely is a bigger contributor to us "floundering".
That $3.2 billion would be enough to pay for 23,000 Americans' college education. Is that more valuable than giving weapons to Israel? Of course it is. Even a single college education is a better use of the money.
The rhetorical tactic of citing some much larger number to justify a misuse of funds is meant to obfuscate and confuse, and it's not a good faith argument. It's like a mayor saying "yes, this program is wasteful and corrupt, but look at how big our military spending is! Why aren't you talking about that?!". Or "Yes, I may have created a made up job for my brother, but look at the trillions we spent in Afghanistan! Why aren't you talking about that?!"
We should not be falling for that type of rhetoric when calling out government waste and abuse.
There is no reason that the U.S. should be sending any aid to Israel (or, for that matter, Egypt), it's not a poor country, there are many more countries deserving of the aid, and the aid is being used to increase the militarization of a region that has already had too much military conflict.
I pointed to a big number because it reveals that the motivation is neither to battle waste and corruption or to provide for those 23,000 Americans. There is obviously much bigger waste and corruption in the domestic military budget. You are singling out Israel because of a specific political complaint about Israel. You admit as much in your last paragraph. That is a perfectly reasonable political opinion to have and I'm not even arguing against it here. I am arguing against the hypocrisy of taking that political opinion and trying to make it more attractive by dishonestly claiming it is motivated by fighting waste, corruption, and the floundering of the US.
Again, questioning the motivation of someone who raises a point you don't have an answer for is no better than trying to change the subject when you feel like you can't win on the merits.
If you think it's a good use of the money, then defend it.
But changing the subject and questioning people's motivations, or insisting that all larger forms of abuse in the military be talked about before anyone can call into question our aid to Israel - that's not a legitimate argument.
The answer may well be that we have mutual interests that span generations, and which have--and continue to--pay dividends. The broader question may be what those interests are and if they are truly beneficial to us in the long-run.
I'm not making a claim either way, FWIW.
Agreed. It's never as simple as people may think. Plenty of criticism available, though, against one of our closest allies, which shouldn't be shouted down as merely "anti-semitic" in general. Not to imply you are making that case.
First, putting aside Israel for a second. I understand the urge to reduce foreign aid while we're running deficits (I assume is what you mean by "floundering"), but think of foreign aid as diplomacy. We need both hard (military) and soft (aid, donations, etc.) diplomacy. If any thing, the bang for buck is higher with soft diplomacy. Hard diplomacy is very expensive.
Second, Israel is a shining example of a robust democracy in a part of the world that is more or less run by kleptomaniacs and dictators. Israel's politics -- especially with the coalition government -- serves as a role model for citizens of other countries. I think it seems reasonable that we extend foreign aid to them.
"a 2013 National Intelligence Estimate on cyber threats “ranked Israel the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US” behind only China and Russia" [1]
"Israel among the U.S.’s most threatening cyber-adversaries and as a “hostile” foreign intelligence service." [2]
"Israel’s snooping upset White House because information was used to lobby Congress to try to sink a deal" [3]
I think it is probably fair to assume that every country (friend or a foe) spies on others.
Just a few months ago, we were caught red handed spying on the EU and our closest allies [0]. I’m sure their equivalent of NSA lists us as the most aggressive hackers behind China and Russia.
When your economy or your survival (in Israel’s case) is at stake and you have the tools, the temptation is just too strong.
The “here” matters, here. If it’s America or Europe, then yes, Poland is part of NATO and the EU. Its decisions impact its partners. And if it’s invaded, coalition blood will be spilled. Mutual defence means a common interest in being worth fighting for. Add to that Warsaw’s belligerence on multiple political fronts, and the criticism is unsurprising.
More pointedly, this is current news. How are you already judging reactions?
People almost always make such points as part of an agenda against of the sides. If you insist you didn't mean it way, ok, I believe you (though that would be highly unusual)—in that case, though, your comment would have needed to come with enough information to make that clear. Otherwise the default interpretation kicks in anyway.
The Israeli government and former government ministers also fund propaganda orgs on American soil, CAMERA and Hasbara Fellowships to name two. You could even say that every US election has been compromised by well-funded, successful foreign propaganda operations since at least 1982!
We know about Pegasus/NSO and its a fun subject to follow, but in all honesty, every engineer privy to the 0-day bank that powers it could build one of their own, or sell it to another group, and no one would know