Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel more or less continuously since October 7, and Israel has been firing back. I believe both countries have had to evacuate border areas, something like 100,000 Israelis living hear Lebanon are internally displaced.
In short, there's a war on. Neither side wants a full blown war but Israel doesn't want to let Hezbollah muster a larger assault, so they're doing what they can to cripple Hezbollah and disrupt their operations.
De-escalation is a goal that takes cooperation from both parties (or in this case, from Israel and the various Iranian proxies attacking them). Telling one party to "de-escalate" while the other party continues attacking is just farting in the wind.
A Zionist influence campaign targeting western governments and public opinion with the aim form an Israeli state predates WW2 and has been going on for over a century. Not sure you're referring to with your scare quoted 'they'.
1. What are you suggesting “has been going on since before World War II”?
Before Israel's formation as a state -- a campaign to influence public opinion and policy in favor of that formation.
Afterwards -- a campaign to defend its unlawful and unrecognized territorial expansion; to deny its atrocities (from 1948 through the present day) for as long as possible; and to keep U.S. military and financial support flowing, no matter what Israel does.
And as an added cherry on top: an astonishly successful campaign to brand essentially any serious criticism of Israel's policies or its founding ideology as antisemitic.
4. Don’t be coy, you know precisely the “they” you’re referring to.
There is no “they”, scare-quoted or otherwise, in the commenter's posts in this thread (except when they're quoting from yours). However we see that you've introduced this formulation twice now.
Perhaps you'd care to explain why you are doubling down on this rather peculiar misrepresentation of the commenter's words.
Pro tip for reading an article that concerns Israel: compare and get context. Israel is often held up as a boogeyman even when it compares similarly to other countries. For example, I could say “Israel has a higher rate of incarceration than China!” and while (according to Wikipedia) that’s true, it’s also true for 90+ other states and territories. Israel sounds uniquely bad in the first telling, but when you contextualize you see that they are actual around the middle of the pack. No more boogeyman.
Context is terrible for the boogeyman narrative, so it’s usually left out.
In this case, the accusation is that Israel attempts to influence US opinion. Do other countries do this? In 2020 the US department of education said it uncovered ‘$6.6bn in previously unreported gifts from countries including Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It said this figure could be "significantly underestimated".’[0] $6.6b in secret funding from mostly anti-democratic countries, just to a few universities. How does this story about Israel sound now, in the light of more context? Context tends to disrupt the “Israel the unique boogeyman” narrative.
Does the guardian story include any context about how other countries try to influence US opinion, or what is typical? If not, why not?
tl;dr: seek context, especially in stories about boogeyman Israel.
If you think Israel has more supporters on social media than Hamas, you definitely don't use twitter and probably don't use facebook. And you definitely don't use Tiktok, which is overwhelmingly anti-Israel.
As another commenter said, the social media "battlefield" Israel is massively asymmetrical in Hamas's favour. This isn't to say Hamas is using botnets or anything like that, my view is that the anti-Israel sentiment is mostly "organic" (though it is clearly helped along by propaganda from Hamas and other anti-western groups).
As a Jew in North America I'd appreciate if Israel would not use botnets and astroturfing, because antisemitism is a big problem here in Canada, and stuff like this gives ammunition to antisemites who want to say "all claims of antisemitism are fake."
Winning an argument via lies or deception is a Pyrrhic victory; it's more important to "keep the truth on your side" and maintain your credibility and honesty.
I don’t think the reason why Hamas has more support is rooted in systemic antisemitism. The only people mad at Israel for being Jewish are people like me who have the background but don’t like to associate with Zionism or ethnostates in general…
> If you think Israel has more supporters on social media than Hamas, you definitely don't use twitter and probably don't use facebook. And you definitely don't use Tiktok, which is overwhelmingly anti-Israel.
Can you show me where you think I said that? In the context of this thread, it's clear that I'm talking about social media misinformation campaigns run by Hamas.
To state the obvious: the fact that there is a lot of anti-Israel sentiment on social media is almost certainly to Hamas' benefit, but that doesn't mean they paid for it to be there.
You said the conflict is "asymmetric." You don't clarify what you mean by this but it seems like a safe assumption that you're referring to Israel's superior military power. I was pointing out that when it comes to social media propaganda from Israel's supporters and detractors, the field is tilted sharply against Israel. As for whether something is "run by Hamas," that seems like a vary narrow distinction.
The Hamas brass live comfortably in Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based. They are backed by Iran, which is a huge regional power aligned with Russia, another major propaganda power who has an interest in sowing discord in the USA & the west more broadly and this topic is a very effective wedge. (In the USA it splits both republicans and democrats internally.) Ditto China who has tiktok, where they suppress topics that create discord in their society (the three Ts, in addition to other censorship they do domestically on tiktok and beyond) but have no problem with misinformation and propaganda spreading like wildfire in the West. All of these players have media and propaganda outfits above and below board that have an incentive to support Hamas. So as for the "social media propaganda war" I'd say Israel is the one outgunned.
"that doesn't mean they paid for it" I wish you had read to the second paragraph of my comment, you'd see we agree. To wit: "This isn't to say Hamas is using botnets or anything like that, my view is that the anti-Israel sentiment is mostly 'organic'"
> I wish you had read to the second paragraph of my comment, you'd see we agree.
I wish you'd read my first comment before responding to a grossly distorted version of it that was clearly a result of projection on your part. I guess I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "organic", though, because your first two paragraphs imply that the popular anti-Israel sentiment in the West is largely driven by intentional propaganda and misinformation operations, which is the opposite of what I'd call organic.
IMO, unless news media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are bankrolled by actors such as Iran, Russia, and China, the simple facts of the war and resulting humanitarian crisis in Gaza—as credibly reported by such outlets—are more than enough to tilt popular opinion against Israel. That is what I mean by "organic".
We played to play campus-wide capture the flag at the camp I went to as a kid a couple times and I will never forget the experience. The camp spanned an enormous area with all kinds of varied terrain and we had ~170 campers and counsellors playing. I vividly remember patrolling in an out-of-the-way part of our area by myself amongst the rhododendrons and detecting some movement; a counsellor from the other team was hiding amongst leaves. A frenzy chase ensued.
One twist to this game on the enormous area was that neither team knew where either flag was, so you had to send groups to scout your own side to figure out where your flag was. I get why the person who posted this article chose not to have jail, but the jail was another fun dynamic. It gave the opportunity to break people out of jail, which was another goal besides the flag.
The author is completely correct that these are lifelong memories.
We played as a kid and it was always fun but a bit annoying when players would argue about whether they had safely crossed the line when the other team tagged them, so in my 20s, I had the idea to solve that once and for all with 1,000 feet of yellow caution tape! I organized multiple games at Spotts Park in Houston, a city not known for having elevation changes, but Spotts has a bit of hilly landscape to mix things up, plus plenty of trees and other things to hide behind. It wasn't pitch black since we were in the middle of the city, but it was big enough that people could sneak to the other side undetected if they kept looking for routes with no enemy patrols. We actually used glow sticks as the flags and the only particular rule was that they had to be visible from multiple sides if you were several feet away. A lot of adults came out to play--at least a dozen per side but sometimes twice that many!
I don't think it's fair to disparage this article. The other one is perhaps good for a "deeper dive" but I'd say TFA is better overall at illustrating the concept.
I'm disturbed by the idea that an AI could be used to make decisions that could proactively kill someone. (Presumably computer already make decisions that passively kill people by, for example, navigating a self-driving car.) Though there was a human sign-off in this case, it seems one step away from people being killed by robots with zero human intervention which is about one step away from the plot of Terminator.
I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this. I know very little about military strategy-- without the AI would Israel have been picking targets less, or more haphazardly? I think there may be some mis-reading of this article where people imagine that if Israel weren't using an AI they wouldn't drop any bombs at all, that's clearly unlikely given that there's a war on. Obviously people, including innocents, are killed in war, which is why we all loathe war and pray for the current one to end as quickly as possible.
> B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
> “Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.```
So, there was no human sign-off. I guess the policy itself was ordered by someone, but all the ongoing targets that were selected for assassination were solely authorized by the AI system's predictions.
This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
Hm OK, I read this a bit differently. I read these sections:
> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.
> According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults.
I took this to mean that a human did press the "approve" button on the computer's recommendation. Though they make clear they were basically "rubber stamping" the machine recommendation.
But to my point:
> “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender.
What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection. Again I know nothing about military strategy, I'm hoping someone with more experience will speak up.
To use an analogy: if we are talking about self-driving cars, the rates of collision or death should be compared the rates of collision or death in cars driven by humans. Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
> What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter?
Honestly, I'm not sure. Obviously humans make errors of all sorts as well, and even make intentionally unethical decisions.
I think the horror of this situation is that it makes war easier to wage. Accepting that all war has costs measured in blood, we should want less war. However, those in control of military forces always have incentive to wage war, so removing friction from the process is dangerous.
Off-topic of AI, but on-topic of your question:
The actual alternative to unleashing AI assassination is not human-selected targets, but not waging war. It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence, it would have worked better to give Palestinians dignity and self-determination long ago. That can still work, although until it does Hamas will continue to be a problem. But as I said, war is useful for the political leaders of Israel, so they stoked and fed the flames for decades to maintain an excuse for the war machine.
Since you went off topic. If Palestinians only wanted dignity and self-determination this conflict would have been resolved a long time ago. Palestinians, broadly speaking, want Israel removed from the map. This is why they're chanting "from the river to the sea" which happens to include the area Israel is situated in.
During the Oslo peace process, when Israel was trying to address this in the way you propose, Hamas launched a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians:
You can be critical of everything Israel does, in this war or ever - fine. But the Palestinians have no other accepted settlement other than shipping ~8 million Jews to Europe or killing them.
The people who suddenly developed this simplistic understanding of occupation/resistance/occupier have no idea what they're talking about. Often quite literally in the sense they don't even understand the meaning of what they're saying, not to mention the history of Israel or the middle east. EDIT: I realize this last statement can feel offensive but this is still my take based on two decades of interactions with a fairly random sample of people trying to explain wth is going on in this tiny piece of the middle east. The complexity of the situation doesn't yield itself to simplistic narratives (from neither side really, though my statement refers to one of those narratives the Israeli side simplistic narrative is also insufficient/inaccurate).
"From the river to the sea" comes from the Likud policy program, which says there will be an israeli jewish state in that area. The palestinian slogan finishes with "Palestine will be free", without stating that it would cover the entire area.
Israel has been sabotaging peace talks and applying divide et impera politics in the region since it was created.
Sheikh Yassin, the paraplegic spiritual leader of the Hamas movement was quite clear that their beef wasn't with the jews, but with the occupation and apartheid. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. In hindsight Hamas was correct in not trusting the israelis in the Oslo talks.
It's more like 700000 jews that would definitely need to move, i.e. the illegal settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
"Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a 2017 law that would have allowed for the retroactive legalization of thousands of Jewish homes built on occupied West Bank land privately owned by Palestinians, a law so provocative that few believed when it was passed that it would survive judicial review."
"Those homes — already viewed as illegal by most of the world under international law, for having been built in occupied territory — will now remain illegal under Israeli law as well, and Palestinian landowners will be able to proceed with lawsuits seeking to evict the people living in them and recover their property."
> The original Hamas charter (that was never revoked) calls for the murder of Jews.
And the original charter of Netanyahu's political party says "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty".
> And the original charter of Netanyahu's political party says "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty".
Yes. Arabs got all of Jordan. That you see Likud’s charter stating Jews want a smaller version of their historical homeland as being comparable to Hamas charter calling for the murder of all Jews says more about you than it does about Likud.
You're doing a lot of conflating Jews with Israel/Zionism/Netanyahu, and Arabs/Muslims/Palestinians with Hamas. There's a reason no one reputable is calling this the "Arab-Jewish War".
The only reason Israel exists is because of U.S. If we were to withdraw support Israel would be gone within months. This goes against the central part of your argument that "Israel won wars of ..." and gets to keep lands, legal or illegal. There is no in-between, US wants/needs Israel in the region and here we are.
OK, so you also disagree with the Fourth Geneva Convention, then? You'd be fine with Syria joining forces with Hezbollah and iraqi militias to take Golan and north of Israel by force and expelling or subduing through apartheid whatever population they come across? I have a feeling that e.g. the small groups of circassians that still exist and live in northern Israel might disagree with you and prefer another international legal order.
I don't think it's made to appease "Western Hamas supporters". They've clarified that the enemy is zionists, which is a much larger group than "the Jews", as the previous charter put it. Some, like you, seem to interpret "the Jews" in the old text as 'all the jews in the world', while Hamas leaders have said that they meant the jews of Israel. Ahmed Yassin has said, on camera, that his movement doesn't have a problem with jews, but with occupiers, and that if a muslim stole his land he would resist that too.
A problem with your interpretation is that many palestinians aren't aware that there are jews elsewhere in the world, or that zionism is a predominantly christian project rather than a jewish one, so when they are refering to 'the jews' one needs to figure out whether they mean israeli jews or jews in general.
Has the UN demanded that Poland and France do so? Are Poland and France states imposing apartheid on germans, or have they ethnically cleansed these areas?
Kinda weird racist remark about arabs being inherently genocidal at the end there. Maybe edit it and make it less weird?
Terrorists will terrorize, especially when they feel justified by their homes being stolen from them by foreigners and inept leaders as happened with the formation of Israel. They should be caught, punished, even killed, since what they are doing is destructive and morally wrong.
However, if you actually want peaceful coexistence in the long term, the only possible solution is to stop oppressing these people, and instead to build a better world for them. The Israelis won: they built their country, they got international recognition, they defended it from their neighbors. However justified this may have been given the horrors of the Holocaust, it is also undeniable that this was to a large extent to the detriment of many people who previously lived there. They now need to ensure those people can be content with the life that is left for them.
But the reality is that Israeli leaders (and a significant minority of the population) do not want that. They don't view the Palestinians as full human beings (as many in the Knesset have compared them time and time again to cockroaches and other pests), and they believe Israel has a right to even those small territories left to the Palestinians. They are continually illegally annexing more land in the West Bank, and some are preparing to do so in Gaza as well.
Netanyahu has been very open about funding, or at least supporting, Hamas as a means to ensure that moderate Palestinians don't get a voice and a two-state solution is never allowed to happen. He has said these things openly. Of course, a one state solution is also unacceptable, as it would threaten the Jewish character of Israel to have such a signficant (and growing) Muslim Arab population. Making them officially second-class citizens is also unacceptable as it would deny Israel's claims of being a democracy. Killing them all would be a bad look internationally.
So, what was happening before October 7th was in fact the ideal state according to Netanyahu and his ilk: the Palestinians are de facto second class Israeli citizens with almost no rights, they act as a convenient boogie man to scare the populace, and they are weak enough to be no more than a nuisance. October 7th was an embarrassment to the authorities on many levels (and of course a horrific crime), so they have to punish the cockroaches of Gaza to ensure they don't have the courage to try another October 7th anytime soon, and to prove their strength to their own population, then return to the status quo. Of course, if Hamas is destroyed, they will also have to find a new militant anti-Israeli organization to lead Gaza, lest they end up with credible peace attempts that could make their position difficult.
> their homes being stolen from them by foreigners and inept leaders as happened with the formation of Israel.
The population of British Palestine was 31% Jewish, 9% Christian and 60% arab in 1946 UN Survey. Jews got more land after partitioning but a huge chunk of that was the Negev desert. Arabs rejected partitioning and the Arab nations started a war to destroy Israel. You can confirm this from any source you like.
dang: can you kill this article? The article has biased language (Israel is fighting Hamas not “bombing Palestinians” as if the war is on the civilian population) and the conversation here is political advocacy.
Not sure what those percentages are supposed to show. Most of the ethnic Arabs were living in all of the cities of Mandatory Palestine (as it was called at the time), and around half of them fled those cities after the war started and Zionist forces established the state of Israel. They were encouraged to flee both by the Zionist militias and by their own leaders, as civilians do in most wars. But, since the war was lost, the vast majority never got to return to the homes they abandoned in the new state of Israel. Some of them still live in Gaza and the West Bank, as do the children and grandchildren of the others.
Of course, the war started because surrounding Arab nations didn't accept the UN plan of splitting up that territory - with both good and bad intentions to be sure. But even if you think the intentions of those nations were entirely mosntruous, my point is that the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine were victims of this whole war, and they (and their descendants) are the people who today live in ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank. And it is understandable that they would bear malice on those who caused them or their parents or grandparents to lose their homes, especially when they now live in squalor. And it is also to be expected, though sad, that some of them will turn to terrorism and hurt other innocents in their own turn.
But the existence of terrorists among a population does not give one carte blanche to attack that population.
> Not sure what those percentages are supposed to show.
That the narrative of Israel stealing land is false.
Israel encouraged arabs within their partition that were not resisting the new nation to stay. You can find many references to this, and it was Hertzl’s origin intention is his writing. This is why the 2M Israeli arabs - that have more freedom that in any arab nation - exist. Pity the arabs that left.
> is understandable that they would bear malice on those who caused them or their parents or grandparents to lose their homes
They don’t though. They have no malice towards their leaders that constantly started wars trying to destroy Israel and resulted in their losing their homes. They just hate Jews.
> But the existence of terrorists among a population does not give one carte blanche to attack that population.
Yes agreed. This is why the war is on Hamas rather than Gazans (even though Gazans overwhelmingly support the slaughter of their Israeli neighbours) at the cause of a great many Israeli lives.
While Hertzl may have believed so, I don't think Ben-Gurion would have agreed. If the Palestinian Arabs had not fled, they would have been driven away in time. The Jewish character of Israel was immediately enshrined into their constitution: an Israel with a majority Arab population was never a possibility. A minority of Arabs can easily be tolerated, and represents a nice defence against accusations of racism or ethno-nationalism.
> They don’t though. They have no malice towards their leaders that constantly started wars trying to destroy Israel and resulted in their losing their homes.
Of course, they are living under propaganda and they are being actively oppressed by Israel, not by other Arab nations.
> They just hate Jews.
This is just false and racist.
> Yes agreed. This is why the war is on Hamas rather than Gazans (even though Gazans overwhelmingly support the slaughter of their Israeli neighbours) at the cause of a great many Israeli lives.
If this were true, than the population of Gaza would not be starved, with aid being trickled in such low quantities that even the USA under Biden is trying to go around Israel's official quotas and provide aid separately. And if this were true than the IDF would not be deliberately targetting aid workers, hospitals, nurseries and so on.
And for every Palestinian happy to see an Israeli killed, there is at least one Israeli happy to see Palestinians killed. Both sides have their disgusting extremists. The difference is that one has access to every weapon on Earth and is currently rampaging and killing tens of thousands of civilians, while the other side has killed a few hundred civilians in the worse attack they have ever mounted. And flaunting every international law they can find, such as recently bombing an embassy in a different country.
> The Jewish character of Israel was immediately enshrined into their constitution: an Israel with a majority Arab population was never a possibility
Yes. That doesn’t prove that the arabs were driven away by Jews though.
> they are being actively oppressed by Israel
No. As we’ve discussed Arabs tried to destroy Israel 3 times and lost. If you have a response to this historical fact then post it, otherwise it’s fairly clear who is causing misery to the arab Palestinians.
>> They just hate Jews.
>This is just false and racist.
No. Firstly Gazans and west bank Palestinians are not a race, Arabs are. Secondly accusing others of being racist is not racist. Finally you can easily look up opinion polls in support of the massacre in Gaza to confirm that Gazans hate Jews.
> if this were true, than the population of Gaza would not be starved
Yes exactly! The starvation is another myth. You can look up obesity statistics in Gaza to confirm this yourself. Or watch videos posted by Gazans enjoying their open markets posted every day, or other Gazans throwing away their rations because they don’t like M&Ms. Like the nakba or the MrFAFO videos a huge amount of what you see is simply fake.
> The difference is that one has access to every weapon on Earth and is currently rampaging and killing tens of thousands of civilians
No. Rampaging would be running around torturing people in front of their families. You don’t know how many civilians are killed in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Your only source is Hamas and they don’t distinguish between fighters and civilians, they also increased the number by the same amount every day for a month before they realised it looks bad.
> That doesn’t prove that the arabs were driven away by Jews though.
Given that the region was majority Arab, and that Israel was never going to be a majority Arab nation, the only logical possibility is that Israeli authorities always intended to drive out a large number of Palestinian Arabs from their land. That the Arabs realized this and opposed the formation of a state that would drive them out is not that surprising.
> As we’ve discussed Arabs tried to destroy Israel 3 times and lost. If you have a response to this historical fact then post it, otherwise it’s fairly clear who is causing misery to the arab Palestinians.
Even if the ultimate fault for their current state lied entirely with Arab leaders (which it doesn't) that doesn't change one iota the fact that it is Israel forcing Palestinians in Gaza to live in an open-air prison (as UN rapporteurs call it) for the past 60 years, and currently committing genocide against them. And you forget that it's even Israeli officials supporting Hamas as the rulers of Gaza, as Netanyahu has bragged.
> The starvation is another myth. You can look up obesity statistics in Gaza to confirm this yourself. Or watch videos posted by Gazans enjoying their open markets posted every day, or other Gazans throwing away their rations because they don’t like M&Ms. Like the nakba or the MrFAFO videos a huge amount of what you see is simply fake.
I don't need to look at propaganda videos or cherry picked social media. Serious news organizations and the UN have been investigating this, and unanimously discuss the fact that Gaza is very close to starvation and that rations are nowhere near enough. Even Israeli officials actually acknowledge that there is not enough aid going into Gaza (though of course they don't admit their role in making sure of this).
> Given that the region was majority Arab, and that Israel was never going to be a majority Arab nation, the only logical possibility is that Israeli authorities always intended to drive out a large number of Palestinian Arabs from their land.
Or that, as history tells us, that Arabs refused to accept partitioning and tried to destroy Israel 3 times and lost. I’m not sure why you would ignore well documented events in favour of deciding something else is the only logical explanation.
> I don't need to look at propaganda videos or cherry picked social media
Gazan obesity stats aren’t produced by Israel, nor are the social media accounts of Gazans.
> is Israel forcing Palestinians in Gaza to live in an open-air prison
The only open air prison with open fields and malls and luxury cars. Forced by Israel and Egypt which I gather you think is also secretly controlled by Israel.
> Or that, as history tells us, that Arabs refused to accept partitioning and tried to destroy Israel 3 times and lost. I’m not sure why you would ignore well documented events in favour of deciding something else is the only logical explanation.
What does one have to do with the other? The moment that the partition plan was announced, some Arabs were going to be expelled from the territory of Israel regardless of anything else that would have happened. They chose to fight this, and obtained support from those around them. They lost, and now Israel exists, is larger than the original plan, and they are forced to live in squalor. These people are angry that history turned out this way, and they are turning all that anger on their current oppressors, and will continue to do so as long as they are oppressed, all the more so when they are slaughtered by the thousands and starved as they are now.
> Gazan obesity stats aren’t produced by Israel, nor are the social media accounts of Gazans.
Are you seriously claiming that, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are being starved since this war started, Gazans are actually getting fatter? This is beyond ridiculous.
> The only open air prison with open fields and malls and luxury cars.
The existence of a handful of rich people doesn't mean anything. All objective thrid parties assessors have come to the same conclusion, that the people of Gaza are living under oppression.
> Forced by Israel and Egypt which I gather you think is also secretly controlled by Israel.
Egypt is complicit, but they only control a tiny part of the border, and have explicit agreements with Israel about what to allow to pass through there.
You keep claiming Gazans are poor because they are oppressed by Israel. I keep referring to history and the choices of arab leaders as the basis for their poverty.
> Are you seriously claiming that Gazans are actually getting fatter?
I am not claiming Gazans are getting fatter. The data says they were obese before they started the war, giving the lie to the open air prison fallacy. If you want to refute that, or claim that the videos produced by your fellow pro Hamas accounts showing markets open and food being thrown away are false, you are welcome to do so.
> The existence of a handful of rich people doesn't mean anything.
Not just rich people, the malls are for everyone as are the wide open spaces. It proves your claims about an open air prison are false. No reasonable person would describe that as a prison.
> Egypt is complicit
You didn’t write that Egypt is oppressing gaza.
You also didn’t take back your spurious claim that it was racist (?) to point out that Gazans hate Jews as evidenced by their overwhelming support for the massacre.
The proximal cause of Gazans' poverty is Israeli oppression. The fact that this oppression comes in retaliation for old wars doesn't change the fact that it's not Jordan or Syria or Qatar not allowing anything in and out of Gaza.
> The data says they were obese before they started the war, giving the lie to the open air prison fallacy.
You brought that up in the context of the starvation to which Israel is currently subjecting them. Neither I, nor others, claimed Gaza was starving before the current genocide. The fact that it's an open air prison is related to the way Israel, and to some extent Egypt, are controlling access into and out of Gaza, not to obesity.
> It proves your claims about an open air prison are false. No reasonable person would describe that as a prison.
And yet every UN rapporteur that has investigated has reached the same conclusion. Almost as if they know some reality that you don't.
> You didn’t write that Egypt is oppressing gaza.
Yes, Egypt is also oppressing Gaza. That's what complicit means.
> You also didn’t take back your spurious claim that it was racist (?) to point out that Gazans hate Jews as evidenced by their overwhelming support for the massacre.
You are the one who claimed two million+ people are each and every one antisemitic. And also the one who seems not to know what it's called when you smear a whole ethnic/cultural group like this.
Now we need our central overlords to shut one side down so we don't hear inconvenient truth. You don't get to suppress the truth because it is inconvenient. HN is consistently flagging and removing articles about Israel and Palestine which doesn't fit the "approved truth". You and people like you need to hear "the other side" and not just keep repeating convenient lies. Israel is perpetuating a genocide against unarmed civilians under the guise of "war" and the people supporting the genocide don't want to hear it. Does it upset you that you support all out genocide and want the other side to shut up? That's the truth, killing 30,000+ Palestinians, and now aid workers, is not a war it's a genocidal slaughter.
>It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence
It isn't possible to destroy Hamas with violence, or apartheid for that matter. Israel has created hatred towards themselves that will last for generations, even if they could kill every last Hamas member, they've made damn sure that a subset of Palestinian (if not broader) youth will reorganize a militia and the cycle of violence will go on.
A gross projection, and you're out of your mind if you think peace is what follows that act.
For what it's worth I'm not suggesting anything, just pointing out the obvious fact that this war doesn't end with the whole of Gaza population being turned into martyrs. Looks to me like Israel responded exactly like the jihadists wanted in the first place with their attack.
Eh, some people actually have different visions for the world. They'll elect people who are abhorrent to western liberal values over and over again. I don't know what a new election in Gaza would yield, but I don't think it can be a given that giving X group dignity and self-determination will necessarily tilt them toward western liberal outcomes.
I don’t think israeli policy is or has been particularly effective in expanding western liberal values to palestinians. I’d argue putting people under such pressure provides the exact opposite incentives.
> The AANES [Rojava] has widespread support for its universal democratic, sustainable, autonomous pluralist, equal, and feminist policies in dialogues with other parties and organizations. Northeastern Syria is polyethnic and home to sizeable ethnic Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian populations, with smaller communities of ethnic Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, and Yazidis.
> The supporters of the region's administration state that it is an officially secular polity with direct democratic ambitions based on democratic confederalism and libertarian socialism promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability, social ecology, and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural, and political diversity, and that these values are mirrored in its constitution, society, and politics
Oh, you meant human rights and all that? Having ideals and ethics? Yes, that would be my hope. I thought you were referring to the neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.
Yes, correct. Human rights is a liberal concept. Pluralism is a liberal concept. Secularism is a liberal concept. There are in fact lots of people who actually literally disagree with these ideals. Lots of ‘em in the Middle East, in fact, which is why you cannot assume that merely lifting the oppressor’s thumb would yield the outcome that’s so intrinsically appealing to your sensibilities that you’re struggling to even identify it as an opinion that you hold and that others may not.
No, I was referring to western liberalism that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”
> that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”
the latter often cloaks itself as the former when asserting itself.
For example, in France (one of the "birthplaces" for, and current bastions of, western liberalism) there is a phrase often used as a blanket push back against almost any criticism of Israel's actions: "Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East!". It's so prevalent that academia has written an entire book around it: https://www.cairn.info/moyen-orient--9791031803364-page-113....
Depending on how often and how recently they have been encountering things like this (given current events) in their daily life, I can understand the other commenter mistaking your position as such.
For my part, I am unsure of exactly what would happen if we lift the oppressors' thumbs (starting with Israel, Hamas, and wealthy "western" neoliberal hegemony, namely, but the list doesn't stop there). I don't think that anyone knows, for that matter, as it's never happened in any historical circumstances that remotely resemble our own. I do think that if you want western liberalism as the concept, and avoid some of its historical failure modes like boom&bust cycles and exacerbated economic inequality paving the way for populist anti-democratic revolts, you need to aim for much higher than its current outcomes in terms of dignity and self-determination for all groups of peoples. To your point, I've read some reports that Rojava has deteriorated, especially post-US-withdrawal, to very much not be either "western liberalism" or a society I would want to live in.
Palestinians were given opportunities for self-determination in 1948, 2000 (Camp David), 2008, and 2006 in Gaza (blockaded by Egypt because of Hamas elected to run Gaza). In 1948, they along with 5 invading Arab countries tried to destroy Israel, resulting in their own destruction of their Arab state. In 2000, Arafat turned down a peace agreement with Bill Clinton starting terrorism that resulted in 3000 Palestinian and 1000 Jewish and Israeli Arab deaths, in 2008 Abbas turned down a peace agreement.
After 10/7 almost every Israeli knows that the Palestinians are not interested in their own state.
Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists, thus resulting in a far lower civilian-to-combatant death ratio than in other urban conflicts such as Mosul.
The lesson learned with Japan in Germany in WW II is that total military defeat is necessary. The AI technology enables the targeting of all terrorists, not only senior-level terrorists as before, resulting in a quicker end to the conflict than otherwise and thus resulting in fewer civilian deaths.
As we know these terrorists hide among civilians including in and under hospitals, making these legitimate targets. The high number of civilian deaths occur from the terrorists hiding among civilians.
> Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists
13k out of 32k is around 40%. The estimates for the number of murdered children and women have been about 70% [1] for months, so the "40% are terrorist" claim already does not match that unless women and children are counted as terrorists. Anyway, even going with only 60% of those murdered being women and children, that still implies that every single killed male person is a terrorist. Now, I am sure that IDF already presents this as true in order to justify the murders, but that will not pass basic logical scrutiny of any critically-thinking person.
"according to the Gaza Health Ministry" i.e. according to Hamas. The actual truth is nobody knows. There are a lot of children in Gaza.
To be crystal clear, the below isn't attempting to justify targeting children but it's important that those who are blindingly critical of Israel understand the complex realities.
Hamas does employ combatants under 18yo (which is what counts as children in those counts):
"There have been reports of children below 15 years of age in Hamas, with the lowest recorded age being 12, but the process of selection for the Izz al-Deen Al-Qassem Brigades is reportedly long and rigorous and has not to date included children." - https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2001/...
"Amnesty International is gravely concerned about reports that earlier today a 16-year-old Palestinian child
was found to be carrying explosives when attempting to pass through the Israeli army checkpoint at Huwara,
at the entrance of the West Bank town of Nablus"
...
"a 17-year-old Palestinian detonated an explosive belt he was wearing as he was being tracked down by Israeli soldiers,"
- https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150...
"However, children receive military training and are used as messengers and couriers, and in some cases as fighters and suicide bombers in attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.21 All the main political groups involve children in this way, including Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.22
>Throughout four wars and numerous bloody skirmishes between Israel and Hamas, U.N. agencies have cited the Health Ministry’s death tolls in regular reports. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent also use the numbers.
>In the aftermath of war, the U.N. humanitarian office has published final death tolls based on its own research into medical records.
>In all cases the U.N.’s counts have largely been consistent with the Gaza Health Ministry’s, with small discrepancies.
>2008 war: The ministry reported 1,440 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 1,385.
>2014 war: The ministry reported 2,310 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 2,251.
>2021 war: The ministry reported 260 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 256.
It's perfectly reasonable to question data from an organization known for propaganda and terrorism. But please also try to find answers to your doubts.
You bring out a statistic of 9 children carrying out suicide attacks in 4 years when a 1,000 times that were deliberately killed by Israel in 4 months?
You do realise that statistically that argument is insane by several orders of magnitude?
There is no rationale, or sane, argument for killing this number of children indescriminately. Never mind the tens of thousands that have been disabled and maimed.
This isn't about statistics. This is simple fact that Hamas has used children, including young children. It definitely uses 17yo and 16yo. If they used 9 (out of?) back then this simply means they don't care about using children in war.
I think it's important to understand this to know who Israel is dealing with.
On Israel's side of this I think it's clear Israel has been using fairly indiscriminate force at times. However even if Israel used has the most discriminate use of force a lot of children would get killed.
What do you propose Israel can do against Hamas? What would you do when 30,000 combatants are sitting on your border, embedded with civilians, in civilian clothing, want you to kill as many civilians as possible, use them as shield while launching attacks at you? Half of the population is younger than 18yo. What do you do when thousands of rockets are launched at you from densely populated places? Let's reset to Oct 8th, how do you wage this war?
Until you understand that for a very large number of Israelis Palestinians are sub-human you will waste your efforts trying to argue with Israelis based on rationality or ethics. They are racists full stop.
The reason is simple: it’s the combination of forced military and being the descendants of a generation that migrated and ethnically cleansed Palestine are overwhelmingly potent sources of indoctrination. Most people tend to assimilate and therefore they will blend into the Israeli military (and you see what kind of ethics they have) and most people find it difficult to condemn their parents and grandparents as genocidal monsters so instead they will favor whatever narrative absolves their lineage.
This is nonsense. Palestinians live in Israel too. There is less racism in Israel towards Palestinians than racism towards minorities or blacks in the US.
You just don't get it.
The hatred Israelis feel towards Gazans right now is not driven by racism. In general Israel's feelings towards Palestinians is related to the violence Palestinians have inflicted on Israelis and the violent conflict in general. Israelis think Gazans want to murder all of them and that feeling has support reality.
I agree there's some amount of indoctrination but that's also a simplistic world view.
Really? Less racism than towards blacks? You must never have heard Israelis speak about Palestinians.
I really wonder, if you think this is what Israelis think, what do you think Palestinians think? You know, the ones that have been murdered by the tens of thousands. The ones that have been made refugees in their own country.
"There are a lot of children in Gaza" tickles the Bayesian probabilities that Israel is mostly killing children in Gaza.
Overall it still points to "what is the right response to guerilla warfare?" Or, "if even children want to kill you for what you're doing, what makes you so sure you're in the right?"
It's important to note that Hamas' suicide bombers were in general manipulated. I.e. this is not some grass roots child that decided they want to "kill you". This is cold blooded recruiting, conditioning, sending people to blow themselves up. I recommend you read up on that a little bit, there's a fair bit of material.
This (the start of the wave of suicide bombings) was also during somewhat euphoric time in Israeli-Palestinian relationships with the peace process happening, it wasn't a time of extreme repression.
You should also look a little at the textbooks and curriculum taught to those children.
No, Israel has never seriously been open to palestinian self-determination. Netanyahu brags about it, because he knows that it has been the mainstream position among israeli politicians so he has to project an image of being especially valuable in that regard.
It's not hiding when you are on your own territory. It's not a shield if your enemy kills non-combatants with impunity. It's also very hard to discern "terrorists" from resistance fighters when you're an occupier operating in occupied territory, which Israel doesn't even try to do.
Thought experiment: Let's assume the vast majority of Palestinians genuinely despise Israel and would be willing to sacrifice their own community's existence to exterminate Israel.
Do you think that's a genetic inclination? My guess is you don't.
So if it's a cultural inclination, do you think it can be changed? Seemingly no, so why not? Why wouldn't goodwill and nation-building be able to change Palestinian minds?
Taking lessons from the final acts of WWII is extraordinarily myopic and foolish. It seems to assume that whatever did happen must have happened - why would we believe that? It's contradicted by the simple and undeniable fact that humans make errors in judgment. People chose to cause suffering. People chose to respond to suffering with war. People chose to pursue war to "total military defeat" (I would say that is actually a fiction but we can go along with it as it's close enough to the truth for our purposes here).
I agree but I'm sure this comment will be met by backlash from the anti-Israeli crowd. Nobody actually knows for sure how many are dead, how many are combatants, or anything else about the casualties.
The right wing in Israel now refers to Oslo as the "Oslo Disaster" due to the large number of Israelis killed in what they claim is a result of giving the Palestinians control over some of the land, arming their police force, and letting Palestinian leaders from abroad (Tunisia) return to the region.
The left (whatever is left of it) says Oslo never had (EDIT: never was given) a chance to succeed and wasn't implemented properly.
Just a total mess like it always is in this region.
---
I do agree Israel has just cause to "remove" Hamas from Gaza post 10/7 (for some definition of remove). I also think Israel has been waging this war very poorly. I agree Palestinians don't want peace. They want Israel erased (which they sometimes put in different words but with the same end result). They say so out loud (see street interviews with Palestinians e.g. on YT, even before this war, and surveys etc.). I also know this from talking to a small sample of Palestinians myself. But, as we say in Hebrew, wise people don't get themselves into a situation that a smart people knows how to get out of, and unfortunately post Oct 7th even smart people have a hard time getting anywhere. That said, the blame lies on the Palestinians. They are responsible for the public in Israel moving right. Which in turn created this pathetic excuse of a government and general erosion of Israeli society. Which in turn is resulting in Israel's heavy handedness in Gaza (though even the less heavy handed version would be not that different in scope). They are doing that because they think that's how they'll get what they want. Hamas (supported by the majority of Palestinians) thinks that right now they're actually getting what they want. I think it's unlikely they'll get what they want. Israel is bound to take ever more aggressive approaches and nobody is going to help the Palestinians. Stopping the violent struggle, accepting Israel is a fact, and talking to Israel, is the only way Palestinians will get anything, but they're not willing to do that for various reasons (and when I say they I mean the vast majority + a way of imposing its will on the minority, i.e. if Palestinians can't get Hamas to stop killing Israelis then it doesn't even matter).
Is Israel moving right meaningful? Before moving right, israeli's as a voting block weren't particularly worried about how colonization of the west bank was going, and wasn't going to prioritize decolonizing the west bank over other local needs.
Can you point to policies of removing west bank settlements to show that before the horrific attack, accepting Israel was going well in the west bank? If anything, the not-being-kicked-out-of-your-home was going better in the violent Gaza strip, and they overstepped their hand
I think it's extremely significant. There was a majority of Israelis around the time of the Oslo accords that would have supported dismantling all the settlements (+/- or land exchange in some specific cases) and handing over the entirety of the west bank to Palestinians. This was a given, had major support, and the only reason that flipped was Hamas' campaign of suicide bombings, which also led to Rabin's assaination. I lived there at the time and I think I have the right perspective here.
You're also wrong about Israelis at the time not worried about the west bank. The Israeli left was extremely worried about the occupation of the west bank. I would say resolving the status of that territory was an important thing since 1967 (though I was born in 1968 so I don't have the entire experience in my head) but for some of that time the state of war with the surrounding Arab countries was a show stopper to that. The peace with Egypt was one of the factors that enabled the start of the peace process with the Palestinians.
Today you'll maybe find 5% of Israelis are agreeable to that two state solution, at best.
I'm not quite following your second question here. Settlements in the west bank have occasionally been removed but before the Oct 7th attack we're in a process of the right wing getting more embedded in the west bank and the extremists more emboldened which is sort of the process I'm alluding to here. I'm not sure if you're referring to violence forcing Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 here as some sort of benchmark for the west bank? Supposedly Arik Sharon's plan was to follow the withdrawal from Gaza with a unilateral withdrawal from most of the west bank.
My point is the Palestinians could have gotten all the West Bank and Gaza through peaceful negotiations within the Oslo framework. It is true that what pushed Israel to even talk was the first intifadah though I'm convinced there was no need for violence even then.
A complete treatment of this topic would require a lot more time and effort. But anyways, the move right is again extremely significant for Palestinians, in a bad way. (EDIT: It's pretty bad for Isrealis a way in many ways)
>> Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
That's not the whole story. For example, we ban certain kinds of weapons -cluster munitions, chemical weapons, biological weapons, ideally we'd ban bloody mines- not because they kill too many people compared to "conventional" weapons (they don't) but because they are considered especially ... well, wrong, in the moral sense.
So maybe we decide that being killed by a machine, that decides you're a target and pulls the trigger autonomously is especially morally wrong and we don't accept it.
Also, in case of top tier of biological weapon, even a single strike - or a single accident - has potentially unlimited area of effect, up to and including the entire planet.
Remember COVID-19? Whether you believe in it being natural or a lab leak, it is a good model of how a handling mishap with a mediocre bioweapon would look like.
Better bioweapons would potentially be more targeted, and/or have reproductive clocks that disable them after a certain number of generations. But you absolutely run the risk of them evolving away from such restrictions.
Genetic kill timers are production technology that has already been deployed. There are genetically engineered mosquitoes for example that become unviable after a certain number of generations. The idea being that you mix them into the population, they cross breed and spread their genes, then 10 or 50 generations later, they suddenly are infertile en masse and the whole species dies out.
Very big conventional bombs also have similar effects and yet they are not banned, so that's not the difference. The difference is in the way people are killed.
The difference is between inaccuracy of a weapon hitting a target and inaccuracy of target selection in the first place.
Remember the scene in Men In Black where the recruita do target practice? They were all accurate at hitting what they shot at but only Will Smith's character was accurate at selecting a target. This AI chooses targets; it does not fire weapons.
The job is not "shoot aliens". It's manage aliens, including Earth's population of legal resident aliens (like the taxi driver who he delivers a baby for). The Big Bad of the film is indeed posing as a human, and Smith's character runs into an endless procession of innocent (or at least non-capital-crime) aliens he should not shoot along the way.
There's a reason he gets hired over all the military folks in the scene immediately blasting away at the aliens in the shooting range.
The entire segment this is part of makes it very clear they're looking for out-of-the-box thinking and a unique approach to problem solving in situations that might not be what they seem at first glance.
It starts with uncomfortable chairs and a written test on flimsy paper without desks; Smith's character noisily pulls over a table to write on while the military folks do the expected thing of struggling through. "You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training", they get told, and then their memories are wiped. Smith's character, instead, gets a briefing on the MIB and an intro to alien bugs pouring Kay some coffee.
(Said briefing also indicates Earth is a neutral zone for alien refugees. Again, "shoot first" is not what they want people doing!)
I watched the movie 2 times in past. I think Smith killing a child just because she is carrying science books (Oh she must be up to something) was sure out of the box and completely ridiculous as well. Also, how is Smith's characters action not "Shoot first"? please.
"Just following orders" huh?
I can't believe I'm being offered Will Smith analogies as apologia for an actual genocide. This is one of the most of awful (in all senses quality, content, intention, execution) posts I've ever read in my entire life.
I think 90 percent accuracy in this case means 10 percent of "suggested terrorists" were overturned with detailed human review. There's no way the Israelis were actually able to reliably question the Gazans about whether they really were terrorists.
So the issue isn't that there's errors, it's that the army knows there are errors and expect humans to pick them out in 20 seconds- which they know realistically won't happen. The human only has two realistic choices- approve every target, or disapprove every target (which gets you reassigned to another role).
It's the classic statistics case of two medical diagnostics for an underlying value that isn't directly observable.
> > “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender.
>
> What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection.
I think you've misunderstood the "zero-error" statement. It's not saying "there must be zero errors", rather that "errors don't exist - only some level of collateral damage". Hence the follow up about things being viewed statistically.
They view it in the same way that you suggest they should - that there will always be deaths and the questions is whether the system leads to more or less of them.
Personally I view that as a very utilitarian argument when applied to a machine of war. It embeds the concept that some loss of innocent life is acceptable.
We also have to be open to the possibility that Israel is committing a genocide and the goal is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and terrorize the rest. That the AI system’s main purpose isn’t to be accurate in selecting target, but rather to manufacture a reason to kill more Palestinians than a human ever could. Another function could be to remove accountability from a targeting officer. Zero-error is never really a desired feature, in fact zero-error would be a bug, as it would prevent the genocide being conducted efficiently.
What we may be witnessing is the first information age level genocide, where the killing is done at the behest of a statistical function with near infinite computing power.
And incredibly inefficient genocide. Why is it that modern discourse has become so polarized that criticism has to make the worst possible accusations?
These are the same accusations made among world leaders, human rights organizations, the UN, and the World Court. We should be free to make these accusations here on HN too.
This is a strong accusation, but it has the evidence behind it. The most recent of which is a report published at the UN Human Rights Council[1], but also the case filed at the World Court by South Africa in December with addenda added in March[2]. The evidence for this claim is both public, overwhelming, and has been filed at the world’s highest court.
All that said, I actually didn’t make the claim here—though I have elsewhere—I merely said we should be open to the possibility that this is the case.
I'm aware of all that, but I don't trust those organizations to be objective as there's a lot of geopolitics at play. South Africa's ruling party is friendly with Russia, for one thing. Then you have Iran's influence, and most of the Arab world has always been against Israel as a nation. Plus all the opposition to the west's influence in the region. There's a lot of proxy stuff going on.
But more than anything, I can just look at the conflict itself and there's no genocide going on. It's war in a dense urban area where Hamas hides among the population.
Later in the article they talk about how they specifically approved up to 15-20 civilians to die with those marked individuals and would bomb their homes as a first option.
I’m disgusted by this, I don’t care anymore what happened in October, this needs to stop. Israel government cannot be trusted to run this war, it’s turned into genocide and we’re all complicit letting them do it and supporting them. I can’t believe people actually support this, it’s clear they’ve forgotten Palestinians are people.
Israeli officials are constantly being asked "how many dead palestinians is too many" in this conflict, and the answer has explicitly been "there is no such thing" way too many times. There is no upper limit on how many people can be killed to further their goals.
The most upsetting(for me) thing is reports of all the kids killed by snipers and just in general, as a father I cannot imagine losing my child to this.
Cognitive dissonance? Those children are just cockroaches to a large portion of the Israeli population
The mistake the west made was not recognizing that some Israelis are just as capable of the same level of savagery as the original Hamas attacks. 'They share the same values as us westerners', they said.... they assassinated their own president!
If you multiply out the number of targets that Lavender generated by the number of acceptable civilian deaths per target, you get a number that is ~40% of all Gazans.
In 1999 Yugoslavia killed ~12 thousand Albanians and displaced ~85 thousand more. Bill Clintons secretary of defense had no problem calling that genocide: "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide.". This led NATO to drop bombs on Yugoslavia [0].
In this conflict Israel has killed ~31 thousand Palestinians and displaced ~2.3 million more [1]. And now we sell them jet planes [2].
>>It's rather unfashionable these days to bring up the fact that Hamas purposely disguises themselves as civilians and operates almost exclusively from civlian buildings, and makes sure their compounds aren't separated from civilian infrastructure.
And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.
I guess they are actually just people who live at home with their families. Aren’t most resistance fighters exactly that: civilians who are willing to fight to enable their families to live in freedom?
I mean, honestly I don’t really think anyone cares about international law when decide to murder a bunch of people (any conflict, not just this one). That’s the problem really, you can shout as much as you want that they don’t have uniforms etc, but this is not some battle field with the solders lining up on each side. The article also explicitly states that they have a program called: “where is daddy” that targets males when they are home with their families.
>And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.
See, that's how you feel, because you aren't thinking or looking at data. And perhaps because you interpret "up to" as the actual ratio.
According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war[1].
Meanwhile, the estimates for Israel operation in Gaza is ~9000 militants killed out of ~25000 total[2].
The entire problem in discussing the issue is that the way people feel isn't driven by reality on the ground, but on what sounds nice.
> According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war[1]
That's not exactly what it says:
"Conflict continued to cause widespread civilian death last year, notably in densely populated areas, where civilians accounted for 90 per cent of the casualties when explosive weapons were used, compared to 10 per cent in other areas."
If that's the only case where this is true, then both the headline and the first sentence of this article are misleading or incorrect. The headline states "Ninety Per Cent of War-Time Casualties Are Civilians" with no qualifiers. The first sentence starts "With civilians accounting for nearly 90 per cent of war-time casualties..." with no qualifiers.
It's disappointing that this UN report is so poorly written as to seem to contradict itself. Do you think ultimately the 90% refers exclusively to explosive use in urban areas, or all war casualties? I'm frankly not sure which thing the article is claiming.
I imagine you get to tune the probability window of "person is >90% likely a Hamas terrorist" and choose how many innocent people you kill. Who set the window?
"Hamas terrorist" criteria: a male of fighting age, give higher weight to those congregating with others of fighting age. Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set. Lovely.
>This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
Reminds me of similar industrial thinking of a certain previous fascist government.
This is a callous, inexcusable massacre. By comparison with the Israelis, the Russians look like "gentle and parfait knights." But the former are presumably on our side, and the latter are our geopolitical opponents. So.
That's not true. The UN themselves state that their numbers for Ukraine are likely severely undercounting the total casualties simply because they don't have any insight into what is going on in occupied territory. They do not give "estimates" for Ukraine, the numbers are what they have been able to confirm. So for you to call that very specific number an "estimate" is incorrect - which should probably have been self-evident.
>> The U.N. human rights mission in Ukraine, which has dozens of monitors in the country, said it expects the real toll to be "significantly higher" than the official tally since corroboration work is ongoing.
There are more than 10,000 fresh graves in the city of Mariupol alone and many of them appear to contain multiple bodies - which was the case in other graves uncovered in places like Kherson and Lyman.
The actual civilian death toll is almost certainly in the tens of thousands, not a singular ten thousand.
Also consider the death toll caused by the withholding of medical assistance to those who refuse to take Russian citizenship, and the flooding caused by the destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam.
Perhaps the number is higher. What's your best estimate for the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine? How about military casualties on both sides?
And, quibbling over numbers aside, surely you can see that the nature of the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are very different. In Gaza, civilians are taking the brunt of the fighting. Ukraine, in contrast, is hell for soldiers, but civilians and aid workers are generally moved away from the front, and they're more rarely treated with the wanton disregard and disdain that Gazans suffer.
To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
That's not a source, it's a link back to the very same UN figures I just explained the problem with. Literally if you follow the citation on that page for that section, it goes straight back to the UN report, which explains how each casualty was corroborated (NOT estimated. independently verified.)
>And, quibbling over numbers aside, surely you can see that the nature of the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are very different. In Gaza, civilians are taking the brunt of the fighting.
I do not see the difference between Gaza and Mariupol, except that the population of Mariupol is older and the temperatures drop below freezing for months of the year. It was carpet bombed, residential areas were shelled, there were reports of civilians needing to drink water from puddles, incidents of torture and murder, practically the entire city was destroyed.
>To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
With all due respect I do not see how you can possibly think this unless you've been ignoring much of what has been happening in Ukraine.
You don't want me to share the video of Russians executing 9 Ukrainian POWs with their hands behind their backs, the video of Russians castrating a Ukrainian POW and then executing him, or the video of Russians decapitating a Ukrainian POW slowly with a knife.
And Bucha, and the Nova Khahovka dam, and the torture chambers, and the air campaign designed in the Russians own words to freeze Ukrainians over the winter, and the mass graves in Lyman where raped and murdered women and tortured Ukrainian men were discovered. And the Kramatorsk railway station attack. And the Kremenchuk shopping mall attack.
Literally yesterday the Russians hit an elementary school in Dnipro with ballistic missiles, the only reason it wasn't a mass casualty event was that they had 5 minutes warning to evacuate to bomb shelters.
This is literally just what I can remember off the top of my head.
Sure, fine, maybe the UN report is all wrong -- even though everybody seems to use it.
What's your best estimate of civilian + military casualties in Ukraine, with whatever supporting evidence you care to muster?
Edited to add:
You've edited and added to your post after my response.
In response to your Reddit links, I think that they distract from the main point, which is that the Gaza war has disproportionately affected civilians, even in comparison with the worst of Ukraine's battlegrounds.
Ukraine has depth, and not only can its civilians move west to cities such as Lvov, its citizens have been invited into Europe.
In contrast, Gaza is a sprawling low-rise cityscape with a population of 14,000 people per square mile -- far in excess of anything in Ukraine; nearly double Kiev's population density -- and Gazans are, for the most part, forbidden from leaving. Egypt can't take them, save in special circumstances. All the privation of war is felt by this civilian population -- and, at least to an extent, this is used by Israel as a weapon.
Russia, for all its faults, has a straightforward strategy and straightforward, even realistic aims. I don't think you can say the same for Israel. It's just wild.
There were actually some unfortunate people who fled Ukraine for Gaza - families who had Palestinian-Ukrainian marriages back in Soviet times, and more recently, that are now in an out of the frying pan into the fire situation
> Sure, fine, maybe the UN report is all wrong -- even though everybody seems to use it.
It's not wrong, you're wrong. You called it an estimate of casualties. The UN calls it a list of verified casualties and say that they estimate the number is "far higher".
I don't have a problem with citing those numbers if you call them what they are - the hard minimum that can be independently verified. "at least" 10,000 dead civilians, as opposed to "only" 10,000 dead civilians. That is a significant distinction. "everyone" uses those numbers to make Israel look worse at the expense of whitewashing Russia, which is appalling to me.
An actual estimate is extremely hard to find. It appears that Ukraine estimated in February 2023 that the number of civilians killed was around 100,000. The UN themselves won't say what they think the number is other than that it's "likely far higher" than the confirmed number in one statement, "tip of the iceberg" in another, etc.
In any case, the highest the UN was ever able to count in Mariupol was around 2000, whereas there's more than 10,000 fresh graves, many of which are big enough for several bodies, alongside some mass graves. And that was over a year ago, in one city. Dunno what more to tell you.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then Hamas' claims of ~25,000 dead civilians should be compared against the Ukrainian government's claims of tens of thousands of civilian dead. Otherwise don't compare claims against numbers that have been independently verified to be correct (minimums).
And also, oh my god, don't say
> civilians and aid workers are generally moved away from the front, and they're more rarely treated with the wanton disregard and disdain that Gazans suffer.
or
>To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
Because that's such utter horseshit. Everything the Israelis have ever been accused of doing, the Russians have done in Ukraine. Don't claim otherwise just because those pictures / videos don't get as much traction on TikTok
> Everything the Israelis have ever been accused of doing, the Russians have done in Ukraine.
This is demonstrably false in trivially obvious ways. How many Ukrainians have left the country? How many Gazans have been permitted to leave? And the question you keep muddying the waters around: What's the military to civilian casualty ratio? It's much worse in Gaza, no matter how you slice it.
Even if we run your apples-to-apples comparison: 25k civilians dead in Gaza, "tens of thousands" (let's say 40k?) dead in Ukraine. (I am not sure how credible this is). The Ukrainians also claim that 180k Russian soldiers have died. Israel hasn't killed more than 12k Hamas members; Hamas claims 6k dead. In the one war, far more military than civilian casualties; in the other, the reverse. There's really no way to spin this.
No, they were often NOT allowed to flee. Sometimes they fired on the humanitarian corridors travelling back to Ukraine, sometimes they forced people in occupied territory into "filtration camps" and took their passports to give them new Russian passports. People with Ukrainian passports weren't allowed through border checkpoints.
About military-to-civilian casualty ratio: again, compare like-for-like. Mariupol is the best analogue for Gaza, and Mariupol suffered tremendous civilian casualties despite not having all that many soldiers in the city. I would be shocked if the ratio was not comparable to Gaza if not worse. Had Kyiv been encircled it would have suffered the same fate or worse.
Even if you use the UN-confirmed deaths in Mariupol (around 2000), which we agree is an undercount, that's around 0.5%, compared to 1.2% in Gaza. On the other hand if it's 10,000, which still might be an undercount, that would be significantly more than Gaza.
But yes, Ukraine has "depth" and a larger population, so yes, lots of the fighting takes place away from cities. That doesn't, of course, prevent Russia from bombing and striking apartment buildings and kindergartens. Like this incident from a few days ago
But this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison: we happen to use the word "war" to describe both what's occurring in Ukraine and what's occurring in Gaza, just as we use the word "surgery" to describe both the removal of birdshot following a hunting accident and the removal of a brain tumor, since, after all, the two phenomena we call war share many characteristics (violence, mutual non-recognition of legal authority, etc.), just as the two kinds of surgery do (anesthesia, scalpels, etc.). But it would be an obtuse medical review board that faulted the tumor surgeon for damaging a higher percentage of healthy tissue, or for causing a greater loss of post-operative function, or for having a higher number of her patients die on the operating table, than the gunshot surgeon. After all, the pellets will be close to the surface, easy to distinguish from benign human cells, and unlikely to be hiding behind anything as delicate and vital as the blood vessels of the cerebellum. Of course, if you weren't such a review board member making careful medical-ethical judgments but instead a malpractice lawyer trying to convince a jury of ordinary citizens of the ineptitude and even malice of some neurosurgeon, you might not be quite as scrupulous about pushing an emotive analogy too far.
For every militant they correctly identify (90% of the time, they'd have us believe) and kill, they also kill dozens of innocents. This doesn't give them pause; on the contrary the Israeli public revels in the carnage and bring out lawn chairs to watch. It's genocide.
Many people in the west enjoy it too. Lots of Europeans and Americans don't like Muslims (or even Jews or just people who don't look 'white'), and they like turning on the news to find out how many have been killed each day because it wouldn't be acceptable to carry out in their own countries, especially in the era of DEI.
There's the two-wrongs-make-a-right atonement for the holocaust aspect on the German side and the promise of the rapture for Americans also.
Maybe most importantly willingness to show eager support for something that may seem 'bad' such as genocide functions as a shibboleth to display allegiance to one's political party and society because ultimately what's happening in the news has no deep significance for most westerners beyond that of a football match. Showing you're not an anti-semite is the most important thing one can do, and there's no better way to do that than support whatever the current Israeli government feels like doing (perhaps sparking a large regional conflict) and rounding up any Jewish people who object on charges of being race traitors.
>Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set.
Now that we've established that this is horrific, please turn a small portion of your attention to American predictive policing systems (digital and not) and the circumstances that lead to mass incarceration (including the War on Drugs).
But you see, if you kill just them, then their family would very likely get radicalized because of that, and then you'd have to kill them too, only some time later so it's just more efficient to do it in one fell swoop while you have the chance.
I don’t like Lavender. I think humans should always be in the loop. I’d like to see more care by analysts for kill orders.
That said, any organization might do something if it’s 90% accurate. Assuming it even is (doubt it), I think any fair evaluation of such a technology must ask:
What is the accuracy of inexperienced humans in the same position who are rushing through the review during a blitz invasion? If they have battle experience, what about them, too? (I’m assuming most won’t.)
Is the system better than those humans or worse? How often?
Do the strengths and weaknesses of the system allow confidence scores on predictions to know which need more review? Can we also increase reviews when the number of deaths will be high?
That’s how I’d start a review of this tech. If anyone is building military AI, I also ask that you please include methods to highlight likely corner cases or high-stakes situations. Then, someone’s human instincts might kick in where they spot and resolve a problem even in the heat of war.
It is very clear to me that that is a sentence reflecting the editorial interpretation of the paper rather than a direct quote. You might agree with the interpretation - I think I might - but that is very different from this specific sentiment being something Israeli leadership are openly saying.
90% is a BS number . Computed basis what ? What is the baseline how did they benchmark . Is there any data whatsoever to back this claim ?
They just spout a high number that is not 100% (clearly civilians are being killed publicly undeniably ) claiming 100% would be too obviously ridiculous.
More than half of 32,000+ (more under the rubble) killed are woman and children, Hamas is still quite able to fight, hardly any hostages has been recovered .
Israel labels any sort of civilian organization as hamas including journalists, medical and aid staff. 200 UN staff and 100 journalists are dead so far . Israel’s argument is UNWRA terrorist aiding and journalists were also secretly Hamas and doing non journalistic stuff when killed so they include them in legitimate targets .
If you consider everyone is Hamas unless otherwise proven then 90% is possible .
There is no realistic way an algorithm was designed factoring in the level of destruction of infrastructure never seen in any real world data and also benchmarked accurately.
> I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
It seems obvious to me that the alternative would be a slower process for picking targets leading to fewer overall targets picked and the guarantee that a human conscience is involved in the process.
Or alternatively pressure from the top down on targeting specialists to get more and more targets selected resulting in less quality and effort spent on selecting targets and maybe leading to rubber-stamping proposed targets without adequate consideration. Which isn't to suggest that that would definitely make the AI better per se
It's an army too cowardly to have dismounted infantry protecting their tanks, so instead their conscripts burn alive in there when they get in contact with actual militants.
It's an army incompetent enough to recreate the rubble of Stalingrad to help its enemy.
How would they go about producing officers that could enact such pressure? How would they recognise the difference between a specialist and a charlatan whos family is good friends with the army rabbi?
It's well known that the IDF refuses to use dismounted infantry to protect their wagons, and that they've turned cities into rubble and given themselves some of the same kind of problems that the Nazis had in Stalingrad.
You'll also find interesting stories in israeli papers. Rabbis are important to the IDF because the state it is part of is based on religious convictions, and quite often there is no other justification for what they do.
Look I know this is gonna sound cliche but the thing they should do is not engage in an offensive asymmetrical war and bomb a dense urban area full of innocents for basically no reason. Then they wouldn’t need the little ai.
This is obviously veering way off course of the topic of AI at this point, but I imagine the residents of kibbutz be'eri and the 100+ hostages still held in Gaza would disagree that Isreal is fighting for "basically no reason." I'm interested in analysis and criticism of Israel's use of AI in this case but suggesting Israel has no causus belli is absurd.
I never understood why the argument that only war can bring hostages back, or that it is the most reliable way, was allowed to be propagated in public for so long.
> but I imagine the residents of kibbutz be'eri and the 100+ hostages still held in Gaza would disagree that Isreal is fighting for "basically no reason."
On the contrary, I think that those exact people would agree the most.
Do you think that they do not wish that Israel did a hostage exchange instead of starving and bombing them together with their captors?
To bring the "low hanging fruit" example, do you think that the three hostages who were waving white flags nearly entirely naked, and who were subsequently murdered by the IDF; do you think that they or their families prefer(preferred) this devastation that lead to their deaths instead of a simple hostage exchange?
What do you think would happen if IDF killed most of Hamas and had their last few forces cornered with no escape, and were getting close to them? Do you think the hostages would not be killed by either their captors or by IDF as collateral damage in such a scenario?
Claims that the systematic destruction of Gaza and genocide(-lite?) serves the goal of bringing back the hostages is such an obvious cover for bloodthirst that it is honestly intellectually-insulting to keep reading it over and over again.
> the argument that only war can bring hostages back
The war has explicilty been about removing Hamas from power for a while now. To the degree there is opposition within Israel to the war, it's in the hostage-retrieval prerogative having been subsumed.
In 1999 Yugoslavia killed ~12 thousand Albanians and displaced ~85 thousand more. Bill Clintons secretary of defense had no problem calling that genocide: "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide.". This led NATO to drop bombs on Yugoslavia [0].
In this conflict Israel has killed ~31 thousand Palestinians and displaced ~2.3 million more [1]. For all its tough talk the Biden administration has responded by selling Israel jet planes [2].
I'm not saying bombing Yugoslavia was justified. But there is plenty of historical precedent to call this conflict genocide.
I, at least, had sources. I tried looking evidence of this new fact about Yugoslavia you presented but could not find any.
It was called the Kosovo war. Why can we not compare the two? They seem VERY comparable to me.
But if Wikipedia and Al Jazeera are not good enough for you then you will see the following orgs also posted these numbers: NPR [0], BBC [1], NYTimes [2]. And if your worried those numbers are inflated there is an article in the Lancet that shows if anything it is the opposite [3].
It sounds like you are unaware on the attack on Israel in October that intentionally killed about 1.5k civilians of which the current action is the consequence.
It's hard to speculate on the circumstances of their deaths given there is no reliable independent reporting on it, but I'll give it a go as you asked.
Certainly starving civilians are being killed by the IDF. I'd be shocked if some of the deaths aren't related to self-defence. Given there look to be credible reports of the IDF operating kill zones, and allowing on the ground soldiers to set their own rules of engagement, as well as making it generally clear it's little issue in collateral deaths it's difficult to have much empathy with those numbers.
A number will be attributable to friendly fire and accident too. It wouldn't surprise me if that's a significant proportion, potentially the majority given the level of sniping, significant munitions and general anarchy.
Finally, I'm sure some are as a direct result of actual engagement with Hamas.
Any reporting by the IDF is obviously security checked propoganda, filtered through multiple levels of approvals and inspection.
That figure was corrected a number of months back to 1.2k was it not. The most accurate figure I've seen stated is 11,600, although it doesn't seem to be in widespread use, although the 1,200 figure is often caveated.
The total isn't all civilians. No official figures have been released on the split is my understanding.
It's also not clear how many are attributable to Israel's response, but it's clearly non-zero and may well be a significant proportion.
OP didn't say Israel is fighting for basically no reason.
You're twisting their words, I'll assume out of a misreading. Read the comment again. They clearly said that there's no good reason to bomb Gaza the way that they have been doing, resulting in the murder of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of civilians.
There is a great reason for doing it: nothing else has worked.
Unilateral withdrawal from Gaza led to the tripling of rocket attacks. Multiple peace offers have been rejected. Limited Israeli retaliation and extensive international aid has meant the Palestinian civilian population is sufficiently insulated from the violence that they have no incentive to demand peace from their leaders.
When Palestine was sending children as suicide bombers, Israel decided to play defense and built walls that dramatically lowered the efficacy of suicide bombings. So the Palestinians switched to rockets. So Israel again played defense and built the iron dome. So Hamas switched to Oct. 7th. Do you think they should play defense again?
Tell me: what peace offer do you think Israel could make the Palestinians that would lead to a lasting peace? Tell me: if Israel surrendered unconditionally to the Palestinians, would the Israelis live in peace?
You don't get to massacre tens of thousands of people because they fight back against brutal occupation and repeated massacres, then paint yourself as the victim.
The world's eyes are open. We've seen what happened to those WCK aid workers; to Hind Rajab, to Reem and Taleb, and all the others. We've seen the mosques, churches, hospitals destroyed, and the wilful, wanton disregard of international law and basic decency.
What Israel has done over the last six months hasn't made Israelis safer, nor Jews. These atrocities won't ever be forgotten.
There has been no period in the past nearly 100 years[0] when these two groups have not been fighting. I'm not assigning anyone "victim" status. I'm saying Israel is trying to end the conflict, and has run out of other options.
What happened to trigger the events of last October which in turn triggered this.
Hamas had the run of Gaza and could have built whatever society they wanted there. They used that chance to built up for explicitly slaughtering civilians instead.
To dismantling Hamas and armed resistance from Palestinians? Stop ethnically cleansing the West Bank and remove the boot from their necks so that people in Gaza see that there is a better way and that going down fighting is not the only choice.
Plenty of alternatives to death and destruction when those are not the actual goal itself. Of course those alternatives do not go hand in hand with the idea of an ethnically-cleansed Greater Israel, so here we are.
All that is just an internet search away, and provides an endless list. Let us ignore the major bombings of Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022. How about the following few:
You mix Gaza and West Bank and conveniently ignore the fact that each of those bombings in Gaza came after indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
Disturbing indeed. I've been worried a push back in AI is coming and this sort of story could be a tipping point and certainly would justify a period of reflection.
And your probably right that the alternatives maybe worse, the folks behind Lavender could probably even prove it with data.. but there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless. And any such attempt to justify it won't capture the publics attention like a sky-net doomsday happening over the civilians in Gaza.
there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless
I don’t understand how to come to this. War is crap, not a dinner party. There’s always a human on both sides who will drop a bomb and laugh on camera, with no responsibility. Go watch it (actually don’t, it’s NSFL). Reading this thread feels like everyone watched and believed in that movie where they tried to select and eliminate a target for 2 hours with futuristic hi-tech. A human hesitates to press the button before the war. When in it, he will only be concerned with things like ammunition saving and tactical nuances. There’s not much more morals in a human who usually sits there at the button than in AI automation.
There's an old IBM presentation going around, from 1979, that says "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a Management Decision." We know that humans make monstrous decisions in war; many of us remember seeing the Collateral Murder video, and everyone has at least heard of the Nuremberg trials. When humans make monstrous decisions, at least some of them, sometimes, hang for it. The computer here serves mainly to diffuse responsibility for decisions that would be made in any case. Who will hang?
It's a good question. I also immediately found myself asking the same one of myself after posting that comment. I guess part of me just wants as many possible breakpoints along the process as possible.
But also at least then you have someone who is liable when things go wrong. When its fully automated, like the other comment mentions, they can just shrug and blame the AI. Who gets sued when a self driving car kills someone by accident? I don't know. Perhaps a lack of ownership is excusable. But when a weapon deliberately kills someone I think we need to have ownership somewhere.
Perhaps as a general rule the maker of the AI system should have liability for the AI up until someone else signs and accepts that responsibility. None of this "Company does not accept liability" crap. They have to make it clear that "customer accepts liability" or else it's them. That way they will be incentivized to make the military or whoever sign.
I would strongly argue that even being able to prove that a human might perform worse is not an acceptable excuse for the reasons I will outline. The bar for a computer needs to be significally higher than that of a human.
We know that humans can make mistakes, due to a multitude of reasons. They can be tired, moody, distracted, stressed out, time-pressured, simply not care enough, etc, all contributing to making the wrong call. But a computer does not suffer from such issues. Secondly, a computer (program) is able to perform billions and billions of computations within some time period in order to ENSURE that doing this thing with grave consequences is absolutely warranted.
Maybe for some domains we can tolerate errors from AI, but when deciding whether a person (and everyone around them) lives or dies, surely simply being on average even more accurate than a human is not enough. "Killbots" MUST be extremely heavily regulated.
Pushback on AI will of course have a “National security” exception. If the industrial level facial recognition tech in Xinjiang was forgotten I doubt this will make a difference
>I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think that once you start from the viewpoint that you're not going to create the Torment Nexus, it becomes a lot easier to avoid creating the Torment Nexus.
A lot of news around the bombing called out the uniquely large scale and rapidity of the campaign.
This was a preview of future conflicts.
We're entering the WWI phase of new technology being brought without rules to conflicts where the abuses will be horrific until rules are finally put in place.
We crossed the line of machines that automatically kill a long time ago. A heat seeking missile, or a shell that detects and target tanks [1] are effectively doing that. Software selects the target. The soldier only points in the general direction. AI is only a small technical increment.
It's never really that clear-cut, though. Human drone operators, pilots, etc. routinely send missiles into cars, buildings, weddings, etc. that cause collateral damage, killing or maiming innocents and passers-by. Sometimes it's an accident, but not always.
And that's just when we even try to limit damage, vs indiscriminately firebombing or nuking entire cities.
We shouldn't demand perfect accuracy of AI when we don't expect the same of humans. Long ago, we decided collateral damage in war is acceptable, especially when you end up winning the war and there's nobody left to prosecute you except historians =/
This system bassicaly just gave everyone a score from 1 to 100 of how luckely they are part the military wing of hamas.
Another system would signal that target is at home and it's time to bomb. This system was using phone to geo-locate and due to nature of living in Gaza phones transfer hands often.
Without Lavender they would have dropped less bombs IMO.
Is having a human make those decisions really better? It was humans who ordered the Holocaust, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Rwanda, Tiananmen, etc.
At least AI pretends to look at some data instead of just defaulting to tribal bloodlust... who's to say it can't be more ethical? It doesn't take much to beat our track record.
I think people are worried no one really understands how AI picks the target.
Reminds me of that story from probably 5-7y ago. Someone wanted to use AI to classify photos of tanks as soviet vs US. So he went to a US tank museum and took lots of pictures of the tanks under every angle. Did the same in a soviet tank museum. The resulting model worked great on that training dataset. Then he tried on photos outside of the training dataset. Turned out that it was cloudy the day he visited the US museum and sunny for the soviet museum, and the model used the color of the sky to classify.
An eternal story; I heard the same thing at university 22 years ago, except then it was NATO taking nice crisp in-focus photos of their own tanks from close up, while the images of Soviet tanks were all blurry and grainy because they came from high-altitude spy planes.
(This kind of human model hallucination is how and why I think Genesis got written and taken seriously).
> I think people are worried no one really understands how AI picks the target.
Yeah, I mean, black-box murder is never really desirable... but is it fair to assume AI will never be able to elucidate its reasoning? And that also seems a bit of a double standard, when so many life-and-death decisions made by humans are also not entirely comprehensible or transparent, either to the general public or sometimes even to the other individuals closest to the decision-maker.
Sometimes it's a snap judgment, sometimes it's a gut feeling, sometimes it's bad intel, sometimes it's just plain "because I said so"... not every kill list is the result of a reasoned, transparent, fair and ethical process.
After all, how long have Israel and Hamas (or other groups) been at each other's throats, with cries of injustice and atrocities about either side, from observers all over the world? And it wasn't so long ago we destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, and Russia is still going at it because of the desires of one man. AI doesn't have to be perfect to be better than us.
If there's one thing humans are really, really bad at, it's letting objective data overrule our emotional states. It takes exceptional training and mental fortitude to be able to do that under pressure, especially life-and-death, us-vs-them pressure.
Humans make mistakes, too, and friend-or-foe identification isn't easy for humans either, especially in the heat of battle or in poor visibility. Training for either humans or AI can always be improved, but probably will never reach 100% accuracy.
Maybe we should start putting some hypothetical kill lists in front of both humans and AI, recording their decisions, and comparing them after a few years to see who did "better". I wouldn't necessarily bet on the humans...
Run it through some panel of experts and demand algorithm changes?
Send it to some Judge API and get back some JSON?
I dunno, what?
They're not exactly very good at preventing or punishing human atrocities, either... it's more of a symbolic group, or a tool of the victors, than anything resembling actual justice. I'd argue textbook authors have more of a lasting ethical impact than the ICC.
I'm having to take a few deep breaths before responding to some of these comments. The difference is Accountability. A computer can't be held accountable and a person can. Full stop. It makes all the difference.
You could get a bystander effect kind of dilution of responsibility, even if unintentionally. Everyone points to someone else which is a system of incentives that enables bad things to happen. The buck always stops with the leadership, but you still want well-defined blame at the decision maker level that's transparent to everyone while decisions are being made.
Yes, and that's not happening right now, and it's a Big Fucking Problem. I am pretty sure this will someday be a prime case study in AI ethics courses. A Waco type of "how could this happen" moment.
when a computer program designed by a human "makes" the decision, humans can claim that it was "a funny mistake", it was not their fault and pretend to be very sad for it.
Having a human to make those decisions is better because this human can be judged if commits war crimes or genocide or violates international war laws.
A computer can't be jailed and this is the real power of designing this system. To hide the criminals on a black box so nobody can be made responsible
I'm a fairly ignorant outside observer, but it seems that government disarray and massive internal dissension within Israeli society caused by Netanyahu's increasingly extreme political moves must have contributed to Israel's defense failure on October 7. Netanyahu had so split Israeli society that millions were out protesting every weekend for months leading up to 10/7 and reservists were even refusing duty in protest.
Perhaps if he were more focused on governing or stepping aside rather than keeping himself out of jail by any means necessary, there would have been fewer distractions at the national level. I'm not saying it's his fault but the chaos he caused can't have helped.
> at least twenty-two thousand people, some 70 percent of them women and children.
People are definitely dying and that includes civilians, but facts matter and a lot of these numbers are simply made up by Hamas. Here's some analysis that demonstrates that it's extremely unlikely Hamas's Gaza Health Ministry numbers are based in reality: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-he...
Stuff like almost perfectly linear growth of deaths over days and so on, take a look at the article.
This is also Hamas who claims that every person killed was a civilian. Try to find "number of Hamas combatants killed" in the Gaza Health Ministry numbers, they don't even count this. Isn't that a bit weird? Israel will tell you how many people killed were armed soldiers and how many were civilians, as most places will do.
I don't know why people believe the numbers coming from Hamas. I wish there were a more reliable source in the area, but believing Hamas because you have no other numbers to go on is plain stupid.
The thing to do when you feel like a commenter is "beyond reason" is to flag the comment. Writing a long response to what you feel is an unreasonable or bad-faith comment is just feeding the toxicity. The abyss is commenting back into you, so to speak.
You can see the effect here: in trying to compose a reply to the parent comment, you managed to violate a variety of HN guidelines yourself.
Ah OK. I didn't realize I was violating guidelines. I'll try flagging in the future.
I thought there was some utility to analyzing the comment because it's characteristic of much of the rhetoric on this topic and it seemed like a good "teachable moment." But point taken.
I’d like to note that it is not Hamas which is reporting the official death count, it is the Gaza Health Ministry. While the ministry is under the control of Hamas, the actual reporting is done by actual public health professionals, doctors, etc. who may be Hamas members simply as means of occupation. So Hamas is not under reporting anything.
Second, the methodology of the reporting is a lower bound. They compile a list of names who health-care workers (doctors, nurses, etc.) confirm dead. This list is very credible, as you can cross reference the names with the Israeli controlled Gaza population registry, you can find real people behind those names, with social media profiles, obituaries, etc. This methodology has been proven to be accurate in previous wars. This is still a lower bound, because there are still around 7000 people missing and presumed dead. This number is harder to estimate because this may actually include double counting, and false positives (e.g. successfully fled over the border). It may also be an under count as there are cases of entire families being bombed at the same time with nobody left to report them missing. Your parent’s 100 000 is not realistic, but around 40 000 is not an unrealistic estimate (the 100 000 is used to described the sum of dead + missing + injured, so perhaps this was a simple mistake by your parent).
And finally the statistical methodology of the article you cited earlier is—to but it bluntly—pseudostatistical crap. The your parent was correct in pointing out that the assumptions based in that article are never sufficiently justified to proof an abnormality. This is actually from the playbook of Trump election denialism, where the distribution of votes was somehow proof of tampering. Here the distribution of reported death is not proof of any abnormality. This article you cited has actually been submitted and flagged, submitted and flagged repeatedly here on HN. The HN community has weighted that article and deemed it unfitting. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684474)
In short, there's a war on. Neither side wants a full blown war but Israel doesn't want to let Hezbollah muster a larger assault, so they're doing what they can to cripple Hezbollah and disrupt their operations.
De-escalation is a goal that takes cooperation from both parties (or in this case, from Israel and the various Iranian proxies attacking them). Telling one party to "de-escalate" while the other party continues attacking is just farting in the wind.
reply