> Within the Israeli cyberweapons industry, the totemic name is NSO Group. Its Pegasus technology can purportedly hack a phone without the target even clicking a link. It’s been used to track dissidents, activists, and journalists from Mexico to Morocco. Most infamously, according to a 2018 lawsuit, the Saudi government is alleged to have used Pegasus to hack the phone of a friend of Jamal Khashoggi’s in order to monitor the journalist before his murder.
> Behind NSO Group, there are many more. Cellebrite offers services to reconstruct data deleted from devices. NSO’s sister company Circles sells the ability to locate a person’s physical location using only their phone number.
Terrifying stuff. All this makes me wonder: nowadays, how are citizens living under oppressive governments ever to conceivably organise any kind of resistance? Such pervasive and all-encompassing surveillance makes it impossible that any kind of opposition can ever be mounted, if citizens can be monitored everywhere at all times. Absolutely depressing stuff.
It's also suspected the Saudi gov / monarch used Pegasus to hack Jeff Bezos phone and steal his and his mistresses nudes [0] in response to Washington Post's coverage of the Khashoggi murder.
I think the latest theory is someone close to him peeked at his unlocked phone?
Like, I think there was something about the journal threatening to release the photos and being able to describe the photos, but they never followed through or sent a proof that they did have the photos, which suggests someone looked at Bezos' phone but didn't actually download the data.
This is why I have recently thought that part of the US national labs’s mission should be to create secure communications software in the event of an authoritarian government takeover. Such software could also be shared with other country’s citizens.
Once they have drones with weapons then even gun rights like the second amendment won't help. I feel people like Stalin or Hitler were born just a little too early. Today's tech would make their job much easier.
> In Israel, tech education can begin as early as middle school
Actual selection starts in kindergarden. Various games and activities that select for ability to follow and understand the rules and so on. Results from kindergarden define class distribution in elementary. At the second grade kids do kind of IQ test (0-100). Those who scored 92-95 get selected for one-day-a-week development program. Those with 95-100 get selected to special schools. Every half a year each teacher fills a summary on each kid. The summary is added to general evaluation.
By the time, they get to army, it's known precisely which unit is the best fit mentally and physically.
Drawback of this system: if immigrant kid gets directly into high school without document trail, he is labeled as not smart. Goes directly to the Border Police. There is a special unit within the Border Policy for kids, who are smart and got there by mistake. In general border police are mentally challenged grunts unable to follow complex written instructions (anecdote: my collegue was treating in the field a border police soldier who lost an eye by shooting through the hole with label "Do not shoot through this hole, you'll lose an eye").
It's a bit overkill. There is plenty of immigrant kids that go directly to high school and from there to 8200 and whatever. Half of compsci class in my high school was fresh off the plane and i don't think anyone ended in border police :)
> As K. recalls, the recruitment pitch directed toward him was more about the “caressing of ego.” He was told: “You’re the best. We chose you. You’re one in a million. Most people can’t handle this job. You’re a genius.”
When I was in the last few months of tech school, Ft. Meade recruited our class. Apparently, the school had a deal with them.
I decided not to pursue. I wasn't particularly thrilled with being a janitor for six months, while they cleared me.
These days, I doubt they'd touch me with a ten-foot pole. Young folks are clean slates. Us old farts are baggage, personified. No "red flags," but I'm also really cynical, and they'd have a hard time getting me to jump through their hoops.
It's kind of hilarious because the big lesson I learned in the US military is that they have a great system for coordinating/motivating a whole bunch of average people into doing "big" things.
I use this to motivate myself to this day... "well I was born a perhaps slightly above-average schlub... if those other people can succeed then with a bit of persistence so can I."
Do you find pretty universal recognition of unit 8200 among American companies at this point? Most recruiters and hiring managers must be somewhat familiar by now, no?
8200/8153 on a CV is a pretty much guaranteed interview regardless of experience, if nothing else than out of sheer curiosity, that also holds true in Europe these days.
That said outside of Israel it’s essentially impossible to validate, I actually wonder how many people take advantage of that, 8200 is huge it’s the largest (single) unit in the IDF (tho 8200 is technically the command level unit number, there are numerous sub units under it) it won’t be that hard to simply lie especially to a foreign company.
for the average person, if you studied computer science in school or something like that, they refer you to intelligence unit tests, and they refer you to whatever sub-unit/team/squad/center/agency call it whatever. it's similar to big corporations where they say "get me 50 specialists of X Y and Z by next year" and then managers of X, Y and Z rock-paper-scissors it.
also before you are being recruited, you are asked to list preferences. then in intelligence again, what are your interests, etc. I guess I aced the tests because I went through so many of them, should've focused only on what I actually wanted. it goes without saying it's not odd for them not to give a fuck about your preferences.
IDF has a whole process for examination and selection of people into various roles. You usually get an invitation for an exam if you majored in CS in school and you can also request one.
just kidding, it's the same from what I hear and see. usually 8200 have it better, it's supposedly most "elite"... but other units have it easier so...
This is really straight forward - a nation's economic activity is always going to be shaped by its military policy and investment.
For example - the US dominance in fields like internet, electronics and aviation is probably directly related to the investment the country has made in related fields for military reasons. Once you have a manufacturing base and labor force that knows how to do X, they will do it commercially.
Israel is a small nation of well educated people which is consistently dealing with external existential threads. Of course its military strategy is going to be intelligence-based (rather pre-empt on pin-point basis rather than go to all out war down the road.) And then of course people will graduate from that military experience of using computers for broad data analysis and look to put it to commercial use. This manifests in cyber security and ad tec and plenty of other civilian uses like medical imaging. None of this is particularly malign or surprising. It comes down to - if you have a large labor force who can do X, and there are subsets of X you don't like, there's going to be some proportion of what the country does that you won't like.
The idea that the nation with the most lethal, best organized, and richest military in the region by orders of magnitude - the only military in the neighborhood with nuclear weapons, and invincible submarine-launched nuclear weapons at that - faces any sort of existential threat from anyone is a bad joke. That you see this "argument" so often only speaks to the effectiveness of a decades-long PR campaign, and not any reality.
Does Israel have enemies? Plenty, and justifiably so in many cases! But enemies and existential threats are not the same thing. There is no existential threat to Israel, certainly not any in the form of a foreign aggressor. Anyone even considering becoming a serious existential threat to Israel has to contend with the reality of attempting to get rid of it militarily, assuming they could even come close to doing so: the inevitable (and probably immediate) annihilation, Dr. Strangelove-style, of the entire region in retaliatory nuclear strikes. Israel has militarily guaranteed its continued existence, and wagging our fingers at each other on the internet cannot change anything about it.
If anything, with an arsenal like that, you wonder whether other countries in the neighborhood might ask whether Israel is an existential threat to them. Who could tell them they're wrong?
This seems like a really odd take. Iraq attempted to develop nuclear weapons back in the 80's. Iran is currently attempting to do so.
Israel's enemies are often non-state actors that have already demonstrated they don't really care about their personal survival or civilian casualties (theirs or Israel's).
You could argue that Israel is well equipped to control any existential threat by it's neighbors, but to argue such a threat doesn't exist is kind of silly.
You know what Israel is also good at. Propaganda and creating fake intelligence.
Israel has for almost 30 years now argued that Iran is just a year away from nuclear weapons and the US must instantly attack Iran.
Iran had no plan to develop anything and wanted civilian nuclear power, complete controlled by France in terms of import and export of nuclear fuel.
When this was blocked Iran moved said, well I guess we will invest in this ourself. Once they had the started capability to do so, again with no evidence of developing nuclear weapons Israel/US started the assassinate Iranian scientists, create one of the most aggressive sanctions programs in world history and a whole host of other things such as stuxnet.
Despite multiple US intelligence agencies saying there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program and many expert predicting Iran had no such plans.
Iran eventually agree to the most extreme observation of their nuclear program that any nation has ever agree on in history of nuclear agreements. And this program was active for quite a while, and found no evidence what so ever that there had ever been a nuclear program. Basically all expert saying that it was practically impossible for them to have a nuclear weapons program with those safegurads in control.
The US then left an international agreement, despite every other nation that was part of the agreement agree that Iran had behaved perfectly within the agreement. Iran was certified multiple times of having not engaged in any activity that was not allowed in the agreement.
And even after the US left the agreement, Iran and the other nations still hold to the agreement and safeguards are still in place.
So this idea that Iran is this big danger is simply propaganda pushed by Israel mostly and other US interests who hate Iran for various reasons.
What really mind blowing about this whole 'Iran nuclear controversy' is that ironical Isreal IS ACTUALLY nuclear rough state. Iran is a signatory of the NPT while Israel is not.
But of course them having them is just fine and proper, but anybody else getting them existential thread. But that argument of course is never allowed to be made the other way around.
If there is a state of rebellious fanatics that repress large parts of their population that is a thread to the world, I know what state I would pick. And if I were the neighbour of such a state, I be very concerned. It is Israel actually that has invaded other countries repeatedly far more often then they were invaded.
Just about right now that Biden might even consider even possible reopening negotiations, the propaganda machine is pumping out this garbage again.
The only way this perspective makes sense is if you cherry pick Iran's statements and believe the ones that argue they have a peaceful nuclear programs and ignore the ones that say Israel should be wiped out.
Yeah so lets ignore international nuclear safety organization who have verified the situation and the US national and international intelligence agencies who have also said so.
> ignore the ones that say Israel should be wiped out.
Israel has multiple times and often directly advocated and produced fake evidence in order to attempt to provoke a war between the US and Iran.
There is a well document history of this.
Why do we think its legitimate for Israel to ignore international agreements, and threaten Iran non-stop (including multiple assassination and attacks on Iranian territory) but when Iran does even 1/10 of that everybody freaks out and calls for war on Iran?
A reason Iran is threatening to Israel is because Iranian leaders don't recognize Israel's right to exist. I don't have data on when Iran will/can develop a nuclear weapon. There is a fear that they would make use of it though, which is definitely a problem. In contrast to Iran's stance, Israel does recognize Iran's right to exist, and while it is in possession of nuclear bombs, has not used them. Iran also provides funding and weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, which are both internationally recognized terrorist groups on Israel's borders that launch rockets into the country. So while Israel is technologically ahead, Iran demonstrates intent to be an aggressor against Israel given the opportunity. In the interest of avoiding a war between Iran and Israel, where I argue there is no real winner when lives are lost, it's worth making sure Iran doesn't have the opportunity to start a war. Israel would much prefer to have peace.
I agree with the concern about the 1 year claim. Iran definitely has the right to use civilian nuclear power, and I don't know the math behind the 1 year line. It may be that 1 year is the fastest possible amount of time that Iran could conceivably develop a nuke, in which case, I totally agree, it's propaganda to be citing that.
> A reason Iran is threatening to Israel is because Iranian leaders don't recognize Israel's right to exist.
Neither do most nations in the region. Iran has stated multiple times that Iran would comply with the Arab peace process.
> I don't have data on when Iran will/can develop a nuclear weapon. There is a fear that they would make use of it though, which is definitely a problem.
And what is that fear based on? That they are crazy religious nuts who don't understand game theory? Very reasonable.
This is just more propaganda, that one religious nation claims the other religious nations leaders are a bunch of suicide bombers.
Expert consequences by people who actually study this is that even if Iran had nuclear weapons, they would not use it.
This is exactly like when in the US the anti-Communist claimed the Communist whole nuke everybody.
> Iran also provides funding and weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, which are both internationally recognized terrorist groups on Israel's borders that launch rockets into the country.
And Israel has invaded the Lebanon, is consistently stealing more land from Palestinians, is often bombing West Bank and Gaza.
Israel has attacked the Iranian nuclear program and has bombed Iranian forces in Syria. Despite these forces being there based on invitation from the international recognized government of Syria.
Why can this not be treated like any other conflict between two nations, where we use the same standards for both governments?
> So while Israel is technologically ahead, Iran demonstrates intent to be an aggressor against Israel given the opportunity.
In Israel has done the same thing and arguably has done far more. Not to mention the constant and public demands from Israel that the US should attack Iran and bomb them into the stone age.
Seriously, go and actually listen to what Israeli politicians from the Likud and even further right wing groups say about what should be done to Iran. And listen to what people in the US government who are friends of Likud say. Bombing them into the stone age, preemptive war and so on.
Btw, while Israel accepts that Iran as a country should exists, they do not think the Islamic Republic is legitimate and had a regime change policy for a long time.
> In the interest of avoiding a war between Iran and Israel, where I argue there is no real winner when lives are lost, it's worth making sure Iran doesn't have the opportunity to start a war. Israel would much prefer to have peace.
Israel has a funny way of showing they want peace in that case.
> I agree with the concern about the 1 year claim. Iran definitely has the right to use civilian nuclear power, and I don't know the math behind the 1 year line. It may be that 1 year is the fastest possible amount of time that Iran could conceivably develop a nuke, in which case, I totally agree, it's propaganda to be citing that.
As long as the safeguards are in place, Iran can't develop a nuke at all. And from Israels perspective that is exactly the problem. That is exactly why Israel and friends almost went ballistic when Obama showed that Iran could be a international partner with an agreement.
Now the buggy-men about Iran nuclear is gone and that makes it impossible for them to ever get the US into a war with Iran. And they know Iran doesn't have the conventional military.
What if if 'shock' Iran became a normal country in the international order. That must be prevented at any cost.
Their military is so well equipped and organized only because outside pressure from their neighbours forced them to do so. The very existential threat discussed by the parent comment was what put them where they are now.
> Israel is a small nation of well educated people
Out of 9 million population, only 200k work in Hi-Tech and only 28k of those work in startups.
Only half of the high school students successfully pass matriculation examination.
Very common mistake (even in Israel) to confuse Jews as a nation and Israel as Jewish state. Half of the jews chose not to live in Israel. The educated half.
> Out of 9 million population, only 200k work in Hi-Tech
Per available data, that is 321,000 employees, comprising 9.2% of the overall workforce. That is a very high portion, higher even than here in the US, where only 7.7% are tech workers.
> Half of the jews chose not to live in Israel. The educated half.
It's very clear that you have a blatant anti-Israeli agenda. Still important to point out that contrary to your biased, counterfactual claims, Israeli Jews are no less educated or talented than others, based on the actual facts of the Israeli technology industry and its economic achievements:
Hmm being and remaining a Jewish state is the very cornerstone of Israel and Israeli Palestinian conflict. Otherwise they could have just agreed to the right to return and ended the whole thing
Even if the Jewish state status wouldn’t be an issue right of return will never happen it would be a social and economic suicide.
This isn’t the German unification it’s not even the possible Korean unification there is really no way to deal with it other than grant Palestinian refugees an actual refugee status and settle them.
Keep in mind even the PA doesn’t want to grant RoR to refugees many of them weren’t refugees from the land that is now Israel but wasn’t pre-1967 or even 1948, many of them escaped from what is now the West Bank, some one their own, some due to Israeli pressure some due to Jordanian pressure.
In the 1990s, over a million Jews from the former Soviet Union settled in Israel. We should be clear about that. It is technically possible for the Palestinians to return. What prevents them from returning is deeply entrenched racism:
"In 2009, 72 percent named a Jewish majority as one of their two leading values, versus 71 percent in 2007, while 36 percent and 29 percent, respectively, named Greater Israel as a leading value. Democracy has been losing public support in the last five years. In 2009, 35 percent of the population opted for democracy as their most or the second most important value; in contrast in 2005, 60 percent of respondents chose democracy as their most or the second most important value."
There are 2 millions Arabs living in Israel right now. If you add 5 millions refugees, Israel(9m total population) will no longer be Jewish state. Which is what I said in the first post. RoR simply will never be realised. You can call it whatever you wish, but to Israel it is basically a suicide
Never say never. In my experience, when people say "it will never happen" what they mean is that they hope it will never happen. But you are correct that as long as Israel continues to be an apartheid state that values Jewish life over non-Jewish, the Palestinian refugees will not be allowed to return to their homeland. However, just like the South African apartheid system was dismantled in the 1990s, so can the Israeli apartheid system. Most people didn't believe it would ever happen until it did. And just like in South Africa, there are Israeli dissidents who are not happy with the racist nature of their state. It's up to the world to support them.
> You can call it whatever you wish, but to Israel it is basically a suicide
If you just repeat something often enough people start to believe it. And in reality most of those people wouldn't want to come back anyway.
And of course, what really is unbelievable is that Israel claims the right to return for literally every Jew in the world, despite most of them having no connection what so ever to Israel for 1000s of years.
Israel actively engages in a demographic battle where the recruit Jews form around the world, to come to Israel.
In Ukraine, if you can prove even some Jews in your family try, you might get a passport for Israel and a nice place to live in Westbank.
Lets be clear here, this is not about what can and can not be done. This is about what leaders of a Apartheit state want to be the case. Its not surprising an Apartheit state doesn't want to remove itself.
Its profoundly fucked up that somebody 1000 of miles away from Israel who was never there had 'the right to return' and those people who grew up there don't.
But that is the entire point. Of course PA doesn’t want refugees to resettle in the West Bank, they want them to return to Israel main. Two states solution means completely different things depending on who you are talking to. To the Palestinians it means two Arab states
Outbrain and Taboola are as sneaky as the cybersurveillance and they might cover the same thing after all. Not sure how far this will go without any consequences until Israelis decide it's not the right thing to do and it is bad for the country in the long run.
They are less sneaky and have less reach than Google and Facebook - but are comparable (they provide some value to users, but mostly to advertisers at the expense of users - and they keep most of that value for themselves. On a smaller scale)
Why do you expect them (or Israelis in general) to decide that’s not the right thing to do? Do you expect the same of Google or Facebook? Or Americans for that matter?
> “Most Israelis think that intelligence is pure and slick,” he says. He came to see IDF intelligence as blunt, dirty work. “Old school things,” he says. Like blackmailing gay Palestinians, he explains. Or threatening to cut off medical care from people with health problems. Or threatening the families of people with health problems. But when it comes to criticism of 8200, K. is an anomaly among his peers. Many are more like Raphael Ouzan — true believers.
I was in 8200 and this sounds like rubbish to me. unit 8200 doesn't directly deal with human intelligence: they don't contact Palestinians/threaten them.
This stuff is done, don't get me wrong, but that's the Shabak's doing. Shabak has way more tools to gather this kinds of info (vast network of snitches, really good Arabic experts etc) and can also use this info since Shabak deals with Palestinians directly.
BTW the cooperation between army intelligence and Shabak is shit, at least that's how it was in my days. So I doubt any data about gays is passed from 8200 to Shabak.
I call bullshit, sorry.
I think blackmailing someone in the closet is almost always wrong -- I'm sure there's some contrived edge case that could be thought of, but as a whole, it's never okay.
Just because most / all intelligence agencies do something doesn't mean it's okay. It's unambiguously wrong.
A theme of this article is to say that you are reachable from the metaphorical armchair of your residence. And if you are gay, you are within reach. If you have a reason for insurance companies to cut you off, then that is the smell of of leverage.
Israeli intelligence is working around the clock to disrupt the actions of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. There are countless terror factions who's sole purpose is to destroy Israel and execute a second Holocaust. You don't hear about the terror plans which were foiled. You don't have sympathy for Israel because they are winning.
No, they also work for money and would snitch on friends to make money. It’s not like other secret services don’t have similar patterns but they’re unequivocally bad. What comes to mind is Saudi Arabia dissidents info sold for money, iphone security broken, lives destroyed or severed completely and solely for money.
This will backfire as more and more friends turn away and become suspcious of what Israel allows to happen
There is no moral high-ground for Israel. They are the colonizing force and they're committing war crimes and illegal annexing of Palestinian land. They're also blackmailing people for being gay as per the article.
>Why do you expect them (or Israelis in general) to decide that’s not the right thing to do? Do you expect the same of Google or Facebook? Or Americans for that matter?
Google and Facebook are hacking journalist's phones and selling access to dictators for the purpose of planning an execution? Citation?
Might be unpopular opinion but I think these do more damage than these private intelligence corporations. they ARE private intelligence corporations, just not (well not exactly) offensive cyber.
Writing code is a great way to make money in the desert. Israel is essentially an island. Also, warfare in the future is likely to be primarily digital, and Israel has many enemies. Israel will lead the cybersecurity and cyberwarfare industries out of sheer necessity.
I don't think warfare will be primarily digital. Similar things were said about airpower, artillery, and naval power. Ultimately you need boots on the ground. If you rely too much on any one thing the enemy will route around it.
Why invade a country, when you can shut down its infrastructure and force them to surrender? War isn't won by killing, its won by conquering. I also suspect that machines will be so effective at killing, that you won't be able to find soldiers stupid enough to fight them head to head. We have yet to see the full capabilities of a cyber super power.
The problem is you are assuming you can do that. Not everything is connected to the internet, and there are backups. You can probably shutdown power for a couple days (and a couple more weeks to be back up to full power), but you can only pull that trick once or twice before they start taking action. It isn't hard to disconnect internet cables (shut down all internet and force the operators to use personal cell phones...).
Likewise, water processing is mostly pumps. Even better, any competent town has backup generators and they keep a few days of fuel on hand, so even if you get the grid down there is water, and the system can function without internet.
That isn't to say you can't annoy life for everyone. However state collapse won't happen because of that. More likely you firm up the resolve to fight.
That stuff is so distributed and so heterogenous that I just don't think a successful attack of that sort is likely.
Edit: Maybe the most sophisticated attack of that sort was the one against the Iranian nuclear program, and while it was successful it and seems to have set back the program it was hardly a show stopper. It also required pretty specialized knowledge of the controllers used to operate the centrifuges (for enriching the fuel). If you consider the enormous variety of controllers and ways of doing things across different plants I just don't see how it would work to shut down a large fraction of even something like power generation.
That talks about poisoning hundreds of people, which would be a tragedy, but not all that unusual for a war. Hundreds of people dying is hardly going to decide a war.
Edit: My point isn't that cyberattacks can't cause real damage. They can and there are many examples of them doing that already. My point is that they aren't enough to win a war because they are by their nature specialized and restricted in scope.
I said it was hard to develop a nation in the desert, I didn't say it was impossible. Israel is a world leader in agricultural technology [1] precisely because of this problem.
I'm glad that there is some internal opposition to the Israeli cyberterrorism trade. However, it is sad that K does not feel that they can come out openly about their position in famously the only democracy in the middle east.
I don't think people understand the
devastation caused by just one of NSO's sales. Every country should teach in school the true cost of their own arms trades.
Depressingly it seems peace can only be found within a weapons contract. How long do we wait for stability and freedom? Which arms shareholder's bank balance needs to be satiated before we can have peace?
This community is full of talented and privileged people, if you are reading this I compel you to not lift a single finger in the way of another person's demise - no matter how sophisticated the abstraction or large the paycheck.
Israel doesn't want to own or control these populations. The west bank is largely self governing, and Israel pulled out of the Gaza strip and helped orchestrate free elections there. Not exactly the same, but if quebec separated from canada and attempted to join the united states, was rejected, and then was self policing but monitored for crime by the US government in response to periodic violence, would you say the US is therefore not a democracy since they barred the people of Quebec from joining the country? Alternatively, if some of the people in Quebec said the US shouldn't exist and devoted the government to eliminating the US, and the US responded with a naval blockade to prevent arms from being shipped to Quebec, would you then conclude that the US is not a democracy? I think you can definitely question Israel's handling of interactions with the West Bank, especially around the military interactions. But I wouldn't say that Israel isn't a democracy. There are people in Israel who want to annex those territories, and make the people in them citizens. But most people in the territories and in Israel don't want that. The people of the territories refuse to be annexed, and most Israelis don't want to annex them.
Israeli armed forces have been in control of these population for 50 years. The West bank is basically a patch work of Bantustan-style territories surrounded by Israel controlled territory.
Israel controls most of the resources, like water and most of the infrastructure. Those things are made available to Israeli settlers but Palestinians are barley allowed to move from one Bantustan to another.
At the very same time as Israel claims not to be responsible for that area, they also claim the right to move in 10000s of people people into that very area every year.
Israel went out of those territories because close domination is expensive, however simply surrounding the territories, taking their resources and restricting their movement is a cheaper way to control the population.
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. This one turned out to be hellish all over this thread, and it's not what this site is for. Nothing so repetitive is what this site is for. High-repetition plus high-indignation equals bad-for-HN.
I'm not saying the indignation isn't understandable—of course it is. But users here need to use the site for its intended purpose, not for things that destroy its intended purpose.
That's such a straw man.
You don't have to build a huge commercial industry around the tech we make for our intelligence bureaus.
The Israeli intelligence has become a way for greedy people to become billionaires at the price of killing democracy.
I'm Israeli, and I know a lot of people in this industry.
I know many people like me who actively refuse to work on active offensive cyber solutions because of moral reasons.
OTH I see many greedy people working in NSO and the only thing they think about is money. They don't give a damn about positive or negative consequences of the industry they work in.
But "We face extermination therefore we should be able to get rich by selling our (cyber)weapons to despots who in turn use it against their own citizens" doesn't sound like a winning argument.
Easy one. Nobody should be selling these things to anyone else. Everyone should keep their weapons to themselves. If you are able to make it, well done now you have that upper hand in that arena. Cant make it? Sorry you can't buy it. Making it and have surplus? Sorry can't sell it - do something useful for society with all that brain power.
Oh I see where the confusion lies. This article is about the cyberterrorism companies inside the state of Israel, that's why. If you have articles where other countries are doing this (which of course they are) then please tag me and I will gladly condemn them also.
If you phrase it like that, then no. how about "We face extermination, therefore we shall train soldiers who will work for us for a while, they will be able to make a living after their service using those skills"
Not sure about you, but I don't concede any moral authority to "The Multibillion dollar global defense industry" so the refutation is invalid to say the least.
I do. warfare breeds innovation via the military industry, jets, computers, internet, radar, advanced etc etc etc etc,
All of which were catalyzed by warfare.
You don't need to like it, but you probably wouldn't be able to let me know without acknowledging it.
Selling Turkey a WhatsApp 0day and operating the C&C servers for use in a war zone isn't contributing to peace and Israels survival, it's a war crime. NSO employees should probably be jailed the moment they leave the country.
If you are Raytheon and you sell someone a rocket, maybe come to their country and teach their personnel how to fire it, that's fine. When they decide to use it, you are not involved.
That is decidedly not what NSO is doing. They run the C&C servers.
C'mon guy, that's not good faith argument. I have a whole twitter full of folks calling for war crimes against what China's doing; Not to mention, Disney got plenty of backlash for that move from the people paying attention. (Google Disney Xinjiang and it's so ubiquitous I don't feel the need to link myself)
Seems your problem is more with mainstream media. You're deflecting from the argument at hand here. Not to mention, the wrongs of the Israeli cybersec industry, like with NSO group, seem much less covered than Xinjiang genocide (to me, but I'm sure there's ways to quantify the coverage differential)
My point is that there's a massive propaganda campaign targeted specifically at Israel. Many Western and non-Western nations are developing these kinds of tools. They are not at all unique to Israel. Yet again and again, we are exposed to publications targeting Israeli companies, specifically.
This article doesn't even try to hide the fact that it is focused on Israel as a nation, while several other nations operate in this space.
> Disney got plenty of backlash for that move from the people paying attention
"So much backlash", yet nothing has been done. Mulan is still distributed, and that thank-you note to Chinese authorities who build and maintain massive prison camps is still there.
It's almost like all these "moral concerns" are just thinly-veiled real politics.
Disney could remove that thank-you note from the Mulan credits. It didn't.
That's the same Disney that takes action against any works in its catalog that have any trace of supposed racism.
So, Disney tirelessly takes action against dubious subtle traces of racism in 60+ year old works, but won't take any action against real racism subjecting millions of people in China, right now. In fact it embraces this current racism.
Why? Because Disney wants the lucrative Chinese market and needs to play nice, cooperate with, and sometimes even praise the CCP which operates these racist prison camps.
So all the moral outrage against racism in the Muppets etc is just meaningless virtue signalling. Everyone is really doing what is in their best interest, but sometimes it is beneficial to dress that up for PR purposes.
Selling their systems to totalitarian governments like azerbaijan is wreaking havok and not advancing peace for israelis. with great power comes great responsibility, yet a lot of israelis play the amoral card in my experience
I wonder, would Israel face the violent opposition it faces today if Israel wasn’t founded through the terrorization of, extermination of, and colonization of the indigenous Palestinian people? It is well documented and widely accepted that groups like the Irgun and Haganah —- led by many of Israels most celebrated figures — resorted to terrorism and genocide to establish the supremacy of the Israelis.
Really? What do you make of former Irgun leader Menachem Begin? FYI he eventually became prime minister and is definitely a celebrated figure in Israel.
How many from the (Lehi)/Stern Gang and Irgun, among others, later achieved high ranking political success in Israel? Both Begin and Shamir come to mind.
Despite siding with the Nazis in WW2, Lehi membership was first granted a general amnesty and later an award was named in their honor.
I think Germany in 30s had broadly a very similar mindset, being humiliated, driven to utter poverty, and they felt they were doing what was necessary to survive as a nation. I guess you don't hear that as an excuse for their WWII atrocities often.
In other situation it would be funny to point direct parallels between above and state of Israel, but this ain't even slightly funny topic. They achieved impressive things, but these kind of actions make them lose any moral points pretty quickly.
Similarly, K. says much of the work he did inside Unit 8200 is far from the sophisticated spyware that’s so often trumpeted. “Most Israelis think that intelligence is pure and slick,” he says. He came to see IDF intelligence as blunt, dirty work. “Old school things,” he says. Like blackmailing gay Palestinians, he explains. Or threatening to cut off medical care from people with health problems. Or threatening the families of people with health problems. But when it comes to criticism of 8200, K. is an anomaly among his peers. Many are more like Raphael Ouzan — true believers.
This is serious because many leaders especially in developing countries where democracy is relatively young are using the same technologies to spy on opposition leaders and activists. Many people are dying and are running away from their homeland because Israel technology is enabling dictators and shrinking the rights of others.
Some years ago I had an interview from a cybersecurity startup founded by a member of 8200 unit.
It was the worst process selection ever: they ask me to perform a demo (with my own hardware, in the nights and weekends) and at least 5 interviews with several VPs and company's key persons. The process seems going well, they made me lot of promises, they told me that we was only two in the final selection step, but suddendly they disappeared and they completely ghosted me.
I send several emails to the HR but he did not reply. At the end, I mailed the headhunter that found me on LinkedIn and he told me that they took other decisions.
This was very unpolite by them, I wasted lot of private time for nothing.
I don't want to do whataboutism and I completely agree that international arms trade is a seriously evil, especially with the kind of partners the article mentions...
But I really don't like the overall tone of the article and the way it paints Israel as uniquely nefarious. Eg:
> In the Israeli cyberweapon sector, he argues, “the companies are implementing government policy.” Mack says Israeli companies are not truly private, like their European or American counterparts. “Israel has so much military sensitivity” that, in effect, many of these cyberweapon sales are “military agreements between governments.”
Oh please.
You will never find an arm sales from French, British or American companies that wasn't mediated on some level by their respective government.
In France the top executives of weapons companies (eg Dassault, Thales) often come from the same school (ENA) as the political elite, and are always well connected to whoever the current president and ministers are. Thales in particular is owned at 25% by the government.
Israel plays the same game everyone else in the world plays, they just happen to have a more immediate stake in it. Any discussion of weapon sales that doesn't mention the broader picture is misleading at best.
> A 2018 study cited by Haaretz estimated that 80% of the 2,300 people who founded Israel’s 700 cybersecurity companies had come through IDF intelligence.
The specific quote is that 8200 grads have founded a large number of cyber security companies in general, and the article follows by discussing specific offensive and surveillance ones (NSO, etc.). My read of the article is that it implies that most of the 700 companies are similar. The link for the study links to a paywalled article about the survey.
Since defensive cyber security is a bigger market, I'd like to know if 8200 grads found offensive companies at a significantly higher rate than defensive ones.
I follow the field, and I'd say defensive companies (anti malware, intrusion detection, monitoring, anti fraud etc.) outnumber offensive companies 100-to-1.
Citizen Lab has covered NSO Group extensively, just search for HN comments or stories ("nso citizen lab"). What NSO Group's selling is much scarier in reality (with more details) than what this article presents (I just skimmed the article).
Maintaining an apartheid regime where half the population is subject to military rule will require big investments in this. I guess it’s profitable for them after all.
Do you have any more information about that? It sounds really interesting, and I think my family used to actually have iSentry cameras at an old house.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
They are blatantly an apartheid state, when you call it "laughably biased" you are implicitly taking the side of the settler-colonialist aggression against the people living their, placing them under siege and military occupation.
The only ethnic cleansing genocide is against the Palestinians who have their land and sea borders occupied, patrolled and militarily enforced at checkpoints. Try that with me, and I certainly will revolt violently. No offense, but these are plain accurate facts and common sense.
That's a very one-sided explanation. I'm not saying that Israel are the "good guys" but there's more to their conflicts with their neighbors than just Israeli aggression.
Only if you believe that Israel's occupation of Palestine is legitimate. In 1948 we knew better that to create a new colonization project (or should have).
You're changing arguments. Your first comment was phrased in present tense and was about current Israeli aggression. Now you are supporting your one-sided view by claiming the original settlement was illegitimate.
The reality is at some point you have to move past history to make the best decision now. It's neither moral nor practical to uproot or kill the people currently living in Israel because the original settlement was wrong or misguided.
Palastinian claims over Israel make as much sense as Taiwanese claims over mainland China (or PRC claims over Taiwan). And I say that as someone who is very against continued aggression from Israel and for recognition of a Palastinian state.
>Your first comment was phrased in present tense and was about current Israeli aggression.
What about Israel regularly attacking the Syrian territory near its capital using Lebanese airspace without permission and allegedly using civilian aircraft to shield its warplanes from return fire? Yes, Israel and Syria are formally in a state of war, but so are Russia and Japan.
Iranian forces on the Syrian soil pose a threat to Israel? Sure. But they stay there with permission from the internationally recognized government (does not matter if you like it or not), so those strikes is a clear act of aggression against Syria and violation of its sovereignty.
And I haven't even touched the Golan Heights, continued occupation of which is clearly illegal under the international law. But who cares about the international law if it's your best buddy in the region, right? You may as well recognize its sovereignty over the territory with zero repercussions.
I think what's missing here is that Israel trying to defend itself from Syrian aggression. Israel's occupation of the Golan heights is in response to multiple Syrian invasions and attacks from the position, and Israel has offered to return the Golan heights to Syria in return for peace. Unfortunately, Syria still chooses not to recognize Israel, and as you point out, hosts Iranian forces on Israel's border. It's fair to say Israel has violated international law in an attempt to protect its sovereignty from Syrian aggression.
> The reality is at some point you have to move past history to make the best decision now. It's neither moral nor practical to uproot or kill the people currently living in Israel because the original settlement was wrong or misguided.
Indeed. No one in the right mind would suggest that the European settlers that colonized North America should go home. However, we very much expect them to treat the remaining Native Americans that they didn't exterminate as equals and also to recognize that a genocide took place.
Israel was founded in much the same way. In 1948, 80% of all Palestinians in what became Israel were driven into exile by Jewish forces. They were prevented from returning while Israel confiscated their property and handed it over to Jewish immigrants. "In Israel, only Jews have a right to return" Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion proclaimed.
To this date, Israel still doesn't allow the Palestinian refugees to return while granting every Jew in the world the privilege of settling in Israel. Israel has not even considered compensating the Palestinians that it ethnically cleansed and whose property it stole.
I think your misconception of the conflict is that it is "all in the past". It is not. 50% of all Palestinians live in exile, unable to visit their homeland. A large fraction of those live in refugee camps or are destitute and dependent on UNRWA for subsistence. Gaza is an open air prison and the underemployment rate is approaching 80%. In the West Bank, extremist Jewish settlers harass Palestinians daily and more and more settlements are being built. In Israel, Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens and explicitly condemned as a threat to the state by leading politicians.
My argument is consistent. Israel was an illegally created colony and it continues its illegal expansion.
I strongly disagree that we should just give up on stopping the Palestinian colonization. For example, one concrete thing that is absolutely politically attainable would be to completely cut the US funding sent to Israel (billions of dollars a year).
I do not think a colony that's less than 100 years old has to be taken "as a given".
a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country.
Which country is controlling and settling the Israel? It's not a colony you are thinking of, at best you can claim it's a part-invasion part-colony, but you are not. you are saying that its all a colony. so you are wrong.
There is no requirement that the colonizers be from a single country. The US is certainly playing part in the colonization by funding Israel. The UK also played a huge role in the creation of Israel. The point is that the colonizers of Israel were not from Palestine, then they created a nation over the top of someone else's land and have aggressively expanded the borders of that nation.
> at best you can claim it's a part-invasion part-colony
I think that's a pretty apt description actually. You have to invade a place before you colonize it.
The significance of the disengagement plan [from Gaza] is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.
Dov Weissglass, senior advisor to prime minister Ariel Sharon
Immigrant would imply moving to an existing country. Please don't confuse this with Israel. Israel is engaging in colonialism, the practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
> Colonialism is where one country assumes political control over another, often by establishing colonies and generally with the aim of economic dominance.
The Jews after WWII weren't a country. They were a group of refugees and holocaust survivors. They created a country for themselves in Israel since they had nowhere else to go. Comparing them to rich powerful nations like the British Empire, which took over other nations to gain even more wealth and power, is dishonest propaganda.
This is where this breaks down. Without support from Britain, France, and the United States the Palestinian majority would not have allowed the formation of Israel.
There are slight differences from traditional colonialism, as there are a few countries working together and the colonists aren't necessarily from those countries. But it still broadly fits that definition.
As I've addressed in previous comments: none of these nations actually helped Israel at all in its early days.
The British in fact actively fought against the formation of Israel, by forcibly preventing incoming Jewish immigration, and actively fighting against the Jewish defense groups that were to be the Jews' only defense against the Arabs who attacked them once the Brits left in 1948:
The US enforced an arms embargo against Israel starting from 1948, and only became its ally after it won a major victory in 1967, proving it to be a valuable regional ally.
Still, the main point is that this isn't colonialism, because Israel isn't a colony of any other country or power.
>Jewish immigration, and actively fighting against the Jewish defense groups that were to be the Jews' only defense against the Arabs who attacked them once the Brits left in 1948:
Yes, while they were fine maintaining their empire they opposed a Jewish state. Sometime during or after the war their policy shifted as they would rather not give such prime land over to a group certain to be bitter over their very recent mistreatment. Better to support the colonization of outsiders and make them dependent on you militarily.
And as for the US, you ignore their role in stopping the 1948 war, their role in the Tripartite alliance, and Kennedy's beginning of the military alliance.
Really not sure what you're trying to say. You admit that the Brits were opposed to the Jewish efforts to establish Israel. In other words, Israel was not established with the help of the Brits, but in fact against their opposition, contrary to your original claim.
I'm not sure what actions by the US during the 1948 war you refer to. From wikipedia:
> This situation caused the United States to withdraw its support for the Partition plan, thus encouraging the Arab League to believe that the Palestinian Arabs, reinforced by the Arab Liberation Army, could put an end to the plan for partition.
In other words, US policy actually encouraged the attack on Israel and Arab hopes that they could destroy Israel and subjugate the Jews.
The only way US was involved at any later point was as part of the UN efforts to establish a ceasefire, after the Jews successfully defended Israel against the Arab attack. In other words, after the Jews already won.
The US allied itself with Israel during the Kennedy administration, i.e. much much later, because Israel won the 1967 war.
Either way, your representation that Israel was established based on foreign powers is not supported by any facts.
As a side note, one of the most capable armed forces that attacked Israel in 1948 was the Arab Legion, a forced trained, organized, and armed by the British Empire, and commanded by British officers:
>Really not sure what you're trying to say. You admit that the Brits were opposed to the Jewish efforts to establish Israel.
Before WWII, they wanted to maintain Mandatory Palestine. As the breakup of the Empire became obvious during the war, they changed their tune and supported Israel.
>The only way US was involved at any later point was as part of the UN efforts to establish a ceasefire,
Ignoring the large amount of US arms that ended up in Israel's hands, you act like US stepping in to end the war is a small thing. Prolonging the war would not benefit Israel, and guaranteeing their gains in the aftermath is what gave them the time they needed to truly colonize.
>much much later, because Israel won the 1967 war.
Kennedy was elected in 1960, and served under a term.
> a forced trained, organized, and armed by the British Empire, and commanded by British officers:
Obviously, as before that the region was a part of the British Empire.
Much of your claims that nobody supported Israel seemed to be based on their resistance to arm the nation. Immediately following WWII, the hope was to limit the ability of such nations to wage war, and guarantee them in case they are invaded. Plus, the west's constant worst fear was arming Israel only for the Kibbutz to take control.
> As the breakup of the Empire became obvious during the war, they changed their tune and supported Israel.
So you're just going to keep repeating this claim, that is backed by zero evidence or facts, and is contradicted by established historical facts which I cited.
You claim that Britain decided to support Israel after WWII, which ended in 1945. Yet in 1948, the most powerful military force that attacked Israel was organized, trained, and armed by the British and led by acting British officers:
>So you're just going to keep repeating this claim, that is backed by zero evidence or facts, and is contradicted by established historical facts which I cited.
None of your facts mention a time past 1942, except the existence of the Arab Legion which I addressed in my last post. As for evidence, the fact that Britain allowed the creation of Israel in their territory is about all you need.
There's plenty of evidence that the Brits took anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli actions after 1942 and even 1945. This evidence is in the links I posted, and you haven't read.
> British troops intervened to stop Operation Hametz, leading to a small battle with the Irgun. The intervention succeeded in preventing a Jewish takeover of Jaffa, while it failed to expel the Irgun from Menashiya due to stiff resistance. To put pressure on Ben-Gurion to rein in the Irgun, British planes flew over Tel Aviv and also bombed Haganah positions in Bat Yam. Eventually the British issued an ultimatum to Ben-Gurion, threatening to bomb Tel Aviv if he didn't stop the Irgun offensive. The next day, an agreement was reached in which Haganah fighters would replace the Irgun in Menashiya, and the Haganah pledged not to attack Jaffa until the end of the Mandate. British troops were allowed to reoccupy the police fort in Menashiya, but the town remained in Jewish hands.
So the Brits fought directly against Jewish defense organizations, engaged them in firefights, bombed their positions, bombed Jewish civilians, and threatened to bomb civilians in Tel-Aviv - Israel's effective capital and largest city.
All that happened in April-May 1948, just as the Brits were being forced out of Israel.
Yet I'm sure you'll keep claiming that Israel was founded with the help and support of the Brits, because you aren't here to debate facts but to promote an agenda.
Operation Hametz was the British trying to stop Jewish expansion during the the partitioning they were involved with to create Israel. Looking just at that incident while ignoring the fact that Britain was creating Israel is promoting an agenda, if they truly opposed Israel they could have ended that insurgency at any point.
The British were doing it for the benefit of British interests, which don't always align with Israeli interests.
There is zero evidence that the British "were creating Israel". This is just a false propaganda point you are repeatedly trying to make, with no evidence and against available evidence.
The wikipedia pages I linked above are full of literally hundreds of examples of British forces acting against the Jewish residents trying to form their new state and defend themselves against Arab attacks. In many of these cases, British forces engaged the Jewish armed groups in direct combat, just like in Operation Hametz.
You and others are not debating honestly here. Your only goal is to spread counterfactual, false propaganda by any means at your disposal.
>There is zero evidence that the British "were creating Israel
It was British Territory, and they allowed a UN resolution through creating the original dual state solution. The petition plan you mentioned earlier was impossible without them. Britain could have ended it before it even started.
>You and others are not debating honestly here. Your only goal is to spread counterfactual, false propaganda by any means at your disposal
Stop making shit up because someone disagrees with you. I have provided plenty of factual information, and anything that goes against your narrative you ignored and go back to claiming my argument only exists out of some desire to spread anti-Israel propaganda. Notice how France and the US have completely disappeared from the discussion.
Multiple times you've completely ignored what I've said about something, and immediately brought it up again in your next post. Like in this post, just because the British opposed Israeli expansion doesn't mean they were against Israel.
Your conspiracy theory that Britain decided to give land to the Jews "to support the colonization of outsiders and make them dependent on you military" makes no sense. Israel has never been dependent on the UK for military support. The UK has even attempted to impose arms embargoes on Israel. Relations between the two countries have been strained at best for nearly all of Israel's lifetime; it was only in the 2000s that things improved. The first ever joint training session occurred in 2019.
>The UK has even attempted to impose arms embargoes on Israel.
During a period where they guaranteed Israel's border with an agreement to intervene in any war. And beyond that, what about the 1956 war? This claim is just ridiculous, not wanting to arm Israel is separate from not making them dependent on the UK military
You've asserted without evidence over and over again that Israel is somehow dependent on the UK for military support, and that this was true around the time of Israel's founding as well.
The UK opposed Israel's creation, armed its enemies, and its officers served in armies that actively attempted to crush the state, while its air force provided air support. If you somehow contest this, and claim that Israel and the UK were close allies despite everything linked to you in this discussion thus far, please provide evidence. It's pointless to continue this while you handwave away numerous and repeated historical references to actual military engagements where the two countries were on opposite sides, and provide no references of your own other than your own assertions.
The first time Israeli and UK forces even trained together was in 2019. The claim that the UK provided long-term military support from the date of Israel's founding is just totally specious.
>You've asserted without evidence over and over again that Israel is somehow dependent on the UK for military support, and that this was true around the time of Israel's founding as well.
> According to Gerald M. Steinberg, the "agreement did not prevent the Arab states from obtaining weapons through their alliance relationships with suppliers, but Israel was excluded.... Little foreign aid was provided by the United States, and Israeli military officials who sought to purchase weapons and ammunition in the United States were rebuffed."
Thus this agreement, that was aimed at stopping the Israeli-Arab arms race (which by itself is a neutral and not a pro-Israeli agenda), led in fact to Israel being blocked from purchasing weapons, while Arabs were still able to purchase them.
This is in fact yet another example of the major powers active in the area - United States, United Kingdom, and France - acting against Israel and its interests.
So I have to conclude you don't bother reading your own links, in hopes other won't as well.
>Thus this agreement, that was aimed at stopping the Israeli-Arab arms race
That is the secondary goal of the agreement. The primary one is spelt out immediately
>The Tripartite Declaration of 1950... was a joint statement by the United States, United Kingdom, and France to guarantee the territorial status quo that had been determined by the 1949 Arab–Israeli Armistice Agreements.
I never said that the countries wanted to prop up the Israeli army, they didn't want it to exist.
I think you are profoundly misinformed on this topic. Britain, in particular, was violently opposed to the formation State of Israel, and the invading armies of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan were in part led by British forces.
Similarly, although the US now is closely aligned with Israel, it disavowed the partition plan prior to the Arab invasion.
The country that (ironically, given later alliances) gave the most direct military support to Israel in 1948 was the USSR under Stalin.
This is the case. Britain had learn that the Zionists were pretty insane group. It was them that started suicide bombing the British to make them leave, so they could start the exact war they later did.
Source, please? The Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi did carry out bombings — as did many, many other groups ruled over by the British, not just Jewish ones, so why that's particularly "insane" seems hard to discern — but I don't believe any of the attacks were suicide bombings. Suicide bombings were first introduced by Hezbollah in the 1980s in Lebanon. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/suicide-terrorism
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. This one turned out to be hellish all over this thread, and it's not what this site is for. Nothing so repetitive is what this site is for. High-repetition plus high-indignation equals bad-for-HN.
I'm not saying the indignation isn't understandable—of course it is. But users here need to use the site for its intended purpose, not for things that destroy its intended purpose.
An ill-informed, un-true and blatantly anti-semitic attitude, although not surprising coming from someone with a link to an anarchist wiki page on their profile.
There’s nothing anti-Semitic about criticizing Israel’s actions. Nothing I said is untrue. They are actively engaging in human rights violations and have since their inception (with the help of the US).
Disparaging an entire nation as "illegal and amoral" qualifies for being vlagged in this forum, I believe. Not to mention the fact that this is a digression from the topic of the thread into vitriolic politics.
This is a vast oversimplification of an incredibly complex issue. Also, calling it "dirty" is a prime example of your bias. Every nation state engages in espionage.
I used to believe there should be a Palestine and an Israel. But, they both want something that they are totally unwilling to share with the other. Furthermore, one has technologically and culturally dominated the other.
Israel has won in the sense that a two state solution is no longer an option. There's not enough land left to give the Palestinians a viable state of their own. So that leaves two options. A continuation of the status quo with Palestinians living under eternal occupation and apartheid surrounded by growing settlements. Or a single state with equal rights for all.
The single state solution is idyllic, but disfavored by both sides because there is shared fear of the country going the way of Lebanon afterwards - devolved into factionalism with zero sense of shared nationality.
Unfortunately that's not an option available to the Palestinians. You don't get to have a one-state solution when you're effectively held prisoner in an apartheid occupied territory.
> Thanks for demonstrating, once again, that biased attacks against Israel are heavily laced with Antisemitism.
Antisemitism is such a tired strawman. Am I accused of sinophobia if I critique the CCP? Of course not. But critique of Israel is so often interpreted as 'antisemetic'.
Please think more carefully about using 'antisemitism'. Israeli power does not represent all Jews - and calling 'antisemitism' to deflect critique of it is just disrespectful to the lived experience of historically oppressed Jewish people everywhere.
> Am I accused of sinophobia if I critique the CCP? Of course not. But critique of Israel is so often interpreted as 'antisemetic'.
Do you have concrete examples? I am getting tired as well of hearing this statement. Usually it's an answer to not much differentiated and thoughtless criticism. (Disclaimer: I'm from Germany and this discussion underwent unbelievable depths over here)
Your comment above is clearly flagged and downvoted due to being transparent whattaboutism. You aren't making substantive arguments of dissent, you're just spamming a wikipedia quote with your own editorializing after it.
I am pointing out a blatant double-standard. The fact that HRC is not condemning egregious mass violators like China, Russia, and Syria, and focuses all its attention on Israel, shows they are not honestly trying to enforce any standard in good faith, they're just trying to attack Israel. That, together with the well-documented participation of Neo Nazi and other openly Antisemitic groups in movements that criticize Israel, shows that criticizing Israel is often linked to biased prejudice against Israel and Jews.
Either way, your subjective disagreement with my post is not cause for flagging, which is supposed to be reserved to objectionable content that violates basic rules against SPAM etc. Users are supposed to downvote posts they simply disagree with, not flag them. Nothing in my posts violates any rules, and their flagging is a clear example of abuse.
The HRC does condem those, you're just trying to cherry pick a naive statistic as some sort of slam dunk proof while deflecting from the banal reason that Israel gets criticized a lot because it keeps doing terrible things. It's possible to have informed views on this stuff without the jingoistic nonsense.
> The following is a list of United Nations resolutions concerning Israel. As of 2013, Israel had been condemned in 45 resolutions by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Since the creation of the Council in 2006, it has resolved almost more resolutions condemning Israel than on the rest of the world combined. The 45 resolutions comprised almost half (45.9%) of all country-specific resolutions passed by the Council, not counting those under Agenda Item 10 (countries requiring technical assistance).
Are you seriously claiming that Israel has committed about the same amount of atrocities as the rest of the world combined?
Just one example from one country that is not Israel: an estimated 500k civilians have been killed as direct result of the Syrian regimes' atrocities over the past decade alone:
How many Palestinian in total, including combatants, died in decades of conflicts with Israel?
Fewer than 10k according to the highest estimates.
You are welcome to keep believing that this is all fine, and there's no bias or Antisemitism here. This is certainly the convenient and politically expedient belief to hold.
No, again, it's possible to simultaneously condemn both Israel and China. Mentioning China by comparison is not a meaningful response to criticism specific to Israel. Counting the number of UN resolutions to claim it's a measure of the proportion of antisemitism is preposterous nonsense. Yes antisemitism exists in the world, but it is not the driving force behind UN policy nor is that a valid approach to measuring bias.
You know you have no substantive response to the criticisms of Israel. The "actually your criticism of a government is antisemitism" deflection is not convincing to those of us who no longer want our tax dollars supporting the actions of a defacto apartheid state.
> So Israel, a tiny nation, received almost half of all condemnations by HRC.
> It's abundantly clear that Israel is singled out for "special treatment"
No, what is abundantly clear is that Israel is a state that engages in supremacist tactics, land grabs, war crimes, and is essentially occupying vast tracts of stolen Palestinian land. Everyone knows it, but because of people like yourself who fling the accusation of "antisemitism" against anyone who dares question your neocon war machine, nobody can say it. There would be far more condemnations against Israel from nations all over the planet if it didn't have such disastrous consequences, politically, to do so.
They served the PM of Japan food out of a shoe. A tremendously offensive, targeted act of personal humiliation. Many such stories. Any attempt to push back on this ruins careers and lives.
Not a surprise that many of the people most vehemently against free speech are your countrymen - you have the most to lose, because if people can freely discuss things from the Balfour Declaration through the Suez Crisis, the USS Liberty, the first and second Gulf Wars, etc. with the positions and actions of your country accurately accounted, you look pretty bad. Much better to clamp down on discussion and call any serious dialogue on the topic Hate Speech so as to avoid having to answer difficult questions.
The defense always comes down to "if you don't agree with Israel's foreign policy, you're Anti-Semitic, and therefore a Neo-Nazi", and it's a weak and tired defense. It doesn't work when the people that are calling you out are diverse and have well-researched positions.
Much like America, your nation has sins to atone for, except I don't see any honest dialogue on the topic emerging. Perhaps you personally could learn how to be a voice for change instead of a partisan troll.
> “This was a stupid and insensitive decision,” a senior Israeli diplomat, who had previously served in Japan, told Yediot Aharonot. “There is nothing more despised in Japanese culture than shoes. Not only do they not enter their houses while wearing shoes, you will not find shoes in their offices either. Even the prime minister, ministers and members of parliament do not wear shoes to work... It is equivalent to serving a Jewish guest chocolates in a dish shaped like a pig.”
> Antisemitism is such a tired strawman. Am I accused of sinophobia if I critique the CCP? Of course not. But critique of Israel is so often interpreted as 'antisemetic'.
In one you criticizing a ruling party, in the other you are criticizing the only majority Jewish country in the world.
Your statement itself isn't anti-Semitic but highly ignorant of the key differences. I don't intend to change your views nor biases but I hope you are able to reflect on what you wrote.
“The nation of Israel was attacked by 7 Arab countries literally the day it was founded”.
So a bunch of foreign powers come in and take land off you and create a new nation state overnight and you’re supposed to just be chill!? Yeah - no shit they were attacked.
I’m not anti-Israel btw. Not in the slightest. I just find it funny that ppl act so shocked that - what was effectively an invasion - was not well received by the locals living in the region in the mid 20th century.
“But it’s their homeland...” Yeah I’d love to see how Americans would react if China/Russia came in overnight and carved out a new action state to give to Native Americans cause it was their homeland hundreds of years ago...
That argument would be more convincing if many of the attacking countries weren't created by the same foreign powers in exactly the same way around the same time.
The borders of Lebanon were set by the French in 1920 as part of the Mandate of Syria and Lebanon. It was recognized as independent by the French in 1941, and the French Mandate more or less dissolved following the end of WWII.
The borders of Syria were similarly drawn up by the French in 1920 under the same Mandate. French troops would not evacuate the territory until 1946.
The territory of Jordan was drawn up by the British around 1915, and they are also the ones that created the distinction between the territories of Palestine and Transjordan. It gained a measure of independence in 1922, but remained under British Mandate until 1946, when it was granted independence with The Treaty of London.
In fact, of Israel's 4 immediate neighbors by land, Egypt is the only one to have existed as any kind of autonomously governed territory prior to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the assumption of responsibility by occupying European powers.
The entire region was basically re-drawn and carved up by foreign powers following the end of WWI pretty much by necessity, since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire left an enormous power vacuum. Far from being an anomaly, Israel's creation is actually pretty consistent with the area overall.
> carved out a new action state to give to Native Americans
I rather like the idea that Native Americans could have their own country if they choose, as Jews do now, something better than reservations. China and Russia have nothing to do with it.
Forgive me, but that’s a pretty one sided view to take.
The local Jewish population was certainly instrumental as were Zionist groups in the UK and elsewhere. But you’re fooling yourself if you think great power diplomacy and the region’s colonial history weren’t also important factors.
I’d encourage you to look into the history of the British mandate, the Balfour Declaration, and the lead up to the 1947 Partition Plan/1948 War. It’s a fascinating story if nothing else.
The British mandate authorities outlawed all Jewish defense forces and tried to confiscate all arms from the Jewish population before they left the region. They also actively prevented Jews from immigrating to Israel:
That doesn’t mean the British state played no role. Are you saying the Balfour Declaration had no impact on developments in the region from 1917-1947?
I’m not saying the formation of Israel was 100% the result of intentional British foreign policy.
Foreign policy is messy and inconsistent. The various actors in the region were seeking different things at different times.
Yes the British were in some cases trying to disarm Jewish militants, but in many cases they were also the ones who had handed out the arms in the first place (eg. The Jewish Brigade).
I don’t see how you can dispute that this a messy, contested historical saga with many factors to consider.
I urge you to read more widely on this topic. If you’re so certain that your position is the correct one, you stand only to confirm your existing beliefs.
> Are you saying the Balfour Declaration had no impact on developments in the region from 1917-1947?
Not much, no. It was largely a symbolic act. Actual British policy remained hostile to the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel.
The fact is, that besides this exceptional, purely symbolic act, the British Empire as a foreign power did all it could to prevent the successful establishment of a Jewish nation in Israel.
> The Jewish Brigade
The Jewish Brigade was part of the British Army, a brigade of Jewish volunteers.
It is true that some individuals who served in that brigade ended up joining Israeli groups that eventually formed the IDF, but these were individual acts by individuals, and by no means an expression of a policy by the British Empire or any other foreign power.
> I urge you to read more widely on this topic.
I'm not sure well read you are on the topic, when your only example of a "foreign power" helping the nation of Israel in its inception is... the Jewish Brigade.
Did you know it was a brigade of individual volunteers within the British Army? If you did, I don't think you'd cite it as an example.
> In September of 1936, Wingate was posted to Palestine as an intelligence officer with the British Mandate. His obsession with the Bible had a profound effect on his views during this posting, turning him into an ardent Zionist and supporter of the idea of a Jewish state.
So this is yet another example of individual actions based on his personal convictions, not of the British Empire acting at the state level.
Compare that to the British official support of other military and paramilitary groups, such as the Arab Legion:
These examples shows substantial evidence for the British Empire itself formally supporting groups that _fought_ Israel. Indeed the Arab Legion was among the chief military forces to attack Israel in 1948:
> During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Arab Legion was considered the strongest Arab army involved in the war.[3] Glubb led the Arab Legion across the River Jordan to occupy the West Bank (May 1948). Despite some negotiation and understanding between the Jewish Agency and King Abdullah, severe fighting took place in Kfar Etzion massacre (May 1948), Jerusalem and Latrun (May–July 1948).
John Bagot Glubb was a British officer in official capacity leading a force trained and commanded by other British officers to a fight against Israel.
It certainly appears that it was individual action instead of state policy, but it did occur with state sanction:
> Wingate quickly conceived of a joint military unit, staffed by both colonial and local Jewish troops, to protect Jewish and British interests, and took the idea to Lieutenant-General Archibald Wavell, the commander of British forces in Palestine. Wavell, intrigued, granted Wingate his permission to set up such a unit. Wingate then pitched the unit to the Jewish Agency and directly to the Haganah (“the defense”), the pre-state Israeli military. The Agency, which originally opposed the idea, eventually had a change of heart, and in June of 1938, the Plugot Ha’Layla Ha’Meyuchadot, the Special Night Squads, were born.
And it sounds like even if it went against the letter of state policy, it certainly fulfilled the spirit of it, at least in other areas of colonial control:
> The SNS fulfilled a dual purpose that likely aided its establishment within a colonial administration opposed to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine: Though it indeed fought against armed Arab insurgents who rose up in increasingly violent acts against British forces and against the Jewish yishuv (the settlement in Palestine), the unit’s stated purpose Wingate may have given to his superiors was to protect the oil pipelines of the Iraq Petroleum Company. The southern of two pipelines (the “TAPline”) which spanned Iraq to the Mediterranean ran for over 1,000 km from Mosul to Haifa, on the coast of British-controlled Palestine, and moved over 4 million tons of oil per year (between two lines) prior to the Second World War. This line was increasingly being bombed and sabotaged by Arab bands throughout the revolt, and as it ran through the Lower Galilee on its course to the sea, Wingate could easily patrol its length with the SNS from his base in Ein Harod.
> Wingate quickly conceived of a joint military unit, staffed by both colonial and local Jewish troops, to protect Jewish and British interests
The SNS were founded to "protect Jewish and British interests" which were attacked by the Arabs under the British Mandate. At no point did the British government start any group, or take any action, to aid the creation of Israel as a independent nation.
At most, you can claim that they sometimes tried to defend the Jews under their mandate from violent Arab attacks. Which makes sense, given that these Jews were under British mandate, supposed to be protected by the British, and massacres of Jews reflected poorly on the Brits.
Compare that to the official British government's actions in creating the nation of Jordan and founding the Arab Legion, and it's clearly much easier to argue that the British Empire helped create and support the nation of Jordan, while doing nothing for Israel, and in fact creating, training, and commanding one of the major military forces which attacked it after inception.
1) who allowed Jews to migrate into british mandate before the creation of the state?
Jews lived in the area continuously for thousands of years before, so some Jews already lived in places like Jerusalem long before the mandate begun. Even modern Jewish immigration to Israel happened before the Mandate, which only begun in 1923.
The Brits tried to limit Jewish immigration into the territory of Israel. The Jews responded by organizing illegal immigration:
Though generally the Brits were pretty effective in blocking these efforts, as soon as they left in May 15th 1948, large waves of Jewish immigrants (especially refugees) flowed into the newly-established Israel.
2) since the british did not opposed jewish state, why did they allow it to form?
It wasn't really their choice. The Brits had a mandate in Israel for a specific purpose. They tried to follow an agenda that suited them, and did not include helping the Jewish minority establish their own country, but instead aligned them with the Arab majority in the region - with the obvious goal of gaining and maintaining influence in the region by this choice.
The Jews understood that very clearly, and launched an insurgency campaign to rid themselves of the hostile and indifferent Brits:
This conflict soured relations between Israel and the UK for decades, arguably to this day.
The Jews accomplished their goal: the British mandate terminated and the Brits had to leave. However, the UK remained bitter towards the Jews and Israel, which reflected in its policy. The UK organized, armed, trained, and in some cases directly commanded Arab military forces that become major foes of Israel, notably the Arab Legion:
The "right of return" is a unique invention with no historical precedent. Ethnic groups got into conflicts since the dawn of humanity, and frequently one would displace the other. Nations won territories from each other in armed conflict.
There was never a "right of return" in any of these cases. Refugees are resettled in available locations.
The refugees in this case are deeply hostile to the nation of Israel and in particular to its Jewish population. That's why they became refugees in the first place.
The idea to try to simply resettle them among the Jews they hate has no precedence in human history. In Israel's case, it will lead to the Jews becoming (again) a persecuted minority, and end their independence. There's no reason to assume an Arab majority will treat the Jews any better than they treated them before 1948 and the decades of conflict that followed - and they already tried to destroy them in 1948.
The Middle East is also not a place where minorities are treated very kindly in general. Neither ethnic minorities, nor religious minorities - and the Jews are both.
TL;DR the "right of return" is an invention by the "social justice" crowd to promote a policy that sounds just and reasonable but is without precedent in human history, and is designed to make the Jews of Israel into a persecuted minority, subject to the same violent attacks they've been suffering for centuries - while stripping them of the protection of having their own state and military force.
Interesting I just find it ironic that israel have the law of return that allowed my friend Dan who has basically 0 material tie to that many to emigrate to israel but banished my friend Ahmed who still have the photos and records of their house and farm land.
I'm not saying this right or wrong but to me it's so extremely unfair especially coming from the people who experienced the holocaust.
The British government opposed the creation of the State of Israel and its armies fought alongside the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan during the 1948 war in an attempt to destroy the state. The US disavowed the 1948 partition plan, which in part led to the Arab and British invasion. The country that provided military support to the nascent Jewish state was not the capitalist West that had previously exerted military authority over the region: it was the USSR under Stalin, as part of an effort to destabilize the British. The USSR was in fact the first country to recognize the State of Israel (ironically, given later alliances in the Middle East). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_and_the_Arab%E2...
I urge you to read more widely on this topic. If you're so certain that your position is the correct one, you stand only to confirm your existing beliefs.
its not anti-Israeli to refute the statement "Foreign powers did not create Israel. Jews did." by pointing out the actual Middle Eastern Jews who lived in the region are the ones doing the worst in modern Israel
> Israel isn't perfect, and has its own internal tensions, much like the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and basically every other nation.
The level of racism in Israel is unique among Western nations:
* 53% of Israelis say Arabs should be encouraged to leave. Only 51% think they deserve equal rights. 46% say that they would not want to live near Arabs [1].
* 52% of Israeli Jews thinks African migrants are "a cancer" [2].
* 96% of Israeli Jews would be uncomfortable with their child marrying a Muslim, 89% say this about a Christian [3]
* 72% of all Israeli Jews thinks it is more important to keep Israel a Jewish majority than to keep Israel democratic [4].
> Trying to use these tensions as a wholesale argument against Israel is like claiming Sweden is an illegitimate country since it's going through social tensions and unrest due to immigration right now.
The tell-tale sign of a right-wing bigot is that they use the uninformed "what about Sweden!"-argument. The idea that immigration of brown-skinned people is a threat to their country because, apparently, and unknown to most Swedes, immigration has caused Sweden to collapse.
My "judgement" is that it is abhorrent to view African asylum seekers who flee war-torn countries as "cancer". I don't think that is an American standard. I don't think it is disrespectful to claim that it is racist to compare humans with cancer.
> Love it when a bunch of new users join the discussion to spread anti-Israeli propaganda.
You've made like 10 comments in this thread. I'm not accusing you of anything. But before you accuse others of "propaganda", maybe take a look at yourself and see who's behaving somewhat suspiciously in this thread.
I've made probably 30 comments in the last thread in which I participated, which had exactly zero to do with Israel. Unlike these new users, I have a history of comments on the site, and I have not joined today just to engage in this very specific thread.
Have a look at that Wikipedia article. No other "power" was fighting for Israel, as it was attacked by Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
This narrative of "invasion" and "stealing land" is entirely false and irrelevant to 1948. Iraq doesn't share a border with Israel, neither do Saudi Arabia or Yemen. Israel also didn't claim any territory from any of the others.
It was just tribal warfare, pure and simple. The Arabs didn't like the Jews, so they attacked them.
Folks like to assume that Israel was "helped" by various "foreign powers", notably the US. The reality? Not only did the US not help, but Israel was under a US arms embargo since its inception in 1948. The alliance between the US and Israel only started when Israel decisively won the 1967 war, because at that point the US figured it was in its best interest to ally with Israel.
Poor choice of words on my part. I meant British occupation of the region at the time and a promise by the British of the establishment of a home for Jewish ppl in the region.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m not anti-Israel. Im saying that ppl shouldn’t be shocked that there was a hostile response by neighboring Arab nations when Jewish ppl asserted their claim to a new state in the region.
Basically what I did a terrible job of trying to get at is - that Israel isn’t special. Try create a new state anywhere and ppl around that area will get mad, doubly so if your beliefs don’t align.
> and a promise by the British of the establishment of a home for Jewish ppl in the region.
That promise meant next to nothing. The British actually tried to confiscate all the weapons held by the Jewish population before leaving Israel. They fully expected (and arguably, intended and hoped) that the Jews would lose to the Arabs in the ensuing war.
> Im saying that ppl shouldn’t be shocked
I think people "shouldn't be shocked" by the 1948 attack, and the many ensuing attacks, because the Middle East is a tribal region, has been such for centuries, and the Jews are a minority there. The Middle East has been an arena of ethnic and religious conflict for over 2,000 years, after all.
> Jews seek refuge from Antisemitism in their historic homeland, immediately get attacked by 7 nations. But this is all their fault, of course.
Of course. That's what happens when you unilaterally found a country on someone's else historic homeland and start an apartheid state.
> Right, all these Jews in Israel are using "many dirty tricks". Thanks for demonstrating, once again, that biased attacks against Israel are heavily laced with Antisemitism.
The bulk of Jewish and Palestinian people in Israel during the founding were similarly recent turn-of-the-century migrants from elsewhere in the Middle East to relatively low-population areas previously lived in by Bedouins and Druze.
The standards you're raising are arbitrary and can apply to all of the other countries that were drawn up after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Many forcibly expelled their Jewish population, while Israel at least offered all residents first-class citizenship. It's tragic that Pan-Arab Nationalist neighbors convinced so many to reject and rebel, and then offered no aid after.
It's been a colonization project since inception and it continues to this day. Antisemitism is not an excuse to colonize others and commit human rights violations.
Not just that. But Jews lived all over the Middle East and now they all been expelled, most into Israel. (Similar story is still being played with Christians of the Middle East.)
That happened 70+ years ago, we have had a genocide as recently as the 1990s back here in Europe [1] and nevertheless the country that got out of that tragedy doesn't feel like it's in an "existential threat" (I'm talking about BiH).
From some point on (I'm betting on the second part of the 1990s, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin) parts of the Israeli establishment decided that it's more worth it to double-down on the "existential threat" discourse because it was good for business instead of really wanting a way out for everyone involved (including the Palestinians), and here we are almost 30 years after the Oslo accords, no end in sight for the tragedy that happens to the Palestinian people, to say nothing of the Israeli citizens that have to live in a constant state of war.
Israel is threatened with destruction right now, for example by Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria.
In 2006, Hezbollah fired rockets and missiles at Israeli population centers. Hamas in Gaza has fired rockets at Israeli civilians literally every year since 2001:
Iran is a nation with over x7 the population of Israel, which is also trying to develop nuclear weapons.
It's very easy to dismiss existential concerns when you live in Europe that has been one of the most peaceful regions on Earth for the past 30 years. Try doing that as an Israeli civilian in a bomb shelter, hearing Hezbollah/Hamas rockets explode in your city. That's the reality for millions of Israeli civilians today.
> when you live in Europe that has been one of the most peaceful regions on Earth for the past 30 years
Transnistria, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine. Not really peaceful.
> Try doing that as an Israeli civilian in a bomb shelter, hearing Hezbollah/Hamas rockets explode in your city.
As an Israeli civilian I say: if you hear rockets explode you chose a wrong city to live at.
You have to understand that Gaza is kind of concentration camp and significant portion of Gaza population are arabs forcefully displaced from villages in Gaza-Ashdod-BeerSheba triangle. Do you expect them to just agree with "facts on the ground" and do nothing?
> Ah, so it's perfectly acceptable to you when rockets hit some Israeli cities, where the poorer Israelis live.
If it's acceptable for them, who am I to judge?
Election after election they vote for the party (Likud) that does consider Hamas a viable partner, transfers them hundreds of millions USD in cash and refuses to support any alternative government in Gaza.
Nations rise and fall based on a sense of common identity, solidarity, and shared fate.
Your comment revealed the complete breakdown of these necessary elements.
As someone who has enormous sympathy for the suffering of the Jewish people, and Israel as a response to that, I do hope that there are very few of you in Israel.
Otherwise, Israel will disintegrate, and you will discover that when you demonstrate smug selfish indifference to rockets hitting your fellow citizens, those same rockets will eventually hit you too.
> for the suffering of the Jewish people, and Israel as a response to that
You do understand, that Israel was established by people, who didn't suffer in Holocaust, but still demanded retribution from Arabs, who weren't responsible for Holocaust, right?
A lot of Holocaust survivors were afraid to admit it until 90-ties for the reason they were considered sub-humans by fellow Israelis.
> sense of common identity
Please, be kind and explain to me, what common identity can be between me, secular son of Ashkenazi Jew, and minister Deri, Moroccan Arab of Jewish religion, who considers my father as good as dead since he married my non-jewish mother?
Given the incredibly polarized state of American politics and society over the past decade, especially the last five years, I don't think that comparison is as true as it was twenty years ago. Probably not the most cogent comparison these days.
American society has polarized, it is true. Still, I believe only a tiny fringe minority will openly claim indifference to the WTC attacks because they haven't affected them personally. Much less show any support for the terrorists who committed these attacks.
At this point it's not even indifference, it's more like animosity between different regions and different segments of society. When was the last time anyone stormed the Knesset?
The US is home to 350,000,000 people. If you gather the craziest of these in one small place, you'll have enough force to storm a (poorly defended) Capitol.
The US always had various fringe, a-social and anti-social groups. Still, Americans do largely share a sense of identity, especially against a common external threat. To judge by some of the comments here, perhaps to a greater extent than Israeli society currently does.
Isreal bombards Gaza with missiles and chemical weapons, and continuously fires at Syria taking advantage of the "moderate rebels" it and its allies sponsor. Meanwhile, they continue to evict 60 year old men from their homes and arrest children. Not to mention Isreal has nuclear weapons but refuses to comply with any international treaties.
I'm sorry that I'm not going to respond to outright false claims, such that Israel used "chemical weapons" in Gaza, especially when you are at the same breath apparently defending Syria, which has been proved to use chemical weapons against civilians multiple times.
Under international law white phosphorous is considered an incendiary weapon, not a chemical weapon. There is a list of chemical weapons and white phosphorous is not on that list, although it is often incorrectly claimed to be so.
The Chemical Weapons Convention, sometimes invoked in discussions of WP usage, is meant to prohibit weapons that are "dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare" (Article II, Definitions, 9, "Purposes not Prohibited" c.). The convention defines a "toxic chemical" as a substance "which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals" (CWC, II). An annex lists chemicals that are restricted under the convention, and WP is not listed in the Schedules of chemical weapons or precursors.
The fact that an American intelligence analyst once during the Gulf War miscategorized WP as a "chemical weapon" when Saddam Hussein used it doesn't change its listing under international law.
Your 'key quote' misses the next section, which makes my case.
> No it's not forbidden by the CWC if it is used within the context of a military application that does not require or does not intend to use the toxic properties of white phosphorus. White phosphorus is normally used to produce smoke, to camouflage movement.
> If that is the purpose for which the white phosphorus is used, then that is considered under the convention legitimate use.
> If on the other hand the toxic properties of white phosphorus are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that, of course, is prohibited, because the way the convention is structured or applied, any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons.
~ Peter Kaiser, spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
Dropping white phosphorus during the daytime (when the illumination features of WP aren't needed) on a school in a dense urban environment is pretty clearly the case where it's considered to be a chemical weapon.
The annex lists chemicals understood to be chemical weapons under the convention, but it doesn't purport to be a complete list, only a set of some examples.
Er, but unless I missed something, Amnesty International didn't claim Israel used it for its toxic properties against humans or animals? They were against it being used for any purpose in Gaza, and chiefly cite it causing property damage. While that's still bad, it's not true that in that case WP counts as a banned chemical weapon. Ergo, the claim is false. White phosphorous is not a banned chemical weapon, and was not used for its chemical properties against humans or animals.
Also, even Amnesty International mentions that the purpose wasn't "illumination" — which would be ridiculous — the purpose was camouflage (which is apparently a typical use case).
The Amnesty International article is against any use in Gaza _because_ any use in a dense urban env is by definition an illegal use of chemical weapons.
Camouflage isn't a valid use of chemical weapons on a dense population when the arguments are taken as a whole. Even Mustard Gas works as a camouflage, it'd mean the whole convention is pretty much unenforceable.
Even the Amnesty International article doesn't call Israel's usage of WP as using a chemical weapon: they call it an incendiary weapon in the very first sentence (which goes along with the Wikipedia article I linked). The Mustard Gas comparison isn't valid; the whole point of mustard gas is to target humans. WP was being used as camouflage, and caused property damage. That can be bad! That can even be a war crime. But being bad or a war crime doesn't mean Israel used chemical weapons against people in Gaza. They used an incendiary weapon that caused a lot of property damage (which is possibly a war crime in its own right).
Edit: the entire Gaza War started with Hamas firing rockets packed with incendiary chemicals into dense Israeli urban environments. I would say many things about Hamas, but I would not say that Hamas has used banned chemical weapons against Israel. I suppose if you believe Hamas has used banned chemical weapons against Israelis, you may certainly believe Israel has done the same. But I think your definition of chemical weapons is significantly broader than international law. AFAIK neither side has done this.
The event they're talking about killed 2 and critically injured 14 more when WP was used over an in use UN run school. I'm not sure how you attached to the property damage component, but it's not a core piece of the argument being made by me or Amnesty International.
Edit in response to your edit: It's not the incindiary part of WP that's an issue, it's the chemical toxicity to humans and animals. Hamas has not used anything approaching chemical weapons by any definition against Israel, despite your attempt to deflect.
Hamas has not used anything approaching chemical weapons by any definition against Israel, despite your attempt to deflect.
Hamas rockets have in fact been filled with white phosphorus, literally exactly the same substance you're talking about, and fired at Israeli cities, intentionally, in attempts to kill Israeli civilians. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_o...
I assume you've been misinformed, or only presented with information from a specific side. But literally both Hamas and Israel have used white phosphorous. That's not a matter of debate, it's just a fact.
International law doesn't consider WP a chemical weapon, which is why no one claims Hamas has used chemical weapons against Israel. It's also why your claim that Israel used chemical weapons against Hamas is incorrect.
Ok, I was mistaken about that one piece. It doesn't help your case.
One of the citations from that line on the wiki page has
> Haim Yelin, head of the Eshkol Regional Council, added: "Everyone criticized Israel for the weapons it's been using, but we must realize that the other side is using illegal weapons."
So, yes, people including Israelis claim that the use of WP is a chemical weapon and illegal.
You get how taking unexploded munitions and sending them back over is a different thing than using them originally in the first place, no?
I searched the wiki page for that quote, since it doesn't mention chemical weapons, and it doesn't appear to exist on the page. Do you mind providing a reference? Weapons — and certain uses of weapons — can be "illegal" without being violations of chemical weapons bans.
I admit to being a bit suspicious that this quote claims anything about "chemical weapons." What the international community has criticized Hamas for, as per the wiki page, is indiscriminately firing rockets at civilian areas — which is illegal. They used white phosphorus in the rockets as well, but even prior to that, as per the wiki page they were filling rockets with TNT and explosive fertilizers, which use their chemical properties (of explosion) to kill people too. So if chemical properties of lighting on fire count as "chemical weapons" (they don't though), I think the chemical properties of TNT would suffice as well.
As per numerous [1] articles [2] and sources [3] the international community does not even consider Israel to have ever revealed owning chemical weapons (although it is suspected that they do); if white phosphorus was considered a chemical weapon, there would be no question: Israel has publicly used it, and publicly admitted to using and owning it [4]. Your claim is just incorrect.
Edit: even the Human Rights Watch article you linked disagrees with you! It criticizes Israel's use of white phosphorous because it violates international law on indiscriminate weapons use — the same laws Hamas broke with its rocket attacks — and specifically says that white phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon. Quote:
White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon and is not banned per se. But like all weapons its use is restricted by the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law: it must be used in a manner that adequately distinguishes between combatants and civilians, and it may never target the latter.
I think this is the end of the discussion. Even the sources you have tried to provide contradict your claim that Israel used "chemical weapons" on Gazans.
Literally nobody considers WP as a "chemical weapon" in the same sense as Sarin Gas was used by the Syrian regime against its own citizens over the past decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack
You and others are obsessively focused on any collateral damage caused by Israel which is trying to defend its citizens against deliberate rocket attacks launched by terrorists from civilian population. Meanwhile, you ignore far more egregious violations by the enemies of Israel, like Syria.
You use hyperbolic and unjustified language to condemn Israel for using weapons nobody considers "chemical weapons".
This is bias, pure and simple. Some of you have been brainwashed to obsessively hate Israel. Others were Antisemitic to begin with. Either way, you are now prejudiced.
> If on the other hand the toxic properties of white phosphorus are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that, of course, is prohibited, because the way the convention is structured or applied, any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons.
~ Peter Kaiser, spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
Yes, people consider WP a chemical weapon. It's been cited several times from several different sources from authorities on the matter.
I also condemn in the strongest terms the US's use of WP in urban areas which I also consider a war crime (and several others do as well).
As far as Syria or any other, why do you think I accept their chemical weapon use? But just because someone else is using chemical weapons doesn't give Israel a pass.
The roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict were all laid out in 1948 and the years immediately preceding it. 1948 also reflects the attitude that Israel's neighbors have repeatedly taken towards it, namely: trying to destroy it.
Israel was attacked again in 1973, 1991, 2006. They suffer regular rocket and terror attacks to this day.
It's also hard to blame all aggression in the region on the Israeli (Jews) when we recall that they were attacked by all neighboring nations as soon as they tried to find refuge in Israel, before there was any history of hostility.
Simply put: Israel's neighbors targeted it for destruction from day 0.
Uhm... At least 32% of those living there would probably beg to differ.[1] (Or 55%, if you look at the actual partition plan.[2])
In any case most of the rest of the region was carved up by the occupying European powers in much the same way, including the creation of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.
What I said shouldn't even be controversial. It's sad how many people here are supporting Israel's war crimes and colonization of Palestine. It's a country that was created in 1948 on top of existing people. They continue to commit human rights violations and expansion of territory. The time has come to recognize our own role in this (as a US citizen, my tax dollars are partially responsible) and do something about it.
> It's sad how many people here are supporting Israel's war crimes and colonization of Palestine. It's a country that was created in 1948 on top of existing people. They continue to commit human rights violations and expansion of territory.
I'm sure you know this but Israel was there long before Palestine existed; Israel was colonised by Islamists in the middle ages, it's the Palestinians that are the invaders.
Israel colonized people who have been living on that land for over a thousand years, and they did it in the 20th century with the help of western global powers. Since then they have engaged in ethnic cleansing, illegal annexation of land and war crimes. They are the invaders.
> Behind NSO Group, there are many more. Cellebrite offers services to reconstruct data deleted from devices. NSO’s sister company Circles sells the ability to locate a person’s physical location using only their phone number.
Terrifying stuff. All this makes me wonder: nowadays, how are citizens living under oppressive governments ever to conceivably organise any kind of resistance? Such pervasive and all-encompassing surveillance makes it impossible that any kind of opposition can ever be mounted, if citizens can be monitored everywhere at all times. Absolutely depressing stuff.