> As of May 2024, these campaigns do not appear to have meaningfully increased their audience engagement or reach as a result of our services.
Just like I've predicted many times on HN.
Text generation is low on the list of things needed to successfully engage in automated spam. Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest. And funny enough the ex-OpenAI people (mostly Helen) calling for gov regulation said GPT should not have been released to the public because of this risk.
In a way, I find your comment unintentionally hilarious. Sure, this may actually be true. Consider the source, however. Congratulating yourself by quoting the tobacco company's own research of (the lack of) adverse effects of tobacco seems a tad ill-conceived. The talk of reputation makes it doubly so, since on this topic Sam Altman or any official OpenAI post has no credibility whatsoever.
> Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest.
This is not the whole picture at all. I’d even say mostly incorrect. You can definitely influence public opinion with a social media consisting entirely of bots, provided the public aren’t aware of it.
A lot of social consensus is often made when huge threads on twitter or Instagram have a massive number of supporters behind a topic. So when bots get better at all saying the same thing in seemingly human voices, it trains us to believe that is popular, and likely that that is right
The wild part about this, at least to me, is the wholesale incompetence demonstrated by Israel in this regard. If I couldn't google the talking points the bots make and see Israeli officials saying the same things, one would think these bots were Iranians acting with the intent to make Israel look bad.
What's the incompetence? Having talking points? If you have a group of people trying to advocate for something, isn't "talking points" something you expect would arise organically? I'm sure YIMBYs have "talking points" as well (eg. how it'll reduce housing costs or whatever), but nobody would say that's "wholesale incompetence" for having them. Or maybe it's having it easily searchable? I'm sure if you search around you can find YIMBY bloggers on substack or whatever saying how good YIMBYism is. Aren't those basically "talking points"?
James Bamford has written extensively on this. Pathetic that the FBI doesn’t arrest any of them as acting as unregistered foreign agents, but not surprising given the cowardice of DC officials in the face of AIPAC.
It's a very interesting thing, it demonstrates something uncomfortable & scary to me as a goy Zionist, who hangs out in a private, predominantly Jewish, space.
Note the biggest word in the cloud: UNRWA. All my confirmation bias was in one direction in October. The oddly dissonant and desperate messaging you'd see made things extremely difficult to maintain that, like, you have to be of a very specific mindset to see message after message about the evil UN and not say, "uh, did we go off the rails somewhere?"
(n.b. this was in a lefty Jewish space, broadly denigrating governmental institutions isn't a usual virtue signal)
Going back to the beginning, there's an uncomfortable willingness/ignorance of Overton window widening, in a way that reduces sympathy rather than engenders it, and all of a sudden, otherwise kind people are engaging in rank racism*, glorification of destruction, and extreme conspiracies**.
* lots of "no such thing as innocent Palestineans", "Palestineans love redacted", when questioned, turns into "it's not racist if they're not a race, and they aren't because bla bla bla"
** Day after day after day of the bailey, "World Central Kitchen was trying to smuggle terrorists", coupled to the motte "Jose Andres held a barbecue buffet! Lol!"
Out of idle curiosity, how did you arrive at Zionism from a non-jewish and leftist background? That has to be one of the rarest identities to simultaneously associate with.
Thank you for asking, it's sublime to see that you're unique in others eyes, very hard to see yourself
Let me really blow your mind: also, raised very conservative Catholic, didn't do Confirmation, then was Muslim for about 6 years
It's all a long story. Catholic, LGBTQ stuff rubbed me the wrong way and in some of the deepest grace I've seen, my religious educator encourage it.
Muslim, I was essentially on my own once I turned 15 (abusive and absentee parents) and transferred from Catholic school to public school (save $$), and the most welcoming people were foreign, the rest had been in the same classes for a decade. They didn't prostelyize, it was fun going there on Friday nights to play dodge ball, it was little incremental work to show up earlier and it felt good.
Zionist...I swear to God there wasn't a single negative word about Jews or Israel or other religions at either of the 2 mosques I went to. There was a quiet understanding that Palestinians were hurt and that it was a bit melodramatic at times, given they had structural issues on their own side.
In general, I'm an inveterate both sides er, and I'm guessing knowing a lot of avowed older Zionist as well as Muslims makes me feel secure in "ugh there's some extremists / ignorant people in group X" rather than "wow group X is inherently evil"
And now you're making me think maybe the parents have more to do with it than I realize. It took a lot to finally say...wait, no...what they're doing is wrong and I don't owe them anything. As long as I'm thinking things out and rational, I'm doing my best. Adds to the comfort with tendatiousness/both sides and confidence in holding to it.
(Ran out of posts on main, so this is from my old backup when I was gainfully employed at FAANG)
Ah! You’re your own Jerusalem; ever in the middle. :)
That does make more sense: unless I read you wrong, leftism wasn’t a real sway here - and that’s easier to square away. Leftist Zionism is (as far as I can tell), almost only advanced by Jews.
Neat, though I’m perhaps confused as to how you might even arrive at Zionism (a rather polar position to take).
> like, you have to be of a very specific mindset to see message after message about the evil UN and not say, "uh, did we go off the rails somewhere?"
I think saying "evil" anything is wrong. But the UN is still a body made up of people, and like everything has its flaws. Its done some things that have turned out great and truly made the world a better place. Its done other things that haven't worked out so well. I certainly don't think it is above criticism.
For the record, I agree wholeheartedly. It's hard to word these things. I hope it's clear the meaning is short of "The UN/UNWRA is above all criticism", happy to explicate at length if it isn't (I wouldn't be surprised, at all, anything I write on this looks like an unnecessarily mousey person's verbal diarrhea to me :) )
I can understand why Israelis might be suspicious of the UN. The relationship between UN and Israel seems kind of fraught in a way that isn't true of pretty much any other country. The not allowing israel to fully vote until 2010 (edit: 2014), the (arguably) unequal focus only Israel's human rights record relative to other countries, and the whole UNRWA being totally different with different rules than any other refugee group, all make israel a bit unique in its relationship to the UN. I could easily understand how someone from Israel might feel that the UN treats them differently from other countries and is perhaps biased against them.
> the (arguably) unequal focus only Israel's human rights record relative to other countries
Two thoughts on this:
Firstly, every time a country is getting criticized for it's human rights abuses it, like clockwork, raises the spectre of being "unjustly singled out" about it's human rights abuses. To be clear, I would very much like every country on earth that engages in human rights abuses prosecuted for it, including mine, and specifically every U.S. President that's still currently alive since they are ALL guilty of them in varying degrees. And that way, we can't be accused of biases.
Secondly, I believe it's fair, even if we are biased against Israel in this way, to be biased since it has the rather unique position of being a state that exists solely because of and by the authority of the West. It is a colonialist project and has been from it's inception and I don't think you can take this situation on fully without acknowledging that fact.
Debating whether it should or shouldn't exist is rather moot at this point because it does, and tons of people live there who have committed no crime and done no wrong. That said, it is at the end all, an ethno-nationalist state built on a foundation of war crimes too numerous to count, that is currently incrementing as they barrage an utterly impotent neighbor to death, and it is doing so with the enthusiastic encouragement of FAR, FAR too many colonial powers. Maybe that's enough to say, ethically, that all of it's citizens should be displaced, maybe not. I do not know the solution. My point is that Israel's existence, in entirety, is violence perpetrated against every country it borders with, it wars with, and who's land it sits upon. That cannot be ignored.
> Firstly, every time a country is getting criticized for it's human rights abuses it, like clockwork, raises the spectre of being "unjustly singled out" about it's human rights abuses.
My favorite one of these is when South Africa would say that the only reason people were angry about Apartheid was their obvious "anti-Boer prejudice." Which sounds stupid, until you remember that the British rounded up Boers and put them into concentration camps. It's still stupid, but if you accept the premise that being abused gives you the right to abuse, it's a claim as legitimate as any other of that type.
> My point is that Israel's existence, in entirety, is violence perpetrated against every country it borders with, it wars with, and who's land it sits upon.
They could have just torn down the walls, and still can. Israelis can call the resulting country Israel, and Palestinians can call it Palestine. It only requires both groups to give up any dreams of theocracy. What made the PLO and Arafat so distasteful to Israeli power players was the fact that they were secular, reasonable, and making moral arguments, not theological ones. People whose goal was to wipe out the Palestinians vastly preferred Hamas.
I feel like comparing just to china is an unconvincing argument.
I think a more reasonable argument would be number of resolutions relative to the behavior in question and the types of behavior that are criticized.
Israel has basically been condemed more times than all the other countries combined. At the same time while Israel is not perfect there are objectively much worse countries out there. There are countries ot there where citizens have no civil rights, there are countries where slavery is effectively still a thing, etc. It seems impossible to explain this disparity of attention except by politicization and bias.
Second the behavior criticized often seems quite minor compared to things in other countries the human rights council is silent about. For example, in 2018 Israel was condemed for allowing people in the golan heights to vote in municipal elections. The argument goes that since that should be syrian territory, its wrong to treat the people there like citizens. Without getting into the pros and cons of whether that is right or wrong, it seems crazy that given all the terrible human rights abuses in the world, extending voting rights to people is what the human rights council is trying to stop.
Sure. I'm not doing a PhD thesis on this topic. I just came up with one example on the fly. I don't think it's particularly unconvincing but anyways. My main point is that we can actual quantitatively convince ourselves that Israel is singled out.
Re: Golan heights that's a particularly interesting example since if Israel does not let people vote in occupied territories then it's condemned as an "Apartheid State". But if it does then it's condemned for something else. Basically Israel can not win, condamned if it does, condamned if it doesn't.
This is exactly what I'm referring to in the root comment.
#1) The China claims are straight up lies. I'm a Zionist, I was willing to believe it, then I googled it.
#2) "our human rights abuses aren't relevant because there's others" isn't convincing
#3) the implication that other human rights abuses aren't policed is another google-able lie
#4) we got slapped on the wrist by the world for being an offender, thus we are a victim, is obviously fallacious in a way that is alarming to anyone who isn't prioritizing self-soothing, instead of prioritizing Zionism
#5) the Golan Heights stuff is really rank. It's not about "preventing voting" it's about turning territory that isn't Israel's into Israel's, a huge, massive, problem and violation of international law for many, many, many years
You don't get to say "I Googled it and it's a lie". How many security council resolutions and UN general assembly resolutions are there condemning China vs. how many condemning Israel? If you say it's a lie let's have those numbers.
The best I can find Googling is: "Joint Statement on Behalf of 50 countries in the UN General Assembly" which is very different than the criticism Israel is getting from the UN.
#2 - This is not the argument at all. I'm not even debating "human rights abuses" though I think there's plenty to debate there. Even under the lies propagated by Israel's critics Israel is receiving unfair treatment.
#3 - Show me the proof. Don't say "Googleable lies". How are human rights abuses by Palestinians in the west bank and Gaza enforced by the UN? In Syria? Saudi Arabia? Iran? I mean the list is endless. Give me some measurable criteria that supports your ridiculous claim that equal standards are applied to Israel. Again, without even debating the validity of the claims against Israel, many of which are debatable.
#4 - "We" get attacked by the world for using force to defend "our" citizens. The offense in question is daring to do what other countries have done and what international law allows countries to do to defend themselves. Wars are not a sterile matter. The US and the UK e.g. had many questionable incidents in their various endeavours to guy fight random bad guys around the world. Israel is far from perfect and we can ask for a much better government than the bunch of morons running it and we can be critical of many things, but what we're seeing isn't legitimate criticism, what we're seeing is a political lynch mob.
#5 - So we should have handed it to Syria, without a peace agreement, so we can have Iran's militias on the high ground above Israel's north and more cities in rocket range? Or we should have kept it as "occupied" territory where people would say "Apartheid", how can you not give those guys rights? Make up your mind, either Israel is "Apartheid" for not giving e.g. Palestinians voting rights, or those are occupied territories that are waiting for a peace agreement? And that ignoring the legal debate about the precise status of those territories.
I'm a Zionist. Please don't troll me about being part of some They screaming apartheid, and please don't troll about how you can't find any security council resolutions on China. It cheapens our cause. Shameful.
People are smart enough to see that, and it's clear you think about this enough to know exactly what you're doing by bemoaning the lack of security council censure of China, and it cheapens our cause to have behavior like that affiliated it with it.
I'm not trolling. Can you make a coherent counter argument that's not "I'm a Zionist stop embarrassing us". I'm stupid. Explain your position to me. Is your point "ofcourse the security council is not going to go after China" or is your point "they go after China, who is really committing a genocide, just the same way they go after Israel fighting a war", or is your point "China is cool, Israel is committing the terrible crimes and so ofcourse the UN goes after it"?
Tell me what you're claiming and what metric or some objective method we should use to measure your claim. I'm claiming Israel is picked on in the UN disproportionately. I can't even tell from your reply what's your position on this topic.
I wouldn't call myself a Zionist. I'm an (ex-)Israeli. The right of the Jewish people to live in Israel is an axiom for me. It's ridiculous that's debated. It's a fact and Israel is not going away.
I think your point is maybe don't use China as an excuse. That's maybe fair enough. But it's not the topic. I'm not debating whether Israel should have a pass for genocide because China does, I'm debating whether Israel is disproportionately attacked which is what I would consider antisemitism. This claim can be debated independently of the other multiple things there are to debate here. Israel should not have free pass to do anything and it should also not be subjected to the lynch mob it's being subjected to, these are not mutually exclusive.
How were all security council resolutions on Israel blocked, until one got through, 2 months ago?
How can a security council resolution be blocked?
Who is on the Security Council?
If you just don't know the basics of what you're talking about, my apologies, not a troll, just ignorant, opinionated, and willing to claim anything and everything for your argument, and make others do the work of explaining why the refs aren't rigged while you weaponize dead bodies to make your argument for it
I'm sorry but you are still avoiding my topic. Is or isn't Israel singled out by the UN? What is the metric of your choice? What is your opinion/position? Pick Asad killing 600,000 civilians or pick other examples of your choice and metrics of your choice.
UN Security Council resolutions against China is technically a dumb example on my side but my original statement you called a lie was:
> We can measure "unjustly singled out" fairly well.
> How much condemnation from the UN has China received for what it's doing to the Uyghurs?
> How many times has the UN security council discussed that vs. discussions related to Israel?
You googled that and found it's a lie. That means China was discussed more times? (veto isn't relevant to this question) The UN has otherwise condemned China (veto isn't relevant to that either) more times than Israel? What exactly is the lie here?
The US vetoes some/most security council resolutions against Israel. And sure, China can and will veto resolutions against itself. So that is your counter argument? As I said, you pick the metric. How many vetoed resolutions were there against Israel and how many against China? How many meetings to discuss these issues? If the security council wants to make a statement, as it seems to want to do endlessly against the US and Israel, then certainly it can keep bringing proposals and let China veto them, right?
What about the general assembly? China has no vetoes there.
I picked China off the top of my head as one of an infinite list of severe human rights violations that the UN shrugs off. Maybe it wasn't the best example. We can pick the Turkish and the Kurds. We can pick Syria. We can pick Azerbaijan. We can pick Pakistan. Saudi's actions in Yemen. I mean literally the list of "bad things that happen in the world that nobody cares about because no Jews" is endless. Most of the world is in a terrible state. You're nitpicking me on veto rights but you're not addressing my point.
Israel is singled out. It is the target of endless lies and racism. It is the target of antisemitism. There is no doubt about that and I'm not sure how you can be a "Zionist" and not see that.
This does not mean everything Israel does is right or that there's no criticism to be levelled at it. My argument isn't Israel should get a free pass because look how bad the world is. My argument is Israel is subject to antisemitism and double standards.
And this is before we even start debating the facts of the war and the history of the conflict.
> I'm sorry but you are still avoiding my topic. Is or isn't Israel singled out by the UN?
Honestly, I haven't read more than a couple sentences of these obsessive rants in 3 comments, just enough to check what you've learned about the UN so far.
This isn't behavior I expect to see on HN, and after reviewing the thread, it looks like its a consistent issue, across multiple threads: you ask questions addressed long ago, claim people aren't answering them, then go rabid with page after page telling us the answer. Thanks for your insightful contributions.
I mean, you said it yourself, you found the UN criticizing Uyghurs. Then, we can also find Uyghurs have bombed and missiled Beijing. You lied, sorry.
Then you went off on me, a Zionist, about how I'm yelling apartheid(?).
Then you went off about how the security council (with China on it??) is the real measure.
Then you went off on I never answered if I thought UN was biased against Israel compared to China (???) We can start again from there if your interest here is curiosity. Is it?
> Isn't the US a colonialist project from its beginning? Isn't Canada? Isn't all of South and Central America? Australia? New Zealand? Jordan? Saudi Arabia? and the list go on.
I mean, yes? And while in a better world we'd have proper solutions to that that would render unto these various peoples the land that was unjustly stolen from them, that is neither practical nor realistically achievable (undoing everything done to America and sending all Americans back to the various places they came from is quite a logistical undertaking, and we've decimated the various native populations to a degree where re-settlement would take quite a long time). Fortunately the vast majority of exploited peoples, Palestinian and otherwise, share a commonality with the vast majority of the rest of humanity; they don't want revenge or domination, they simply want to exist free of oppression, which is quite a bit easier to do (though not easy thanks to entrenched settler supremacist ideas worldwide).
So, stop spreading propaganda that they're inferior, stop excluding them from the halls of power, let them participate in determining the destiny of their societies, give reparations, etc. etc. I don't know if these things will be enough for all of these groups, they were harmed in different ways and the wounds are in different states, but it certainly beats what we've done so far, which is status quo while endlessly debating it.
> Fortunately the vast majority of exploited peoples, Palestinian and otherwise, share a commonality with the vast majority of the rest of humanity; they don't want revenge or domination,
It seems pretty hard to square this with the rhetoric and actions of Palestinian leadership, especially Hamas.
Like if this was their goal, why are they so opposed to a two state solution? It seems like they could easily have had this if they wanted it. Instead their leaders became obsessed with revenge against a militarily supperior force, and the results lead to the present day.
[To be clear, there have also been plenty of missed opportunities for peace on the israeli side as well, but it seems at least the israeli side has at various points in time made good faith attempts at finding peace, even if it ultimately went no where]
Alongside the other comment, Hamas is far from popular in it's leadership position in Palestine. Probably something to do with the last election being in 2006. Saying it is representative of all Palestinians is a pretty tough reach.
I think you are confusing hamas with the PA. From what i understand, the reason that there have been no elections is because those who are de-jure in power know they would lose to hamas if an election was held.
Regardless, at some point it doesn't really matter how popular leadership is, only that, whether rightly or wrongly, they are in a position to give orders and have those orders obeyed.
The current Hamas charter calls for a 2 state solution with the internationally recognized 1967 borders. But what's written and what leadership would accept might be two different things.
Even what is written is kind of questionable and seems more like wanting it both ways, just look at the beginning of the wikipedia article on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter
You are imagining propaganda but are spreading much of it yourself in my opinion. Israel exists because Jews were prosecuted. If there were reparations, it would be quite the sum going to Israel or Jews living in other countries.
Israel exists because the West wanted a seat of military power in the Middle East. Just like America exists because various European powers wanted to exploit the Americas, until American leadership wanted to stop cutting them a slice. Just like Peurto Rico is directly under America's authority yet remains entirely unrepresented in it's government. Colonies all, of various justifications.
We exist in a world built by colonialism, by exploitation, who's foundations are lousy with the bones of cultures we dominated, some to extinction.
The idea that Jews needed a nation of their own after the Holocaust was debated at the time and remains so to this day, especially since the nation that was created is now engaged in it's own genocide. However there was no reason at all Israel HAD to be in the Middle East, apart from the fact that none of the colonial powers that worked to create it felt the urge to carve away their own land from themselves, and felt quite comfortable taking it from a bunch of nations who had zero say in the process.
I don't know if a Jewish state was needed or not, I'm not educated enough on the subject to have an opinion, but I know it was far from a consensus, and irrespective of how you want to slice that particular issue, the fact remains the powers that be at the time who were responsible for Israel's creation did not do it on land that was there's to give, but instead on other's. And said other's have had pretty understandable tension with Israel ever since.
> Israel exists because the West wanted a seat of military power in the Middle East
I think this is mixing up time periods. This doesn't make sense in the context of the 1940's/early 1950s.
Later on, sure. USA wanted a military base to counter soviets becoming buddy buddy with several of the Arab countries... typical cold war stuff. But i don't think that is historically accurate in the immediate post-war period. If for no other reason than at that point in time Israel would make a shitty military base.
Israel isn't involved in a genocide and it was their homeland once. If they are colonizer so is everyone else involved here at least. It doesn't carry any meaning.
Your tensions with Israel might indeed be understandable, meaning the prevalence of such animosity isn't really something new. In that regard I indeed believe that Israel needs to exist.
I also disagree that this was a plot by the west. Of course some pretty smart political moves enabled the foundation of Israel. But that was a special interest group. There were strategic considerations by nations involved, but there is much more to it.
If you want to get rid of your bad conscience of your colonial part, pointing your fingers at Israel surely is the wrong thing to do.
That's a laughable argument, comparable to Italian fascists claiming Romania as the legacy of the Roman empire. Israel is built majority on refugees, and secondly on colonizers who hold a tenuous connection to the land. But you don't get to claim 2000 year old grievances, especially if your supposed ancestors share as much genetic material with the current inhabitants. Political zionism always had fascist components, but it really turned for the worst in the last 40 years, and I truly do not understand how an educated individual cannot see the parallels to the rise of fascism 100 years ago or apartheid South Africa 40 years ago. The post-holocaust refugees at least at large had the decency to recognize the injustice they put on the palestinians, but their children turned to a maximalist, fascist, and deeply dishonest ideology instead.
I won't deny there exists a rise in extremism in Israel itself.
That said, my education strongly tells me that there is indeed something reflecting fascism coming alive and I don't look at Israel here.
The self reflection about innocents being harmed is something that you can see exclusively in Israel with very few exceptions. That is not an indignation of Palestinian children that have constantly exposed to severe propaganda, but at least have the decency to not blame Israel for that.
The parent comment also was wrong with his analysis of Israel being a result of western powers wanting some form of outpost. This is just bad history.
Clearly people in this discussion are getting different views of reality. There is definitely a long term rise in extremism in Israel but what that means to someone who is closely familiar with Israel and someone who is not can be two very different things.
I don't think people outside Israel think that Israelis are engaged in self reflection. That aspect isn't something that's reported on. There are some Israelis that don't care about innocents in Gaza, and it's easy to just pick up that story if it furthers the reality that you believe in. Reality isn't one, or two, or one hundred stories. It is a continuum.
Israel being a "western colonial enterprise" is not an analysis. It is a talking point. I've seen it hundreds if not thousands of times in online discourse on this topic. It's something that has been pushed for some time (a decade or two?) in various circles. The history of Israel can be studied superficially in one semester in University. To really understand the period and all the nuances, and the related historical processes, get a PhD. There are good lectures on YouTube by historians and good resources on the Internet that give you a taste but you need to put in time.
It's also about the semantics, what exactly do these terms mean, a common theme in the information war arena is to use words in unusual ways or to redefine them in a way more convenient to your cause.
Jews maintained a pretty strong connection to the land. They keep praying to be in Jerusalem and Zion. The connection is a central part of their identity and faith. Jews also generally stayed together as a people and a group and genetics do show this connection. It's not exactly a secret that Jews had a country in the region- it's mentioned in the most popular book in existence.
I'd say the connection of Israeli Jews to the land is stronger than the connection of most citizens of most countries to their land. To descibe that as "tenuous" is at best unfair.
[EDIT: erased a bit of not so nice retort]
Israel's right wing isn't very different than right wing parties in other parts of the western world. I'm not a fan of Israel's extreme right but conflating the violence between Israelis and Palestinians with either the rise of fascism or South Africa is just again yield to propaganda. The various governments of the Palestinians, the PA or the Hamas, make the Israeli right wing look centric. Put aside the various labels that are intended to dehumanize the Israelis, after Israel tried in earnest to make peace roughly around the proposed two state solution and was met by a wave of Hamas suicide bombers that impacted at some level every single Israeli, what do you think is an actual solution here?
I'm originally from Israel. No Israeli that I know thinks that Palestinians are inferior. Famously the ex-Israeli Prime Minister Barak said that if he were a Palestinian he might have become a terrorist himself. I'm not saying it's not a thing in certain right wing circles but painting all of Israel with this brush is not right. If anything there's a tiny minority in Israel that would consider Palestinians inferior to Israelis (or Muslims inferior to Jews or whatever). Plenty of right wing nazis everywhere in the world.
You're also wrong on the Palestinians willing to move forward. They had plenty of chances. They absolutely do want domination. For the most part the story that land was unjustly stolen is factually wrong. Land was bought by Jews during Ottoman times legally. Palestinians never had a country so that couldn't have been stolen from them either. Palestinians were displaced during 1948, in a war Arabs started against the new state of Israel. Read Israel's declaration of independence to see how Israel would have preferred that play out. Palestinians, and the Arab countries, have inflicted plenty of harm on Jews in the middle east. Jews were ethnically cleansed from most Arab countries and more land was stolen from Jews in the middle east than the entire area of Israel. But sure, the topic of harm and reparations can be discussed once Palestinians decide to stop using violence to pursue their goals (of domination). This is not about reparations anyways.
This fairy tale you're telling yourself here is some westernized story that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground. Sorry if I'm sounding patronizing.
EDIT: and by the way we can totally reverse Canada and New Zealand for example? Let's use those as test cases for your anti-colonialism fix the world sentiment and see how it goes? Those guys have zero claim of any sorts to the land they're on. Israel at least has something.
>Famously the ex-Israeli Prime Minister Barak said that if he were a Palestinian he might have become a terrorist himself.
I wonder how do someone tells something and not think it through? Can you get the the full statement by Barak on this? He says why he would choose to fight. He clearly understood that for Palestinians, no other venue to raise against the brutal oppression exist. If that doesn't make you understand, I don't know what will. The irreversible damage that tye state of Israel has done had made it so. And it continues to do so, and finds new ways to make the lives of Palestinians literal hell.
>Plenty of right wing nazis everywhere in the world.
Yes plenty do. But not many examples where they are armed to the teeth, has a façade of democracy, has the liberty to label the other as human animals, and has practically a free hand in killing the other. Not many the so called neo nazis have that sort of institutionalised power. There are not many examples of this level of apartheid. Not many places where a settler could shoot and kill children and can get away with it.
"יו"ר מפלגת העבודה ח"כ אהוד ברק, אמר אתמול כי אם היה פלשתינאי ובגיל המתאים, ייתכן שהיה מצטרף לארגון טרור. ברק אמר את הדברים בתוכנית "פגישה אישית" שתשודר הערב בערוץ הכבלים, בתשובה לשאלת המראיין גדעון לוי, מה הוא, שלחם בטרור הרבה שנים, היה עושה כפלשתינאי צעיר. ברק הוסיף, כי זוהי שאלה לא הוגנת מאחר וארגוני הטרור פועלים בצורה לא הומנית, חמורה ושפלה ועוסקים בהריגת אזרחים, נשים וילדים חפים מפשע, דבר שיש לגנותו ולפעול נגדו."
"ברק אמר אמש ל"הארץ", כי דבריו לא היו בגדר פליטת פה. "למיטב זכרוני יצחק שמיר אמר דבר דומה. בן גוריון, כשנדרש לתאר את עוצמת השנאההערבית נגדנו אמר דבר דומה, וגם דיין אמר דבר דומה. ההתעסקות התקשורתית בעניין הזה היא מגוחכת. מה רצו שאומר? שאם הייתי צעיר פלשתינאי שהווייתו מינקותו היא הוויה פלשתינאית, הייתי הופך להיות מורה בכיתה ג' בבית ספר עממי?" מהליכוד נמסר בתגובה, כי ברק ירד מהפסים, וכי אינו מתאים עוד לייצג מפלגה ציונית במדינת ישראל. "בדבריו ברק מעודד פלשתינאים בגיל המתאים
להצטרף לארגוני טרור"."
I need to find the actual interview if we want to be super precise. But either way, the way this is referred to in the Pro-Palestinian narrative that you're presenting here is incorrect.
Barak isn't saying that Palestinians have no other venue for rising against the "brutal oppression". He's just stating the fact that if he was a Palestinian, and grew up under that ideology, and was in the right age, he would probably be in those organization. He is not justifying that. The point I was making is that Israelis don't view Palestinians as inferior. They view them as wrong, brainwashed, driven by extreme ideologies, etc.
Israel is a democracy. It's not a "facade of democracy". It's not labelling all Palestinians as "human animals" though there were certainly a lot of heated statements and emotions after the Oct 7th attack on Israel. There is no Apartheid. It's armed to the teeth because its neighbours want to destroy it. Settlers in general can't shoot and kill children and get away with it though I do agree that there should be better law enforcement in the west bank (and ideally no settlers until its status is resolved). That's my perspective anyways which I think is well in line with the facts and reality.
Palestinians never had a country so that couldn't have been stolen from them either
You know, you wouldn't be invoking this defense if you weren't aware, deep down inside -- that it really is mostly forcibly expropriated land that the State of Israel currently sits on.
Imagine a defense lawyer making the following argument: "Your honor, my client would never have broken into that house, and stolen that woman's necklace. It goes against everything he was raised to believe in. BTW it was never hers to begin with, so it couldn't have been stolen from her anyway."
No Israeli that I know thinks that Palestinians are inferior.
And yet -- the State of Israel was founded on the belief that its claim to the land and resources was categorically more legitimate than that of the people who (by and large) had been living and thriving in the area continuously for thousands of years -- since before the establishment of the first Israelite settlements, in fact.
I'm not "invoking a defense". I'm stating facts. You give me a definition of "forcibly expropriated land" and we'll compare it against the facts for Israel and all other countries in the world and see what comes up. It's not going to support your thesis.
The trial analogy is also completely false. The appropriate adjustments to this story is that nobody broke into that house, you actually own the house and it's always been in your family, no necklace was stolen, but you're still put on trial for stealing a necklace that doesn't exist from your own house because you're Jewish.
Your last statement of "fact" is also not fact. It is simply not factually true that all the people that lived in the region have been living and thriving there for thousands of years since before the Israelites. Many Palestinians have immigrated to the area in fairly recent times. Many Gazans are from Egypt. There are probably some Palestinians who do trace back to the Israelites. In general much of the population of the Levant and the middle east in general, including the Israeli Jews from all over the place, goes way back but there's no specific historic continuity of Palestinians in Israel for the most part. There was plenty of population movement and immigration. This is well supported history with plenty of archaeological evidence.
I also think the characterization of Israel as being "founded on the belief that its claim to the land and resources was categorically more legitimate than" is also false. There was no comparison of legitimacy of various claims simply because there were no other claims at the time. Israel was definitely founded on the (factual) belief that it is the historic homeland of the Jewish people who feel a strong connection to it. What we see in practice is that a person of Italian heritage, living in California, taken by force from Mexico, with the aboriginal inhabitants confined to a reserve and all their resources literally stolen after they were genocided and ethnically cleansed, is telling Israeli Jews why their country, founded on their historical land, where they went as refugees in more recent times because they had nowhere to go to, is illegitimate. If we want to litigate every country's legitimacy going back 3000 years, sure, let's do that. Are you an immigrant in Canada? better start packing since you're going back to where your ancient ancestors used to live. This is ofcourse all total nonsense.
I don't like to appear to be dismissive of longer posts by picking out just one aspect of them and ignoring everything else that was said; but in this case there's one assertion you're making which stands categorically above all others:
You're still put on trial ... because you're Jewish.
If what you mean here is the fact that the State of Israel is often subject to criticism for both for its founding ideology and the violent mechanisms of its creation (or its various attempts to expand its borders and resource claims through the present day) -- no, it's not simply because the people behind this project are of Jewish ancestry. You seem to believe axiomatically that this is in fact the case -- i.e. that all strong critiques in regard to the founding of the State of Israel or its modern policies are basically the Dreyfuss Affair all over again.
I do not share this axiom, so it is unlikely that we will have a productive discussion in regard the finer-grained historical topics.
We're unlikely to have a productive discussion anyways because we're so far apart and this is not a good medium to handle something like this topic. People that are entrenched in certain positions don't seem to want to give them up.
However I'm not claiming all criticism on Israel is because "the people behind this project are of Jewish ancestry". But certainly antisemitism plays a role. It plays a role in Arab views on Israel and that in turn plays a huge role in the world's take. That's just one of the ways it plays out. There are other factors including geopolitics. I would go so far to say that the majority of criticism of Israel is not in good faith, but sure, not all of it is because there are Jews involved. But certainly that accounts for some portion.
> Imagine a defense lawyer making the following argument: "Your honor, my client would never have broken into that house, and stolen that woman's necklace. It goes against everything he was raised to believe in. BTW it was never hers to begin with, so it couldn't have been stolen from her anyway."
I was going after this analogy which feels completely wrong.
> all strong critiques in regard to the founding of the State of Israel or its modern policies are basically the Dreyfuss Affair all over again.
I disagree with this statement. There's no problem with any critique of Israel in general. Where it becomes a problem is when Israel is singled out. E.g. if there is no critique of the founding of Jordan, which was given as a gift by the British to the Hashemites for helping them during the Arab revolt, then I think this is a problem. Then there is "critique" and there is stuff that's not critique. But for people that are interested in reopening the question of how various countries were founded in general in the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, sure we can have this discussion and include Israel in it for sure. For people whose main focus is simply attacking Israel by any means possible, I think that's a problem. I'm totally with John Lennon "Imagine" on a purely romantic idealistic way, but then there's reality.
I still don't think the original statement I jumped in at ("Palestinians never had a country so that couldn't have been stolen from them") stands on its own, or helps explain the current situation.
Of course they had a country; and hence would not recognize domination by a foreign population -- unless imposed by overwhelming force. The original Zionists were keenly aware of this fact, which is why it has become one of guiding tenants in nearly major strategic decisions Israel has made since.
>if there is no critique of the founding of Jordan, which was given as a gift by the British to the Hashemites for helping them during the Arab revolt, then I think this is a problem.
That can also be criticised. Although what is tend to get lost in these type of arguments is that, it is entirely different to give assistance in ruling a patch of land versus literally displacing people from their land and homes and imposing military control over them.
Let's do a thought experiment. Please give this a honest consideration.
If the Uyghurs had 40,000 combatants. And if they were dug in tunnels under Uyghur cities. And fires 10's of thousands of rockets into Chinese cities. And killed thousands of people with hundreds of suicide bombings. Their cities were mined and booby trapped. Their combatants were well trained, armed with RPGs, sniper rifles, machine guns.
Then the Uyghurs raided some Chinese city, killing 1200 people, taking hundreds of hostages.
What do you think China would do?
China isn't bombing them because it doesn't need to bomb them.
Uyghurs have less people that care about them in the international community, for sure. I'm not sure they're not suffering a lot more than the Palestinians are.
If china's goal is to wipe them out as a people, its more effective to do that quietly.
Having Uyghurs cry for their kins brings international attention. Having them slowly deported to camps and sterialized brings about the same result without that pesky international pressure.
Apologies for the LMGTFY, but there needs to be a ratcheting up of gently-administered teasing of people when they share tired, easily checkable, fallacious, talking points like this.
Frankly, to me personally, it's stomach-churning, especially when it's reserved for "my racism justifying human rights violations is noble self-defense, unlike theirs."
> Do the Uyghurs launch rockets on Beijing? Did they blow up busses and restaurants in Beijing?
The Uyghurs did not launch rockets on Beijing. As far as I can tell they did not blow up any buses or restaurants in Beijing either. To contrast suicide bombings in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem were a weekly affair during the early 2000's. And Palestinians fires 10's of thousands of rockets into Israeli cities.
Ofcourse China is not justified in what they're doing to the Uyghurs. Israel also did not respond to the significantly larger attacks on its civilian population like China.
You've decided that Israel is engaged in racist human rights violation and not self-defense. I think that's the crux of the issue. I think Israel is engaging in self defense and during the course of the self-defense inevitably human rights are violated. This is true on a personal level and it's true on the level of a country. We violate the human rights of criminals we put in prison. If you're killing someone else to defend yourself as an individual you are "violating their human rights".
The world largely stands by as China genocides the Uyghurs. No campus encampments. No boycotts. No heated HN discussions. 10 million people effectively being wiped out.
> The not allowing israel to fully vote until 2010
You're not going to throw that out without reference to how the US and Israel have consistently been the only countries to oppose Palestinian UN membership and voting.
I mean, i was trying to talk about why Israelis might feel the UN is against them. That doesn't preclude Palestinians feeling the same way.
It is possible to talk about why X might feel Y without talking about why other groups might feel the same way or even whether or not that feeling is justified.
Talking about motivations is different than determining what is "fair"
Palestinians are not a country. What other members of the UN are not countries? I believe other countries have opposed to the Palestinians becoming UN members. The last time around 9 countries voted against and 25 abstained. So I guess 34 did not support that purely symbolic vote (since the UN general assembly can't give the Palestinians membership, only the UN security council can).
> Palestinians are not a country. What other members of the UN are not countries
In fairness, the definition of state is pretty arbitrary and seems more like a popularity contest than anything else. Like how is taiwan not a state? How is the vatican a state? How is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta a state?
Wikipedia says: "International law defines sovereign states as having a permanent population, defined territory, a government not under another, and the capacity to interact with other states.[2] "
Taiwan has a permanent population, it has a government not under another, and it has the capacity to interact with other states (and does). There's no doubt Taiwan is a state and the only reason it's not universally recognized as one is China.
"Palestine" has no defined territory, no government, and really no capacity to interact with other states as one.
Wikipedia goes on to say: "There are also entities that do not have control over any territory or do not unequivocally meet the declarative criteria for statehood but have been recognised to exist as sovereign entities by at least one other state." including Palestine in this list.
It feels like the statehood of Palestinians should be a matter between them, Israel, Jordan and Egypt, the three countries that own the land that Palestinians desire to have as their state. Can the world declare that California is a state if the US doesn't want it to be?
Btw re: admission to the UN: "The requisite conditions are five in number: to be admitted to membership in the United Nations, an applicant must (1) be a State; (2) be peace-loving; (3) accept the obligations of the Charter; (4) be able to carry out these obligations; and (5) be willing to do so."
You might be right. I'm not an expert on the legalese of their peace contracts with Israel. I think giving the Palestinians autonomy was part of the agreement with Egypt. In which case, it's a matter between Israel and the Palestinians.
+1, the thing that jumps to mind is how "U N Schmu En" dates back to the...50s? I was disappointed people were 'shocked' by Gvir tweeting it because it sounded new. I am no fan of Gvir, but again, goes back to what a complex mess there is.
It's a body made out of countries. Many of which are not free, not democratic, do not support basic human rights. What has the UN done that's turned great and made the world a better place? Top 3 examples?
UN has been pretty succesful in areas that are not super politicized.
E.g. they have done a lot of good work reducing hunger & famine throughout the world. UNESCO has done a lot to preserve unique cultural & envirnomental sites around the world. UN has done a lot to put pressure on countries to ban female genital mutilation.
I think you're a reasonable person so I'm not going to argue much ;) I don't see the UN as a successful organization. It's just a mirror though to what this world looks like.
"The appointment of Ali Bahreini, Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, to chair the 2023 United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Social Forum (2 and 3 November 2023), is nothing more than a slap in the face given the human rights situation of most Iranians, particularly women, and the repeated executions in the wake of the ongoing protests in the country and, more generally, the Islamic Republic's gross human rights violations and its catastrophic and politicised handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, when its refusal to import Western vaccines cost hundreds of thousands of lives."
It's amusing you can self identify this way without much hesitation. My personal experience with colleagues and family on both sides of the regional, religious, lijguistic, and cultural debate is that if you talked about being a non-Muslim supporter of political Islamists or up to including Hamas or similar groups, so anywhere in that continuum inclusive, few in Western or Israeli media will hesistate in labelling you in a way common with these talking points: a terrorist.
So good luck to you, but I'm not surprised you'd stay private
But my anecdata (or some may call life experience) tell me you'd be fine and fare well where a similarly extreme position on the opposite end of the spectrum would cost you a lot personally and professionally. I wish we all reflected in the West or in tje region or conflict area, well, why is that?
For the record since I inevitably get routinely called an anti-Semite anyway: I think Hamas and groups like them are vile, but many in the region opposing them don't take the high road by comparison either. Im nkt sure if its recent or monitoring that become easier and more economical, but that means their opponents with this crap and other tactics have really screwed up. This HN post further supports my cynicism and disappointment.
Its bad because if Palestinians agree with the attack then they can be collectively punished, that's usually what comes after showing those polls. How many in Ireland supported IRA? Should UK have bombed them as well?
Did Israel provide evidence that UNRWA supports Hamas? If so why did many countries reinstate aid to UNRWA?
Israel may have left Gaza but they still control all their borders and airspace, even the Egyptian border as nothing can pass there without Israel approving it (even before Oct 7).
Israel might be loosing the propaganda war because they're killing mostly civilians and are starving them. They are a colonialist and apartheid state. The current government has supported Hamas as a divide and conquer strategy so Palestinians cannot unite and form their own state.
If you want to get out of the propaganda bubble of Israel try the Badhasbara podcast.
Gently: I think there's a better way to phrase this, and you still have time to edit. It's strong but once you're at paragraph 4....once you're "saying propaganda war/colonialist/apartheid/you're in a propaganda bubble".........let me start again. We all have agency, and denying agency/telling someone they're in a bubble and not able to think for themselves, is one of the easiest ways for them to ignore your invitation for them to seize agency and think for themselves, via consuming the media* you recommend.
* they would say propaganda. It's a "you're rubber I'm glue, whatever you say..." type deal
But they maintained a land, air, and sea blockade of the region, controlling water, food, power, trade, and immigration. And the region remained under continuous threat of the Israeli military returning. That's not self governing.
> But they maintained a land, air, and sea blockade of the region, controlling water, food, power, trade, and immigration. And the region remained under continuous threat of the Israeli military returning. That's not self governing.
The key is that Gaza can be "self-governing" even with the above restrictions. What they lack is "sovereignty".
We're blessed with polls right before 10/7 re: "Support for Hamas." Roughly 40/60. I've seen other junk ones passed around. I don't think 10/7 or what we ended up with in Gaza was justified, a sweeping international majority agrees, and both Israel/Gaza will poll at "of course it was justified and why are people so evil as to not support us"
You transmutated "I've never seen any jokes about WCK" to "the only thing I've ever seen is links about polls" to "linking to polls isn't bad.": sure, no one would say it is. so it comes across as an attempt to claim it is unreasonable to claim that worse things go on than linking to polls.**
> has a vested interest in perpetuating the "refugee" status of millions of Palestinians who were born outside Israel
I'm familiar with this argument: sure. If that's the case, let's get rid of the UN. We'll have to find some way to get not-terrorists governing Gaza, i.e. providing for the people.
There's two choices from there.*
In my experience, one of them is consistently ruled out by people who spend time litigating the UN. And I strongly believe that is where the breaking point in international support is.
* if you exclude "kick the can down the road" and "the Palestineans without the guns should seize power from the guys with the guns, otherwise they're complicit"
**
It's just a feeling, but one informed by 1000 conversations I've had: if the strawman about poll links means "yeah, I've seen racism, but justified and rational, because the polls say a majority of Them" -- I think that's exactly the class of behavior that leads me to be a proud Zionist, it's dangerous to proscribe beliefs to a group, based on location of their housing, religion, skin color, anything. It justifies some very ugly things.
* Assuming the comments came from Israelis/Jews.
All the left and right-wing channels are infiltrated with Iranian agents(plenty of news on that topic in Haaretz/Walla). They are causing rift and radicalization in society.
That's a solvable tech problem to shut it down. Unfortunately, it's not a priority on a state level because everyone is doing it.
From an outside perspective, this doesn't appear to be the case.
It's like that old management consulting saw: "Strategy without execution is useless — execution without strategy is aimless." Israel's actions appear to be entirely reactive; they're on the back foot, and they don't have a clear set of strategic objectives. Execution without strategy.
In essence, they're responded to one chevauchée raid with another chevauchée raid. It's only going to end in tears for all involved.
It appears the government has no clear strategy and lacks the famous "the day after" plan.
But from IDF side, it took two weeks to take over the whole border with Egypt. Rafah is empty and by the end of the month, it will be Israeli.
So yes, they spent months not doing anything while the government was trying to secure hostage release and Biden was screaming do not touch Rafah.
But in general what strategy do you need? Take over, destroy the military infra and prevent smuggling. That's all that is needed.
Gaza is thousand years back, it will never recover. It is not a threat anymore in any meaningful way.
Do you really believe this? Do you think this is an efficient way to perform military counterinsurgency?
And are you really sure it's a good idea to wallow in war crimes like this in relation to the rest of the world? Something like, the UAE kind of gets away with it in Sudan currently, so Israel can use IDF like its own janjaweed?
Look at Judea&Samaria, beyond a shooting from stolen weapons nothing happens and that's without tight control over the border.
Insurgency works as long as you have a constant supply of weapons. Gaza had it, but not anymore.
Why do you think that? I follow the reports from palestinian resistance and news quite closely and see no signs that the weapon supplies have been cut off.
> But in general what strategy do you need? Take over, destroy the military infra and prevent smuggling. That's all that is needed. Gaza is thousand years back, it will never recover. It is not a threat anymore in any meaningful way.
Impressively amoral post, but this is insanity.
(1) Israel doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is not self-sufficient.
(2) There's something monstrous about keeping 2M people herded up in a closed pen.
Whether or not those people are "threats" shall remain to be seen, but Israel is going to lose (is, already, losing) the hearts and minds of everybody on the planet under age 40 -- and you're going to see what being a real pariah state feels like. Israel won't survive as a state very long after that; it is a hard thing, to be despised. And yet, if it comes to that point, it will be very richly deserved.
What you need is a strategy which improves the lives of Gazans -- not one that bombs their homes to rubble and sets them back a thousand years. You need to address their very real grievance. Without this, you're both sunk. Gonna end in tears, like I said.
>Whether or not those people are "threats" shall remain to be seen, but Israel is going to lose (is, already, losing) the hearts and minds of everybody on the planet under age 40
At this point, I think these are not the real power dynamics.
I used to think Israel needed western support to exist. I don't do anymore. Now I believe that Israel needs any support, and they are perfectly fine with the idea of allying with Russia, China or whoever seems reliable enough and willing to put up with their stuff. Which means that Israel is not dependent on the west, more specifically, the US. The US is reliant on Israel for presence in the middle east.
Which would explain why they seem to do whatever they want, ignoring warnings from the US. The warnings aren't real, Israel is going to commit unspeakable abuses on a population either way, so might as well have them on our side. I believe that to be the current state of affairs.
I have no doubts that Israel is willing to search for support anywhere it can find it. Yet, this doesn't mean that they don't need the western one to keep with their standards of living, political standing in the west, and self-identification as a modern western country. A serious political condemnation and sanctions would be enough to steer Israel towards a different course- provided that the radicalisation of society hasn't already reached a point of no return.
On the other hand, the US certainly doesn't need an ally that creates far more problems than it resolves. Their solid, oil-rich ally in the region is Saudi Arabia. The power dynamic between Israel and the US is not that of a client-state and its powerful protector or even one between allies; it resembles more that of a narcissistic, abusive lover towards their submissive partner. This is why we have been seeing the entire US government utterly humiliating itself for the past few months, finding pathetic excuses to pretend they haven't been slapped in the face every single day, while reiterating their unconditional love and swearing that their partner never did anything wrong.
Really, there is no rational (in the sense of geo-political or strategic) explanation for this. It's a psychological subjugation.
Hello friend. I've been on HN for a while. I contribute to the discussions here and contribute with submissions (you can check my submissions and comments pages through my profile). I have earned my right to crack a joke once in a while.
Please consider not shooting from the hip and respecting other users' comments here, yourself.
Is it? Pragmatically speaking, who is going to make it end in tears? Nobody in the region really wants a war with Israel: the Arab countries got their fill of it and Iran sure doesn't want to get into an actual war. And if anyone gets any big ideas, there's always Uncle Sam (and Uncle Sam's Western allies; who, btw, include Turkey).
I understand that people want to see things put right, but we must understand what world we live in and how the cards are dealt. There are three great powers, the US, China and Russia, and Israel has a um special relation with one of them, whereas none of its enemies do. The Arab countries want to make peace and do business, Iran might like to be a regional power but has no friends in the region and the Palestinians have nothing to negotiate with and nobody to stand up for them; nobody with any clout, that is.
There is nothing and nobody that can make it all end in tears for Israel. You and others misunderstand the geopolitical situation in the Middle East: Israel can do whatever the fuck it pleases, and it does.
To be perfectly clear, it is a shitty situation, but there is no obvious way out of it.
US support, extraordinarily stalwart as it is, has shown its first cracks. Western allies are considerably less religiously motivated, or defense-industrial-linkage motivated, and can’t be counted on in the same way. Recent ICC news can be read as an indicator of prevailing winds.
The US is not above dropping allies when politically convenient, and as Israel burns its public image (or seeks geopolitical independence), both parties stateside can entertain anti-Zionism.
Watch what was previously far-left/right become normalized as legitimate considerations regarding US support of Israel. That Iran would entertain its recent long-range strike should tell of regional estimations of how likely the US would be to intervene, and then extrapolate from there.
I don't completely disagree. It's clear that the US does not want war in the Middle East: it's bad for business and I think that the US too has had its fill of fighting. I'm also kind of getting the vibe that the US administration is not at all happy with the Israeli government's actions.
But that doesn't change the geopolicical situation: Israel is an important ally of the US in the Middle East and the US is an important ally of NATO, so whatever Israel does, the US will stand behind, and Nato will stand behind the US.
In any case, if the US wanted to stop the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza they would have done it months ago. I don't think they really care, and if the Republicans come into power, with all the looney tune characters from the Christian Zionist right in their ranks, I don't think there's going to be more care.
But, hey, we'll see what happens. It would be great if public sentiment and opinion counted for something in modern liberal democracies, but we have the recent enough example of the war on Iraq and the gigantic demonstrations against it in the UK, and how they didn't change one thing in the decisions of a liberal British PM.
> There are three great powers, the US, China and Russia, and Israel has a um special relation with one of them, whereas none of its enemies do.
Things keep going the way they're going, and that special relationship has got twenty years left on the clock, max.
I don't think that American support should be taken for granted -- and it's not like Israel is cozying up to the Russians or Chinese. They may well end up like South Africa, with investment bans, arms embargoes, sanctions, no participation in international cultural events, etc. That's a very hard fate for a nation. The white South Africans of those days weren't able to hold out for very long.
I disagree. It is very obvious, as Levitz points out above, that Israel can just cozy up to the Chinese or the Russians if Uncle Sam washes its hands of it, China and Russia who would jump at the chance to gain a foothold in the Middle East, right next door to all those industrial juice springs. If I may.
But even if that were not the case 20 years is plenty of time to cleanse Gaza, and the West Bank with it, of every last Palestinian. I'd say at the current rate it would take hardly a couple years.
Edit: to be fair, I don't know how to compare SA and Israel. Maybe you have a point, but I don't think it's that simple to impose any kind of, essentially, sanctions to Israel as long as Uncle Sam's got its back. That special relation is a pretty big trump card there. And, btw, we're still at a Democratic president. Can you imagine the Republicans letting Israel suffer arms bans and trade embargoes?
> But even if that were not the case 20 years is plenty of time to cleanse Gaza, and the West Bank with it, of every last Palestinian. I'd say at the current rate it would take hardly a couple years.
Surely you realize that this is completely unhinged?
You are apparently an intelligent person. Doesn't it strike you that there should be a moral dimension to this? That there is a right way to act that is independent of realpolitik? Do you not realize that those people are, quite literally, under the care of Israel's government, and that to "cleanse" them would be a crime of world-historical proportions -- even if it might make life a little bit easier for people in Tel Aviv?
Besides, I don't think you understand what the reaction would be. Also, I think you overstate China's willingness, and Russia's capacity, to meaningfully support Israel should the US wash its hands of the region.
>> Doesn't it strike you that there should be a moral dimension to this?
I'm not endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians if that's what you mean. At the same time, you can say that Israel has lost peoples' hearts, that it goes against international law, that it's unhinged etc etc but none of those things will stop the people in power in Israel, who btw are textbook fascists who spit "peace" like a dirty word, from doing whatever they like.
Historically speaking, the Holocaust did not end until the Allies invaded Germany (and even then, it continued until the last moment) and the massacre of Palestinians will not stop until a large international force invades Israel. This will not happen, so the massacre will continue until the last Palestinian dies or leaves and Israel extends from the river to the sea, just like the settlers want it.
That's the facts on the ground. In Lord of the Rings, the bad guys lose. In the real world, they often get their cake and eat it. You can call it unhinged, or realpolitik, you can insult me and attack me, but you're just shooting the messenger.
I kinda agree with your position, but I don’t share your optimistic outlook regarding Israel fate if it loses US support. I think the Arab world is mostly at peace with Israel because of US support, and Russia/China are only thinly supporting other nations because US has such a large stronghold via Israel that make really little sense economically. If Israel loses US support, this calculation changes wildly, and I’m kinda skeptic that Israel could pivot that quickly to other patron, the chaos on the power struggle between factions would create enough delay.
My impression yet is that unless something radically changes, I don’t think Israel would lose US, the power vacuum in the region would be filled by somebody else, something US is unlikely to allow. Despite the show, I don’t believe Biden/Netanyahu’s fallout; it’s simply the only way Biden can do at least the tiny amount of damage control that allows him to keep the most of Jewish/leftist voting blocks.
You're probably right that there would be a power struggle etc, if Israel simply unceremoniously dumped the US as a patron. I just think they would sound out the other great powers beforehand (at the risk of intelligence leaking that they are doing so, of course) so it would be a careful and calculated move, not a sudden jump. That's what I'd do if I was in their shoes, anyway.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Israel is a nuclear power and there are no others in the region (for now), so that, too, gives them some extra time and leverage.
I totally agree that all this is just hypothetical and I, too, am not convinced that Biden is going to take serious action on Netanyahu. I would think that he's royally pissed off at him, privately, though. Bibi has caused Biden no end of trouble and I think it's clear that if Biden lost the elections, Bibi would celebrate.
That's hard to square with the reality on the ground: tens of thousand killed, millions displaced, half of all buildings damaged and the Palestinians can do nothing to stop it, but they're "perfectly capable" of genocide?
Israel has a fully mechanised army, tanks, F16s, drones, rockets, bombs, nukes, while Hamas has ... their grandpas' hand-me down AK-47s? What are they gonna do to genocide the Israelis? Give them the evil eye?
Your prediction isn't substantial. Israel will never win a popularity contest, but that is irrelevant. It also isn't true that all young people are firmly on one side of this issue, in fact they are probably a minority, even if they can be pretty loud. Strong opinions and little information often comes in a package.
Israel exists because Jews were despised. They did not have support when the country was founded and got weapons on the black market. Today their security situation is a lot more stable.
There are western firms/nations trading with Russia today, money always beats popularity, geostrategic interest beats popularity, pretty much anything beats unsolicited opinions from college students on Israel.
In fact I believe support for Gaza will need a lot more political capital in the future and the countries supporting them actively will try to withdraw from this conflict.
The few Gazans that sold products on the world market will have their existence evaporated, since they had to trade through Israel. Those that worked in Israel probably will not return for a very long time.
People pointing their fingers at Israel often simply lack perspective.
> So yes, antisemites and the mentally ill are loud on the streets and on the university campuses but they haven't won the hearts and the minds of people, and rightfully so.
Is that right?
> The survey found that 61% of the population opposes Israel's military action in the sealed-off Palestinian territory.
> Public support in Germany for Israel's military operations has dropped significantly, the survey shows.
> In November, shortly after the October 7 attacks, 62% favoured the Israeli military actions in Gaza, compared to 33% in the most recent survey, indicating a recent shift in public opinion almost eight months into the conflict.
Your point about the Eurovision is something I also am very curious about. I don’t understand how that’s possible, from TikTok and Instagram to Reddit and HN, All I see are mass protests and hate comments against Israel. So how come tens of millions overwhelmingly voted for Israel, even in Scandinavia? Sweden gave them 12 points!
Can you speak more to your perspective? The only way I can understand your take is to say that the West Bank is rightfully Israeli and therefore its residents should be citizens with voting rights. Are you opposed to an independent Palestinian state?
The west bank isn't independent. If a citizen there commits a crime, they are sent to an Israelite court. Their infrastructure and policing are done by Israel. Their elected officials are completely powerless, they cannot change anything.
Their vote cannot affect the government that governs them. They are israeli citizens with no say in the state that controls them.
Not OP, but I am for either giving the Palestinians the same rights as Israelis in a 1 state solution or a an independent Palestinian state but since Israel doesn't seem interested in that it's a cheap talking point because Israel will just crush the Palestinians under its boot until economic sanctions are applied similar to how it was done re South Africa.
"Yitzhak Rabin presented the Oslo II Interim Agreement to the Knesset on October 5, 1995, in his final speech to the legislative body. As he spoke, he boldly laid out what he believed to be the future of the Jewish state, boasting that “The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six-Day War.” He also described his vision of a Palestinian “entity” he described as “less than a state.”
You can't expect people under brutal military occupation to suddenly start loving their occupiers while under that occupation.
You have to end that occupation, period. That means ALL illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank need to move off the settlements too btw.
If after an independent Palestinian state is established on the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, all of West Bank and all of Gaza and then Israel faces violence from that state, then you'll have support of many you don't right now.
You can't occupy people forever, or because one of their leaders rejected a deal once etc.
>> You can't occupy people forever, or because one of their leaders rejected a deal once etc.
Turkey, which has for all intents and purposes occupied the (ancestral lands of) the Kurdish people for many years, would like to disagree.
Turkey, btw, which has occupied the ancestral lands of the Kurdish people, alongside the ancestral lands of the Ionian and Pontiac Greeks, Assyrian and Cappadokian Christians and Armenians, whom it has ethnically cleansed and genocided.
Sure you can occupy people forever. Or until you massacre every last one of them who won't leave (what is now) your land.
But Israel was not the one that rejected two state solutions offered by UN in 1948, USA in 2000, and by Israel in 1990s, 2008 etc. It was Arab countries, and Palestinian leaders.
Why was Palestine not a state before 1967 with Gaza and West bank as territory?
How many times have Palestinians offered to recognize and make permanent peace with Israel?
Responding to your edit
>> If after an independent Palestinian state is established on the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, all of West Bank and all of Gaza and then Israel faces violence from that state, then you'll have support of many you don't right now.
Huh, why did they not accept it in 2000 then? Why launch the second intifada? Why ask the "right to return"? Why call for the destruction of the entirety of Israel as a "white settler colonial state"?
It's questionable that the Western dominated UN of 1948 had any authority to make such a proposal and that it was fair in terms of how the territory was to be divided.
> Why was Palestine not a state before 1967 with Gaza and West bank as territory?
Because it was occupied by Egypt and Jordan and before then by the Brits and before then by the Ottomans....
Are you making an argument that the Palestinians were occupied since forever so why not occupy them forever?
> Huh, why did they not accept it in 2000 then?
The 2000 deal was a deal for 'less than a state' that's why, see my previous post.
The West Bank is occupied by in substantial fraction by Americans, not even Israelis, who choose to live in the West Bank, from where Palestinians were exiled by the IDF, under Israeli protection. How is that anything like Afghanistan nation building?
Countries with bantustans that they technically don't claim as part of their territory, but in practice completely control without giving the population any rights, are not normally considered democratic. See for example South Africa.
The reason why South Africa and many intellectuals consider Israel to be an apartheid state is not because of the treatment of Arabs that were allowed to become Israeli citizens after the Nakba, but because of the occupation of the West-Bank. The West-Bank is not rightfully Israel land, but has been de facto under Israeli occupation for 50 years. The situation there is very comparable to SA Bantustans; the people there have no rights, have no nationality, and are brutally suppressed by the Israeli government and fascist settlers. Ghaza is basically an open air concentration camp.
The status quo is apartheid. The options to change that are one multicultural state, a two-state solution or genocide.
Israel, contrary to generally agreed upon international law, considers East Jerusalem as a part of Israel. The autochtonous Palestinians living there are eligible for Israeli citizenship which would allow them to vote. However only a tiny fraction has gotten Israeli citizenship as that would legitimise the annexation.
This is absolutely true: there are hundreds of thousands of adults who live within Israeli territory under Israeli control, where Israeli law and order is applied, who are not allowed to vote, have no representation at all, and are regularly subject to lethal violence from Israeli citizens.
> Given that designation as a separate state, complaining that they can't vote in Israeli elections is like complaining that Canadians can't vote in US elections.
I don’t remember the US ever occupying Canada.
Not like that at all, and this is a clearly biased take even considering this line on its own.
At no point did Filipinos have the ability to vote for Senators, Congressmen, or the President. Same for Puerto Ricans. US has other territories too, by the way, with the same restrictions.
You have no problem calling the US a democracy, but when the same rules are applied elsewhere you have a problem?
Look, you really like to talk with confidence, but every time you bring up a a point, you pull a whatabout. Have you even looked into what the people you’re so very concerned with want? That’s the most relevant part of all. It’s not your feelings. It’s what the people you say you care about want. It doesn’t appear they want what you want for them, and you’re big mad about that bro.
Nothing like moving the goal posts, conflating a whole bunch of different issues, and then projecting statements on to me when you’re called out nonsense.
Why is your definition of democratic the valid one?
Mine is, a country is only a real democracy if ALL people it rules over have the same set of rights. Israel isn't a democracy and so isn't the DRC, despite the fact that it has democratic in its name.
I like how these people think the checkmate move is assume the person they’re talking to is a blind supporter of the USA for some reason, and have zero response when they realize that rationally applying the same rules to everybody really does mean Israel doesn’t pass the bar for a democracy.
> > Given that designation as a separate state, complaining that they can't vote in Israeli elections is like complaining that Canadians can't vote in US elections.
> I don’t remember the US ever occupying Canada.
I'm confused by this.
Normally under international law, it is illegal to allow people in occupied territory to vote or otherwise integrate them into civil government.
Israel has even gotten criticized by the UN human rights council for allowing elections in occupied territory (in golan heights, so not Palestinian occupied territory) http://undocs.org/A/HRC/37/L.18
An occupying force holding its own elections in an occupied place is indeed illegal (your reference was about Israeli people holding elections in the Golan heights).
Comparing an _occupied_ people’s attempt to hold elections in the occupied place (Palestinian people in Palestine) to two separate non-occupied states (USA and Canada) is nonsense.
There is an argument to be made that if the Palestinians have to ask permission to become a real state from Israel, then their "government" isn't really a government, and that all the Palestinians are in thrall to Tel Aviv, a government which rules them but does not represent them, whose laws bind them but for whom they may not vote.
There is such a valid argument. But the Oslo accords officially created the PA, which rules over the Palestinians in the West Bank. And Gaza is ruled by Hamas. The Palestinians are governed by a mix of Israeli military law and PA laws, which originate from Jordan, I believe.
Some argue that in practice, Israel has control over all the Palestinians, so in practice there is one large apartheid state. I don't believe this argument is valid, for the reasons I outlined above; I think it doesn't make sense for Palestinians to fight for their own State, have a semi-autonomous government that rules over them in practice (two if you count Hamas), fight to get international recognition for this Palestinian State and get it from many countries, but claim that they are being ruled by Tel Aviv.
(Of course the situation is murky - I think the important thing isn't what label we give this, it's to know what the facts are. Those above are the relevant facts, I believe. If you agree with me on the facts but choose to label it in one way vs. another, I think that's a less important discussion at that point.)
And Bibi supported and kept Hamas in power so Israeli society could labor under the delusion that keeping Palestinians out of sight and out of mind was a viable plan. Until it wasn’t.
He’s been elected again and again, and has been steadfast in preventing self governance from ever taking hold. To the degree Israel is a “democracy” it is because there is voter consensus that there can be no Palestinian self rule.
He's a believer. He want several things that can't be well understood by the non-religious. He wants the al Aqsa mosque demolished/removed, so the temple can be rebuilt. He wants all of Jerusalem. And, even what he would call all of "Greater Israel" eventually. In that order, but he's willing to settle for those things out of order if it looks possible. A peaceful neighboring Palestine doesn't allow for any of that. A peaceful, neighboring Palestine wouldn't, for instance, ever do anything that could be used as an excuse to seize territory, or to remove Palestinians (via any of the various forms of ethnic cleansing). This thing in Gaza may well have been dragged out, just in the hopes that the people in the West Bank would be provoked into doing something, or that Iron Dome might shoot down something in just such a way as that the debris would fall on al Aqsa.
All of this will seem like the dumbest bullshit to you. Why would anyone want that? But there are millions of people in Israel that want nothing more than this. And he is their leader.
None of that seems accurate, not when it comes to Netanyahu. He's not a religious zealot and almost certainly isn't pursuing anything because of religion.
> But there are millions of people in Israel that want nothing more than this. And he is their leader.
I don't think there are millions in Israel that want Al Aqsa demolished, that is a delusion that has no historical basis at all. There are of course religious extremists who want really bad things, but they are a relatively small minority of the population.
Most of the population just wants to live in peace and safety. They believe there is no safety to be found with a Palestinian state next door (with good reason, see what happened in Gaza).
> This thing in Gaza may well have been dragged out, just in the hopes that [...] or Iron Dome might shoot down something in just such a way as that the debris would fall on al Aqsa.
This is a ridiculous line of thinking. Hamas (and Iran) are shooting rockets at Israel, including at al Aqsa, Israel is spending millions with the iron dome to shoot down those rockets, and you think it's part of a nefarious Israeli plan to destroy al Aqsa?
> I don't think there are millions in Israel that want Al Aqsa demolished,
There are well over 1 million ultra-orthodox. There's also a not-really-countable number of non-ultra-orthodox who want the same thing, but their opinions are a bit more diverse. Say, somewhere around 1.6-2 million. That's plural millions, as far as I understand grammar.
>They believe there is no safety to be found with a Palestinian state next door (with good reason, see what happened in Gaza).
They also believe there's no safety for a single state solution, because Palestinians will eventually become the majority, and vote out the jews. There is of course, an unspoken third option as well. No one would admit to favoring that.
> Israel is spending millions with the iron dome to shoot down those rockets,
The debris has to land somewhere. It doesn't just evaporate. Could someone finagle it so that it lands where they want? Would be a beat trick. Just have to wait for the right trajectory, one would think.
> There are well over 1 million ultra-orthodox. There's also a not-really-countable number of non-ultra-orthodox who want the same thing, but their opinions are a bit more diverse. Say, somewhere around 1.6-2 million. That's plural millions, as far as I understand grammar.
First, you're assuming that all ultra-Orthodox want to see Al Aqsa demolished, which is a huge assumption that is probably not correct.
Second, in a country of 9 million people, I think it's misleading to say that "millions want" when referring to less than 2 million. I think saying about a country of 9m people that "millions want to see an incredibly important place/monument destroyed" gives a very wrong impression of what is the general spirit here, and is especially misleading because "Al Aqsa is in danger" has been a common worry of the Palestinians for a hundred years, with very little factual basis for that worry, IMO.
> They also believe there's no safety for a single state solution, because Palestinians will eventually become the majority, and vote out the jews.
Of course. The one state solution is a ridiculous non-solution as acknowledged by every official international body that has ever considered the problem, and as acknowledged by about 99% of the people living in the region. And as agreed by the parties themselves in the Oslo accords and ensuing future peace process in which the plan was to find a way to create two states living side by side.
> There is of course, an unspoken third option as well. No one would admit to favoring that.
Unfortunately, you're wrong about that. There is a small, minority, but currently influential group of Israelis that pretty explicitly espouses the idea of, in their words, "voluntary relocation". Which everyone reads as a pretty implicit call for ethnic cleansing.
> The debris has to land somewhere. It doesn't just evaporate.
No kidding. Plenty of people have been hurt by this debris, and I've seen pieces of it - those can be pretty big chunks of metal falling on people's heads.
Still, the implication that it would somehow be part of Israel's plan to destroy Al Aqsa to keep the war going so that maybe debris from rockets that Israel shoots down would land on Al Aqsa, and the implication that this would then be Israel's fault, and not the fault of the people shooting the rockets at Al Aqsa in the first place, is... I don't know what to even call it beyond morally absurd.
You're partially right, and I've stated many times that I think Israel has acted in morally wrong ways for the last 15 years of Netanyahu's rule.
But I think it's important to understand that the reason the Israeli electorate went down this path is because of the failure of the peace process in the 1990s and 2000s. The Israeli public multiple times elected leaders pursuing peace. Even former right-wing hawks turned around and pursued peace. And some things came out of it, like the creation of the PA which gave limited self-governance to the Palestinians.
But eventually, the Palestinians turned down what were perceived to be very serious and generous peace offers by the Israeli public, walked away from the negotiations, and started a terrible wave of terror attacks.
Similarly, Israel removed all settlers and all army personnel from Gaza, the result of which was the election of Hamas, with a sworn mission to destroy Israel, and constant rocket attacks on Israel.
So the way the Israeli public (correctly) sees it, there is no "partner for peace", and even when peace was very seriously pursued and positive steps taken to give Palestinians what they ostensibly wanted, the result was violence directed at Israel.
That is why there was a turn away from pursuing peace and just trying to "live with the situation".
Likely that it (or, specifically, East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem was Israeli both under the partition and the 1949 Armistice Agreement) is part of the territory Israel occupied after 1967 that wasn't Israel, despite later being decalred as annexed, and is generally not viewed internationally as Israeli territory.
Likely, but since as you say West Jerusalem is Israeli, and the government of Israel is in West Jerusalem on a practical basis, calling it a Palestinian city is both wrong, and making a point that I think is worth stating explicitly.
So Israel does the exact thing all the politicians try to scare us into believing Russia does every election in the US. I guess the difference is AIPAC.
What do you mean "try to scare us into believing Russia does"? Do you have any doubt that Russia has been interfering in US politics for well over a decade?
The total amount of direct evidence (evidence, not assertions of secret evidence by the US government, unproven and unsubstantiated allegations of hacking or superman Bernie memes by click farms based somewhere in Russia) that Russia has "interfered" with US politics that has been released by the US government in the last 10 years adds up to less than the evidence in this article on Israel alone.
Evidence aside, I personally think it is extremely likely that Russia, China and most other countries active on the world stage have tried to "interfere" in US politics to some degree, but nowhere near the amount that we interfere in the politics of other countries or that Israel interferes in ours.
> that Russia has "interfered" with US politics that has been released by the US government in the last 10 years adds up to (...)
So you acknowledge that it's quite clear that Russia indeed is systematically interfering, and your only claim is to call "what about" some other country?
No, I acknowledge that some interference by Russia and other countries is likely but not clear, since no clear evidence has ever been publicly offered. The only public evidence of clear, systemic, long-standing and ongoing interference we have is that of Israel.
The only question is why you haven't found any of this evidence, haven't believed any of it, or why you would argue such an easily disproven position without ever taking a few minutes to find out if the position you argue is still true many years after you've formed it.
It's almost as if you heard an opinion once or multiple times, perhaps from people or political figures you trusted. Then you internalized that opinion and it took on the attributes of 'belief' and haven't ever questioned it since it was formed. This belief became bound up with other things you believe, and now the defense mechanisms your brain uses to support 'belief' are also supporting this opinion in contradiction to facts that have been proven over the past years.
These defense mechanisms exist in your brain for good reasons, but they are also a way that propaganda exploits your brain's natural tendency to behave. It's difficult for victims of this to see it for what it is, confront their 'belief' system and admit they've been tricked. They have to overcome the feeling that it's their own fault they were tricked and their brain was exploited, which many never do, even though it's really not their fault that the human brain works the way it does. Propaganda is insidious, and particularly treacherous in the way that it convinces people to argue on its behalf, and that the act of doing so reinforces the hold the propaganda has on the person.
Despite your smug attitude, the evidence you just linked is nothing new and does not contradict the person you were replying to, did you even read the report?
Well I did (again), so let's take it from the top:
- Russia hacked into various local & state election boards, scary right? But in the very same report we learn this from, it's detailed this had no influence on vote tallies.
- Russia's state media outlets preferred one candidate over the other and made efforts to promote them. This one shocked me the most since I'm sure everyone before now assumed Russia's state media outlets would never push Russian propaganda! Who would have thought? Guess I'll have to get all my completely unbiased news from Aljazeera, Xinhua and KNCA from now on.
- Finally Russia is credited with Guciffer 2.0 and DCLeaks. Which likely had the most impressive (relative) impact but are also the most likely to trigger an argument at the dinner table since the evidence crediting these hacks to them are highly dubious.
Not mentioned in the report, oddly enough, was the ad campaigns they ran on various social media platforms to promote fringe candidates to increase national discord. Sounds clever but these ads were pretty terrible, good idea bad execution.
Even if we credit Russia for the DCLeaks and Guciffer hacks, which I personally believe they are undeserving of, Russia's attempts at "interference" were rife with incompetence, much like anything Russia tries. It's noteworthy that one of your links detailed one of their failures as so dramatic it resulted in the arrests of 13 participants!
If you were to combine everything I've listed here and compare it with any single propaganda operation performed by Israel, would you truly consider Russia's attempts more impressive? Certainly not the person you were replying to, and certainly not me.
Not to mention China's attempts, which in both scale and scope eclipses anything Russia has tried:
These indictments contain assertions, not evidence. Indeed, when it came time to go to trial, the government dropped the charges rather than present the "evidence" they claimed they had.
>The only question is why you haven't found any of this evidence, haven't believed any of it
There is an endless number of reports, findings, Senate Committee conclusions, all of which are filled with evidence-free assertions. You may choose to believe the government and their evidence-free assertions, I do not. No doubt you put great credence into the letter signed by 51 top intelligence officials, including 5 former heads of the CIA that the Hunter Biden laptop was "Russian disinformation" - many people continue to believe this despite the fact that the letter has been proven to be entirely false, and the laptop was introduced as evidence at trial by the DOJ this week, with its authenticity sworn to by the FBI.
>It's almost as if you heard an opinion once or multiple times, perhaps from people or political figures you trusted. Then you internalized that opinion and it took on the attributes of 'belief' and haven't ever questioned it since it was formed. This belief became bound up with other things you believe, and now the defense mechanisms your brain uses to support 'belief' are also supporting this opinion in contradiction to facts that have been proven over the past years.
Trust and faith are for children and priests. I don't trust the government, the DOJ, Russia, any politicians, or anyone else. I trust my ability to very carefully scrutinize and interpret information. When a claim is made, I look at the evidence offered to support that claim, no matter who makes it, or what the claim is. I suggest you read the above paragraph (the one that you wrote) and try to understand how it exactly describes your own beliefs.
>Propaganda is insidious, and particularly treacherous in the way that it convinces people to argue on its behalf, and that the act of doing so reinforces the hold the propaganda has on the person.
I could not agree more, and your post is a perfect example.
I would agree that my brain is definitely as susceptible as anyone else's to manipulation. I'm just as human as you, and subject to the same limitations.
I've made you defensive, and that wasn't my intent. At least you didn't go straight to irrational anger.
That said, I really don't see anything in your reply to change my assessment.
You're not engaging on the linked content other than to state disbelief, you seem to have applied some kind of category label to me as a believer in some kind of letter campaign(?), you have affirmed the extremely high level of certainty you have in your ability to assess information, and you've hyperbolized the level of rigor you use to assess all information claims you ingest from any source.
We're not going to take this discussion anywhere useful from here.
And that's okay. I tried, and now remember why most people don't. I don't hold any ill will towards you.
The nation that systematically interferes to the maximum possible extent in other nation's internal affairs, including elections is the United States of America. Tens of billions of dollars are spent on propaganda, misinformation, sponsorship of civil disturbances, activist NGO's, paid-coups of elected leaders whose elections were EU observer verified, etc.
The U.S. has grandmastery level of expertise in this space. No other nation comes remotely close. ex CIA directors have even admitted this openly on TV - "election interference" for the "greater good" - to thunderous applause!
Russian efforts to interfere were small, laughable peanuts that the American experts pitied. Read the assessments written in 2023, when Anti Trump hysteria had lowered.
Other nations just grit their teeth and put up with the extraordinary American interference in their internal affairs - because what can they even do ? The U.S. is the Divine Icon of Sanctimonious Hypocrisy. Complain too hard and you will be openly threatened with sanctions. (Look at what is happening with Georgia nowadays)
I thought they were all bad - according to the U.S itself when it is the target of such activities at the minutest level.
There is a lot of evidence, including open statements made by ex-CIA directors, published books by former military/intelligence agents, de-classified documents, news articles, interviews of EU ministers, etc. But most Americans hold your position - that direct or covert U.S. interference in other nation's affairs is completely fine. The only thing I complain about is the sanctimonious hypocrisy when actions reflect back.
This seems like a remnant opinion resultant from old propaganda campaigns promoted by politicians Russia was supporting with its interference in US politics.
These campaigns were multifaceted and included calling proven basic facts into question, going so far as to suggest Russia wasn't interfering at all.
Convincing people to disbelieve this basic fact precluded them from any possible consideration of whether Russia was supporting specific candidates, how Russia might benefit from such a candidate taking power, and why Russia might consider interference to be worth the effort, money, and risk.
This disbelief would also preclude any consideration about why the politician might:
- support such Russian meddling by pretending it did not exist
- make unsupported claims implicating their political opponents which completely ignored known facts
- play dumb whenever the subject came up
It was a playbook, followed to incredible success in conjunction with other propaganda efforts.
This all served to enable the politician to completely avoid addressing core questions about why Russia would support the candidate to the point of interfering with US elections to begin with.
Get on X.com for more than 20 minutes and tell me it isn’t swimming in Chinese/Russian state actors trying to inflict damage to US societal structure, politics, and way of life. Just go to any political news article for a bit and go down the rabbit hole of all the “patriot” accounts on there that are blatantly not American with bad English and a laser focus on propaganda against the USA and promoting far right (or left) garbage. Facebook has improved quite a bit over the past few years but it was much worse in the 2020 cycle, so much worse.
All major nations interfere with each other’s elections and/or politics and political stability. That said, the narratives around election interference are political rather than objective.
> last decade
well over a century..
The thing is that it’s a Constant. It’s not a new or surprising thing like fake news presents it as.
> Do you have any doubt that Russia has been interfering in US politics for well over a decade?
You mean through completely accepted and legal campaign donations to pretty much every major politician? Oh no wait that’s AIPAC and Israel and “just fine”. You mean through bots that post shit on FB right?
I don’t care for conspiracies, but I do wonder why American politicians don’t try to stop donations from foreign government institutions to politicians in general. JFK was on track to do just that before he was murdered.
> Deepfake of U.S. Official Appears After Shift on Ukraine Attacks in Russia
> U.S. officials said they had no information about the origins of the video. But they are particularly concerned about how Russia might employ such techniques to manipulate opinion around the war in Ukraine or even American political discourse.
Most likely this is meant to target trump supporters to encourage them to go vote for him because it highlights increased US support for Ukraine.
Not a comment about who's right or wrong in this war, but it is fascinating that we have entered the age of the Internet being a place where warfare is fought. There have always been people posting web content about conflicts but now with Gaza and Ukraine, it seems that the nations fighting are actively looking at the internet as the fourth field of battle.
Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
"Manufacturing Consent" was written in the 80s mostly in response to newspapers, but the ideas have been adapted to the Internet for some time (and talk radio, and cable news, etc.). I'm old enough to remember this from the Iraq war. Yeah, we didn't have microblogging back then, but there were Email campaigns, blogs, message boards, chat rooms, etc.
And let's keep in mind that the term "Public Relations" was explicitly chosen as a Newspeak-term because Edward Bernays realised that the actual term for a war time methodology, "propaganda", was too loaded.[0] And honest.
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
Quite often I default to the word propaganda when talking about anyone's PR campaigns in my own personal battle with trying to undo this. I ratchet it up when talking directly to marketing/PR people. Pretty much every time I'm just looked at as yet another crazy person.
My brain just came up with the phrase "You can't spell propaganda without PR", which I think is clever. But I'm going to put it into a search engine now and see that it's not original...
That once again, as always it seems, no one is talking about the Panda Gap.
Literally the raison d'etre of PR | propaganda is to distract, to replace, to (in modern terms) throw a dead cat on the table and have everybody talk about that.
> Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools", or "having better stuff than your neighbors is a virtue, failing to do so will lead to dangerous ostracization."
Very tame "Our blender spins twice as fast as the competition" marketing might be arguably free of ideology, but that's a decreasing minority.
>I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools"
I disagree. This isn't peddling an ideology, it's using an existing ideology (or stereotype) in order to peddle a product. A company with a marketing campaign targeting men isn't going to refuse to sell power tools to women, they're just designing their marketing campaign in a way they think will maximize sales overall, using existing biases and ideologies that potential customers already have. Normal companies don't care about ideology unless it helps them make more money, which is their true goal.
What you have described is, in fact, a mode of perpetuating ideology. If what you awere saying were accurate, it would absolve all capitalistic endeavors of reinforcing ideology, even the essential ideology of capitalism inherent in those endeavors.
That’s not how this works. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan would say.
A woman may never consider buying power tools because of the imagery of the propaganda surrounding power tools. Or the salesman may undermine, intimidate, or otherwise obstruct her attempts to purchase one. But regardless your point falls apart because the ideology of capitalism underlying the power tools on the shelf subsumes the ideology of the advertising.
That subsumption, however, does not in any way contraindicate those ideologies present in the advertisement’s framing. It only demonstrates that money is more important than the other ideologies being peddled.
> the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology
Marketing often includes the peddling of an ideology as a foundation for the product buying, especially for big-ticket items. (One buys the product that fits and signals one’s ideology.) To me, this makes marketing even more insidious as we often focus on the product rather than the message. Think Ford, Tesla, Apple …
I think one of the big takeaways for me was aside from deliberate manipulation of media by the government and willing media partners, that journalists also self censor in a way because they are operating in a professional environment and within a certain Overton Window.
Maybe it's not what I should remember most, but it did help remind me that when your livelihood is based on what you say you will be much more measured, regardless of the subject.
Probably why people look to social media or Substack for more independent people who have a longer leash, less on the line, and more to gain, since that's where you get your interesting although many times wrong takes (e.g. Ivermectin for Covid, or Lab Leak Theory)
Yes, they’re not new. But it is ridiculously easy and cheap today to do propaganda than even 30 years ago. We’re connected to the outrage machine 24/7 now because of internet/social media/smartphones, vs say 1980.
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
Indeed and one reason i don't watch or pay attention to news media(TV, online, etc) especially political news. What to believe is real / the truth and with the advent of AI, Deep fake voices and deep fake videos the Internet becomes an even worse place for deciphering truth.
I do think the economy is different. You've always been able to just hire a bunch of thugs to stage an event to shape the narrative, like old-school cold war style. That takes money and effort and a modicum of skill and the risk of being caught with your pants down is not negligible.
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
This seems reasonable, but it runs into a little problem. If you engage in political discussion anywhere on the internet, the first thing you'll find is that people, if they have formed an opinion, have exactly 0 interest in changing their mind. If you already hold a genuine and internally formed view on e.g. the Israel - Palestine conflict, then even if somebody sat you (or me) in front of 24/7 propaganda for the other side, they'd be unlikely to ever change either of our minds.
Propaganda only seems to work in two situations. The first is on topics people know nothing about. Each time the US invades some places most people couldn't even find on a map, support for it rises in accordance with the propaganda. But as people learn more, and gradually form their own values, that support tends to rapidly decline. And there are also long-term consequences, because people will remember being lied to. My views on the US war machine and geopolitics in general seem unlikely, at this point, to ever change. And they were largely formed due to the Iraq War. Irrefutable [1] and Undeniable [2] are two 21 year old articles I still go back to on occasion.
The other situation is when it's true. During the Cold War we spread endless propaganda about things like having stocked store shelves. This is doubly effective in the same way that lying propaganda is doubly ineffective. Because not only does it create a desired perception, but once people gradually find out it's really true, it also tends to turn them against their own government who invariably misrepresents such situations. Again, people don't like being lied to.
The purpose of propaganda, in its broadest definition, isn't to change minds. It is to leverage the existing contents of a mind in a way that makes you perform a certain action that is desired by the propagandist.
The belief that holding strong opinions protects against propaganda is dangerous. Strong opinions is where propaganda inserts its levers.
People also seem to discount the effects of internet operations by enemy states. For example, in 2022, the FBI blamed the state of North Korea for a string of hacks on US health systems. The "meatspace" equivalent would've been North Korean operatives infiltrating dozens of hospitals and destroying records or supplies. If that had happened, there would've been a bigger response from the government than "Mind your physical security, hospitals." But it's the internet, so who cares (besides the people immediately affected)?
Even in the old days, if your operation was caught, you could always claim that it was an enemy false flag. (And if it was your false flag and you were caught, you could always claim that it was an enemy provocation.)
Go to the Wikipedia pages of these events and click on "Talk" at the top or see the history of those pages. The amount of people fighting over this information war is mindblowing.
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
My understanding is, historians know that the source material is 90% bullshit (texts written to appease an ego of some lord, chronicles of war against "subhuman" enemies, religious scriptures), they just know how to find the remaining 10%.
That's much more oriented to network security, spectrum and hardware, stuff like that. For an American military organisation engaged in internet influence operations you'd want to look at the signature reduction program. Something like 50,000 people strong at this point, insane amounts of resources going into that.
The internet created a whole stratum of people who don’t use tv, radio and newspaper anymore. It’s not that we entered internet warfare, we just exited absolute control of large mass media. Now every TLA has to deal with it somehow.
Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
The Internet as we think of it is already a military project. Why do you think so much emphasis is put on countries that assert sovereignty over their own information space?
I think we’ve been here for a while, and I don’t think you make an overt branch to fight covert wars, you just roll it into the NSA or ops for some (all?) other branches of the military.
> Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
My first semester of college in Fall of 1999, I wrote a paper about cyber warfare and the summary was that the superpowers were already doing it, and the only thing expected to change in the future was the resources that were online and susceptible would increase the scale of cyber war.
Wasn't there something with the Canadian military fighting (what they called) misinformation on social media during the pandemic? Seems like it's already ongoing.
Canadian government was the source of misinformation on social media during the pandemic! Literal curfews were in place with propaganda machine saying how good idea it was.
For purposes of conversation and allowing for a moment your idea is true, to what purpose was the curfews imposed? Who benefited? How? Why were the curfews necessary to achieve those goals?
The only people who can tell you the actual purpose of an action taken are the people who actually took that action. Everyone else can only speculate.
How curfews can slow the spread of a virus, I have no idea. If you want to slow a virus's spread, you do it by isolating people and preventing them from mingling. A curfew doesn't do that; it just forces them to mingle during a shorter number of hours in a day, which if anything helps the virus spread by increasing the density of people mingling. The allegation that it was just governments trying to look like they're doing something useful is not an unreasonable charge. Any idiot can tell you that preventing someone from going on a bike ride in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is not going to help stop a pandemic, but this is exactly what several governments did.
When you propose that a conspiracy happened, you propose that the purpose of something was different from the stated purpose. So what purpose were you proposing?
>When you propose that a conspiracy happened, you propose that the purpose of something was different from the stated purpose.
Yes, but this doesn't mean that you know the actual purpose.
>So what purpose were you proposing?
I'm not proposing anything; I didn't propose a conspiracy happened, the OP did. I'm just explaining that the conspiracy theorist doesn't have to allege a specific purpose.
As for the curfews, my theory is that it was just plain anti-science stupidity, plus wanting to look like they're doing something, like many political decisions. If you disagree, please explain how someone riding a bicycle outdoors in a rural area with no other humans around somehow spreads a virus. Only countries with truly stupid leadership even had restrictions like these (i.e., UK, they're the only one I know of actually).
I think the person you replied to named the purpose as "giving the impression that they were doing something", which is shockingly often the case with politicians: They'll do what they believe will get them voted for again.
I don't think it is necessary to insult people as 'conspiracy nutters' on here. If you don't want to discuss something with someone, just give them a downvote and move on. No need to be uncivil.
I’m sorry, I did not mean for this comment to be a political point, but rather an observation on how technology is used in mass atrocities. I was hoping to raise a point which I find interesting, which other may or may not agree with. I’ve gotten a couple of excellent replies here raising interesting counterpoints.
After posting this, and reading the replies, I’m actually less convinced about my original point. That is, I’ve learned something.
I believe you, but it's too fine a distinction to make a difference on the important point. Your account has obviously been primarily (even exclusively) focused on this one topic for quite a while now. That's not allowed on HN because if we did allow it, HN would dramatically shift towards becoming a current-affairs site, which is not its mandate.
This is not to say that the topic doesn't matter. Of course it matters, a great deal—more than almost anything that gets discussed here. But that not only doesn't change the above point, it makes it even more important.
As I said the last time I replied to you, I appreciate that your comments have mostly not been breaking the site guidelines in other ways. But the "primarily" rule applies regardless.
I don't want to ban you as you've been here a long time and have used the site as intended in the past. But I have to go quite a long way back into the past before that becomes visible. This is not ok.
One nerd to another, I'm rooting for you here, and just want to write a note real quickly that it's very easy to get sucked into this topic. The dopamine circuit we're playing with is a quirk of homo messageboardicus. A couple days ago I did a bunch of conscious things to keep me away from this topic on HN, and with a day or so of detox I've regained my original perspective that this is a deeply cursed species of HN thread. There's lots of other stuff to talk about!
I got very lucky, and the very next day someone started an argument about the futility and/or propriety of user-mode TCP/IP stacks and WireGuard. I wish for you a similarly irresistible nerd snipe for whatever nerd topic lights you up. Good luck!
That would be cross browser support for MathML, or other tools to get math expressions typeset on the web. Those discussions only pop up like once every six months though.
I’m actually way more of a lurker here. There are e.g. once a month a submission about Bayesian Analysis (and a guaranteed once a year submission about Kalman Filters) which I religiously read but hardly ever contribute to (unless a frequentist is advocating for IQ tests or other psychometric devises; then I for sure contribute; but that can lead to flame-wars easily). Every so often there is a back end engineer with an “opinion” on the front end stack which I sometimes answer for, however that often be a flame-y subject, for some reason I’m less tempted to be sucked into flamewars when the subject is actually aligned with my expertise.
It seems you've been triggered by the mention of the g-word. But when we calmly consider what the commenter is saying:
Israel is using information age technology to commit and propagandize their genocide
It's plainly not an unreasonable proposition, nor does it seem to be intended to engage in battle or provoke. They're simply describing a perfectly horrible situation that happening on the ground (that some recognized experts in the field do consider to be a form of genocide per the UN definition of such) and the fact that modern information technologies seem to be a part of the mechanism that is bringing it about.
The post expresses an opinion, but it definitely wasn't flamebait.
I wasn't responding to any proposition, but rather to the pattern of how the account is using Hacker News over a long stretch of time. That's what the word "primarily" refers to, and it's the most important thing to understand.
Of course I replied to a specific post because any reply has to do that; but I was responding to the account's use of HN over time. That's the issue here.
I wrote the GP in haste and can see how this point wasn't obvious. On the other hand it should quickly become obvious to anyone who clicks on the link I provided (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), which is the purpose of providing the link.
Citing international law, Ms. Albanese explained that genocide is defined as a specific set of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,” she said.
Furthermore, “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,” she continued.
Clearly there are opinions at odds with your opinion.
> the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,
Hilarious considering every conflict has been started by Palestine. Ceasefires broken by Hamas on multiple occasions. And there’s no settler colonial process happening now or in the past.
But let’s continue to blame Israel when Hamas kills people trying to get food or supplies. Or blame Israel when Hamas fires its own rocket at a parking lot and claims 500 dead. Let’s blame Israel for trying to wipe out a terrorist organization that’s sole purpose is to wipe out the Jewish population and wipe Israel off the map.
While Israel is quite restrained. We will keep calling it genocide even tho ACTUAL genocide is happening every day in Iran and China and Africa. It’s fun to ignore what’s happening elsewhere so we can focus on Israel and making up things that aren’t happening.
The issue, in this case, isn't opinions nor the other discourse in the thread. Rather, it is the account's comments over a long stretch of time.
The question "has an account been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle?" is one of the most important criteria we use in HN moderation. When it is the case, we ask an account to stop and/or end up banning it.
This rule has many advantages. One is that it's a reasonably objective call to make (and for readers to verify) regardless of the specific views a user is arguing for or against. Another is that it allows for a certain amount of political and ideological discussion (as long as it doesn't break the site guidelines in other ways, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I have read the guide, although i appreciate reaffirming it as the source of truth. What’s hard is from a glance at the posters history their comments don’t seem to break the guidelines, but instead fall into the camp of spirited (albeit strongly so) opinions. Are there specific comments made that weren’t in the spirit of the guidelines? It feels “primarily for ideological purposes” is hard to counter in a discussion because “ideological” itself is a murky term at best.
The point is the pattern (I think the person you are responding to is incorrect about flamebait), you'd go look at the topic of their most recent comments - if the vast majority of interactions are to argue X then that seems to fall under 'idealogical battle'.
Moderation replies have to go somewhere! Did you miss my several explanations about how I wasn't responding to the specific comment, but to an overall pattern? Here they are:
I don't see how I could have been much clearer, so if you read those posts and still have a question that isn't addressed, I'd be curious to know what it is.
That is a 14 year old HN post linking to a dead article, the comments on which say things like
> This is not the 'hacker news' ranking algorithm, this is the ranking algorithm distributed with 'ARC', which is the basis for the HN algorithm, but definitely not equal to it. The biggest missing ingredients are flagged posts dropping off quicker and posts that contain no URL dropping off quicker but there are quite a few other subtle tweaks.
A lot of people have both mechanisms to record what's happening, and share it.
It's been that way with Syria conflict, too, though. A lot was shared in twitter/youtube during that one.
One thing that's seemingly a bit new is how much ordinary Israeli soldiers are sharing their behavior, empowered by their self-righteousness, I guess. Videos from shooting unarmed deaf people up close in their homes, to all kinds of calls for atrocities, actual assaults on international humanitarian aid trucks and violence against the drivers, cheerful mocking of starving people, dedicating videos of them blowing up peoples homes as gifts to their spouses back home in Israel, looting and stealing, wanton destruction of property (like going around and breaking things in someone's gift shop), burning people's houses down, etc. There's so much of this.
Entire 130k strong Israeli telegram channels are dedicated to collective cheering on and mocking of dead and suffering people: https://t.me/s/dead_terrorists Total dehumanization.
Those warned us that we westerners are not immune from getting manipulated into engaging in, and turning a blind eye to mass atrocities against entire groups of people. Even to attempts at their eradication. It was a lesson about the west and humanity.
I believe Telegram channels in them self are an enabler in this. Some sort radicalizing, dehumanizing
Radical elements can find each other and (dis)organize between themself and instigate such actions between military groups outside the chain of command.
Telegram is used to for this in other current wars.
The holocaust came of age in the dawn of the information age if you count the radio as information technology, albeit a very one-sided information technology where you had the government giving everyone cheap radios that were only marked to tune to German and Austrian radio stations, unless you dared to go out at night to get an antenna up to receive others. [1]
Just look at how that's evolved into what's now referred to a "talk radio". Only, you have multiple stations available so you can choose your particular firebrand to listen.
This also applies to the Rwandan genocide. A lot of it was perpetrated via mass media, especially radio. But you can also claim that there were Industrialized genocides before the Holocaust, but what sets it apart is just how much it was defined by industrialized processes.
The Gaza Genocide is similar, the use of AI for target selection (or rather generation), the social media campaigns, using drones for killings, etc. We haven’t seen a genocide before which uses information technology to the extent it really defines whole processes of the genocide.
Germany pioneered a lot of modern propaganda techniques in WWII:
The first television broadcast on earth was of Hitler, and his chief propagandist, Goebbles, continues to have significant influence on modern propagandists. For instance, Biden's publicly compared the tactics Trump used in the 2020 "Big Lie" campaign to those of Goebbles. Of course, there was also the Hitler Youth, which was a pretty successful social engineering campaign.
On the computer side of things: IBM mainframes were famously an enabling technology for the holocaust and german war machine.
Its not at all, even if you mean “social media age”, and not “information age”, it's just one of the first (there are other disputed candidates, e.g., in Ukraine) that are getting first world attention other than after-the-fact.
The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in which Facebook’s role was widely discussed (largely, in the first world, after the fact) was probably the first social media age genocide, if you don't restrict it to ones with immediate first-world attention at a significant level.
I’m thinking in terms of processes and propaganda. While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings. The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones to carry out killings with targets selected by AI.
> While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings.
No, its not. Heck, the Holocaust used information technology for target selection.
> The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones
The genocides in the former Yugoslavia used most of the weapons of then-modern warfare, which may not have included drones but certainly involved plenty of weapons systems that incorporate "information technology" in doing the killings.
I am so sick of the claim that if you criticize Israel you must have something against Jews.
Jews are a loosely-defined, globally-distributed cultural group. Israel is a specific, concrete sovereign country. It is a bit like saying if you criticize Venezuela then you must hate "Latinos".
I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
There are plenty of reasons people care more about Israel's actions than those of any random country that have nothing to do with the fact that Israel is populated mostly by Jews, including:
1. It has historical and cultural ties to Western countries, so Westerners feel naturally interested in what goes on there (see also: why people care more about what's happening in Ukraine than in other armed conflicts around the globe),
2. Israel has a much higher degree of influence over American politics than any other foreign country, which bothers people,
3. It is largely propped up by U.S. aid, so Americans feel responsible for it,
4. Because of point 3., it is one of the only global problems that Americans have a realistic chance of solving by protesting.
> I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict. Though since it's hard to find a protest that isn't pushing for that maybe your right on point 4.
> People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
If I have no conscious negative feelings towards Jews, don’t treat any of the ones I know differently from anyone else (other than maybe asking them curious questions about their culture/religion), and generally don’t have any negative reaction when I find out someone is Jewish, how would you even measure or define this apparently asymptomatic anti-Semitism?
> Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict.
I do not mean that and I think it’s very unlikely the protests will cause that, and to be clear, I think the maximalist demands being made by protestors (“from the river to the sea”, etc.) are too radical, but again, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily motivated by antisemitic feelings. Perhaps sometimes they are, but it’s by no means a logical necessity.
What I think is possible to achieve by protesting is forcing Israel to back down from its own right-wing maximalist posture towards Palestinians and be open to agreeing some kind of lasting peace or at least easing up on the atrocities they’re committing (and I am mainly thinking of the atrocities they’ve been committing since long before Oct. 7th: the indefinite blockade of Gaza and the creeping settlement Swiss-cheesing the West Bank).
But the difference here is that for many in the West, they are seeing their own participation in it (ie USA, UK) with the Germans giving morale support for it. All those American Boeing-made missiles ripping apart and burning alive those little hungry toddlers camping outside in their cold tents… it tends to make people reflect a little more.
I have a different theory. There are tons of wars and conflicts in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia vs Yemen, Iran vs Irak, Pakistan vs India, civil war in Syria, civil war in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, and everybody else is fighting ISIS. It’s not like the US/West are not involved or that the conflicts are any less bloody or that the parties have "better reasons" to kill each other. And still, they receive no where near as much attention and criticism as Israel/Palestine. I also don’t think the reason is antisemitism (at least in the West). I think the reason is that the West has to view everything through the lens of the culture war: it’s white vs brown and white is evil, therefore Israel is evil.
Israel has created its own perception of itself to the world. They gave up all sense of humanity to go on a revenge spree and now they don’t know when to stop because the whole world sees them as monsters so they probably think it couldn’t get any worse.
Changing the convo to talk about some other wars than Israel / Gaza is just another kind of deflection technique to avoid responsibility.
If it isn’t the antisemitism card, it’s the deflection card.
I really appreciate the attempt here, but these people are convinced and refuse to yield to logical questions, e.g. What is the evidence for a genocide? Gaza Ministry of Health says there is a genocide. You mean Hamas? The people who organized and filmed themselves murdering and kidnapping women, old people and children. Why do they have credibility? The UN also says there is a genocide. The UN cites Hamas. The BBC, NYT, HRW... ...also cite Hamas. It's Hamas all the way down. Well, it's the best source we have. Israel is biased, and committing genocide...
Well their enemies used social accounts to garner support from US citizens so you've got to start somewhere!
It's not like we haven't done this either. I worked for a company in 2005 which was doing this paid for by politicians. Moment I worked this out, I quit.
100% agree (hence my point about quitting) but the problem is it's a difficult position to be in when everything is narrative driven and misreporting and propaganda are rife.
You can sit there and do nothing and wait for your enemy to paint you in a bad light and the next thing you know your usual political allies are throwing money and aid at your enemy. Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering the game. The moral high ground may have a higher body count.
This point applies to both sides for ref. And because it's a war, the rules of fair play go out of the window until people are on trial afterwards.
Well there's a problem here. There are rules. But no one really has to abide to them. There are no consequences against a sovereign nation other than political allegiance risk or travel risks for convicts.
>Well their enemies used social accounts to garner support from US citizens so you've got to start somewhere!
I mean, if Israel started bombing me, I'd try to garner support from US citizens too? There is a world of difference between that and faking social media accounts
An exercise with war casualty stats you can do is look at previous wars and look at the variation in estimates in body counts for each side. Then factor that into the news you are reading it.
End game is there has never been a credible body count from even a small scale war. So to claim anyone is right here on either side is probably selective bias on your part. At best when the dust has figuratively and literally settled, it'll be a decade before anyone has an even remotely credible count.
Manipulation of the body counts is easy material for propaganda. It has been since the dawn of war.
Factor child soldiers into these arguments and it gets very grey. The number itself without compounding facts has little meaning.
And for the sake of credibility, the figures were later revised so you're not even quoting their current estimates and compromising your own credibility!
"Two officials from the Palestinian Ministry of Health have told CNN that although the ministry keeps a separate death toll for identified and unidentified individuals, the total number of people killed remains unchanged.
The total number of dead also does not include the approximately 10,000 people who are still missing and trapped under the rubble, the officials added.
CNN has seen a daily report from the Palestinian health ministry which matches the number OCHA published in the revised version. A total of 15,103 children and 9,961 women have been killed in Gaza since October 7, the Gaza ministry of health said in its latest report."
For the record I didn't verify the deaths, I looked at information release in past conflicts for the last 10 or so years *.
"MoH statistics have also been verified by Human Rights Watch and used by the United States Department of State in past conflicts and as recently as March 2023, despite US President Joe Biden questioning those numbers without evidence."
Palestinian authorities were found to be releasing counts in good faith and never inflated numbers for the sake of an information war. This is a key point, why doubt an organisation that hasn't lied about it's death count before.
Deny, Discredit, Disinform, Diffuse and Defray are things you'll see time and time again in threads like these.
Now, it's a sobering thought 15,000+ children have been murdered, in 2023/2024. With full support of the US, 'ironclad' apparently.
That analogy makes zero sense, the Allies were not a settler colonial organization trying to ethnically cleanse natives. Maybe start learning a bit of history before Oct 7, start by reading about the actions of early Zionists[0].
"The organization [Irgun] committed acts of terrorism against Palestinian Arabs, as well as against the British authorities, who were regarded as illegal occupiers.[7] In particular the Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, British, and United States governments;"
Posts on all sides of this topic get flagged quickly (by users), and mods turn off the flags on limited occasions—mostly when some significant new information arises and there's at least some chance of a substantive discussion about it.
It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the purpose of the site. But it's also important that the topics not be ignored completely, even though they're painful. There's no happy medium here, unfortunately.
Here are some links to previous explanations. If you (or anyone, of course) have a look at these and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Reasonable approach and I applaud your effort to maintain the site's purpose while also not ignoring these issues (that do have some relation to the tech industry, as we've seen). Thank you.
Appreciate the case by case basis approach to moderation here. There are quite a few topics where discussion becomes suppressed when blanket bans are enforced.
The problem is that we've already solved these issues many times over on other sites that are decades old. HN simply refuses to implement 21st-century forum enhancements.
Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.
Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.
Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.
Gentle reminder that this is against the guidelines, it comes across somewhat as sneering and dismissive (which i don’t think was the intent, but is there none the less).
> There is no planet where the opinion above represents "force."
How about one of the standard Merriam Webster definitions of force: (verb) "to compel by physical, moral, or intellectual means" i.e. by framing their argument to compel by convincing it's from an intellectual standpoint. Not too interested on your hangups for definitions of basic words to be honest here though.
Throwing a tantrum about being unable to redirect outrage freely onto others while masquerading adding functionality to enable that discourse as an "already solved problem implemented by others" with lack of complying to their personal standards being perceived as refusing "enhancements" isn't a discussion, its an emotion driven stance attempting to make the other party look unreasonable.
I specifically made sure not to claim that "tech is not political", because that would be wrong.
The issue is that "X used fake accounts to push political agenda on social media" might be interesting political news, but it's incredibly boring technical news.
Everyone knows that this is possible, and the only novel information here is political.
I'd say that if you posted news which are interesting in how they relate to tech, and also political, you're going to (or at least should have) more success than this article. Even just a proper analysis of how widespread fake political social media accounts area, deeper statistics, more novel processes of this happening, etc. would all be interesting, and would not fall in the politics-first-tech-second bucket.
It's possible that account is banned, but more likely your self-posts might be getting filtered by HN's software which tries to apply this guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.:.
There's reddit.com if you need to vent your outrage about technology and politics. We don't need to turn every website on the internet into reddit, it's okay to have some websites focus on other things.
Is it really that hard to imagine congress supporting the democratic country with one of the biggest pride parades in the world vs the country that hasn’t had elections in 18 years and is split between 2 leaders who disagree on pretty much everything?
They really targeted the dumbest, most venal people in Congress. These particular people will fight for anyone but the people who elected them, so afraid to lose their jackpot.
Because anti-Semitism is used to derail any conversation about Israel. If you criticize Israel, you're accused of being an anti-Semite, and actual anti-Semites flood the conversation with actual anti-Semitism that immediately shuts everything down.
Because all the aid for Israel comes back to arms dealers and other wealthy creeps in the US, and they own our politics.
Israelis are just doing what their version of Judaism is telling them to do, it's the neocon Zionists in the US that finance it that are the real danger. It isn't just that they don't care about Palestinian lives, they don't care about Israeli lives, either. They care about Israeli contracts.
So would you also expel Russian and Chinese embassy staff?
Allies influencing other allies is part of the process. Don't just think that it is Israel doing it in America. America is also doing similar actions in other countries where they want to win favour.
That really doesn't mean much in a society that has perfected the art of manufacturing consent[0]
"The survey puts numbers on trends that have become increasingly apparent: Cable news viewers are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general. People who get their news primarily from social media, YouTube, or podcasts, by contrast, generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.
WE OFTEN HEAR people say that “Twitter isn’t real life” or that “Nobody watches cable news,” but the survey asked where people get most of their news, asking them to pick just one, and cable and social media won out. Most Americans do in fact get their news either primarily from cable (42 percent) or social media like TikTok, Instagram, or another platform (18 percent). A third of people said they get their news from YouTube or podcasts, with 13 percent saying they got most of their news that way.
Asked generally where folks got their news on a day-to-day basis, with a “check all that apply” option, it’s even more clear how dominant cable (55 percent), social media (38 percent), and podcasts/YouTube (34) are compared to print, at 21 percent. (I read the survey as using “print” as a stand-in for any text-based media, whether digital like The Intercept or on actual printed paper.) "
Even the polls you referenced show how stark the contrast between young and old americans are on this topic. Some of the older americans barely have any education on this topic but just stick with the zionist propaganda they were fed when they were younger, they couldn't even locate Israel/Palestine on a map.
Most of the older christian zealots don't have the critical thinking skills or capacity to change their mind on the topic because their indoctrination is so thorough that they'd rather deny reality than face the facts. Not surprising considering they grew up on a mantra that the so called "chosen" people can do no wrong.
I think if those christians who voted favorably had seen how israelis spit[3] on christians and assault[4][5] christians, their opinions would change swiftly, but the news channels they consume won't feed them this reality because consent needs to be manufactured.
> doesn't mean much in a society that has perfected the art of manufacturing consent
Everyone has a snippy argument for why opioid opinion is wrong. I’m not saying, in this case, that the majority is correct. (Nor the inverse.) Just that it is the reason Israel enjoys such support here.
(Would also note that both sides fervently believe the media is conspiring against them.)
>Everyone has a snippy argument for why opioid opinion is wrong.
So why did you not give your argument? I've at least put in the work to provide evidence & arguments for my thesis, you on the other hand are just saying handwavy stuff.
>I’m not saying, in this case, that the majority is correct. (Nor the inverse.) Just that it is the reason Israel enjoys such support here.
Yes and I've explained how that is largely a product of manufactured consent and there is plenty of evidence for that. I've only provided a fraction of the available evidence here supporting that thesis.
>(Would also note that both sides fervently believe the media is conspiring against them.)
That's just completely asinine framing, at least critique the article, the argument or the data instead of making my position out to be something conspiratorial
General lack of countries with something even vaguely resembling representative government in the Middle East.
Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
Good for them. But if you're Arab Israeli, you don't have the same slate of rights and representation that Jewish Israelis have. See: freedom of movement to and from the Gaza Strip prior to October 7th.
Arabs has 100% the same rights as Israelis.
The freedom of movements to Gaza was not allowed to Jews as well (or every Israeli), since this is an enemy territory.
So I challenge you to find 1 law that treats Jews and Arab citizens differently in Israel
The only Arab-Israeli that ever thought it would be a good idea to wander into Gaza was a mentally ill young man named Hisham al-Sayed a decade ago, and he has been a hostage there ever since.
It's the same as the US's treatment of African Americans for decades; legally they have the same rights but the reality of how they get treated by their government is much different. Just pointing out "Aha! They are equal under law!" is misleading and tries to shut the issue down
> But if you're Arab Israeli, you don't have the same slate of rights and representation that Jewish Israelis have.
You're mixing up two different things. Arab Israelis (as Israel calls them) are Israeli citizens. They have the same rights as any Israeli citizen.
Freedom of movement to and from the Gaza strip is of Gazans, who are not Israeli citizens, and they indeed don't have the same rights in Israel as Israeli citizens.
David Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish History: "Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth."
Iraq and Lebanon both more closely "vaguely resemble" representative government than Israel does. For all their problems, at least all the people they rule over are allowed to be citizens and vote.
Freedom house, which I think is a credible source here, says Israel is free and democratic, and Lebanon and Iraq are not. How does that not contradict your point? The claim was that Israel is the only free and democratic country in the middle east, do you have any credible source that disproves that?
Israel administers the West Bank as a bantustan for the majority of their (technically non-citizen) Arab population, but does not officially count it as part of their territory, so they don’t have to grant the people there citizenship or allow them voting rights. But it’s worth repeating: Israel entirely controls this territory. That is clearly undemocratic.
What is worth repeating this is no different than any other occupied territory in the world or in history. When the US occupied Germany it didn't allow Germans voting rights. When it occupied Japan it didn't give Japanese voting rights. When it occupied Afghanistan or Iraq it didn't give those voting rights either. Puerto Ricans are administered by the US but don't have voting rights.
There is nothing undemocratic about this at all. This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
You can ask why these territories are in this status for this length of time. Part of the reason is that the country it was occupied from, Jordan, does not want it back. Another part is that the Palestinians that live there don't really want this resolved either (at least some really large portion of them). Another part are other external interests that don't want to see this resolved.
What are you talking about? Germany held federal elections less than 4 years after the end of the war. The US didn't occupy germany against their will for 50 years. Japan had elections ONE year after the war. Stop lying.
I'm saying they could not vote in the US which is what the discussion is about. The Palestinians also had elections. I don't think what people are asking Israel to do here is to let the Palestinians have elections while being occupied?
The total physical occupation of Germany lasted 11 years. The final status of Germany was only determined in 1990 in the 2+4 agreement. That's a 45 year period. The US still has bases in Germany.
> I don't think what people are asking Israel to do here is to let the Palestinians have elections while being occupied?
It's incredible how persistently you miss the point.
What people are asking Israel to do is let Palestinians have a say in their own affairs. That can be done _either_ by letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine (as the West German government did relatively soon after the war ended), _or_ by letting Palestinians have a say in the Israeli government that rules over them (one state solution).
I'm being called a liar for pointing out that in general people living in occupied territories do not have the rights of the citizens of the occupier, which is the exact situation here, and for which Israel is labelled as an "Apartheid State", since there's no Apartheid in Israel proper, only supposedly in said occupied territories.
I think you're factually wrong on your "What people are asking" statement. Different people are asking different things. However, you can totally ask that question as an individual and we can discuss it.
Palestinians do have a say in their own affairs. But you're saying "letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine". When you say Palestine do you mean the west bank? Would you agree that in Gaza Israeli did let the Palestinians "meaningfully control Gaza"? What was the outcome of that? What do you propose can be done differently in the west bank for example? What level of say/control do you feel would balance Israel's security needs with the Palestinian's need to have a say/meaningful control? Let's talk specifics.
There was West Germany and East Germany. There was "denazification" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification (e.g. promoting of Nazi ideas had a death penalty under the occupation, do you think that'll fly with Israel vs. Palestinians vs. the world?). There were war crime trials for top level Nazis.
EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that when the west bank was occupied by Israel in 1967 it was considered to be part of Jordan and Jordan didn't give up that claim until their peace agreement with Israel. But if your point is that Israel should have at that point given the people living in this area a measure of autonomy to run most aspects of their lives I think I can agree. There was definitely some self governing, e.g. at the city level. I think the demand was of Israel to return this to Jordan at that point in time and Israel refused since it meant there would be large Arab armies 10 minute tank drive from Tel-Aviv. (e.g.). I wasn't around in 1967 and I haven't studied that period in detail.
> What is worth repeating this is no different than any other occupied territory in the world or in history. When the US occupied Germany it didn't allow Germans voting rights. When it occupied Japan it didn't give Japanese voting rights. When it occupied Afghanistan or Iraq it didn't give those voting rights either.
It is a lot different from any of those examples, mainly because the U.S. didn’t annex the parts of those countries it cared about (see East Jerusalem), didn’t start moving its own people to the rest of the territory carving it up like Swiss cheese, didn’t prevent people from going and coming, didn’t heavily restrict trade between those countries and their neighbors, etc.
So while indeed they were militarily occupied, the degree of functional civilian control by the democratically elected governments were far greater than that enjoyed in Palestine by the PA or by Hamas.
I agree that the situation in Puerto Rico is undemocratic but again, it’s not nearly as egregious for lots of reasons.
> This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
It is laughable to claim the reason for anything Israel does is “international law” when they flaunt it so cavalierly. Really, they didn’t mind the international legal implications of annexing East Jerusalem or building settlements in the West Bank, but the reason they refuse to annex the rest of it and give people citizenship is because of international law?
That’s clearly not the case. They have taken the parts they care about either by annexation or pseudo-annexation (settlements). The reason they don’t want to annex the rest is because they don’t want Arabs to be nearly half their citizens (annexing it without granting citizenship would be too egregious to ignore in the eyes of the rest of the world) and because there’s nothing there that they want. Expect this to change if the trend of Israel becoming more and more right wing continues.
I agree there are a lot of differences. My point though still stands I think. The reason Palestinians don't enjoy equal rights to Israelis is that they live in an occupied territory of still to be determined status. Whatever process happened in Germany after WW-II failed to happen in the west bank after 1967. Israel would love to resolve this problem, ofcourse on terms it can live with. Israel and the Palestinians have not been able to get to terms they can both live with (understatement of the day) and so the situation persists.
I also think my other point stands that if Israel did annex the West Bank and/or Gaza and give Palestinians equal rights, as it did in Jerusalem or the Golan Heights that would not be viewed as an acceptable solution. The reason I raise this is because criticism is levelled at Israel for not doing that. The Palestinians would not consider this to resolve the conflict and neither would anyone else, they say exactly what you're saying here. I'm not saying the reason Israel isn't doing it is international law but surely the lack of acceptance from anyone to this solution is part of that thought process (and also the question of maintaining Jewish majority in Israel).
Palestinians did get some control, they got total control of Gaza in 2005, partial control earlier of Gaza and the West Bank as part of the Oslo accords.
I also want to be clear that I'm opposed to Israeli settlement in the west bank. I don't think that's helpful. I also don't think it's the real problem here. The legal status of the west bank in Israeli law is still occupied territory, there hasn't been any formal annexation.
One thing I can say as to the annexation/reunification of Jerusalem is that Israel is doing a much better job than Jordan did in maintaining and protecting the rights of all religions to have access to their holy sites. When Jerusalem was under Jordanian control Jews could not access it at all and I think Christians also less than today. So I think Israel is a reasonable guardian of this place and all its citizens and visitors are treated fairly. The final status of Jerusalem would presumably be something agreed to as part of the (maybe never) peace agreement. I think between leaving it "occupied" and the current status the current status is/was the better option for everyone.
There are voices by the way in the right wing of Israel calling for annexation and granting of citizenship.
I don't think Israel is "flaunting" international law more so than most of the rest of the world. It just happens to be in an unsolvable mess of a situation. Israel and Israelis really wanted this resolved in the peace process of the early 90's and were willing to go a long way towards what Palestinians were asking for, but didn't really meet a partner. So to blame this solely on Israel, which is admittedly to some degree in a position of power, but is also very vulnerable, is not fair. I would say at least half the blame is on the Palestinians.
500k Palestinians in Lebanon, 2nd-3rd generation "refugees", are not allowed to be citizens and do not have a vote.
(Palestinians are the only people in the world who the UN allow to inherit this status)
> Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
According to the wisdom of US foreign policy, yes.
For what it's worth, the US has also tried to work a two-state solution over the last 30 years with various degrees of vigor. That became much harder to accomplish when the Gaza Strip decided to elect Hamas to lead its government in 2006-07.
> For what it's worth, the US has also tried to work a two-state solution over the last 30 years with various degrees of vigor. That became much harder to accomplish when the Gaza Strip decided to elect Hamas to lead its government in 2006-07.
It became much harder when the Israeli hard Right murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and then took over the Israeli government with Netanyahu's election in 1996.
Both fairly explicitly in reaction against the idea of ever accepting a Palestinian State.
It's worth mentioning that Rabin's murder was almost certainly related/triggered to the wave of suicide bombing attacks by Hamas that came as a response to the peace process. The Israeli right was up in arms about how the peace process was leading to terrorism. I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
> the wave of suicide bombing attacks by Hamas that came as a response to the peace process
The Hamas suicide bombings in 1994 were in response to the massacre committed by Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein in February. The first bombing of the "wave" happened in April.
[1]
> This was the first suicide bombing attack to be carried out by Palestinian militants against Israeli civilians in Israel, and was carried out in retaliation for the killing by a settler of 29 Muslims while they were at prayer in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on 25 February.
> I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
Honestly it's a bit of a blur to me but I do agree that Baruch Goldstein's attack was likely another destabilizing factor. It stood out at the time as something completely insane. For the sake of historical accuracy though Hamas' suicide attacks predate that event, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehola_Junction_bombing
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack, describing Goldstein as a "degenerate murderer" and "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism" - which is important.
>Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack, describing Goldstein as a "degenerate murderer" and "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism" - which is important.
Agree that it is important. What is even more strange is that Yitzhak Rabin himself was assassinated by a Zionist Terrorist.
There were many deals and processes and talks, Almost all of them put Israel front and centre, even Oslo accords for instance. But as claimed by Bibi, Zionist Terrorists tried everything to thwart it. And conveniently placed the blame on Palestinians. It was Zionist Terrorists who brought terrorism as we know today to the middle east. It was them who killed in cold blood, the mediator who presented the plan, Count Folke Bernadotte. But all the blame is on Palestinians, while the Terrorists derailed any hope for peaceful coexistence, and continue to do so.
I'm not sure what "Zionist Terrorist" is getting us here in relation to Yigal Amir. There is very little relationship between that dude, who is a religious extremist, and the secular zionists that founded Israel.
I can't really debate your other statements because it's pretty short of facts. I seriously doubt the truth of "zionism brought terrorism to the middle east" as there were e.g. massacres of Jews in the region (Hebron, or Tsfat) that predate zionism.
And sure, Lehi were terrorists, I'm not super familiar with the Bernadotte story but that's well into the conflict, not by any means that start of it.
From my perspective it was the Palestinians, through Hamas, that derailed the Oslo accords. By any measure you can choose, the Palestinian violent opposition to peace eclipsed the Israeli one. Also while Israel has a government with the ability to enforce policy, the Palestinians never had any centralized authority that talks for all of them. While Israel was putting extreme right activists in detention with no trial, the Palestinians were letting Hamas out of their jails with a "revolving door".
Did you know Israelis ran a covert bombing campaign in Lebanon wherein they blew up hundreds of civilians, blamed it on Palestinians, and then used this to justify the 1982 invasion?
> [Rise and Kill First] contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly ‘terrorist’ campaign.
> As Rise and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister immediately decided to “activate” the FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.
> On September 17, 1981, a car bomb exploded outside of the command center shared by the PLO and its Lebanese leftist allies in the port city of Sidon, killing over 20, most of them women and children who lived in nearby apartment buildings, John Kifner reported in the New York Times.
> Two days later, another “terrorist bomb” killed four in a crowded movie theater in West Beirut, Kifner reported. The FLLF claimed responsibility, but Palestinian officials immediately insisted that the group is “fictitious,” a ploy used by Israel to hide its hand in these attacks.
> On October 1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing 90, as Kifner and the UPI reported. Several other vehicles loaded with explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”
> A RAND report on ‘recent trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its totality claimed 308 lives.
> The censor’s decision made it possible for Israeli leaders to insist, in June 1982, that the invasion of Lebanon was justified in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Remarkably, it made it possible for Ariel Sharon to take to the pages of the New York Times in August 1982 and insist that Israeli troops “were greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered” the country. They had followed the Jewish doctrine of tohar haneshek, “the moral conduct of war,” Sharon added, a policy that stood “in vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.”
Did Israel also fire rockets on its north from Lebanon? Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Anyways, in this conflict cherry-picking is a big problem. Pro-Palestinians are very good at cherry picking some questionable Israeli action while totally ignoring the rest of the story. You can't understand reality by cherry picking certain things and spinning a theory to accommodate them. That's how conspiracy theorists think. The scientific method is to try and falsify your theory and really test whether it stands the test of the other events, not the ones' your cherry picking. And naturally for every story check multiple sources to try and get a sense of what really happened. If you're ignoring the rocket attacks on Israel, and other PLO attacks on Israel, and the attempt to assassinate the UK ambassador, as factors in your theory, then maybe your theory is wrong.
> Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
See below quotes. It also did try to assassinate US diplomat John Gunther Dean.
> Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Not the sole reason in itself, rather a critical part of whipping political support.
[1]
> From his first day at the Defense Ministry, Sharon started planning the invasion of Lebanon. He developed what came to be known as the "big plan" for using Israel's military power to establish political hegemony in the Middle East. The first aim of Sharon's plan was to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure in Lebanon and to undermine it as a political organization. The second aim was to establish a new political order in Lebanon by helping Israel's Maronite friends, headed by Bashir Gemayel, to form a government that would proceed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. For this to be possible, it was necessary, third, to expel the Syrian forces fro Lebanon or at least seriously weaken their presence there. The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan's conversion into a Palestinian state would end international pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
> Sharon and Eytan, realizing there was no chance of persuading the cabinet to approve a large-scale operation in Lebanon, adopted a different tactic. They started presenting to the cabinet limited proposals for bombing PLO targets in Lebanon, expecting that the guerillas would retaliate by firing Katyusha rockets on Israel's northern settlements and that this would force the cabinet to approve more drastic measures. The idea was to implement Operation Big Pines in stages by manipulating enemy provocation and Israel's response. A number of confrontations took place in the cabinet as a result of these tactics. Ministers opposed to a war in Lebanon because they recognized where these proposals were intended to lead.
> Sharon himself displayed the same deviousness in his relations with the Reagan administration as he did in his relations with his cabinet colleagues. He fed the Americans selective information intended to prove that the PLO was making a mockery of the cease-fire agreement and to establish Israel's right to retaliate.
This coincides exactly with the FLLF terror campaign.
> On 3 June the casus belli that the hard-liners had been waiting for materialized. A group of Palestinian gunmen shot and greviously wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to London, outside the Dorchester Hotel.
> Mossad sources had intelligence to suggest that the attempt of Argov's life was intended to provoke an Israeli assault on Arafat's stronghold in Lebanon in order to break his power.
> Avraham Shalom, the head of the General Security Service, reported that the attack was most probably the work of the faction headed by Abu Nidal and suggested that Gideon Machanaimi, the prime minister's adviser on terrorism, elaborate on the nature of that organization. Machanaimi had hardly opened his mouth when Begin cut him off by saying, "They are all PLO."
[1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall, chapter "The Lebanese Quagmire"
What do you mean at least work with Israel? The US is propping up Israel and without that ally Israel would probably implode. What’s messed up is how disrespectful Israel and some of their politicians are to US and their citizens. One thing I like about Israel is that they have a variety of oppinions and schools of thought. What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
Israel is a postindustrial economy with a 600,000-man military reserve and (unofficially) a nuclear arsenal of the size and capability needed to destroy the society of any industrialized nation on Earth.
Almost all of the support and protection they've received from the US since October has been mainly to keep leverage on Netanyahu and to keep the war from spreading across the Middle East. For example, if Iran's missiles had bombarded Tel Aviv, you're probably going to see Israel bombarding Tehran, which could pull in Iraq, etc., and Israel has yet to lose a fight against its regional neighbors.
They don't need the US to prop them up economically or militarily, which should bring about a conversation about support come next budget, but I doubt it.
I too would like to see a more moderate group in charge.
Which Israeli defense contractors build airplanes and tanks? Without aircraft and spares you cannot have a modern military. The US absolutely props up Israeli with weapons and military technology that they do not produce in country. Waving around nuclear weapons and a massive number of troops are the actions of states that are weaker then project as (Russia DPRK).
> Which Israeli defense contractors build airplanes and tanks?
Neither do the North Koreans [1][2]? (Caveats [3][4].)
America dropping Israel simply means it finds a new supplier. Russia is out of the picture, given its dependence on Iran, but China and India would be more than willing to supply.
Israel did use to build fighter jets. It built the Kfir. It planned to build a next gen airplane (The Lavi) but was pressured by the US to cancel that plan and instead buy F16s. The US also affects control of what Israeli weapons systems can be sold to who. Presumably part of the agreement to cancel the Lavi project was some sort of US commitment to supply Israel instead.
> What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
Wishful thinking, regardless of which elections your talking about. In the US, both sides are working hard to prop up Israel. In Israel before October, Netanyahu was on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Who's even talking about that anymore? Now he gets to be a war Prime Minister.
Most Americans have no idea how Israel is governed. Even grasping the basics of how the United States government works is sadly not guaranteed.
All most people know is the spin they've gotten from the media and politicians. Both tend to be very pro Israel in the US. That's changed a little recently, but not much.
Because of the 535 politicians we have, 45 of them have received donations just during the 2024 election cycle. Big names like Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Mitt Romney, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, etc.
It's bipartisan enough that I don't believe the parties will be able to come to an agreement to enact any meaningful change. This goes beyond the Republican vs. Democrat issues so it's much more difficult to make this a partisan issue to rally mass support from either party.
I don't know of any government department in Canada, Mexico, the UK, France, Germany, Australia that target U.S. law makers with fake social media accounts.
I'm not saying it's not happening, however, the US has a much bigger stick to use by withholding funds/arms/aid before stooping to this level of influence*. Pretty much no other country has the reciprocal influence to the US, so these kinds of machinations is kind of expected.
*Historical examples of other forms of US meddling/interference is not being ignored, and paves the way to why I would not say not being done.
I have a question of my own. Is there another country whose citizens are regularly elected to Congress? Dual citizens are not barred from holding office in Congress, and certainly there are more than a few English Americans and French Americans who hold citizens in both respective countries, but I have never heard of any winning office (or even running, for that matter).
Ted Cruz says he did not know he was a dual citizen. He said he assumed that because he was a US citizen by birth, left Canada at 4 and lived entirely in the US and never took affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship he was not a Canadian citizen.
When a newspaper brought it up he went through the steps to formally renounce Canadian citizenship, which became official in May 2014.
> he went through the steps to formally renounce Canadian citizenship,
Not a fan of Cruz, but this is sufficient for me. More problematic would be those nations that don't accept or don't allow them to renounce citizenship.
I'm not accusing him of anything, I'm just saying he's one of two known cases. I don't personally consider it a problem and I wouldn't care if he hadn't renounced it.
I could be wrong but I think it's an intentional misrepresentation of Israel's Law of Return (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return), which allows any Jewish person to move to Israel and then become a citizen. It doesn't mean that every Jewish person anywhere in the world is automatically an Israeli citizen whether they want to be or not, but some people like to say that.
>On the day of arrival in Israel, or occasionally at a later date, a person who enters Israel under the Law of Return as an oleh would receive a certificate confirming their oleh status.
On the very day they step off the boat or plane. This isn't the case of "anyone who comes to the US and waits 10+ years might finally get to become a citizen". Seems pretty fucking automatic.
The Wikipedia summary is oversimplified, it's very easy but you do have to affirmatively express an interest and fill out an application (https://www.gov.il/en/service/declaration_of_intent_to_recei...). They don't literally hand it to you when you get off the plane, and even if they did you still can't point to any Jewish person and declare that they must be a citizen of Israel. Most Jewish people have never even been to Israel.
Maybe you're arguing that since it's so easy, all Jewish people in Congress are effectively dual Israeli citizens even if they never actually apply for citizenship. In that case, you'll also be shocked to learn that every single person in Congress is a dual citizen of Dominica, which can be obtained without ever setting foot in the country by just paying $100,000 (https://www.cbiu.gov.dm/dominica-citizenship/). Everyone in Congress can afford that, so we might as well say they've already done it.
I think you would be surprised by the list of countries the US IC believes are our most important intelligence "adversaries"; the list includes many of our allies.
"greatest ally" according to whose claim? that reads like propaganda, just plain nonsense. perhaps a contender for greatest external funding liability? not sure how the hard data would rank such numerically.
I believe this was sarcarsm, since American politicians like to always pitch Israel as "America's Greatest Ally", thus making it a common target of sarcasm
as i think of it, it's strange that the US supposedly has a separation of religion from state, in the constitution+amendments, yet funds an external country based on a religion. i wonder what fraction of donations to Israel come back as lobbyists paying politicians to fund the next round of donations. there must be datasets recorded somewhere, but i have no idea where to look.
Jordan never sunk a US Navy ship and then machine-gunned the sailors trying to escape in lifeboats. But if they did, they wouldn't have painted over the jet's markings first.
Yeah, AIPAC really opened my eyes to how deep the ties go. They spend tons of money to put their preferred lawmakers in place, and openly brag on Twitter about how much they spend and their extremely successful track record. It just -feels- like it should be illegal, seeing as it's a foreign country.
I was part of a company that "hunted" terrorist groups that did this. Start with sympathizers publicly posting on Twitter, find who they are connected to, and fan out and cross reference to the people who are either organizing violence or running drug operations for funding.
I assume most countries with designs in foreign politics do much the same.
No, they were a competitor that pivoted away from government contracts to more commercial applications because there was too much red tape (palantir had some features that were interior according to our contacts but basically was already entrenched in the space by that point).
It has been a long while since I worked with them- the basic idea was that you could identify how people related to each other via their public posts, identify communities by topic, then identify how people influenced each other.
Some topics were harder to automate- if we took as an example b the keyword "abortion" you'll find multiple opposed groups. Searching for terrorists was somewhat similar- their public mouthpieces would use certain words, and their detractors would use the same words in opposition.
I won't go into too much further detail because while the company closed in 2022 I really respected the owners and I suspect they're going to find a way to bring the idea of the company back in a new form.
If there are influence operations online is it ethical to counter them with your own? Obviously none would be preferable.
We need to better define what propaganda is. To me it's misleading or false information with the purpose of facilitating a political outcome. Or deceptive information not meant for selling a product.
prop·a·gan·da
/ˌpräpəˈɡandə/
noun
1.
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
This definition is good enough, I don't see why it would need a redefinition.
Propaganda is media designed to manipulate your opinion, without going to the trouble of rationally convincing you to change your mind. And yeh, most of what we see day to day is propaganda. If anything, everyone's under-using that word.
Advertisement is, at its most basic, the idea that there are things you'd want to buy if you knew they existed. So they inform you these things exist. And you have seen (a few of) these ads before in your life. You love those ads, and you find them more entertaining sometimes than the media they were encapsulated in. Most people will use trailers before the movie as their example, and they tend to respond positively to those even after having seen them they decide they won't go to that movie. But I remember looking through the backs of magazines just to see what was sold, or looking through classified ads back when those were a thing.
Most "ads" aren't these kinds of ads though, and seek to manipulate you. They at least are just a grift, and only want to separate you from your money instead of, say, supporting a war that doesn't need to be fought.
So buy comments on Israeli MK Facebook accounts? I think the only ones that would move any needle here is Meta profits on DAU and the company being paid to run the bots. You think your congressman goes to FB comments to decide how they’re voting?
Anywhere a voting public gets their information. Unfortunately that means FB comments. Could you answer my question though? Would it be ethical to counter an influence operation with your own?
The entire history of our species runs counter to this. The most peaceful periods are uni or bipolar dynamic. Pax Americana is statistically meaningful [1].
> Once parties lack the resources for war
Generally speaking, impoverishment increases violence.
It really doesn’t seem so when we experience Russia doing the opposite. It only seem to work if both parties to the conflict are democracies where meaningless war can put a toll on the government
So I want to say that it's not entirely clear to me that social media peer pressure campaigns are not on occassion counter productive. Automating it seems like it would be potentially disasterous. At the end of the day, there's much we still dont know about psychology, particularly when it comes to efforts at online persuasion.
I'm sure the story is true, but I doubt it was effective. I don't think most politicians are really looking at their social media given most of it is trolling junk. I'm sure Russia/Iran/Hamas adjacent countries were doing the same. I just don't think they have been that effective in getting politician support. Direct lobbying or phone/email is much more effective than an online troll farm to get the attention of a politician in DC. I have worked in DC and this still feels very true to this day.
I think the more worrying is going after the low information voter. I didn't think Russia's election interference had much effect in 2016, but now when you look at US Media (largely conservative outlets) their footprint is very visible.
Politicians are already influenced by AIPAC and other powerful groups working for Israel, doubt they needed more. They've managed to push anti-bds laws/orders in most states.
> Politics has always been full of deception, people doing politics professionally for decades should know a bit or two about it.
I think it's worth pushing back on this. Deception works when it's unexpected, and if the medium is something politicians aren't familiar with, they may not even be looking for the kinds of deception they're being targeted with. They think themselves hardened to deception, but they may not be open-minded enough to even realize there are forms of deception they haven't prepared for.
You can find examples for everything, the question is whether the incidence among politicians is close to the average elderly population (as implied in the original comment).
Aside from the terminally online politicians (like Mike Lee, AOC, Cruz, MTG) most do not use their own accounts or even look at them. They might have a firm that measure constituent engagement, but still to this day the most effective way to complain to your congress person is a phone call or email. If we're being serious, the latter is what these bot farms, etc are after. They want to influence actual constituents to do their ultimate bidding. Now if we can get evidence of a huge phone campaign using AI voice, that would be much more alarming. Israel is doing it, and Iran/Russia/Hamas adjacent are doing it. There's absolutely no denying it.
Helping my parents in their mid-70s is a constant uphill battle with these things. I simply tell her to ignore *everything* and if she needs confirmation to get in contact with me.
Take a look a r/worldnews vs any other subreddit discussing this topic. r/worldnews is controlled. Negative comments towards Israel get comments deleted and users banned. Any other subreddit, there are people arguing from multiple directions. On r/worldnews, you only see dissenting opinions for the first hour or so until the mods "clean up the thread".
Obviously, this is anecdotal information and probably slightly biased.
r/worldnews has been astroturfed by questionable entities for a long time now. I'll never forget when they censored all information about blood drives after the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
It's not the difference. Back when it was easy to see deleted comments, it was clear to see that there was deliberate moderation to suppress certain viewpoints and stories. Now with the API changes its much more difficult, of course.
This is not anecdotal come on. Worldnews is 100% now a narrative control ops by pro Israel forces. Just looking at one thread is enough to confirm this.
I'm not in the US but am familiar with some politicians here, and they too have a problem with recognizing that the feed they received is personalized, the comments are not representative, etc.
If you're wondering why politics sometimes seem out of touch, it's because politicians, their media and the commentariat are locked into an echo chamber already.
If I were an actor interested in influencing the policy of another country, why would I spend $$$ on manipulating the voting populace if I can poison the feed of the people who matter for far less?
It's not just for the politicians, but the people around them, the companies researching the mood, the normal citizen who will carry the mood to others. It not simply to quantify the effect of this type of social engineering.
I'm aware how it works. But those numbers just aren't that compelling, because as I said every large social media platform is full of large troll farms. It's more about influencing actual constituents to write their Congress person.
We're just arguing semantics at that point though aren't we?
If the purpose of the trolling is to influence a decision, does it matter if the target reads it and is trolled directly or trolls enough constituents to call for action? Either way, the influence was asserted making the effort worthwhile.
No, because there is little evidence it's effective, which is what I said. Israel has lost ground in polling in the US and all around the world as well. If anything, there's a huge backlash online against this sort of things to the degree that it goes overboard into blatant antisemitism.
Always makes me wonder how many false threads exist on other platforms, even this one. There are many chats happening in this thread that seem oddly written. Either excentrics, or automatons.
You know what else garners support from US lawmakers? AIPAC. They give money directly to members of the house and Senate. And that is somehow considered ok.
I'm one of the people who flags some of these articles (though not this one), because they're generally uninteresting, and repetitive. I'm not Jewish, have never been to Israel, and am not part of any brigade.
JIDF turned out to be one guy. That was a sideshow.
This article is from Hareetz, which is a major newspaper in Israel.
There's a huge, organized Israel lobby aimed at the US. It's no secret. There's AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee. "Lobbying for Pro-Israel Policies", it says on their web site. There are official organizations in the government of Israel which do "public diplomacy".[1]
I flagged it because it's really boring to see people go through the same predictable, tribal motions on a topic that's been covered to death by every media outlet.
Honestly I’ve been getting harassed by hackers and really would be excited if the United States would actively find the people bothering me and block them from the internet
There is zero need for Israel to garner support from the US.
The point of this campaign was to highlight "fake social accounts tricking" "Black lawmakers and young progressives" (>Black lawmakers in the U.S., particularly Democrats., >young Americans, >Black Americans) because at least someone wants them to think that they, their teams and their followers are weak & easy targets, thus reducing their perceived competence and credibility without the necessity of success of the campaign itself, except that similar campaigns existed for pro-Russia and fuck-Russia content all while celebrating Ukraine's destruction, sorry, fight for independence, officially.
These campaigns are part of a cluster. They are not meant to merely polarize but to make some people resign and follow public/ the states' opinions much quicker than they normally would. At the same time, buffs, journalists, educated people and the rational kind spend more time sieving through information sources that are bloated.
I'm not saying this is a conspiracy, hell no, it's entanglement, it's marketing, it's the business of politics and national establishments and companies challenging each other to test ludicrous strategies to sway public opinion. It's all from the modern "The Drump" playbook. Just imagine how at least enough people who fall for campaigns like this, feel when they are told the truth. How many will get angry, really? How many are going to start gearing and studying up? Who are they to trust if their own government supports governments who have the need to run campaigns like this?
This whole "making people support conflicting causes" has been working pretty damn well for the (alt)Right, who is desperately trying to diminish young peoples' independence and turn them all into obedient followers to sell their 'stones are really hard' books and narratives and time on screen.
It's just dozens of millions but that's the few you need make the elected look your way when they are ready to pay2win "at all cost".
So how can we fight this with engineering? We need analysis run by red and blue teams from universities worldwide. I mean it's 2024. The scientific community does it, but their time is dictated by the scientific method. Or are there live projects already?
Hackernews have become much worse than reddit/r/gossip or reddit/r/politics or reddit/r/yellowpress or whatever. Good thing, I wasted to much time here anyway.
Still I fail to understand why the mods let this happen. Maybe quantity over quality.
I find it quite concerning just how much propaganda the US seems to get from Israel. Where I live there are big billboards around, I regularly see ads on YouTube.
I know propaganda is a thing, but it feels like we are getting more about a foreign government than our own.
I feel like before what is going on now I was aware of some of the groups responsible for this being a thing, but was not fully aware just how much money there was in it those organizations until recently.
Some of the practices are concerning, like I found out recently apparently the Boston police regularly go over to Israel for training?
Regardless of what is going on right now, I don't understand how this much power over the US was ever deemed acceptable?
Weirdest thing about their propaganda is that it seems squarely aimed at older wealthier Americans and politicians. The amount of content produced targeted at anyone under the age of 40 is much smaller and less sophisticated. There's this narrative that Israel is "losing the propaganda war" but I think they're just targeting it towards major stakeholders. We're not the intended audience of the billboard - it's the editorial writer, the business leader, the member of congress (and their staff).
The Israel / Palestine conflict is one of those low-valence issues with the general public where a politician rarely gets punished for voting one way or another with the notable exception of cash lobbying and super PACs for/against a given candidate.
The best part is when it comes from our own "newspaper of record" i.e. with the extraordinarily dubious "mass rape" article the NYT published. They finally dismissed the one Israel-connected reporter who had liked tweets calling for a brutal response against Gaza, but that of course has seen about one billionth the attention that her original claims continue to receive.
You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lies like "40 beheaded babies" and "a mother and child had kerosene poured on them" with none of the usual media freakout you usually see over "misinformation."
I have struggled to even look at my News app anymore.
Next to articles about the protests or other things, there are the articles about the hostages or something else that just feels like a propaganda piece aimed at one thing.
The wiki article on Media Coverage of the Iraq War[0] is an enlightening read. Most of the same tactics for manufacturing consent that the mainstream media used during the Iraq War are still being used in today's conflicts.
> An investigation by the New York Times discovered that top Pentagon officials met with news analysts where they gave the analysts 'special information' and then tried to convince them to speak favorably about the Iraq war. The discovery was based on 8000 pages of secret information that had been revealed to The New York Times through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The article states that top Pentagon officials would invite news analysts to secret meetings, and urge the analysts to speak positively of the war. Often, the US would give "classified information," trips, and contracts to the news analysts.
> You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lies like "40 beheaded babies" and "a mother and child had kerosene poured on them" with none of the usual media freakout you usually see over "misinformation."
Yeah. The politicians who repeated this also never apologized for inflaming tensions without any evidence or investigation whatsoever. But anything Israel is accused of, requires thorough investigation by Israel (or sometimes independently - without ever mentioning Israel will not allow independent investigators into Gaza), before we can even think about trusting the people they're killing currently, regardless of affiliation.
And you see that 20 children 15 and younger were killed in total, and out of them 10 by rockets, which starts to paint very different picture. So militants killed 20-36 children depending on how you wish to define a child, out of 1200 people in total. So that's 1.7-3% of killed victims.
On the other hand, you get at least 16 000 killed children by Israel in just the last 8 months. 60 a day at least.
And you can see 10-5 a day individually just scrolling through video posts on telegram https://t.me/eyeonpal/
And we're supposed to think that Hamas are child killing monsters and Israel is not and somehow uniquely righteous. Yeah, right. Just the math alone on this doesn't compute for me, at all.
What if I told you modern forms of propaganda are more sophisticated than the mere blunt force repetition of a single obvious and consistent message? When is the NYT willing to stretch truth and credulity, and when is it not? What is the likely net effect of a world-weary, cynical (and false) both-sidesism as applied to the Israel/Palestine war?
Ah yes, a public company is somehow conducting a super sophisticated and secretive propaganda campaign.
I guess you're not a fan of Occam's razor? The simplest explanation here seems pretty straightforward, and no, it doesn't involve some NYT conspiratorial behavior.
> The analysis found that, as of November 24, the New York Times had described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” on 53 occasions and those of Palestinians just once. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1, even as the documented number of Palestinians killed climbed to around 15,000.
You could copy this paragraph verbatim into Manufacturing Consent and it would fit in perfectly.
They were told to not used those words because they are disputed and not consider facts, pretty sure they can and still use those words in opinion pieces.
Spouting off someone's talking points without verification makes you propaganda. It's just a question on if it's due to an agenda or incompetence. It's one of those.
I agree, but to be a "propaganda outlet" that intent does not need to be by the republisher. If some news outlet is just reprinting garbage without thought they are culpable for spreading someone else's propaganda through negligence.
This line of propaganda is kind of infuriating. Separate from this incident, Israel bombed afaik every hospital in Gaza. They claimed Hamas was operating inside them or under them and produced absolutely zero credible evidence of it. They killed a lot of doctors and patients. But if they start out polluting minds with the claim that one time at the Al Ahli parking lot, there was an Islamic Jihad rocket once, they then by extension use that to imply that Hamas is somehow responsible for all the deaths in hospitals that happen by Israeli hands on every other day.
You are changing the subject, I'm just disputing that NYtimes is Israel propaganda, I'm not claiming anything about the righteousness of Israeli actions.
My personal opinion of NYT is that their record is mixed on the subject.
If you'll allow me to change the subject to one that is less presently divisive to provide an instructive example, NYT's conduct in the lead-up to the Iraq war is a great example of where they acted as a pro-war propaganda mouth piece, and maybe the institution doesn't deserve our total trust.
I don't want to go back and forth because it's off topic for HN. If you have seen images of destroyed hospitals and you're saying this, it seems insane to me. What you're saying is on the level of genocide denial. Ps. My family was targeted by the Holocaust too.
You and I have different definitions. I'm saying they're commiting mass murder in hospitals and you're saying they don't do it with air strikes. So I guess it's good then.
> I'm saying they're commiting mass murder in hospitals and you're saying they don't do it with air strikes. So I guess it's good then.
I didn't say it was good.
This thread was about whether NYT is biased or not, with the specific mention of them incorrectly stating a hospital was bombed. You then said that it's infuriating that people are correcting this and that this is propaganda, because every hospital has been bombed.
There is an actual, objective truth here - have hospitals, and especially have all hospitals in Gaza, been bombed, or not. You can decide it doesn't matter, because bombing a hospital is equivalent to raiding a hospital, that's a valid inference. But:
1. I think the truth matters. It always matters, and it especially matters when talking about something complex and divisive.
2. I think that the reason most people say things like "all Gazan Hospitals were bombed", even though it's not true, is because they know that that sounds worse than stating what actually happened.
I don't know what is more clear-cut propaganda than saying things that are not true to deliberately make the truth appear worse.
Look, I understand we don't agree. I understand you think I'm just nitpicking or something over things that don't matter, just to pretend "no genocide is taking place" or something.
I disagree. I think the truth matters. If you think I'm wrong on the facts, I want to be proven wrong - I've been wrong before, and after I'm shown the truth, I stopped saying the wrong thing. I think that's the basic level any person should operate at - not deliberately saying things that are untrue.
But if you think I'm right on the facts, but they don't matter - then I think we have a very different idea of what's important and what isn't.
The common reporting is that all hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed. I saw that written in mainstream media just today. I've seen it dozens of times. I've seen the word "bomb" used, but I am not an expert in explosives or artillery.
If you deny this, then no, you are not correct on the facts. If you want to split hairs with me about what specific mechanism Israel used to destroy those hospitals, I frankly do not think it matters. But I believe you are likely splitting hairs on that in bad faith as means of genocide denial.
> It seems to me the the NYTimes is trying to be somewhat objective
"Somewhat" is doing some heavy lifting here. The NY Times internal pro-Israeli editorial guidelines were leaked. NY Times is a pro-Israel biased source:
CNN even sends all stories to Israel to be approved/disapproved and/or edited to ensure pro-Israel bias, so I guess NY Times is at least better than CNN:
Israel also has put fear of god into US government officials through their lobby group, AIPAC (the only foreign lobby group of its kind that is not required by the U.S. to register as a foreign agent). While no fan of former president Reagan, he called the Israeli attacks on Lebanon a "holocaust" and stopped Israeli atrocities against Lebanon by threatening cutting off US aide. Now all our representatives line up behind Israel in their perpetration of genocide-- especial Biden.
> The real problem here isn't the POTUS repeating some rumour that was going around.
It wasn't “a rumor going around”, it was Israeli state propaganda which both started and continued for a long timw to be pushed by Israeli state organs (official sources like the Foreign Ministry, not just proxies.)
On the other side of town where I live, billboards appeared with slogans like "Be pro-Semitic." This happened almost immediately after the latest conflict involving Israel began. So I can't just be against anti-Semites, but I have to be pro Jewish ethnicity? Interesting. There was also one stating that anti-zionism is anti-Semitic; I guess my Jewish friends and family who are not Zionists didn't get the memo.
I can't prove that these are somehow connected to funding from Israel, but it seemed like these billboards were ready to go at a moment's notice.
As far as why we deem foreign propaganda as acceptable, I like to think that we play dumb about it in part so we can strategically point it out when it is in the favor of politicians and/or elites. Remember how Russian propaganda supposedly got Trump elected even though it was going on during prior years when the establishment insisted on the integrity of the elections? On the other hand, maybe we are just dumb.
> I can't prove that these are somehow connected to funding from Israel, but it seemed like these billboards were ready to go at a moment's notice.
Right, that is what we got in Boston. The timing is just too convenient.
Whether or not it is from Israel themselves or funding here for Israel is kinda a moot point when both have the same purpose: Propaganda for a foreign government.
If there is overwhelming evidence for a claim, it's absurd to smear it as "trope".
So when Nancy Pelosi says: "If the capital crumbles to the ground,one thing that will remain is our commitment to Israel"[0] that's because she has in fact dual loyalty, to dismiss that as "trope" is to dismiss & deny reality.
Some of "our" politicians work overtime for israel's interests and neglect their actual job and obligations towards America.
Do you find it concerning that no presidential candidate can even pass the primary without first kissing the ring of AIPAC? That Zionist lobby openly attacks insufficiently pro-Zionist candidates and then openly brags when they lose elections? With Zionist lobby trying to outlaw any criticism of Israel in direct violation of 1st amendment? Etc, etc. IDK about others, but I think this is insane.
TBH when I said "propaganda" I was grouping a lot of that under that when I should have been more specific.
But that and similar things is what I was referring to with "I don't understand how this much power over the US was ever deemed acceptable".
I remember seeing the articles about them funding the campaign of someone opposing someone else who had been critical if Israel. I don't remember which state or what position, but it wasn't just a one off either.
The MO is basically to try and defeat democrats in primaries who aren't giving carte blanche in terms of spending or support. If their candidate wins the primary, it doesn't matter much who wins the general election, since they have support of R's.
Every single point I made is 100% documented and verifiable. It’s also anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. There is a difference. And even if it were antisemitic (which it is not), I’d be within my constitutional rights as a US citizen living in the US.
You cannot call any criticism of Israel or its hold over US politics anti-semitic just because Israel happens to be Jewish majority. When people criticize the US they aren't automatically anti America, any other country holds the same.
US presidents always visit Israel and cater to it if they want to be elected, it has 0 to do with Judaism or the fact that Israel is founded on Jewish principles.
How do you propose we determine the fine line between the antisemitic "The Jews run the World" and "being critical of their actions"? What would e.g. be the piece of evidence that convinces you that we're dealing with antisemitism and not legitimate criticism?
We shouldn't shut down conversations about Israel with antisemitism but we also shouldn't shut down conversations about antisemitism with "being critical of their actions".
"According to ProPublica, 4 of the top 10 governments lobbying in Washington are Arab, in terms of spending. The United Arab Emirates places first, having spent $10,914,002 in 2007 and 2008. Iraq, Morocco and Saudi Arabia also each spent over $3 million, and the non-Arab, Middle Eastern nation of Turkey also spent over $3 million."
That is the what the article is about and there is something going in involving Israel.
I can't find the article I read a while ago with a graph showing their massive increase in spending, but according to a few articles AIPAC plans to spend $100Million this year.
As far as how to distinguish between them. I really don't think this should be complicated.
Criticizing a government is not criticizing a religion or people.
If I start to attack a religion or to attack a group of people based on those beliefs, then yeah that is antisemitism. Actually having and voicing a problem with jewish people.
A government is not that. We criticize our own government all the time and we are not anti-American (ok, admittedly some do try to make those claims but that's a different story).
yes I will also admit that this got complicated with the protests.
"Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." ...
"Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation."
Because Israel is a Jewish collective then some criticism of it can be and is antisemitic.
One test of whether specific criticism of Israel is anti-semitic or not is to s/Israel/OtherCountry/ and ask yourself whether similar criticism would be made. E.g. comparing criticism of Israel on its war in Gaza contrasted with the US war on Afghanistan or Iraq or the war on ISIS. For example, when the US bombs a hospital in Afghanistan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike ) do we see the ICC issuing warrant for the arrest of the US president and secretary of defense?
This is grasping at straws at an insane degree. If you compare the international blowback the US gets to any other country you are going to have a bad time because it has an extremely unique position in the world.
And even if that wasn't the case, if you argue that pointing at how Israel does godawful stuff is antisemitic, all you are achieving is I no longer care about antisemitism because I'd have to be morally repugnant to justify actions on such basis. Because if you argue that antisemitism is needed to criticize the systematic abuse of a population then my logical conclusion is that antisemitism is sometimes the right thing to do.
Because the original post is about Israel using fake social media accounts to get US representatives to support genocide in Gaza. We’ve literally just passed some laws to _sanction the ICC_ for their daring to say anything negative about Bibi Netanyahu. Does the Arab lobby also have this kind of power? I mean, are you going to seriously argue that this is normal: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/03/aipac-israel-spendi... ?
I'm not American so I can't comment on US politics but I feel like there's a small difference between "daring to say anything negative" and asking for arrest warrants (without jurisdiction as well). The Arab lobby seems to have plenty of power, e.g. it looks like they managed to make the US stop (or at least pause) shipping weapons to a long time ally that's being attacked and is at war.
AIPAC is a lobbying group of Americans that think the US should have pro-Israeli policies. It's operating within the framework that many other lobbying groups are operating in. It's a large and influential group reflecting the large number of Americans that believe in pro-Israeli policies. I guess it's "normal" in any sense that US politics are "normal". Ofcourse Americans are more than welcome to pass laws to limit the influence lobbyists can have, like many other countries do.
We get it, you’re a Zionist. Just say so outright. I’d like to think, however, that the US paused weapons shipments because Israel uses them to indiscriminately kill women and children, and commit ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I might be wrong on that account, but if I am, that’s utterly indefensible.
No I am not, I am still engaging in the conversation.
But there is very little I can actually say when your response is that it is anti-semitic.
You are no longer responding to what was actually said and instead pivoting it to something else that does not leave anything to respond too since you are not addressing what you are responding too in the first place.
And again you are doing the same thing here, instead of actually trying to have a conversation you shut it down by claiming it is antisemitic. That isn't a conversation, that is a pivot to try to end it.
I also never claimed it did not exist.
Over the last several months I have seen many conversations just end with "that's anti-semitic" because it was any amount of criticism as if we have to accept that and that's the end of the conversation.
Well it's not and shouldn't be, you made a claim and I am challenging it.
> Do you find it concerning that no presidential candidate can even pass the primary without first kissing the ring of AIPAC? That Zionist lobby openly attacks insufficiently pro-Zionist candidates and then openly brags when they lose elections? With Zionist lobby trying to outlaw any criticism of Israel in direct violation of 1st amendment? Etc, etc. IDK about others, but I think this is insane.
Edit: If I can figure out what you are trying to say
Was the person I responding too slightly exaggerating? Sure.
But we know for a fact that a lot of money flows from AIPAC to candidates that support strong ties with Israel. That isn't a secret. Saying that isn't anti-semitic.
If that is not your point, please let me know what it is so I can properly respond.
Then you have a somewhat unconventional personal definition for "propaganda". Almost always people use that word to imply something clandestine, misleading, or both.
What you showed is a paid advertisement from a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, JewBelong, with public accounting on all donations, and a relatively clear mandate for how it spends its money.
Again, you're simply saying that a (really only slightly edgy) billboard paid for by your fellow americans with their own money and aimed at changing your opinion via argumentation should be disallowed as "propaganda" simply because you disagree with it (and again: I disagree with it too!).
Tough love: of the dueling philosophies at play here, yours is by far the most dangerous. Let people argue with you, for crying out loud.
Both very famous pieces of propaganda the US put out during War. Neither of them are misleading. They were put out to encourage people to take an action.
Then maybe cite the definition you're using? And explain why it doesn't fit every kind of opinion broadcasting. Like, are flyers for a protest "propaganda"? Is grafitti propaganda? Is writing an opinion essay propaganda? Hosting a blog propaganda? Where does it stop?
Do you cite a definition for every word you use? Of course not. I am using the definition as defined by Webster and every other source I can find.
I am using it the same way that the pieces I referenced, were also considered propaganda.
I am using the excepted actual definition of Propaganda and there is zero reason to expect I need to define otherwise. That is just not a normal expectation when communicating. You having your own definition that does not follow the accepted definitions of the word with examples, is not my problem.
You also didn't answer my question about rosy the riveter which if we would consider that propaganda (which it is considered propaganda) I would consider the billboards propaganda.
Like, are flyers for a protest "propaganda"? Is grafitti propaganda?
They easily can be. Same with opinion broadcasting. It's not a matter of some strict definition, just whether you prefer a negative connotation with "propaganda" and how you feel about the thing being propagandized given that the negative connotation is the most common English usage.
Generally, Propaganda is used to sway opinion, get action, or similar when people may not be inclined a certain way on their own.
Ask yourself this: if there was not opposition to what Israel is doing right now, would they have made these billboards. Most likely no.
Would Rosie the Riveter happen if there was not a need for Woman in the workforce during the war?
Could keep giving examples, but you get the idea.
There are plenty of examples out there of established propaganda that isn't misleading or negative. It depends on the message they are trying to send and the action they are looking for.
> sway opinion, get action, or similar when people may not be inclined a certain way on their own.
This is tiresome and seems like it's in bad faith. Once more: that's just a definition for "argument". You can apply it to "propaganda" if you insist, but I can only repeat that this is not the way others interpret it.
You don't go around calling your friends propagandists when they try to sway your opinion, so don't do it here just because you dislike seeing billboards by Jewish advocacy groups.
I find it tiresome that I have given you 2 examples of established propaganda, there really is no debate as to whether or not these are considered propaganda, that do not fit your definition and you continue to ignore those.
Yes propaganda tends to be negative, but my point (again with examples to back up my point) is that it does not have to be.
You claim others do not see it that way, but that is obviously not true. Or we would not consider Rosy the Riveter as propaganda. It does not fit your definition.
Ignoring that there are examples of propaganda does not make your definition correct.
The reality is these words are murky, what is the line between advertising and propaganda. and similar comparisons.
But I will die on this hill and it is well established by this point, propaganda does not have to be negative.
Unless you are going to acknowledge rosy the riveter and either explain how that is not propaganda (which for the record you would be in the minority with that opinion) or explain how it was negative or misleading I see no point in continuing this conversation.
The question isn't about your digressions and nitpickery about whatever definition you think I proposed (which I'm ignoring quite deliberately), it's whether a billboard by a non-profit can reasonably be considered "propaganda". And your insistence on digressions instead of defending that (IMHO ridiculous) notion is the part I called "bad faith"
Just stop. JewBelong is a group of your fellow americans and you need to treat them like that and not call them propagandists as a way of dismissing their ideas. Your freakout here is everything wrong with Trumpist america, and I hate it.
Don't know about other countries, but in the Bay Area a bunch of those billboards have been vandalized/edited by non-Zionist Jewish groups.
Anyway, advertising media are antithetical to debate, which presumes approximately equal access to an audience to lay out two or more competing ideas at once. You can't argue with a billboard, you can only rent another billboard, and pretty soon you have billboards everywhere. This is a garbage concept of political discourse.
> Almost always people use that word to imply something clandestine, misleading, or both.
No, propaganda is often quite blatant. Look at the posters from both of the World Wars, depicting US enemies as vicious, inhuman monsters.
Even the “Rosie the Riveter” and Uncle Sam imagery is propaganda.
Propaganda can be any sort of one-sided media used to manipulate public opinion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be banned, but people need to learn more media literacy to recognize it.
> I don't understand how this much power over the US was ever deemed acceptable?
Free speech sometimes applies to things you don’t like. There’s pro and anti propaganda for just about any foreign interest. Some of it’s just more subtle such as recommendations on TikTok.
Ukraine had really obvious pro Ukraine requests for military aid and images of destruction, but quite a bit of pro Russia propaganda was more subtle aiming for people to stay out of it.
With Israel you see some really blatant pro Israel propaganda, but both sides also have a lot of more subtle stuff.
That’s incorrect. There’s zero US laws that make it illegal to boycott Israel.
Open a carwash in Texas and you can put up big posers saying you’re boycotting Israel and the state isn’t going to do crap. There are state laws that prohibit state agencies from contracting such companies, but that’s a different question and only really applies to a small percentage of companies.
If you disagree try and post full text of the actual legislation it’s completely clear what’s going on.
The distinction might seem subtle, but even then it’s not illegal.
Also it’s not every contract between companies and the state. Texas uses 10+ employees companies and 100,000+$ contracts as the minimum threshold before language must be added to the contract during the terms of the contract.
But after signing such a contract the company is still only bound by a contract. Breaking contracts happens all the time it’s not illegal. Excluding Fraud etc it becomes a civil rather than a criminal matter.
It's illegal for any company that works with state agencies to boycott any of our allies.. Israel is a common example because most (all?) countries surrounding it in the middle east try to sneak in Israel boycott terms into every little contract, so it's the most common.
But the same is true if someone wanted to boycott Canada. That company wouldn't be able to work/contract with state agencies.
somebody needs to pay for the billboard, or rent a hall to give a speech, or printing the flyers for your lost cat. How is money not essential to speech? Your proposal is that to support a cause, one should only be allowed to go outside and yell, because that's purer than the corrupting influence of money?
Once money gets involved, you inherently have a commercial interest. What's the ROI?
I personally think people misunderstand to whom "freedom" is granted and defended in the US, it is demonstrably not freedom of the individual, but of the powerful.
free speech is a legal concept, and ROI is not a legal concept; when debts are enforced by courts, they frequently don't even enforce interest as if time value of money doesn't exist.
The nature of the strawman you've stood up to to represent my "proposal" (who knew I had a proposal?) suggests you're not even familiar with the history of the legal debate in the United States surrounding the 1st amendment and political donations. So I guess I would propose you read up on that.
I believe the issue here is how much sway Israel has on the US and how rabid many US politicians are about Israel (to the point where many straight up accuse you of anti semitism if you just criticize the country or their policies)
Also issues like where you are not allowed to refuse to work with Israel if you are an arms manufacturer in the US (but you can refuse to work with the US military). I know that part of that is due to Israel being part of the FMS list but they are also the largest recipient on it...
There's nothing inaccurate about what he said. These laws make it illegal for Americans from boycotting Israel. As an American state employee, organizing a boycott against Israel will get you fired or arrested because allowing it would be breaking the law.
Nope, being illegal means something else. Nobody is going to be fined or go to jail for openly boycotting Israel. An amusement park can boycott Israel, they can say so in big bold letters on their commercials etc, and the state isn’t going to do anything.
Not doing business is something else. States regularly prohibit companies over 500 employees from signing specific contracts, that doesn’t make it illegal to be a company with over 500 employees.
There is an interesting caveat in the law: it only applies to boycotts against u.s. allies that are promoted or imposed by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)
The moment anybody else in the world stops boycotting Israel then finally Texas citizens will be fully free to boycott Israel
It's a law designed to stop and prevent the individual political speech of US citizens, call it what you will.
My point was that there is a foreign country that has successfully written laws (using a 'model act', i.e. copy-paste) for 38 US states that is not intended to serve the interest of US citizens, but that of the foreign country. I'm not aware of any other examples of that amount of reach by other countries or foreign interests. Maybe petrochemical/energy?
AIPAC is dwarfed in comparison to some other countries in terms of wielding influence. Just look at how much Qatar has spent trying to influence the top universities in the world.
Once a glorified US military base in the middle east served to expand US interests has become a parasitic entities and controls the host.
The upside is the relationship is symbiotic, US expands Israel's borders, wreaking havock in the region, but tests US's war apparatus under "defence" and prevents a unified Arab/Asia/Indo state.
Israel gets free reign to ignore international law, billions, while touting some story about a 'promised land'.
Israel never got the memo about calming their propaganda campaigns down - now even the most average Joe (at least in the UK) can spot them a mile off. They aren’t subtle about it.
For a country which is meant to be one of the smartest out there, their propaganda campaigns are an utter disaster giveaway to anyone with a pulse and a few dozen brain cells.
To be fair propagandists generally don't have to aim high. They only have to shift the undecided and uninformed opinions a little bit.
You want to see some of the crap the agencies were pushing out pre-Brexit and it worked, so I wouldn't classify the average UK citizen as much to be contended with (I am UK as well for ref).
The only good thing to come from Brexit is that for some people they woke up and smelt the more expensive coffee than it used to be and had some self reflection. I have spoke with a good few people now that were like ‘I was lied to’… well duh.
Unfortunately it was mostly "I was lied to, but I agree with it anyway because of X" where X is some loose justification to absolve themselves of the self-inflicted mess they got themselves into.
My father was a fine one. His staff fucked off back to Europe, he couldn't hire anyone else and had to fold his company and retire. Then he found out he got cancer and that the NHS had staffing problems due to Brexit.
Me, I am better off for it as I fill a niche demand, but I voted against it because it was generally bad for society and I do not always vote in self-interest.
Our business lost around 90% of European customers. Then the odd customer now from Europe emails in a rage because they had to pay import duties… so then having to tell them that ‘Brexit’ happened!
You are so right though - most people just will refuse to accept they were taken for fools with all the nasty rhetoric about ‘people coming in to our country’… and so many have even been convinced that ripping up the Human Rights act is somehow a good thing (??? Wtf!).
Rich people manipulating the minds of poor people was what Brexit was all about. At the time I was convinced this was a Russian move to make UK weaker. But then again, I was convinced for many years that Trump was a Russian asset to make America implode (which is kind of what happened).
Same playbook as scammers, you want to focus your efforts where they are most likely to have the desired effect, and those who fall for the obvious lies will always be more easily manipulated than those who require a more subtle approach.
My wife lived in Israel on and off for years, I got to visit her for awhile during her dissertation work in the West Bank. Only a few blocks of Tel Aviv deserve the "modern Middle Eastern country" label in my mind. And even then it wasn't nearly as impressive as I thought. Haifa is a lovely town though :)
> They are smart with their hacking and that’s where it ends
So are often russians, or chinese. Maybe the concentration is on another level, they are a tiny country but highly educated for generations.
I'd bet if we properly educated and developed whole world we would discover Einsteins and Bolts in many many places out there. Ie elite athletes often come from places around where they could do sport, ie mountaineers but also many others.
Yeah, it kind of reminded me of the garbage my old mate and his girlfriend used to spout when I was friends with them - ‘black people have low IQ’ crap. One of the reasons I avoid making friends - I have always attracted nutters.
"IQ has no relationship with the value of a human" has mostly always been a dog whistle; "so ${disfavored outgroup} is scientifically established as less intellectually capable, that doesn't make them any less valuable".
See, this is the thing - this propaganda is only meant as the "rationale" that goes along with the real bribe - campaign funding from the likes of AIPAC and DMfI.
The funding is what secures these politicians' votes. The propaganda is what the politicians can use to justify their actions to everyone else. That it's laughably bad is a function less of the capabilities of Israel than the utter fealty that these politicans have to the Israeli cause.
May I ask why did you move comments here and changed URL to that other entry, instead of just moving comments from this thread to the other? ISTM you already had a submission with correct URL, so naively it sounds simpler to do one operation than two...
I'd already forgotten! but I think I've reconstructed it. I changed the URL of the current post (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587079) because the haaretz.com article seemed better than the forbes.com one. Normally we would do it the other way, as you mentioned - we'd move the comments to the submission with the better article. But in this case I didn't want to reward that submitter because their pattern of submissions was clearly breaking HN's guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587097. So I did it the other way.
Just as russian bots, israeli bots spreading fake news are worst thing that happened to our society. Crazy that people are falling for this but here we are
How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship? This is even worse. Also, AIPAC is allowed to exist. As a thought experiment replace Israeli with Russian citizenship for the Israeli dual citizens in Congress and replace AIPAC with a hypothetical Russian ARPAC. Imagine how crazy this would be. Yet the current situation is somehow completely acceptable.
> How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship?
I don't know. How many? I was curious and Googled, and couldn't find any good authoritative lists. This Quora answer [0] implies that the answer is zero, as does this Snopes article [1]. Both answers mention that there's various incorrect lists going around that are white supremacist propaganda.
They have defacto Israeli citizenship because of the law of return, no? Not saying I agree with who you're replying to, but if a few dozen congressmen had the same status in Russia, wouldn't you see them as being connected to said country?
I mean, they’re “connected” insofar as they have the potential legal right to move there and acquire citizenship. The question is - is that kind of connection meaningful here?
Speaking personally - I am ethnically Jewish, although I’ve never practiced, and of Polish descent. Technically, if I were to go through the necessary processes, I could acquire citizenship of Israel or Poland. Despite that: I’ve never been to either country, have no known family there, I don’t speak either Hebrew or Polish…the notion that I have any meaningful connection to these foreign countries beyond trivial historical facts is absurd to me. And the idea that, were Poland or Israel to become geopolitical adversaries of Canada, I would be viewed with mistrust, as less Canadian because, through quirks of family history and bureaucracy I’ve been made an offer I never accepted, is pretty disheartening.
At any rate, the upshot of this line of thinking - that we must be wary of Jews with matters of national importance because they are, through no choice of their own, supposedly beholden to a foreign power - is enormously problematic and, yes, anti-Semitic. Similar logic was used to justify Japanese internment camps.
Israel is meant to be a "safe" space for jews, and the Law of Return will allow you and your decedents to move to Israel when the anti-jewish takes power and you will not feel/be safe in your current location. Maybe you won't think it's so trivial then...
While it doesn't seems so today, that's the premise of the State of Israel after the Holocaust.
He may still be able to say he is Jewish or even deny that he is religious today the trend in the west is the same as in the 1930's. You see it in the UK, France, the US and even in Germany. It doesn't matter what these governments say today. They don't fight or even deny anti-semitism either from the radical right or the marxist and Islamo-left. The protests under the mask of anti-Israel are just these ideas peeking into the surface.
When his business gets boycotted, burned and stolen, when he won't be able to run for office or hold a government position, when his house gets marked and his kids won't be able to go to school the only safe place in that regard will be Israel.
I would just note here that Israel being a safe space after Holocaust is not in line with history. I am not denying that it had some aspects of being a safe space, but the project Israel started much before Holocaust, and Balfour declaration predates Holocaust by decades.
Again, I agree that there can be an argument that Holocaust was a culminating event of the antisemitism in Europe. But i never felt that the antisemitism in the west makes Israel a safe space, is not very congruent one when the both West and Israel touts a shared set of Western values. It is even more surprising since the current conservatives call Western values as Judeo Christian.
I would make it clear that people feeling being alienated even in presence of such values is understandable. But the events of establishing Israel, and the continued invasions of neighbouring countries, and the sheer atrocities committed in the process makes no sense to me. Not to say the constant attempts to portray people who have been living there as usurpers, harbouring Zionist Terrorists, are not the actions of some who seeks a safe space.
The Zionist idea was to create a state where Jews could make their own destiny, which in part is to have a place where every jew can come with the rising antisemitism and pogroms as they could no loner be a people without a state. The Holocaust was one of the catalyst that a safe place for jews must be established i.e. no one will protect us but us. A prime example is the expulsion of Jews ,pogroms being a 2nd class citizen in Arab countries.
It's not surprising at all, should the Jews in the west just go about their lives with classic Christen, revived Marxism and newly imported Islamic antisemitism? These western government do nothing to counter it beside saying they condemn that, which means nothing.
Continued Invasions of neighboring countries?? Your bias is showing, every action of Israel is in response to aggression and terrorism by Israel's neighbors. Don't want to get invaded and bombed to hell? Shouldn't have fired thousands of missiles, rape, behead, mutilate, kidnap, harbor terrorists, dung terror tunnels, blocked trade blew up buses, restaurants and coffee shops. These "neighbors" of Israel always like to cry that Israel is the aggressor but it's always reflection.
I agree with you on all of that. I don't think there should be any mistrust either, but I understand that there could be biais towards the only Jewish state for Jewish congressmen. Again, that's completely normal (black congressmen have a biais for black related issues, Muslim Congressmen tend to be more pro Palestine)... Does that make any sense?
The downside of that though is that I've seen tons and tons of Jewish public figures completely downplay what's happening in Gaza, almost reflexively. Either that or unabashed support for the IDF. All of that is also common even amongst my more liberal Jewish friends/acquaintances. That's completely understandable in a way, to unite for that cause in this context but it also means that the biais is hard to ignore. Though I don't see it as loyalty to a foreign power at all, they are completely american/Canadian/whatever.
So I see it more as an issue that'd be similar to an all white congress voting on issues that mostly impact black people or other minorities. Is it loyalty? Nope. Is there biais (conscious or not)? Yes. The same goes for a congress with almost no Palestinian or even Muslim voices but a lot more Jewish voices imo.
But yes, the reality is that it almost always lead to a very dangerous way of thinking, and not just a discussion about biais
To my knowledge, zero. If you really mean Jews, I think there are roughly 40 between both houses of Congress. None of them are Israeli citizens. Jews are not automatically citizens of Israel though they do have dedicated pathway to obtaining it, but it's not as simple as merely showing up and claim you are Jewish.
"How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship"
By this do you mean Jews? Should be prevent Jewish people from being allowed in congress?
"AIPAC is allowed to exist"
Should we prevent it from existing becuase it supports a Jewish state?
You have no issue with the hundreds of other lobbying groups, just the jewish one.
It's not Jewish, it's pro-Israel (American Israel Public Affair Committee). Israel is a foreign country whose interests might be conflicting with those of the US. That's different, don't you think?
> OP's mention of "Dual Citizens" clearly meaning Jews
"Dual citizens" clearly means "dual citizens".
If the OP had the information that many Jews in Congress were dual citizens, he was wrong- although in fairness it's an understandable false belief when you have US politicians coming to Congress wearing their IDF uniform or propose laws to give IDF veterans the same benefits that US veterans receive.
> concerned with AIPAC and not the other foreign PACS. Wonder what the differentiating factor is?
Just look at the the first PAC in the list you mentioned: it's Accenture. Classified as foreign because their headquarter is in an empty office of a tax haven. AIPAC is not even in this list: it's in the "ideology/ single issue" list, where it stands as the only pro-<some country> PAC in the list (and the 4th largest).
> As a thought experiment replace Israeli with Russian citizenship for the Israeli dual citizens in Congress and replace AIPAC with a hypothetical Russian ARPAC
Is Russia the main American ally in the region that contributes enormously to American intelligence and R&D, while also supporting American military operations?
Have you considered that things might go the other way around: if Russia had such a strong influence on the US through its political action lobby as Israel does, Russia would be considered by politicians the main ally of the US, and the economic and military ties between the two countries would be unbreakable. Because the purpose of these lobbies is exactly to influence how a certain country feels and acts about another.
No. The US would be convinced it got another valuable ally- which is not the same as actually having one.
In pretty much the same way, those who fall for long distance romance scams didn't find the love of their life, despite believing so. They found someone who is taking advantage of them.
What operations did Israel support? If anything the US is over involved in the MENA area because of Israel. Before the cringy evangelical push for total support for Israel, the middle east wasn't hostile to the US. Actually the US was seen as the good guys (in the 50s and arguably 60s) because they were strictly pushing Great Britain and France for decolonisation.
It's certainly striking that the quality of the propaganda is very much on par with that of Russia. It's clumsy, it often espouses political views (eg, the faux-anarchist stuff) which are incoherent in America or really anywhere in the West.
You can't make a religious argument to people who don't share your religion, so they're stuck with harassment and bald-faced lies. Even non-Israelis who agree with them on everything end up with a bad taste in their mouth after reading or listening to it.
They don't have any practice making a secular argument about the Palestinian situation, how could they? They fall back to assuring people that Israel is a friend to the US, that Israel is a democracy (a ton of its inhabitants are forced to live in ghettos and refugee camps), that Israel loves gay people (Israel doesn't have gay marriage, or even secular marriage except by treaty), and the worst: "Why don't you give America back to the Indians?"
Russian propaganda is bad, but it's also lazy: it gets them nothing and they don't put a lot of effort into it. Israel is trying as hard as it can. To not ethnically cleanse Israel leaves a population that Europe tried its best to exterminate drifting the stormy seas of having to compromise with their neighbors. This is a population whose neighbors once built factories in order to slaughter them more efficiently.
The difference is that Russia is sanctioned and basically treated as a hostile nation, and Israel gets subsidized arms, unconditional support and any attempt at boycotting it is met by state sanctioned punishments (at least if you are a federal or state employee in the US)
The vast majority of submitted stories on Israel (as a subset of politics in general) are off-topic for HN. They almost never gratify one's intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and almost always lead to massive flamewars and political tangents in the comments. I flag all politics stories - this one is no exception. I want to avoid HN turning into another Twitter or Reddit, thank you very much.
> Criticizing Israel is the like the "Anti Social Social Club" t-shirt of our time
Nice bit of deflection. It’s not even true, either. People are being blacklisted from companies for speaking out against Israel, their faces being paraded through streets with threats made against them. Speaking out against Israel comes with significant risk, particularly for politicians and journalists - the proof is in the pudding, when you look at their insanely soft-balled coverage of anything Israel does. Anyway…
> A political organization or world government is astroturfing on social media you say? And they're targeting lawmakers directly? Well, clutch my pearls!
Sure, if it was Russia or China I wouldn’t be surprised. But it’s Israel. The US gives Israel $1,000,000,000s and $1,000,000,000s of dollars per year and is supposedly Israel’s closest “ally”. _That_ is what makes this interesting.
I don’t really know why I’m bothering replying to you, given your incredibly thinly veiled bias. But here I am nonetheless.
Very few. It contributes to, obviously, our foreign policy issues in the Middle East, but other than those specifically to deal with the Israel/Palestine crisis have lots of other contributing factors pulling in similar directions and probably wouldn't be that much better without the Israeli influence.
Israeli influence is substantial, but it's fairly focused, and unlike other foreign hostile influence operations it is critical to the Israeli influence operations that they minimally damage US cohesion, power, or influence beyond what is necessary to assure US support and protection for Israel.
I don't know if it is a big problem but people around the world, mainly in Muslim majority countries, hate US because of its unconditional support of Israel. Over long term, this is not good for the US.
> I don't know if it is a big problem but people around the world, mainly in Muslim majority countries, hate US because of its unconditional support of Israel.
They also hate the US because of the governments we do and have supported against popular will (and/or opposed despite popular will) for non-Israel reasons (oil being a big one) in the Islamic world.
Oh, and for directly killing a bunch of them, and torturing others, fairly recently in a series of wars -- including a very large one that was very clearly a war of aggression followed by a poorly managed occupation -- ourselves, not principally motivated by Israeli interests.
Like, if Israel vanished tomorrow, a very large number of the people that hate the US "because of its unconditional support of Israel" would hate the US just as much, even though they would have one fewer thing to cite as to why.
And, foreign issues aside, Israeli influence contributes a lot less to American internal problems than other foreign influence operations do.
The ill-conceived post-911 War on Terror was cheered on by Israel and its supporters, but it would have probably happened either way. Osama Bin Laden specifically mentions Israel in his motivation for his terrorist attacks, but his overarching argument for attacking the US is more about western powers empowering dictators across the middle east, suppressing the local population and getting control over ressources. I honestly doubt much would be different in this regard if Israel had been founded in Pomerania instead.
The argument becomes more interesting when talking about the last 10 years. The US actually does not have a lot of self-interested reasons to keep engaging in the ME as much as they do. Controlling energy and trade is useful, but containing China seems to be the more pressing issue, and binding a lot of ressources in the ME might be dangerous going forward. Either way, it is the center point of the world, so controlling it, or plunging it into chaos, both benefit a power on the margins like the US.
I flagged the story because it's uninteresting politics that doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity.
I flagged your comment because it's anti-intellectual nonsense that attempts to emotionally manipulate readers and is unfounded in reality. Please keep that kind of thing to Reddit.
On a more serious note, I figured the majority of US lawmakers already supported the genocide. I'm surprised Israel feels the need to use propaganda for this
Of course it did. This is modern warfare. Welcome to the future.
Just like how we knew everyone was always spying on everyone else long before Snowden, we should all know that everyone is doing this to everyone else long before all the revaluations come down to us. There is no benefit to assuming good faith here.
