Israel tries to limit fallout from the Pegasus spyware scandal
homelandsecuritynewswire.com
homelandsecuritynewswire.com
This spyware is invaluable for the Israeli government because they have something that repressive Arab regimes want. These regimes can’t be bought with money, because some of them like Saudi Arabia and UAE have plenty of money. Israel needs friends and this is a great way to start and maintain friendships - provide a way for these tinpot dictators to cement their power. Sure, some people might be annoyed they were spied on but the news cycle will move on soon, while Saudi and UAE will remain staunch allies. MBS still loves them because Khashoggi remains dead.
Israel would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for the meddling kids at Amnesty International.
It's not. It's equally despicable.
Even if that weren't true, I don't see how the amount of press coverage something gets speaks to whether or not that thing is despicable.
If you want Israel to start for some reason, I think it is fair that you need to call them Gods chosen people at the minimum, because your heightened expectations would warrant that.
That could happen regardless of what Israel does. I mean if the U.S or EU decides that Israel is a colonial entity like Apartheid SA, that's not going to be because some Israeli cyber startup selling a tool. The hard left doesn't really care what Israel does now, the very idea of Israel of Israel existing is a cross between colonialism and white privilege to them. But in the mean time Israel gain actual strategic relations with countries like Saudi Arabia that mean a lot.
There is also the chance of the US losing a lot of its power through various means (ie. Dollar losing reserve currency status, US military being tested by China and losing etc.). If this happens, they may be forced to cut Israel loose. Israel has no other solid allies and so they will flounder for a while but eventually sink because once the US is out others will be free to begin economic sanctions and the country cannot survive that indefinitely.
In both of these scenarios, the lobby groups become less effective and possibly get defeated. Long term we are moving towards a world where lobbies become less powerful. Its going to take decades though.
The "hard left" sees Israel for what it always has been: A settler/colonial state. Israel will continue to push propaganda to bury this but the truth can never be erased.
Who knows, maybe it never happens. If climate change brings about tens of millions of new refugees I don't think people will have that much time/energy to the so called Palestinian refugees anymore. They will have to get along like everyone else.
There is a possibility of a significant economic decline in the US caused by climate change such that the US will not be able to help Israel anymore just due to lack of resources.
Most of the countries in the region will be swallowed by the desert and that may include Israel. Even though Israel is at the forefront of mitigation technology, it does not seem like it is enough from what I have seen.
I think it should be mentioned that other countries spy on citizens too. I fail to see what is the difference for Israel now. We have ample evidence from multiple whistleblowers that governments like to surveil their population.
Furthermore, Israel hasn't had the support it has today. Especially at the time multiple countries tried to attack it. At the time it basically got its weapons for defense on the black market. So scrutinizing questionable defense contracts is a weak accusation, especially since all other countries do sell weapons to regimes as well.
What you are really criticizing is the success. Making that clear might not really helpful, but is factual.
I wasn’t criticising them at all. I was merely pointing out where their interests and incentives lie.
And all of them should be called out, every time. "But those guys get away with it" isn't a defense.
What the Russians do isn't an argument...
That and also have backdoors into their clients' intelligence gathering. Knowing who is a good potential enemy of a state is always handy.
Having a hot mic on a world leader 24/7, and being able to blame someone else for it is invaluable.
"Our clients only use the software against terrorists and criminals, so it can't be used the wrong way"
"We made sure that it doesn't work against US phone numbers".
That is straight out of "A Few Good Men":
If Colonel Jessup ordered the soldier should not be touched, and soldiers follow orders, why was the victim scheduled for a plane ride off the base?
Maybe because that hatred is more widespread than hatred against all Semitic people...?
The fact that Israel is a nation "home for jews" doesn't help, as some people think that every critic against Israel politic is the mark of "anti-semitism" even if religion has nothing to do with. Sometimes it might be the indicator of "anti-sionism" and sometimes... just the indicator of political difference! After all, you can criticize any country for its politic without critizing the counrty "per se"
Moreover, a lot of people in Israel are not jewish but muslims.
Yes, words are polysemic. In this case, 'anti-semetic' is seen as "anti-jewish". That's one sense of 'anti-semetic'. You can also add another sense of that word: "against speakers of Semetic language or people". This sense is not used when people use 'anti-semetic'.
In Europe, there has been centuries of discussion about jews: it was called "the Jewish question". Anyway, this anti-semitism started as a product of religious rivalry (which religion is True? Christianity or Judaism). Then extra features were added, etc.
Who avoids it? Israel is written about, almost always negatively, on a daily basis on all major newspapers.
Care to say which media outlet avoids "criticizing" Israel other than a few unimportant right wing outlets?
> > Israel is written about, almost always negatively, on a daily basis on all major newspapers
You could say that about the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) as well or the dictators in Saudi Arabia. Sometimes there's a well founded reason for criticizing the state in a country.
That does not mean the ones who criticize the Israeli state or the CCP, would think that everyone in Israel or China are bad people.
P:
> same observations as you
There's a cognitive bias to notice negative sounding things written about one's own "soccer team", but not notice positive or neutral things so much.
Let's say there's 1 article about settlers taking land, 1 about the Israeli state selling suicide bomber drones to Azerbaijan, and 15 articles about vaccination, tech companies, the Pride Parade, other things -- maybe you wouldn't remember the 15 latter, only keep the 1 + 1 former in mind.
(This is as expected b.t.w. thinking about evolution and hunter gatherer tribes long ago)
I'm talking about almost every news outlet writing "Israel bombed Gaza" and only one being nuanced enough to mention "Israel bombed Gaza after n hundred rockets crossed the border during the last 24 hours."
Settlers taking land is also interesting. It took quite a while before someone (and none of the big ones) cared to mention that the latest dispute was over Jewish owned land that was stolen by Jordan during their short management of east Jerusalem and sold to Arabs.
It goes both ways. I haven't seen the headline "Palestinian militias shell Israeli targets in response to Israel's attempts to ethnically cleanse illegally occupied Palestinian territory" either.
> It took quite a while before someone (and none of the big ones) cared to mention that the latest dispute was over Jewish owned land that was stolen by Jordan during their short management of east Jerusalem and sold to Arabs.
Has anyone of them mentioned the massive irony in Israel returning lands stolen from Jews while at the same time keeping all the land it itself stole from Palestinians?
What ? That was what Western media wrote over and over again last few months.
Preferrably with links. I'm stubborn but prefer to become right over believing I was always right (but actually being wrong the whole time.)
To the degree that land has been stolen recently except by Jordan it was by UN and the British I think.
Israeli land was either bought, traded, given by UN, won in defensive wars (and most of that have been given back in return for peace).
You could say that the land that was gained in defensive wars is stolen even if it was a defensive war, but I think that becomes unreasonable - especially since Israel has proven that they are willing to give back such land for a real, lasting peace agreement, and also since some of the land represents a massive advantage for a hostile neighbor.
At the same time, property owned by Jews in the West Bank was confiscated by Jordanian authorities and given to Arab Palestinian refugees. In 1970, three years after Israel had taken the West Bank from Jordan, it enacted a law which stated that all property confiscated by Jordan should be returned to their original Jewish owners.
This is what I meant by "massive irony" but maybe it is just hypocrisy or racism.
And this is why there is so many Arabs living happily in Israel today. /s
Quite on the contrary I've read that Israel asked Arabs to stay in Israel during the 1948 war - for selfish reasons - but still.
Surrounding Arab countries asked Arabs in Israel to leave temporarily to make "shoveling the Jews into the ocean" easier. Those who left "temporarily" are the ancestors of those who live in refugee camps today. Those who stayed are the ancestors of Arabs living good lives in Israel today. More or less.
edit: Confiscating the homes of those who left to make it simpler to wipe you into the sea is a bit different than bulk killing people (genocide) and taking their homes. endedit.
Also remember that far more Jews were forced out of surrounding countries and into Israel than Arabs out of Israel.
If Arabs from what is today Israel should get their homes back I suppose Jews should get their homes and shops back in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq etc?
edit: Or can we finally accept that it was botched by UN and actively sabotaged by neigbouring countries? That the sad fate of the Arabs from Israel is less the fault of Israelis and that the ones to blame are neighbor Arab states and the UN? end edit
If any of this is news to anyone just think how much more biased news organizations hide from you.
Everyone should start reading.
PS: I'm not saying Israelis are innocent. I'm saying that media has massively misrepresented the situation for a few decades, selectively presented only the things that makes Israel look bad.
Many of them are true, but as shown above the full story is a bit more nuanced...
To shield itself from criticism, Israel promulgated the idea that the Arabs left voluntarily. That they had been "called out" by their own leaders. Joseph Schechtman, working for the Israeli state, was the first to claim this in his book The Arab refugee problem from 1952. He referenced radio broadcasts and evacuation orders from Arab community leaders ostensibly calling for them leave.
Erskine Childers in his classic article The Other Exodus from 1963 went through transcripts of radio broadcasts in Palestine during 1948 and couldn't find a single instance of an order by Arab leaders calling for them to leave. Arab leaders that he interviewed vehemently denied calling for the Arabs to leave. On the contrary, he found transcripts of radio broadcasts calling for the Arabs to stay. Since then, many historians have investigated the issue and have concluded that the "called out"-theory is completely bunk.
Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that the Palestinians left for fear of getting caught in the hostilities, were "adviced" to leave by Jewish troops, or forced out at gunpoint, some Zionists still cling to the debunked "called out"-theory. That's the power of propaganda, I guess.
I find it callous and cynical to attempt to justify Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine with Jewish emigration from Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s. That the Arab countries persecuted their Jewish minorities cannot justify an ethnic cleansing committed decades prior. Furthermore, some Arab states have apologized for their persecution of Jews and allowed them to return and to claim property. No such apology is forthcoming from the Israeli state.
This is interesting. I'll stop writing that. (Or until I can get proof of it.)
It would be astounding to me if this was true but I also cannot square the idea of a genocide of Arabs within Israeli borders with the fact that there are many more Arabs inside Israel today than before 1948.
I still haven't made up my mknd on this, but here is what I found:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=did+arab+leaders+ask+arabs+to+leav...
There is a lot of information there but the most interesting (too me at least since it partially contractict my llng beld beliefs) was what I found by following the Wikipedia result one step further to this page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestini...
This page mostly supports bjourne but interestingly is also full of quotes that support what I learned:
> Furthermore, in his comprehensive book on the Arab–Israeli conflict, Righteous Victims, Morris wrote:
>> In some areas Arab commanders ordered the villagers to evacuate to clear the ground for military purposes or to prevent surrender. More than half a dozen villages ... were abandoned during these months as a result of such orders. Elsewhere, in East Jerusalem and in many villages around the country, the [Arab] commanders ordered women, old people, and children to be sent away to be out of harm's way.... [T]he AHC and the Arab League had periodically endorsed such a move when contemplating the future war in Palestine.[174]
> In a 2003 interview with Haaretz, Morris summed up the conclusions of his revised edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: "In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves. At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages."[175]
> The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem, following the 8 March 1948 instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, ordered women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes and move to areas "far away from the dangers. Any opposition to this order ... is an obstacle to the holy war ... and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts."[176]
Is it solely about racism, really? You're talking as if there weren't around 50 years of mutual blood shedding before that moment, or that all surrounding Arab states didn't invade Israel to destroy it. The Jews had a good reason not to trust Palestinian intentions towards them (See the Grand Mufhti's meetings with Hitler to help find a "solution" to the Jewish problem for example). In fact the Palestinians refused to split the land twice, on 1937 and again on 1947 and then they started a war, what good would it have done to let them back - to have another civil war all over again?
Even after the war Israeli leaders attempted to cleanse the land of its remaining Arab population. JNF chairman Yosef Weitz in 1951 proposed that the Christian Arabs from the upper Galilee should be transferred to Argentina. Both Ben-Gurion and Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett gave the plan its blessing.
None of the Zionist leaders ever suggested that the need to ethnically cleanse the land of non-Jews was due to Arab belligerency. On the contrary, they were quite clear on that Arab belligerency was not an issue. While there were many more Arabs than Jews in Palestine, they were poorly organized, poorly trained, and lacked access to military equipment.
Yes, it is correct that the Palestinians wanted to keep Palestine as one territorial unit. Dividing it would have meant that hundreds of thousands of Arab from the Jewish part would have been transferred out of their homeland and their property would have been confiscated. Instead, they wanted to create an all-encompassing Palestinian state with a parliament in which all ethnic groups were represented. This idea was a complete non-starter for the Zionists who wanted a Jewish-majority state.
Here are some:
> Until the Arab armies invaded Israel on the very day of its birth, May 15, 1948, no quarter whatsoever had ever been given to a Jew who fell into Arab hands. Wounded and dead alike were mutilated. Every member of the Jewish community was regarded as an enemy to be mercilessly destroyed....
> [T]he Arab population of Palestine anticipated nothing less than massacres in retaliation if the Jews were victorious. Measuring the Jewish reaction by their own standards, they simply could not imagine that the Jews would not reply in kind what they had suffered at Arab hands. And this fear played a significant role in the Arab flight.[112]
I got it from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestini...
It is also worth mentioning that despite what David Ben-Gurion meant, Israels Proclamation of Independence, issued on May 14, 1948, invited the Palestinians to remain in their homes and become equal citizens in the new state.
It might also be worth mentioning that Israel even offered Arabs to return or to buy them out since.
It might also be worth mentioning that while Israeli citizens massacred (some nasty examples exist) this was not encouraged, and perpetrators could be threatened with harsh punishments instead of celebrations like on the other side.
The story goes on.
Israel is not blameless, but the way you present it it is evil powerful Israel relentlessly attacking poor Arabs.
I enjoy (for the lack of a better word, I find it disgusting to read about) learning more including were Israel was wrong, but at the same time, wherever I look it is obvious that while the things you say are correct, you systematically leave out the other side.
(And now that I think of it I might be guilty of the same, even if it is to a lesser degree.)
The quotes you cite are from Joseph Schechtman and Rony Gabbay, two historians who were employed by the Israeli state to "chronicle its history". Schechtman, as I mentioned, is the one who promulgated the idea that the Arabs were "called out" by their own commanders. If you want to know what actually happened, you need to consult modern scholarly works on the subject - not books written for propaganda purposes.
It is true that many Arabs fled because they were afraid of the Jewish violence. Dozens of massacres were committed in the course of the war, some of which to punish Arabs who refused to obey evacuation orders. Most of these massacres have been hushed down so unless you are a specialist you probably haven't heard of them. The Israeli state even closed its archives of the 1948 war because the documents historians found were just too embarrassing. The most infamous massacre was the Deir Yassin massacre for which news stated that the Jews had killed some 250 villagers. This was not true - the Jews had only killed about 110 villages - but the news of the massacre caused many Arab civilians to panic. For what it's worth, Deir Yassin's village elders had signed an agreement with the Jews to stay out of the fighting. This agreement was violated by the Jews who captured it in a sneak attack on April 9, 1948 - over a month before the Zionists proclaimed their state and the Arab states intervened.
So, yes, it is true that fear played a role in the refugee flight. Civilians usually try to get away from war zones. The main driver of the refugee flight, however, was military operations by Jewish forces.
According to a Shin Bet document from June 30, 1948, the most important factor in leading to the refugee flight was direct, hostile Jewish operations against Arab settlements. Abu Sitta in Atlas of Palestine comes to the same conclusion; 54.4% of the villages were abandoned due to military assault by Jewish forces, 24.6% due to direct expulsion orders, and 1% (5) were abandoned due to Arab evacuation orders. You can find details on how and when each Palestinian village was depopulated here: https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/palestineremix/maps-an...
Regarding Ben-Gurion, there are countless instances of him lending support for the idea that the Arabs should be transferred out of the Jewish state. Whatever the Declaration of Independence stated, it was clearly and loudly overruled by military commanders who depopulated Arab villages and then dynamited the houses to prevent the villagers from returning. For example, in one section of Yitzhak Rabin's memoir, he describes how Ben-Gurion wanted him to drive the Palestinians out Lod and Ramle:
"Not even Ben‐Gurion could offer any solution, and during the discussions at operational headquarters, he remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave Lod's hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route to Yiftach, which was advancing eastward."
"We walked outside, Ben‐Gurion accompanying us. Alton repeated his question: ‘What is to be done with the population?’ B.G. waved his hand in a gesture which said, ‘Drive them out!’"
"Allon and I held a consultation. I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out. We took them on foot towards the Bet Horon Road, assuming that the legion would be obliged to look after them, thereby shouldering logistic difficulties which would burden its fighting capacity, making things easier for us."
"Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion."
> It is good when talking about the problems on one side not to completely leave out the problems at the other side.
I don't think I'm leaving anything out. When discussing the Holocaust no one in their right mind would bring up Jewish violence against ethnic Germans because it would be irrelevant. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was a war crime and made much worse by the Zionist side's justifications and insistence on that the victims of that crime have no right to redress.
I think that I should say to you that even if I fundamentally disagree with you on the root of the problem, I find it very interesting and I actually read what you write with great interest even though (or maybe specifically because) it sometimes shatters some of my previous beliefs.
I cannot defend everything Israelis have done and I probably gave that up somewhere late as a teenager or about the time I was drafted, so half a life ago.
I also believe that I could play your position to some degree if I ever met a crazy Arab hater so there's that.
That said this thread is getting long and old. Thanks for taking time to write so carefully instead of just calling me a shill and moving on. I also hope I have demonstrated that I am not and that I'm willing to try change my position in face of evidence :-)
I think I remember reading about that. Are those the properties acquired by an extremist Jewish organization, from the original Jewish owners, in order to be able to legally evict the non-Jewish people living there?
I'm not that into it. I probably only appear knowledgeable because I have read a bit beyond the headlines and because I am as biased as many others.
We discussed the other day as well. We clearly live in different realities which might explain why we couldn't come to an agreement.
For the reference here is what my reality looks like:
Around here there are exactly two major outlets that I am aware of that is pro Israel: "MIFF - Med Israel For Fred" (With Israel For Peace) and the conservative newspaper document.no.
The rest of known media outlets are more or less deeply anti-Israeli:
Public broadcaster NRK is probably the biggest hatemongerer (publishing "funny" skits about "jewish swines", telling that Israeli soldiers "shoots at everything that moves", having a radio host saying on air (yes, on air) that he hope the vaccine doesn't work on them and they die from COVID etc.)
On the other side you have vg.no who will always end their pieces about Israelis bombing something with a sentence or two to balance it somewhat: "The Israeli attack happened after n hundred rockets had been fired over the border the last 24 hours."
The rest falls somewhere in the middle: not calling Israelis Jewish Swines like NRK but simultaneously only reporting whenever Israel strikes back, completely ignoring why.
Would you be referring to the most-discussed conflict of all time? It's always funny to me when I hear on Reddit that "nobody talks" about Israeli war crimes. We're talking about it right now. Go look at Wikipedia's page of active conflicts - how many of them do you hear about the war crimes being committed? Coverage of Israeli war crimes is disproportionately *large* compared to other conflicts, not disproportionately small.
The really convenient thing about "terrorists and criminals" is that the definition of who counts as those is incredibly flexible.
Per [2], US and UK officials were also targeted. Perhaps this was less commonplace though because the scheme had a greater chance of being figured out (example means: [3]) and would then give the US and UK access to the target lists of Israel and proxy countries, and the exploits used. Perhaps this is the reason 'soft targets' (countries without big ICT spying budgets) topped the target list?
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/4599753/NSO-Pegasus.p...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/20/heads-of-sta...
I would be shocked if NSO wasn't feeding intel its 'clients' acquired spying on their targets to Israel.
Calling out chinese, russian and north korean hacking = fighting cyber terrorism.
Calling out israeli hacking = antisemitism
There are a lot of cognitive biases at work in these situations. It always feels like the other person started it; it always feels like they did worse; it always feels like one is being "brigaded" and so on. Mostly the others are feeling the same things. Everyone has good reasons for what they're fighting for, even if those good reasons aren't expressed, and even when the arguments they're making are wrong or distorted or one-sided. Since everyone is having these similar feelings and perceptions, we all have to be super careful about moderating (in all senses of the word "moderate"), or we're guaranteed a downward spiral. That wouldn't do any of us good, regardless of our views on countries or anything else.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
An Israeli company made a weapon, assembled it, loaded it and acted as a spotter for Morocco, who's the party that selected the french targets and then pulled the trigger. Even if the intelligence wasn't shared, the Israeli government should be held responsible for its arms exports.
Did any of his statements really need vindication though? Have we not known about this forever? (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON) I suspect the real problem is, and always has been, our perceived inability to change any of it.
a modern echelon dragnet would get an absolute mass of encrypted data so your fear will depend on whether or not you believe governments can break that crypto, and if so, at what scale.
pegasus on the other hand is highly targeted, infects silently and completely takes over your device–the camera, the microphone, keyboard, etc… encryption will not help. nothing can save you.
echelon was dragnet, pegasus is targeted. both extremely dangerous yet i still find something about pegasus to be infinitely more frightening.
we’ve already seen very high profile journalists murdered from pegasus and i suspect we’re going to uncover more as it’s dug into further.
For a long time, Israel is known to be cheating with cyber... and I wouldn't be surprised that France is using NSO services too! Same goes for Palantir...
But it has to be non-public! Showing it publicly is a way to force everybody to find other ways... but won't change the world nor the game. And it's not about "terrorist"... just about "intelligence" and "national security"
I don't think that was ever the point. In a game of cat-and-mouse, you don't skip on a chance to spray the cat.
I do wonder how many of them are in this comment chain or previous big thread about Pegasus
on vacations in cool places :)
src:
https://www.google.com/search?q=russian+hacker+caught+on+vac...
1
>At noon on June 28, 2012, Vladimir Drinkman, targeted as one of America’s most wanted cybercriminals, and his wife hustled into a cab pulling away from their Amsterdam hotel. They had just been tipped off that the police were on to them, but an unmarked police car blocked their getaway. The Russian was handcuffed and arrested on charges of helping to mastermind what has been called the largest criminal hacking scheme ever prosecuted in the United States.
_____________
2
>The United States has carried out a largely unheralded roundup of big Russian hackers over the last year, grabbing them on vacation in Barcelona, Prague and Greece,
______________
or great talk by Adam Haertle, but unfortunely in Polish with English subtitles avaliable
The day of cybercriminal, or how hard it is to remain an uncaught
Would he actually know or have a way to find out why Macron secrets are being traded to Pegasus clients, or even reign in the spyware industry at all?
Would the fragile coalition be able to handle this PM doing anything about it, or is this so far outside of their priority list that it doesn't matter and there is room for real reform?
I don’t think this would pass muster as an excuse if Israeli industry had been selling missiles to Morocco for use against France.
Curious to see if it ends up being treated the same.
If it was the EU would’ve fallen by now as I’ve lost a count of how many times states were caught spying on one another.
These things make headlines when they are found by the public but they really are business as usual among governments.
If anything, this only reflects badly on the French services themselves if the President's phone (I assume, or hope, private phone as they are supposed to have custom, secure phones for official business) got owned.
(1) https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-toka-the-most-dangerous-i...
Boomer journalists are pro-Israel and millennial journalists seem to be pro-Palestinian.
In the recent conflict NYT and WaPost were pro-Palestinian unlike the conflict in 2014 when they were neutral. In 2008/2009 they were openly pro-Israel.
I keep being contacted several times a year by established Israeli companies to add spyware into my projects. A couple of weeks ago I was offered $5000 as a sign up bonus by Bright Data (formerly Luminati), before that a growth specialist from Similarweb contacted me to gather intelligence about how to aquire Firefox for Android extensions, it was so slimy I've reported the latter to Mozilla employees.
I can't come up with a single country with such a disproportionate amount of shady companies specialized in online tracking and surveillance compared to the small population size.
No one is saying you should be pro-Israel in this instance. But an anti-anything stance should be reasonable and based on facts.
The fact that a country with a very large high tech sector is home to some questionable companies doesn't say much about the country as a whole.
>I can't come up with a single country with such a disproportionate amount of shady companies specialized in online tracking and surveillance compared to the small population size.
That's probably because you're unaware of the size of the Israeli high tech sector, which is completely disproportional to the country's size. From Wikipedia [0]:
> It [Israel] has the second-largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States, and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies after the U.S. and China. American companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel, and other high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, HP, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola have opened R&D centres in the country
Also relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Wadi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital_in_Israel
Unfortunately, the more important it is to hold your government to account, the harder it is. I, personally, don't have the strength to do that, for all I talk of it.
Also, please provide actual counterarguments.
"The Israeli Defense Ministry must approve any license to a government that wants to buy it, according to previous NSO statements."
Israel is a tiny country the size of New Jersey, the fact that there will be overlap of people and connections between them is always the case- there's nothing nefarious about it.
Anyway, looking at the author's twitter gives one a good look into what this looks like if taken outside the context of Israel:
https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb?lang=en
She's an anti-vaxxer talking about how the "ruling class" of using COVID to gain control over the population, about hidden FBI assets, and a ton about how the anti-Defmation League, a group that collects data on antisemitism is really a massive spy network.
If it weren't so scary that people believe in it, it might be funny.
There's no reason to put any more credence in her
From what Ive been seeing over the past couple weeks, the article is probably correct in that pegasus is just the beginning of what we’re going to find out regarding how deep the rabbit hole goes with israeli malware firms, however mint press has a very long history of what may be questionable funding and there have been quite a lot of organizations who have done some pretty well researched investigating that implicates mint press in some pretty nasty propaganda.
Again, I understand how complicated and messy this kind of thing can be, but if you at all value accuracy in your analysis, it would absolutely be worth looking at some of their history regarding incredibly questionable funding and very strange propaganda for certain regimes.
I've no idea why, and no idea how to fix it.
It makes skipping ads easy (anything in Hebrew), but it's mildly disconcerting not knowing what's behind it.
This is a simplified explanation of why this label is not correct.
Palestinians are in fact three distinct groups of people who all self-identify the same way. There are the group of people who are Israeli citizens. They used to identify as Israeli Arabs, but they've recently (in the last five or so years) begun to self identify as Palestinians.
Then there is the group in the West Bank formerly Jordan. This is land that Israel captured in the 1967 war, when there was a unified effort by the neighboring nations to attack/destroy Israel, but Israel won. It returned a majority of the land it captured (more than two thirds), kept some. But Jordan did not allow citizens living in this land the ability to return to Jordan, and they became refugees, being neither Jordanian (according to Jordan) or Israelis (according to Israel).
The situation is similar in Gaza, except there is is Egypt, and is on the other side of the country. The refugees there are former (or descendants of) Egypt.
Both places have had the opportunity to petition the UN to be a recognized country, but they've not done so.
You may ask why these three groups call themselves the same thing. Why "Palestinian"- because for many of them, this unified label also implies in it the idea that Israel should not exist and the land should be reverted back to Palestine, the name that Israel (and Jordan) had before it was split and allocated as Israel.
The PLO, the governing body of the West Bank, would like to see the destruction of Israel and it to be returned to Palestine, but they're also pragmatists and some (many) believe they would accept a two-state solution.
The governing body of Gaza, however, is Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization which is on a religious mission to kill all non-Muslims (and by Muslim they mean a very specific sect/belief system) from the land- no Jews, no Christians, etc. They're very similar in ideology and methodology to ISIS, but ISIS and Hamas don't get along either due to differences in their own philosophies.
Lastly, there are Israeli Arabs, that is fully Israeli citizens who were part of or descendants of the land from when Israel was formed (or who migrated to Israel) have grievances due to the way Arabs are treated in Israel. There are legitimate grievances on their part for sure, and there are a wide variety of solutions- from political reform, new laws about equality, or funding (think US inner-city poverty) to the destruction of Israel, and everything in between.
There are problems with creating a two state solution because there's no land border between the West Bank and Gaza. They're on opposite sides of the country, essentially. It's a bit more complex, but look at it on a map and you'll see the issue. It would be unreasonable for a unified people to have Israel sitting in the middle of its country, or for Israel to give up a huge swath of land and be split into two.
And Israel, under the previous government, allowed 400,000-500,000 people to create settlements in disputed land that was supposed to be kept free of people in an agreement founding the demilitarized zone.
If you're an American, that's basically the population of Washington, DC. Now what the heck do we do with those people?
But my point is there's no single "conflict with Palestine"- there are separate conflicts, each with their own peoples, issues, grievances, etc.
Canada, the European Union, Israel, Japan and the United States have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. Australia, New Zealand, Paraguay and the United Kingdom have designated only its military wing as a terrorist organization. It is not considered a terrorist organization by Brazil, China, Egypt, Iran, Norway, Qatar, Russia, Syria and Turkey. In December 2018, the United Nations General Assembly rejected a U.S. resolution condemning Hamas as a terrorist organization.
The fact that some countries such as Russia and Turkey won't label them as terrorists doesn't change their beliefs, nor does it change how dangerous they are not only to Israel, but to their own people. They take the "long view" that if they need to sacrifice a few dozen, hundred or thousand of their own people to achieve their goal, even if it takes centuries, they're willing to do that.
It hurts not only Israel, but the people of the Gaza strip as well.
I don't want to split hairs about who calls labels them what. As I said, my explanation is simplified.
I guess the only difference with the Israeli government is that the Israeli government manages to successfully avoid killing their own citizens.
Let's be real, they're both as bad as each other, just one side has a prettier face.
False.
" Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims. "Let the eyes of the cowards not fall asleep." "
Article 27 talks about how the PLO(another terrorist organization) must be rejected because it is secular.
From what I have read and understood, it's primary focus is to resist the Zionists which repeatedly encroach on Palestinian land.
Imo, making a comparison to ISIS is a tad bit lazy given the historical buildup to the problems in Israel. Just because a bunch of guys have big beards and shout in Arabic doesn't really make them equivalent in their aims.
Read their own literature, read Wikipedia, read any source on Hamas. This isn't a hidden agenda, this is their stated goal.
> it's primary focus is to resist the Zionists which repeatedly encroach on Palestinian land.
I addressed the issue of "Palestinian" in the previous comments. There are extreme Zionists and there are people like me who support the idea of a safe place for Jews even if we don't support the previous Israeli government- the current one is too new to have an opinion on. And we're Zionists too. I want to see peace and equality for all the people.
> Imo, making a comparison to ISIS is a tad bit lazy given the historical buildup to the problems in Israel. Just because a bunch of guys have big beards and shout in Arabic doesn't really make them equivalent in their aims.
It would be lazy if I were doing that, but I wasn't.
I was explaining their ideology, explaining why it's different than the PLO. As for have big beards- Jews have big beards too, and some of the Jews with big beards in my family speak Arabic as their native language, so what's your point?
The ugly truth is that offering these capabilities to whoever will pay for them is a good business to be in. In addition to getting paid for it, Israel also gets access to all the intelligence gathered by their services for these clients. It's a win-win for them.
The only way to stop them doing this would be to make the costs of these activities greater than the benefits. I'm not sure how that can be done.
As for the commenters downthread: posting personal attacks, religious attacks, nationalistic attacks, and similar kinds of things is utterly against both the letter and the spirit of the rules here, and if you keep it up we will ban you. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site to heart. If you can't do that, please don't comment until you can.