Comment by dadarecit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dadarecit | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked in Israel and is familiar with the tech scene there firsthand I can testify to the fact that the entire cybersecurity industry is intertwined with the IDF and the Israeli government to such a degree that any differentiation that could be made would be purely superficial.

The intelligence units of the IDF are petri dishes in which the talent that later creates the very cybersecurity firms whose products are sold under the direct supervision of the Israeli government is cultivated. There is an entire framework focused around funding and training these graduates of intelligence units to create commercial companies that are essentially subsidiaries of the IDF. And these companies don't discriminate when it comes to sales - clients include tyrants, criminal organizations and even Muslim states. Big corporations e.g. Microsoft are also involved, as they usually end up buying these infosec enterprises, essentially funding the Israeli government / military.

It's truly disturbing to see the opportunistic nature of all of this.

As someone who's also worked in Israel and worked with the tech scene there firsthand too I dispute this quite strongly. Israel has mandatory conscription that is rather difficult to get out of, and given their precarious situation in the Middle East I'm not entirely sure I'd blame them. As a result, the entire country spends their lives between the ages of 18-20 working in the military in some capacity, meaning that you can very easily make a case of 'military links' for any industry. The milk you drink from your hotel in Tel Aviv? Owned by a former IDF commando and run by employees who almost entirely all served in the IDF. Tech is no exception, and to just say that because there are IDF graduates who staff the myriad companies in the tech industry so now it's somehow 'controlled by the IDF' is utterly preposterous. Is Tnuva suddenly an IDF controlled subsidiary? If I buy milk from Tnuva, am I suddenly now supporting the IDF and the government?

Your assertion that the IDF, Israeli government, and cybersecurity industry are effectively one unit is also bizarre to say the least, considering that they're entirely private companies who refuse to take orders from the government and have raised a stink about attempts to do so on more than one occasion. Your comment becomes more and more laughable when you assert that these companies are 'essentially subsidiaries' of the IDF. Please, you're fooling nobody. The issue here is about control - whether these companies advance Israeli foreign policy goals at the explicit direction of the government. Yet even a quick look at the clients of many of these groups shows this to be not the case.

israel isn't the only country to have conscription but it has exceptionally high profile espionage companies

It has many tech companies in general, way more than its relative size.

He doth protest too much, methinks.

> given their precarious situation in the Middle East

That’s an interesting choice of words but I guess settler colonies with apartheid policies do tend to be precarious

Israel's enemies attempted two wars of annihilation against it before there were any settlements, unless you consider the existence of a Jewish state within the 1948 armistice lines a "settler colony" (which admittedly some do).

> unless you consider the existence of a Jewish state within the 1948 armistice lines a "settler colony" (which admittedly some do).

I'm pretty sure OP means exactly that. In fact there are very few progressive leftists who haven't adopted this line of thinking.

? Israel continues to build and operate settlement colonies in the West Bank in internationally recognized Palestinian land. I’m not sure how you can get around calling it a settler colony without some impressive mental backflips

I'm not sure what you mean. Even if one agrees that Israel "builds and operates settlement colonies" how does that make Israel a settler colony? But perhaps you consider Tel Aviv a settlement?

I don’t think anyone denies that Israel is building settlements in internationally recognized Palestinian and Syrian land. They don’t hide it, there’s a lot of very recent news online about it e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/world/middleeast/israel-s...

Yes, I know what the "international community" thinks about that. I'm asking why that makes Israel a settler colony, as you claimed. Do you consider Tel Aviv a "settlement", for example?

Why is a state that builds settlements in other countries’ land a settler colony? Seems very obvious, I don’t really understand your point?

Perhaps it's a simple misunderstanding around terminology. I certainly wouldn't say that Britain at the height of empire was a "settler colony". I would reserve that description for the colonies themselves, i.e. those settlements outside Britain itself! Likewise I wouldn't describe Israel as a "settler colony" simply because it has (perceived) colonies outside its borders. I would only say that if I believe that Israel had no right to exist within any borders. But perhaps that's not what you meant and I just misunderstood you.

"Therefore it would be necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs,...Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy."

--Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, (We and the Arabs) (1923)

If Israel is a settler colony like you say, play tell what the host country is?

Are you asking which country enables Israel to continue to violate international law in the longest occupation in modern history (the West Bank)? That would be the US, who gives them $4 billion dollars each year and prevents them from being sanctioned at the UN

What do you mean by settler colony and what are you suggesting exactly - Israel should dismantle itself and send away its citizens to whoever will be willing to take them?

You can google settler colony. I’m not suggesting anything in this comment other than that settler colonies with apartheid policies tend to be unstable throughout history.

But since you asked, I don’t think citizens of Israel should have to leave, I would advocate for Israel to do something similar to South Africa when they ended their apartheid policies

For once there's something to really harshly critique and attack Israel about that isn't "It's a Jewish state in a neighborhood of unreconstructed Arab nationalists who don't want to admit they invaded Jewish land." And of course, no, you can't just let us attack the actual bad things Israel really did do. You have to change the goddamn topic to "Jew state bad."

Where did you get that from? I wrote two specific criticisms which are quite different from your characterizations, maybe you should reread the comment?

Do you live in an old world non colony then?

They're "funding the israeli government/military" as much as a purchase from a US firm funds the US military - they're legally required to pay a tax and some of that money goes into the military.

Once released from the military these people have no additional obligation to pay for the military more so than people in more tame business - in fact, they might be seen as owed something for serving in the military, rather than the other way around.

Yes, this is why subsidiaries in the private sector are useful - when something goes terribly wrong with one, like it did with NSO, it doesn't implicate the whole of Israel/IDF - at least not explicitly.

First of all, the linked LRB article is just a must read. The cyber beat is often the most underreported in investigative journalism. Probably because its so difficult to crack (hehe) into that subculture. But it's clear it's chock full of 21st cloak & dagger stories that perhaps will one day be told.

Israeli firms enjoy quite a large footprint in the US too, clustered around Route 128 in Boston for example. I've met many engineers from firms like Carbon Black there. And I got the same sense as the article: when it comes to cyber capability, there is no international system at work, it's every party to fend for themselves. And you thus get these situations where nominal allies are infiltrating their fellow so-called allies!

In military budgeting, the requests always come for the next threat. We need an F-35 jet, because our adversaries now have Su-49s. And so the next gen cyber startups are already selling the new: quantum internet. With the tagline: "no eavesdropping over arbitrary distances" ;)

https://www.entanglednetworks.com/

As someone who worked with Israeli companies, there's something to be said about their diverse and relaxed regulatory requirements, which facilitated many essential services that otherwise wouldn't exist due to draconian legislations in many other countries.

To my knowledge, almost all Phishing takedown and ethical deplatforming services are based in Israel.

Could you say a a bit more a about your experience that makes you qualified to “testify” about these things? One of your posts earlier this year noted you were an “undergraduate that mostly deals with front end”

nice try IDF, but I'm behind 7 proxies.

> and even Muslim states

What's wrong with Muslim states? Israel isn't actually in war with the entire Muslim world you know, though some people really wish that was the case.

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