Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you? Is anyone really concerned that mass market consumer devices have command detonated explosives in them already? I mean, other than the iphones?
It seems like the perfect occasion to quote Mickens' immortal words:
> Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
When having terrorist organisations shoot bottle rockets at you or have their members blow themselves up is a common occurrence and your tolerance of collateral damage in your military counter-attacks is so high that you've continuously killed an order of magnitude more people in your counter-attacks every year while maintaining a much higher ratio of civilians casualties per military target, you don't actually need good intel because your mode of response defaults to "just kill 10x as many of them as they killed of us".
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-05/ty-article/.p...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-h...
One take on this is that Netanyahu allowed them to happen because he needs to stay in power to delay his personal risk of going to jail, which would be compatible with his subsequent actions to prolong the war, but it’s also quite plausible that this simply reflects widespread arrogance: many reports say the intelligence alerts were ignored because senior officials didn’t believe that Hamas was capable of a sophisticated attack. Their tactical excellence would have fed into this, because they generally do outclass their opponents considerably.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely. I mean, just from that same pragmatic perspective in which he'd do anything to remain in power - he lost massive amounts of support because of October 7th. He's been able to claw some of that support back, but he's still polling far below where he was before October 7th, and it is very unlikely he will remain in office past the next elections.
That said, if I had to bet my money is on simple arrogance. When you’re that consistently outclassing your opponent it’s easy to assume that’s always true as opposed to to _mostly_ true. We had similar problems with 9/11 where FBI offices were playing internal political games because they just weren’t serious enough about major domestic attacks.
The fact that most of the IDF was busy finding ways to "liberate" land in the left bank while it happened to me is a reason why i mostly think it is due to stupidity. It's very plausible, and that's what IDF primary purpose was until last october. By removing people from their houses in the west bank, they allow settlers to take that land (as it is unused), and that's how Israel grow. It was like that that they took my father's (christian) orphanage and school: pretexted the building was too old and needed reparation, put the Sisters and the kids out, destroyed the orphanage, settled the place. Easy. They probably thought the warnings were given to prevent them to build new settlements fast enough, and choose to ignore them.
I'm sorry that happened to him.
That's a pretty crazy claim. There were very few Bedouins killed (and how the heck would Bibi know who Hamas was going to kill btw? Hamas could have tried driving straight to Ashkelon or could have focused only on Sderot). Nova party was not a left wing event, right wingers are just as likely to go to raves - I would say the rave was pretty much an ordinary representation of Israeli secular society. Other than that tons of cops got killed, tons of right / center leaning people in the towns near Gaza and so on. And yes quite a few left wingers.
I don't think this is a Netanyahu issue anyway, i think that most israeli leaders, whatever their political leaning would probably have made the same mistakes. Not at least acknowledging "discourse on colonialism" from Cesaire when you have settlers yourselves is to me a grave mistake of the Israeli society. I'm not saying you must agree with most of it, i don't, or that it apply 1 for 1, it doesn't, but acknowledgement this text exist and trying to draw parallels and do a self-criticism is a very good way to limit the impact of colonialism on your own population and (especially in this case) leadership.
Another take is somewhat between yours and that of the parent:
It's not that Bibi "knew" that an all-out massacre was coming on the scale that it actually did. Rather, that he chose to discount the signals he was receiving (that something "big" was in the works), and to downgrade the actual risk to his people. Thinking "Okay, so they might try something, but then we'll just hit back with some heaver-than-usual rounds of lawn mowing. Which will get the message across, and be lots of fun besides."
So in that sense he did "know", in that he could have known if he wanted but his ideology and his blind belief in his insane long-term strategy vis-a-vis Hamas prevented him from seeing what should have been staring him in the face.
Very much like with Bush II and the warnings he got about 9/11 -- but in Bibi's case, apparently the indications were much more specific.
The little we do know doesn't seem to point to him being a single point of failure - it does seem like there were many warnings, but for various reasons being uncovered now, it looks like several people in the establishment discounted these.
edit for source: https://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435
Source?
The quoted tweet mentions "videos", and is actually a thread of multiple posts. You have to be signed in to see them, or use a nitter proxy[1]. If you look at those videos, it's clear that they're not calling the protesters "terrorists" for merely protesting, they're calling them "terrorists" for engaging in behavior such as intimidating jewish students or praising the October 7th attacks. It's slightly misleading to round that off to "protesting Israel's actions in Gaza".
[1] https://xcancel.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927143758262389
The OP is correct, since although the official Israel account is quote tweeting Shai Davidai, the most shameless zionist hasbarist on twitter, Israel's tweet is still self contained and is clearly trying to demonize and vilify the protestors as terrorists based on their "ideology" i.e. fighting back against your colonizer and oppressor is "terrorism" because any opposition to the racist colonial enterprise that is Israel has to be demonized and delegitimized by Zionists while they themselves engage in blatant terrorism. Israel's propaganda is so awful and lazy that it has become predictable. They will always hyperfocus on fringe cases, even manufacture such cases if they don't exist, in order to delegitimize the whole protest.
And anyone who actually followed the protests carefully has witnessed that Zionists were the aggressors trying to intimidate anyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza in any shape or form. Furthermore, the "they were intimidating jewish students" narrative has become so laughable at this point because zionists perceive any opposition to Israel as "intimidating" and so they are abusing the jewish identity as a shield to protect the israeli apartheid entity from criticism. People are sick and tired of this game because they have seen zionists playing these sick and twisted mind games for decades.
Did you not see the xcancel link?
It's very misleading to round it off that way, and that's exactly why Israel crafted that retweet the way it did.
Even though the underlying tweet tells a different story, by truncating and framing the material in that way -- by juxtaposing the insipid "(a)-(b)-(c)" argument with a video of a perfectly nondescript protest scene -- it's very clear that the intent to convey a simple, visceral, 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
It seems like a stretch to argue they're "truncating" the material, when twitter doesn't provide a way to link threads besides quoting the first tweet.
>it's very clear that what they're trying to do is to convey a simple 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
I certainly didn't get that impression when reading the tweet. I agree the video was nondescript, which was why I went out of my way to use a nitter instance to see whether there were more to that tweet. The standards around "well if you read between the lines..." accusations are seemingly so low that in any given argument you could use them on both sides. For instance, you could plausibly argue that by linking to a thread where the worst pro-palestinian protesters were called "terorrists", and describing that as "[israel] consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists", it gives the "emotional impression" that you can't denounce any aspect of pro-palestinian protesters without being accused of thinking the entire movement are terrorists.
But the whole intent of the retweet's framing (its truncating) of the underlying tweet is to bypass all of that, and just get straight to the cortisol-spiking emotional imagery.
Again, not being able to quote an entire thread is a platform limitation, so to claim that it was intentional is a stretch. I agree that the tweet would be better if it contained a footnote of "btw we're not saying all pro-palestinian protests are terrorists, just the ones in the video", but given that twitter isn't exactly known for nuanced takes, claiming that the lack of such footnote implies it was intentionally truncated is an isolated demand for rigor. Moreover, if you're against truncating and "cortisol-spiking emotional imagery", of @Israel's quote tweet, you should be against the same behavior of the OP, which rounded off the entire thread to be "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists".
It's not the the Israel tweet was intending to literally say "protests == terrorists". The whole point is that was innuendo. It didn't have to be literally correct -- only to convey an insinuation and/or an emotional message.
And it seems pretty clear that emotional message was very much intentional in this case. It's also perfectly congruent with the number one insinuation / emotional message the hasbara folks have been repeating incessantly for decades (and in recent years, not merely as an insinuation but literally -- even so far as to have it successively encoded as legislation in multiple countries): "All protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy or narratives == anti-semitism".
And perhaps we can leave it at that? I mean you can respond of course, but I'm not sure I have much more energy for this. I guess it's pretty clear that I'm pretty fed up with that country's official (and unofficial) propaganda machine, and all the mindless crap it's been spewing for decades and decades. And so I'm kind of tired of looking for reasons to give it the benefit of the doubt.
If you have a different take, then that's fine for you of course.
"basically" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. At best the claim was directionally correct in the sense that Israel hates pro-palestinian protesters, but that's neither a secret nor controversial. The specific claim of "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists" is only true if you believe the highly subjective read-between-the-lines-and-consider-the-context interpretation.
>not merely as an insinuation but literally): "all protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy == anti-semitism".
literally?
Source?
Moreover, you don't see the irony here? You're accusing the israelis of pushing a message of "all protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy == anti-semitism", but here you are, rounding off a tweet thread where the worst pro-palestinian protesters were called terrorists as "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists"? I'm sure you find the latter to be more justified, but surely you can see the issue when someone who's vaguely skeptical of the pro-palestinian view is reading your comments?
It's not literally "all". But there does seem to be strong, steady insinuation in their propaganda that much protest/critique/doubt of the State of Israel's actions/shenanigans is, ipso facto anti-semitic.
There's no source needed for this. It's been omnipresent in the environment of discourse (at least since the dawn of the ADL/Dershowitz era).
Though I do think it's quite fair cite both the Nakba Law within Israel itself, and the anti-BDS legislation adopted in certain countries as attempts to (at least partially) codify this omnipresent insinuation into law. More specifically the idea seems to be brand this visceral association (between strong critique and anti-semitism) as highly intrinsic -- to such a degree that can be called "close to literal" -- in people's minds.
It's both bizarre, and all too mundane and predictable somehow, the extent to which they've been able to keep pushing the envelope on (and reaping dividends from) this effort.
But here we are.
You likely know who Rachel Corrie, an American student and peace activist is, but are forgetting on purpose. She was killed on March 16, 2003, in the Gaza Strip while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Corrie was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to block its path.
Israel doesn't care, they will murder anyone standing in the way of all the free land land god gave them 3000 years ago.
Americans killed directly by the IDF:
- Mar 16 2003: Rachel Corrie
- May 11 2022: Shireen Abu Akleh killed, very in a likely targeted attack
- Sep 6 2024: Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, also likely targeted
- Jan 19 2024 - Tawfic Hafeth Abdel Jabbar, 17 - [0]
- Feb 10 2024 - Mohammad Khdour, 17 - [1]
The numbers are quite different. However it is deeply significant that Israel is supposed to be one of America's top allies (and the US is definitely Israel's "bestie" by far), yet its government has obfuscated and/or outright lied about a 5 incidents above. And except for Corrie, all 4 were shot in the head.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tawfic_Abdel_Jabbar
[1] - Who Killed Palestinian-American Teen Mohammad Khdour - https://archive.md/PgRrf
[2] - https://abcnews.go.com/US/americans-killed-israel-hamas-war/... - The article is from October 2023, and since then there've been at least 2 more: Gadi Haggai and Hersh Goldberg-Polin
They've been playing this game for a really long time and so it's no surprise they think they'll keep getting away with it forever.
This is not likely to last through the next election, looking at polls.
That is such an out of the left field thing to lead with that I thought the article must have brought up this possibility somehow. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.
We don't actually live in a cyberpunkish dystopia of sovereign corporations. While it's reasonable to expect large companies to have their own intelligence operations - they are huge targets, after all - I find it hard to believe that any of them would run any kind of spook field operation in general, and definitely not anything this offensive.
others have made the point; we're not in a different world than we were a few months ago. the perception of the world we are, and have been in; may have changed for some.
i don't have a specific reason to name a particular company as more likely than any other to be ready to deploy direct violence in pursuit of shareholder value. I speak with cynical observation that if a capability exists, someone will find a use for it.