Belgium's Arrest of IDF Soldiers Could Be a Watershed Moment
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
I saw a video[1] today where I think there was essentially every living ex leader of Israel’s various intelligence agencies stating that Netanyahu and his allies have essentially taken the country hostage and they see it very much as an existential threat from which they might not survive.
Honestly it’s kind of hard to disagree with that analysis at this point from what I am seeing.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/newseye.bsky.social/post/3lvl4ynf32...
Hard to see how that could ever be possible given that the have the full support of the US and all its politicians for the past several decades. We give them way too much military support and aide/funding.
Only way I can see their down fall is if we decide to support and prop up another country in the middle east area instead of them.
Germany won’t come out and say this publicly because of their own complicated history but this general ideal that Europe is on board with Israel is months out of date and support is dropping rapidly by the day.
Of course we can flag things, but I am not fan doing so silently.
"pro-Israel narrative"??? On HN? You must be reading a different site.
While I didn't flag this, it's really not hard to see how (a) there is nothing about it that is relevant to tech, hacking or entrepreneurship, but more importantly (b) it's the topic that predictably leads to a dumpster fire of comments.
With the known sophistication of Israel's tech and PR sectors, it's less of a cabal and more of an inevitability.
That's simply false. This article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731958, from 6 days ago has 734 votes and 924 comments when I pulled it. Searches for "gaza" and "israel" bring up a lot of other recent stories, some with over a thousand votes.
A lot of HNers (myself included) will flag stuff if it's highly likely to devolve into a flamewar with no substantive discussion, especially if it's related to a news story that's highly likely to be covered in loads of other places online. Unfortunately, articles about vinyl records or Sudan tend to elicit more informative discussion than many articles about Gaza.
Reading the article I find nothing to object in there as such, and so I was wondering why this would be flagged. "Oh heck someone flagged it" is not quite good enough an answer for me.
> In October 2024, the Hind Rajab Foundation submitted a report to the International Criminal Court (ICC) identifying 1,000 Israeli soldiers, backed by over 8,000 pieces of evidence — mostly from social media — implicating individuals in attacks on civilians and the destruction of Palestinian homes.
1. The soldiers were displaying IDF military flags at a music festival. This was not allowed by festival organizers and obviously pissed some people off.
2. These soldiers were then taken in for questioning.
It's not clear to me that these 2 were some of the specific 1,000 soldiers from that Hind Rajab Foundation report - that sounded like an associated piece of information given in the article.
But flying a flag makes identification easier?
Almost certainly. US DOD actively discourages carrying identifying items while traveling for exactly that reason.
> The complaint accused them of direct involvement in war crimes and acts potentially constituting genocide in Gaza — specifically, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, torture, and forced displacement.
Seems pretty clear?
TFA
> The Hind Rajab Foundation’s strategy focuses on targeting individual soldiers, especially dual nationals or those traveling to countries with universal jurisdiction provisions. Since its establishment in September 2024, the foundation has worked with legal partners to gather documentation — including videos and images taken during the soldiers’ service in Gaza — and file cases in multiple countries, including France, the Netherlands, Brazil, and the UK.
I don't think it would be surprising for such evidence to be enough to warrant investigation and questioning - but perhaps not enough for holding in custody until a trial.
The founders of the foundation, Dyab Abou Jahjah and Karim Hassoun, are known to campaign and provide material support to Hezbollah - a terrorist organization. Diab Abou Jahjah actually went to Lebanon and may have actually participated in Hezbollah operations - he declared his intent to do so in the newspaper before leaving, but was not so stupid as to confirm it afterwards. So there is no proof he actually fought for them. It IS proven that he transferred money to Hezbollah and collected money from others for Hezbollah (which is by the way a war crime, in case that convinces anyone. Knowingly supporting terrorist organizations, which he did, is a war crime)
Socialists in Belgium protect especially Mr. Jahjah because he's been part of a Belgian communist party for a long time. Of course, that doesn't change what he did.
But it would still be VERY surprising that any court would take any complaint about terrorism from a terrorist supporter, from a person who left for a war zone declaring his intent to become a terrorist in the newspaper, seriously. Especially given other problems with people who did that, and the fact that the Belgian police force is, and I'm putting it very mildly, not particularly well suited or interested in fighting a foreign war ...
Of course, this would be pretty typical strategy for the PVDA. Making legal complaints that are so absurd there's zero chance any court will do anything, then "pointing out" how unfair the justice system is and how it will always protect the capitalists (previously usually represented by OpenVLD, but more recently by the NVA). It's probably a decade ago, but they sued a hotel chain for refusing to convert a central hotel in Antwerp into social housing for free, and then made a big fuss when the court said what amounted to "WTF?".
Why? Prosecutors should pursue cases based on evidence. As long as the evidence is valid, it shouldn’t matter who brought it to the prosecutor’s attention.
In other words, if you don't have fair and honest application of law (ie. the prosecutor going after every case they know about), NOT having law at all is actually preferable.