Israel is reportedly storing Palestinian phone calls on Microsoft servers
engadget.com
engadget.com
(was flagged, because of course)
Israel faces real and ongoing threats from groups such as Hamas, which has a record of carrying out attacks on civilians and is officially designated a terrorist organisation by the U.S., EU and others (https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/terrorism-and-illici...). Monitoring communications within the territories controlled by such entities is a rational, defensive measure.
As for storage on Microsoft servers, Israel, like many governments, uses U.S.-based cloud services with strict contracts and data protections. The U.S. government itself stores classified data on Microsoft Azure through its government cloud services (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/government/). The implication that Microsoft’s involvement is unusual or illicit is misleading.
Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context. The article omits this.
It's still bad
> Israel faces real and ongoing threats from groups such as Hamas
Israel helped put Hamas in power, FWIW. Maybe instead of stealing Palestians' land, Israel should give them citizenship and voting rights. It's the moral thing to do.
> Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context
Criticism of Israeli policy should account for their colonialism and war crimes. It's a moral issue. The rest be damned.
As for land and citizenship, roughly 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab, including Muslims and Christians, with full voting rights. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not Israeli citizens because they are governed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas respectively, per the Oslo Accords. Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed. See: https://ecf.org.il/issues/issue/153.
Calling the situation “colonialism” ignores the fact that both sides claim historic ties to the land and have engaged in multiple rounds of negotiations. That includes offers of statehood rejected by Palestinian leadership, notably in 2000 and 2008. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28israel-t.html.
Security and morality are not mutually exclusive. Both sides deserve accountability and safety.
I said helped put Hamas in power. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
> not a reason to ignore Hamas’s current actions
The problematic actions under discussion are the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
> Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed
So you're saying they wouldn't go for it? Let's ask them.
> both sides claim historic ties to the land
You act as if the land was empty when the Zionists showed up.
> Security and morality are not mutually exclusive
Depends how you define security. Israel is defining it as genocide. And we're not even mentioning the horrible actions happening in the West Bank. Or in Syria and Lebanon for that matter.
> Both sides deserve accountability and safety
This is not symmetrical. One side has modern weapons, surveillance, air power, an modern army and an embargo on the other with the backing of the US (and other Western states.)
The context of being an occupying power also factors into this too?
Even Snowden’s own disclosures differentiated between the problematic scope of domestic collection and the more accepted targeting of hostile foreign entities (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...). You may oppose both, but equating them as equally unjustified weakens the argument.
Israel has experienced decades of terror attacks, rocket fire and armed conflict originating from Gaza and the West Bank. That fact matters. Countries routinely intercept communications from adversarial regions, whether it’s the NSA, GCHQ, or Shin Bet. Calling this “insane” suggests a disregard for the protective responsibilities of a state.
Another piece of context is polling showing that a majority of Israeli citizens support the forced expulsion of Gazan citizens and even Arab Israeli citizens.
The arabs themselves never wanted to be called Palestinians - they used the name "Syrian Arabs". Yassir Arafat, former leader of the PLO, was one of the most prominent opponents of the word "Palestinians" with regard to the arab population - he only changed his mind as Jordan and Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, because he wanted to distance himself from these "traitors".
One of the problems he (and also most arabs) had with the word "Palestina" - it has exactly ZERO relationship to arabs and to Arabic languages. It's a greek word with actually Hebrew roots. It means "land of the Philistines" - and the Philistines, according to many historians, are a mixed group of people, mostly from western Mediterranean (modern-day Italy, France, Spain, northern Africa), also called "the sea people", or, in other words - pirates. The Romans introduced this name to the region to wipe out the original names Judea and Samaria (which IS actually a sign of a genocide).
And now to your points - the word "Aschkenaz" IS actually of middle-eastern origin. It describes people who lived in the area of modern day eastern Turkey, north-eastern Syria, and north-western Iran - similar to the area where Kurdish people live today. The meaning of the word changed over time, and yes - nowadays it does have some relationship with Europe - it describes Jewish people who were driven out of Judea and Samaria by Romans and later settled in the middle and eastern Europe. So - yes - they are by definition Palestinian refugees with a right to return to their native lands.
But, of course, they are only one group of the Jewish people and not even the only one who lived in Europe. There are also displaced Jews and their descendants in Irak, Iran, northern Africa, India, even in China and Japan. But in the end, every one of them, including the "European" Aschkenazim still have substantially better claims to the land of Israel than the Arabs who are by definition just invaders in that region.
I don’t understand the point of this article.