Hacker News Reader

What the NSA is doing should be considered illegal wiretapping. None of this is ok. And trying to justify it is insane. Look at the Snowden leaks. Lets you know everthing you need to know about what our "spy" agencies are actually doing.

Arguing that “none of this is ok” overlooks the security context in which states operate. Israel is not conducting indiscriminate mass surveillance of its own citizens. It is monitoring communications in territories largely controlled by designated terrorist organisations such as Hamas (see: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/terrorism-and-illici...). That is not equivalent to the NSA intercepting Americans’ domestic calls.

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.

Funny to talk about "context" while narrowing the frame of reference.

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.

Link to that poll?

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-28/ty-article-ma...

> Engadget frames Israel’s surveillance of Palestinian telecommunications as extraordinary, but such practices are common in national security contexts

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.

Israel did not “put Hamas in power.” Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. These were monitored by international observers, including the Carter Center, who confirmed the vote was largely fair: https://cartercenter.org/news/pr/palestine_013006.html. The idea that Israel created Hamas is a misrepresentation of historic tactical decisions in the 1980s, when Israel tolerated some Islamist activity as a counterweight to the PLO. That is not the same as “putting Hamas in power,” and certainly not a reason to ignore Hamas’s current actions.

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.

Talk of colonialism often descends into semantics. I think the main issue with Israeli policy in this regard is that Israelis are attempting and succeeding to expel people from their homes. That is happening on the west bank now.

> Israel did not “put Hamas in power.”

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.)

Israel faces a "threat" from the people it's been ethnically cleansing for 80 years. Also, this is in the West Bank, so has nothing to do with Hamas (not that it would be ok to do this in Gaza). That the U.S. and EU also violate human rights at scale, doesn't make it ok for Israel to do the same. Only they go one step further and actually murder people based on the information they've spied.

I think your confusion results from the fact that "Palestinians" was the name used to call the Jews basically for nearly two thousand years, until the early 20th century. And, yes, they have been ethnically cleansed by arabs basically since the arab invasion in the 7th century.

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).

The Palestinians are native, the Ashkenazis are European. Your hasbara doesn’t work anymore.

You definitely need to learn to read and to understand words. Otherwise you make an impression of a degenerated parrot with a really limited vocabulary.

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.

You shouldn't expect people to believe your religious fairy tales. Especially when they're so clearly invalidated by actual history.

I don't know what history you're hallucinating, just discuss it with your dealer, because until now I didn't say a single word about religion to you.

> Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context. The article omits this.

The context of being an occupying power also factors into this too?