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Comment by greggh | Hacker News Reader

The real answer here is that he is mad about people protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza. This $100M donation is being made with funds he had given to UPenn. He has taken it back, via lawyers, because they allowed the protests to go on. He is now just taking that original donation and moving it somewhere else. Not that I am against the Olympians getting paid, just some context.

Sources: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/donor-pulls-100-mill... https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4348656-upenn-loses-1... https://www.timesnownews.com/world/who-is-ross-stevens-stone... (many more)

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I would have never guessed that a significant portion of western society would not only be ok with killing thousands of children but be outraged that anyone would protest it. I feel like I have more information about the world than ever and understand it less than ever.

What people feel about things is almost an entirely a function of their information environment, rather than the facts of the events themselves. Almost nobody truly aware of the number of slaughtered and starved Palestinian children would be "okay" with it; the people defending it are more-or-less viewing these events in terms so different from that that those basic facts cannot reach their understanding at all.

> Almost nobody truly aware of the number of slaughtered and starved Palestinian children would be "okay" with it

A lot of people aren’t okay with it but also choose not to engage on it.

If I ignore it, it is as if it never happened. Part of it is willful ignorance though. For Ross, he is deeply religious and views the security of Israel as that of the Jewish people (having a home to run away to if shit hits the fan). Children dying is a sacrifice he is willing to make. For the majority of America though, I believe they are a) either scared, because they saw a witch hunt orchestrated by people in power (like Ackman). If 3 female deans, many of them minorities, can get ousted at the whim of a billionaire, then the typical engineer or employee will be easily labeled antisemitic for defending those who are denied their rights to life and property, and will lose their job. Canary Mission and other groups are funded by successful billionaires like Ackman, Adelsons etc and harass students on campuses for protesting. They doxx them, blacklist them (no boss will hire someone on those letters, at the expense of being labeled an antisemite, and you are in it for a suprise once you notice how many of our tech companies and finance sectors are run by religious sociopaths). I know a few victims of those efforts. Interestingly, 90% of them are white middle class, and I think they are mostly women. Their courage is to be admired. Or b) people are okay with it, because Ghaza is so far away and because of Israel's blockade on the media covering ghaza (Israel has already killed more journalists last year than all other nations combined btw. I do not know of any democracy that does this).

Not that I'm anyone important, but at this point if I google someone and they show up on the Canary Mission website, I'm inclined to hold them in higher regard.

The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That

https://theonion.com/the-onion-stands-with-israel-because-it...

Bad characterization.

I’d personally put myself in this camp. I think what Israel is doing is horrible. But the us-versus-them dynamic in the American Palestinian-activist community is exhausting. Furthermore, it is focused on personal showboating—messaging and rallying—versus helping anyone on the ground.

So I’m continuing to focus on Ukraine, my pet war, and northern Ethiopia, my pet FP issue. I’ve been able to materially aid folks there and—twice, on the margin—influence U.S. policy in their respects. I don’t have to deal with partners who want to convince me that each of my friends who doesn’t post daily on Instagram about Tigray is Hitler. Instead, they’re focused on the folks there.

I have opinions on Gaza. But I’m not taking a stand. And let’s be honest, that’s a fair characterization of 90% of folks who constantly go off on rants about Zionists or genocides but have never given a dollar to a humanitarian cause, called an elected or tried to travel to their region in question.

Please explain the us–versus–them dynamic you referred to?

> Please explain the us–versus–them dynamic you referred to?

The tendency to tar and feather anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with one as a Zionist. (Which, in these circles, carries the same weight as being a bona fide racist.)

This memorably presented itself a few months ago when folks—potentially on the way to changing their minds—would be called Nazis for referring to the war as a war, as if a genocide within a war is somehow inconceivable.

Absolute morality rallies the base. It doesn’t usually convert moderates. And the situation in Gaza defies absolute morality.

Don't you see the same problems with Ukraine and Ethiopia? I've seen if you don't 100% agree with a Ukraine supporter they call you a Putin bootlicker, a Russian bot, a Nazi, and so on.

> Don't you see the same problems with Ukraine and Ethiopia?

Not commonly.

> I've seen if you don't 100% agree with a Ukraine supporter they call you a Putin bootlicker

I’m sorry. Fuck those guys.

They’re doing damage to the cause in exchange for self aggrandizement. Ersatz therapy through others’ misery is ghoulish.

Perhaps it’s a problem of degrees and segregation. I see much less of that with those fronts. And to the degree it exists, it sequesters itself online and away from the people doing anything useful for the folks on the ground. (My work in Ukraine involved some arms early and then purely political help. In Ethiopia it’s been humanitarian.)

When it comes to Palestine, I see basically zero people quietly focused on the work. (I’ll grant this may be due to ignorance. But it’s exhausting to trawl through shit. And I don’t think I’m alone in disengaging on that basis.)

There's a lot of non-obvious information or hidden information out there if you have no context. I mean, at the very least I can tell that there are a lot of wealthy and powerful people in western society that are invested in maintaining the innocence and primacy of Israel.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair.

Where salary in that quote could be metaphorical, given there's other reasons like identity, beliefs, or politics.

Don't think anyone in the "global South", which have suffered from Western "civilizing missions" are surprised by this.

It's kind of funny to see "anti-interventions" podcasters go full empire mode and justify literally colonization today.

Hardly surprising, since most of these white nationalists love the British Empire's "oeuvre" in non-White countries (but somehow ignore the fact that their own country fought against its tyrannical rule).

Estimates for deaths we caused in Iraq range from the low hundreds of thousands to the millions, and that's going to be overwhelmingly civilians. [1] And given those are all very short time estimates (generally 2003-2007), and since many studies are from violent deaths only (excluding subsequent caused famine/disease/despair/etc) the millions is likely closer to the mark than not.

Compare that to the death toll in any comparable war, event, or behavior that we politicize against domestically. Now imagine yourself seeing these things from the outside. That's how the world looks to the 'real' rest of the world, and not the ~15% and declining percent of the world that people call the 'rest of the world', when they mean Europe, the Anglosphere, and a handful of occasional oddballs like Japan or South Korea.

And when you see this world through their eyes, you start to see an entirely different world, and it's the world that we are also starting to see now as all masks and pretexts have been coming off for years now. And in general I think that's a good thing. People can't form realistic and meaningful worldviews if they're stuck in a Marvel Comic Universe perspective of international relations.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

> deaths we caused in Iraq

Doesn’t much change the horrible situation but overwhelming majority of them were indirect.

Not quite the same as carpet bombing a densely inhabited city.

Also well.. if you look at Sadam’s death toll in the 80s and 90s it isn’t really lower. Rather a low standard of course…

The disclaimers speak loudly what are you trying to say

> Estimates for deaths we caused in Iraq range from the low hundreds of thousands to the millions

How many do you estimate you caused ?

it's hard to put numbers to words, but I doubt "a significant portion of western society [is] outraged that anyone would protest it" - likely, it's very small but influential and/or wealthy.

I think it's probably significant and at least as big as the crazification factor https://shebloggedbynight.com/2025/the-27-club-or-lizard-peo...

Of course we haven't actually defined what we mean by significant, so I suppose we will have to drop back to that old standby of 5%.

They're good at influencing opinions. Half of America voted for a person with dementia. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Having more information doesn't necessarily means that one is better informed.

I also read/watch as much original sources as time and energy allows, that often (not always) gives a very different image than what media represents. For example, what I have read in the documents produces by UN representative for signs of genocide showed very thin/constructed arguments. Haven't read all of it so maybe there are better arguments as well.

I'm surprised that a significant portion of western society has any sympathy for the Palestinian side after October 7. Hamas started a war and used a bunch of heinous tactics -- kidnapping and murdering a bunch of random civilians, putting bases in hospitals, stealing food aid, and so on.

Israel tries to avoid casualties when they can. For example when Hamas launches rockets at Israeli civilian targets, they shoot the rockets down with the Iron Dome and shrug it off. In my view Israel would be perfectly within their rights to return rocket for rocket into Palestinian civilian targets. That the Israeli rockets would have far more devastating effect as they'd produced by a nation state with a proper MIC, not what terrorists or smugglers can jury-rig, and the defenders don't have their own Iron Dome, Palestine would by far get the worst of the exchange, is something Hamas should be thinking of before they go around launching rockets at other people's civilian territory.

That Israel doesn't return rocket for rocket in this way tells me Israel is fighting with a significantly higher amount of restraint and morality than their opponent, and I'm confused as to how many otherwise intelligent people seem to feel otherwise.

I feel sorry for the civilians caught in the middle, but in my view, almost all the moral responsibility for the bad stuff happening to Palestine falls on Hamas. Hamas is always going around deliberately committing atrocities, Israel is often trying to show restraint while still maintaining reasonable military effectiveness against an enemy who likes using human shields.

"Israel tries to avoid casualties when they can."

Provably false: 2018 Great March of return. Peaceful protest against the occupatioon and for the Palestinian right to return.

People got show down by snipers who also (until this day) shot at kids and medics.

Edit: Also the "mowing the lawn" doctrine

>Israel is fighting with a significantly higher amount of restraint and morality than their opponent

Gaza would not be starving were this the case, and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting otherwise.

Please don’t be absurd.. or are you one of the people pretending that the October 7th attacks didn’t happen or that the victims somehow deserved it?

What Israel ended up doing in Gaza ended up being extremely horrible.

But what options did they really have? Not doing anything would have been the same(or worse) than the US ignoring 9/11… Hamas on the other hand had the option to stop the war at anytime they wanted, the chose not to.

> But what options did they really have?

Not kick a dog for decades upon decades and act suprised when it bit back?

It's been a shitty situation all round, since the fall of Beersheba if not before, but its a difficult ask to want all to believe October 7th came out of nowhere.

If I had to pick a single thing differently (I have many) Isreal should have not only ”allowed in” (which they didn’t ) food and water but actively driven in huge amounts of it.

Not kill children is the start , then not kill the innocent and then move to the civilized world conduct. Fairly low bar to meet.

So just ignore the atrocities Hamas/male Gazans committed and move on? Not exactly realistic?

they are not synonymous as you’d like to make us believe, just cant be a homogeneous group.

Yes I think countries shouldn’t kill innocent people, you’d think people that experienced a genocide wouldn’t commit genocide so easily

They could've, like, stopped firing missiles at the people every day. When you fire missiles at people every day they will get angry and try to scrounge up something to fire back.

And there's just no excuse for the part where they shot children with sniper rifles, recorded themselves laughing about it and posted it on TikTok.

Gaza isn't starving. Civilian deaths in this conflict are remarkably low.

History did not begin October 7th, 2023. We are capable of looking at prior events to see that the story is not so clear cut.

When are you thinking history began? 1948?

For the part of the history relevant to the topic, you have to go back to at least November 2, 1917 [1].

From the same page: "1901 the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman central government) gave Jews the same rights as Arabs to buy land in Palestine and the percentage of Jews in the population rose to 7% by 1914"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

That does nothing to explain Israels handling of the West Bank or Jerusalem. Personally I dont care for both sides. Also any resources and attention on this conflict is pretty much wasted and could save so many more lives in other conflict zones that nobody cares about.

Was there any Israeli history before October 7 that might explain any of that?

(1) If you are going to protest something, you need to show up with an answer to the question: “well, what should they have done?”

(2) That doesn’t matter to the situation at hand. The protests on college campuses got WAY out of hand and disrupted the purpose of the institution: teaching.

(1) The answer is simple: Stop the genocide in Gaza by any means necessary. The US has the power to do that with its proxy Israel.

(2) Reading that I wonder if you also supported violent dismissals of Vietnam war protests

Not what I was asking about. What should Israel have done in response to Oct 7th? What would be the downstream effects?

What should a country do when a neighbor invades and massacres entire towns, live-streaming the violent deaths and rapes for the world to see? What is the correct response to this?

You have clearly not thought through the game theory and repercussions of what you are suggesting.

Like many college protesters, you would do well to understand the complexity of the mechanics of the real world, and understand that reality ain’t rainbows and butterflies.

I have no clue how you drew the Vietnam war protest thing from what I wrote.

First, genocide is not necessary response. Second, Israel hard right was working on that and moving toward genocide for years.

So I guess no one is actually going to try and answer the question?

I think that a better response would have been much, much more targeted. Strategically, Israel have put themselves in a much worse position vis a vis the rest of the world (and importantly the US) by the indiscriminate leveling of Gaza. So it would have been much more like a police action than a war. Maybe take lessons (god I can't believe I'm saying this) from how the British responded to the nationalist terrorism/freedom fighters in Northern Ireland?

Targeted urban warfare is exactly what happened in Gaza, which had one of the LOWEST civilian death rates for urban warfare in this century. It was 1/4 that rate of the US army in fallujah for example.

Talk of “genocide” and “indiscriminate leveling of Gaza” indicates to me that you didn’t really understand the situation and probably get your news from propaganda sources - which, unfortunately, include nearly all media sources in this conflict.

Northern Ireland was a gang/rebel group in occupied territory. Hamas is the government of Gaza, and Israel had no boots on the ground on Oct 6th. The situations are not in any way comparable.

> which had one of the LOWEST civilian death rates for urban warfare in this century

Can you provide some evidence for this statement?

EDIT: removed everything except this statement, as I feel it will lead to less productive conversation.

What should Palestine have done in response to Oct 6th?

Maybe you should be asking what it should have done on September 13, 2000.

> by any means necessary

Not that carpet bombing a densely populated city wasn’t extremely horrible were there any better was to destroy or at least massively weaken Hamas?

For that matter Hamas could have stopped the Israeli atrocities any time they wanted, they chose not to.

> were there any better was to destroy or at least massively weaken Hamas?

Perhaps not pursuing policies that create the conditions for Hamas to thrive in the first place?

Also avoiding literally supporting Hamas would help weaken Hamas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas

Wikipedia has become a very poor source for anything Israel-related. The basis of the article is just

- Israel supported a non-violent predecessor org, which is pretty irrelevant to Hamas.

- Israel allowed Qatari aid to fund some Gaza infrastructure projects, salaries for civil servants, etc.

Neither is actually supporting Hamas, unless we say that allowing food to enter Gaza is also supporting Hamas.

> Perhaps not pursuing policies that create the conditions for Hamas to thrive in the first place?

That sounds pretty easy when you're not involved, but things on the ground are rarely that simple. Much of Israeli society is convinced (somewhat accurately) that the Palestinians hate them and want them dead, as much of Palestinian society is convinced of the same (again, somewhat accurately).

I don't know how you get both sides to climb down from this, or does it just end with genocide (of one side or the other). Like, I'm from Ireland and the north of the island was engulfed in violence for the first half of my life (not to a Gaza standard but bad). That only got resolved because a superpower (the US) intervened to help mediate (and help the side that considered themselves Irish).

I would imagine that I might have been very angry at this if I were a member of the other side (the side that considers themselves British), but ultimately it worked out pretty well (modulo Brexit and potential other landmines).

But it's not over, the groups are still really segregated and people just don't talk about it. The Israel Palestine situation is much, much worse and I honestly don't see any superpower being willing or able to mediate this situation.

So yeah, it would be great if everyone could just sing kumbaya, but I don't see how we get there from here.

Benjamin Netanyahu literally made Hamas rise to power, on purpose, because he needed Gaza to look evil and they were getting too peaceful.

> Benjamin Netanyahu literally made Hamas rise to power, on purpose

I think that's probably a pretty uncharitable take. Like certainly it benefits extremists on one side if the other side are also extremists, but certainly he didn't force them to start blowing up buses in Israel.

Did he benefit? Yes. Did he facilitate them? Yes, but mostly to damage the less extreme Palestinian side. Is it all his fault? Definitely not.

Hamas is an idea. Hamas is the idea that Israel must be destroyed. If you want people to stop thinking Israel is evil and must be destroyed, it would greatly help if Israel stopped killing their families. Usually, when you see someone kill your family and the people around you, you start thinking they are evil and must be destroyed. This is pretty basic human psychology.

To make people believe that Israel is a good thing instead, they could start by delivering lots of food and fresh water. Even more easily, they could start by letting in the food and fresh water that's lined up outside of the border.

Both sides have had family and people killed and can view the other as evil by this reasoning.

Have they? The Iron Dome blocks almost all Hamas rockets. The trauma suffered by Gazans is hearing the voices of their friends and family under collapsed buildings slowly fade away. The trauma suffered by Israelis is that sometimes there's a siren and they have to run to a bomb shelter just in case, which is also how the Japanese deal with earthquakes.

I don’t think it’s helpful to minimise anyone’s suffering. There are many deaths and permanent injuries on both sides.

But to your point about seeing the other as evil, living with missile shields and walls to guard against the terrors living on the other side, who have made it clear that would love to kill you if they can, has the same psychological effect you mentioned.

Western Palestine protestors want their countries to stop giving stuff to Israel. That's a very achievable goal. It would be good if the war stopped, but most of them recognize they only have influence over their own countries.

If that was what they actually wanted, why did none of them seem to care when Netanyahu proposed tapering off of US aid, or when a credible ceasefire agreement was finally being negotiated?

When opportunities arose to achieve the outcomes they were supposedly fighting for, they were suddenly very quiet.

Did the US cut off aid?

Trump is resisting the idea [1], though it's too early to say how it will ultimately go. It's a confusing time, particularly those who were fighting for an end to the aid, but couldn’t fathom supporting something that Netanyahu wants.

What not everyone understands is that US aid comes with strings attached. Israel developed multiple fighter jets in the past, for example, but canceled them mainly due to US pressure.

[1] https://jewishinsider.com/2026/01/trump-netanyahu-u-s-milita...

Also the US aid is just credits for the purchase of US military hardware that can’t be resold. Yes it is subsidizing the Israeli military and some people don’t like that. But it is also propping up the US defense industry while keeping Israel “bought into” the NATO military tech standards, which has strategic benefit.

> real answer here is that he is mad about people protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza

This sounds more like a proximate cause than a “real answer.”

Answer to what question?

This answer is correct.

By the article it sounds like Ross Stevens wanted his money to go towards excellence. Perhaps he didn’t find that at today’s Penn. Taking him at his word, he seems to have found that with the US Olympians.

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