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- cross-posted to:
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Israel has deployed a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7th attacks, uses technology from Google Photos as well as a custom tool built by the Tel Aviv-based company Corsight to identify people affiliated with Hamas.
Way easier than having them wear an armband.
That’s brutal because it’s so fitting. Well played.
So, hot take here: preface this with saying I absolutely condemn the surveillance by Israel here.
But I think it’s wrong to judge a nation by what they’ve gone through themselves, with an attitude of " they should know better". Just because the Holocaust happened, doesn’t mean that Israel has better morales or values, or that they would never do such things themselves. Humans are humans. With the wrong people in power, horrible things happen.
It’s perfectly reasonable and necessary to argue that Israel is currently violating human right laws. We should keep doing that.
It is not reasonable to keep pointing at the holocaust and nazi germany as a stick of " look, you became the thing you suffered under", unless in a context of learning from history. “You should know better” creates unreasonable expectations where some nations ought to have higher morales somehow.
Edit: I ment condemn, not condone. Apologies
That’s because they ought to have better morals than Nazis.
I’m gonna play devils advocate here… it’s easy to say “don’t hate these people in that other country” when these two countries have decades, if not hundreds of years of violence, hatred and conflict between them. You cannot look at what’s happening while ignoring the past 600+ years.
In ww2, there was no actual reason to hate jews. In this situation, the two parties have had actual conflict with actual victims for hundreds of years.
It only takes the wrong people in power at the right time to have this timebomb explodes like it did.
Is it right? Hell No. But the morales at play here are grounded in a vastly different way than with the nazis.
This isn’t it. Arab Jews and Arab Muslims lived in the region together mostly peacefully. Sure, some violence happened, but nothing particularly unusual. The violence really started to happen when the European Jews came over, purchased land and farms that were traditionally worked by Arab Muslims, then created a rule to only hire Jews to work the land. It ripped any possibility of continuing existing together away because one of the groups decided it would stop cooperating with the other.
The idea that Jews and Muslims must fight is bullshit. No matter where you look in the world there’s some conflict, but this region has been home to Jews and Muslims together for centuries and they mostly lived together fine. The current conflict is modern, not historic, as much as they will say otherwise.
600? I mean there were Jews in Palestine then too, and very occasionally unforgiveable things were done to them, but the people who are now running Israel weren’t there for any of that. These are people who migrated to Israel less than 100 years ago and their descendants.
Thanks, just commented on a different post where I said 600 years too. It was an arbitrary number from me, probably misremembering a fact I heard on a podcast about this conflict. The guest on the podcast said something along the lines of “this conflict comes from way before ww2” but I might have misremebered the context or actual years.
Apologies.
I’ve put together a long list of historical events of the conflict here if you’re interested. The concept of Transfer in Zionism goes back to the late 1800s while the dispossession of Palestinians started around the 1920s.
I think you mean condemn.
I mean when a country does Nazi things usually other countries point out that that’s Nazism. It’s not something unique to Israel (see: Trump’s rhetoric being compared to Hitler’s); it’s just that Israel’s philosophy shares a lot with Nazism so the similarity is pointed out a lot.
Fair. I guess I saw something in the original post that wasn’t there. I see and hear a lot of the “they should know better” argument when that’s not an argument at all, and unfair to anyone on the receiving end of that argument. I might have concluded that too soon.
I believe we should be very careful to stick the label nazism to everything we find abhorrent. I’d like to judge situations on their own merit, not compare them to other atrocities in our history. The socio-political situation in Gaza is so different than 1930’s Germany. Even experts are having a hard time really putting the finger on all the mess that has been Israel-Palestine situations for the past 600 years. Calling everything Nazism has a sideeffect of devaluing and maybe even downplaying said words in the long run.
But maybe I’m just rambling on semantics. I think we all agree that what is going on now in Gaza is a mess and a violation of human rights. And something needs to be done about that.
True enough, but the ideology itself is very similar. The methods and forms of injustice differ, but the idea that the ubermench have the right to kill the untermench/enslave them/drive them from their homes/all of the above (also known as Lebensraum) is a very important point of similarity that actually allows us to better understand Israel’s actions and ground them in reality. Comparisons with Nazis are usually unproductive, but in this case they serve to take away the air of Israeli exceptionalism Israel has spent 70 years creating, in the sense that if you logically evaluate the proposition that Israel = Nazi you find it having a lot more merit than you’d expect at first glance. Way too much merit to coexist with the idea that Israel is acting in self-defense. Gonna go on a bit of a tangent, but you’ll find Israeli ideology similar to Manifest Destiny, aka the Nazis’ inspiration. In the end it’s all settler colonialism.
Why specifically 600 years? AFAIK the modern conflict started about 100 years ago with the Balfour declaration.
Hmm, I see your point. I remember seeing some terrible comments from Israeli politicians about the nature of Palestinians . But in the past, there have been many attempts by the governments to reconcile Israel and Palestine. They have failed (I believe partly?) because after every agreement, it seemed some terrorist would explode something somewhere to fuel the conflict. So I have a hard time believing it’s always been part of the Israeli plan. I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t partly self-defence, turned into a (terrible) revenge-raid.
But I’ll be the first to admit I’m very much a layperson when it comes to the whole of this conflict. And that is, to me, the most important thing in this whole affair. I believe we as westerners really have no clue of the actual day to day mess that was, and is, Gaza. We jump to conclusions without actually really understanding the full breadth of the situation. Seeing comments on this conflict on average feels like one big Dunning Kruger mess. I guess that’s what sort of sparked my original comment, a mess of “not devalue words” and “let’s not pretend we understand this conflict”. I’m not always great at getting points across I guess.
The 600 years wasn’t a specific amount. I just remember hearing in a podcast that the history of the Isralian conflict comes from way before second world war. Might have misremembered the specifics of that fact, or put the wrong facts into my brain.
Thank you for taking the time to respond in a reasonable manner. It helps me organize my thoughts on this horrible conflict, and gain some new insights.
I left another comment to you elsewhere about this, but no this conflict is not ancient. Israel likes to claim it is as justification of their actions, but Arab Jews and Arab Muslims lived together reasonably peacefully in this area for centuries. The current conflict was created by the European Jews immigrating, buying land, and refusing to hire anyone except Jews for jobs the Muslims typically held. It removed any hope of creating a livelihood from these people and giving them resistance as the only option left available. This is where the violence starts. It’s only about 100 years or so.
We are not comparing their governing or how they structure theur legislative system we are comparing the open air camps, tight restrictions and indiscriminate murder. I think it is perfectly fair to compare them to nazis, for one there isnt many comparisons they have left themselves with - this is the company they are in now.
I can’t condone mass surveillance of a population that have been subjugated, harrassed, violently targetted, stolen from and currently going through a genocide and enforced famine. But that is just me.
This seems… incongruent with the rest of your comment.
Apologies. I meant condemn. Second language and all.
No need to apologise.
If Israel can play the “criticizing the Government of Israel is the same as opposing the Jewish ethnicity” card, then we can play the “you especially should know better” card.