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Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

(simonwillison.net)
724 points simonw | 2 comments | 11 Jul 25 00:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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0points ◴[11 Jul 25 08:39 UTC] No.44529722[source]▶
> Israel ranks high on democracy indicies

Those rankings must be rigged.

Nethanyahu should be locked up in jail now for the corruption charges he was facing before the Hamas attack.

He literally stopped elections in Israel since then and there's been protests against his government daily for some years now.

And now, even taco tries to have the corruption charges dropped for Nethanyahu, then you must know he's guilty.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/29/world-news/israeli-court-postp...

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-corrupti...

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Asafp ◴[11 Jul 25 08:51 UTC] No.44529811[source]▶
Almost none of what you wrote above is true, no idea how is this a top comment. Israel is a democracy. Netanyahu's trail is still ongoing, the war did not stop the trails and until he is proven guilty (and if) he should not go to jail. He did not stop any elections, Israel have elections every 4 years, it still did not pass 4 years since last elections. Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy. Source: Lives in Israel.
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DiogenesKynikos ◴[11 Jul 25 09:16 UTC] No.44530008[source]▶
Israel is a democracy (albeit increasingly authoritarian) only if you belong to one ethnicity. There are 5 million Palestinians living under permanent Israeli rule who have no rights at all. No citizenship. No civil rights. Not even the most basic human rights. They can be imprisoned indefinitely without charges. They can be shot, and nothing will happen. This has been the situation for nearly 60 years now. No other country like this would be called a democracy.
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Y_Y ◴[11 Jul 25 10:20 UTC] No.44530481[source]▶
I've lived in several "top-tier" democracies and had limited or no voting rights because I wasn't a citizen. I don't think this is unreasonable (or unusual) from a definitional perspective.

A country who government was chosen by its inhabitants could be quite different. I know many states allow voting from abroad, but my home country doesn't and nobody ever questions its democratic credentials.

(I make no comment on the justice or long-term stability of the system in general or specifically in Israel, that has been done at length elsewhere.)

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1. DiogenesKynikos ◴[11 Jul 25 12:58 UTC] No.44531614[source]▶
Your comparison is absurd. We're not talking about small numbers of recent immigrants without citizenship. We're talking about 5 million people (out of only about 14 million living under Israeli sovereignty) whose families have largely been living in the same place for hundreds of years.

They live their entire lives in a country that refuses them citizenship, and they have no other country. They have no rights. They're treated with contempt by the state, which at best just wants them to emigrate. They're subjected to pogroms by Jewish settlers, who are allowed to run wild by the state.

This isn't like you not having French citizenship during your gap year in France. This is the majority of the native population of the country being denied even basic rights. Meanwhile, I could move to Israel and get citizenship almost immediately, simply because of my ethnicity.

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2. Y_Y ◴[11 Jul 25 15:13 UTC] No.44533090[source]▶
Pardon me, but I think you may have mistaken my point.

I agree entirely with your first two paragraphs, except that I don't feel I'm making any comparison or absurdity.

I'm not talking about extended holidays. I don't like giving much detail about my own life here, but I didn't get automatic citizenship in the country of my birth due to being from a mixed immigrant family. I have lived, worked, and studied for multiple years around Europe and North America. I've felt at times genuinely disenfranchised, despite paying taxes, having roots, and being a bona fide member of those societies.

All that said, I never had to live in a warzone, and even the areas of political violence and disputed sovereignty have been Disneyland compared to Gaza. This isn't about me though!

I am merely arguing that Israel can reasonably be called a democracy by sensible and customary definition which is applied broadly throughout the world. I don't mean I approve, or that I wouldn't change anything, I'm just trying to be precise about the meaning of words.

(I think your efforts to advocate for the oppressed may be better spent arguing with someone who doesn't fundamentally share your position, even if we don't agree on semantics.)