You can spy but data is all mine.
Its interesting that they seem to be saying they dont know the full details of how their customers are using Azure, due to privacy commitments.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/israeli-milita...
Now obviously, this was a lie, but the implication is staggering: Microsoft can't trust it's own employees in Israel, and believes they're lying to the mothership! And if microsoft can't trust them, surely no one else should either!
This is something that has been discussed in major Israeli media publications.
Highly likely, or at least a bit naive -- Completely reasonable to have local staff for a contract this big, but Microsoft should have independently 'double-checked' sooner
And preferring them to the PLO in the wake of the second intifada was reasonable. All Palestinian groups claim to want to kill all Jews, but at that point in time the PLO had actually done it for decades. For the record, the PLO still has the pay-to-slay program...
Every time I hear or read that expression, I stop taking the comment seriously because it attempts to shut down dialogue with a cute, esoteric phrase instead of fostering a discussion about a serious retrospective.
A long way of agreeing with your point, I suppose.
I've worked for big corporations for nearly 20 years, I've seen this more times then I can count. Higher ups always happy to turn a blind eye to a bad situation as long as it's making the company money, and then immediately throwing subordinates under the bus when it bites them in the ass.
You couldn't know (but you could have guessed) this but as an Israeli I'm well aware what appeared in major Israeli media publications and this didn't.
https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-azure-gaza-palestine-is...
https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-azure-gaza-israel-prote...
https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-build-israel-gaza-prote...
https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-protest-employees-fired...
The israeli democratically elected government feels it is acceptable to children, and has, for the past two years employed a campaign of systematic destruction against the palestinian children.
The majority of citizens agree with this. That’s… I don’t know how to describe it.
Anyway I have no comment on the specific claim being made here, I just really dislike it when discussion is stifled by saying “I’m right and no one can ever disagree”.
I worked at a large US bank, and we used IBM mainframes at the core, including user identity.
Every employee had a five digit number as login, no different than Holocaust prisoner number, with a prefix, indicating user account type (employee, non-employee, service acct, etc).
My IBM number was 23579
They listened to their internal staff and stakeholders and public pressure, and did terminated the contract instead of ignoring it or doubling down.
That is a good thing.
In which case, is it prudent to remove the IDF's ability to successfully target the correct people? Precise military intelligence is absolutely necessary for minimising civilian casualties.
it's straight up worse
I think it’s this second assertion that relies on facts not in evidence. Previous Guardian reporting on IDF use of compute for targeting indicated they were using it to increase, not decrease, the number of approved targets.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
Israel just gets more aggressive in the murder and bombing.
But here we have UN and other twisting it to fit a situation that clearly weren't meant to be covered by it.
Because if the war in Gaza can be called a genocide so can almost every single other major war!
Also it is absolutely ridiculous to call a war that is started by one side, and one that only that side can end, a genocide against the same side that started it!
Just as most of the citizens of Iran are victims of an Islamic totalitarian government, just as many Germans were victims of the fascist dictatorship that took hold of their nation, most human beings living near the southeast bit of the Levantine Sea are victims of actions outside their control.
They're collectively paying the price for horrific violence on both sides of an ugly, tragic conflict that they have no power over.
Giving those victims some sovereignty and peace would not be "rewarding" extremists, it would be taking a tiny step towards sanity.
Nobody with any semblance of ethical, just or just plain being a basic good corporate citizen would say.. oh yeah mass surveillance of the comms of a whole population for money is in any way acceptable or ok. This shouldn’t be a tech side note this should be a total meltdown front page scandal. What a disgusting abuse of power by all involved.
That will get you fired from bussing tables or washing dishes, let alone a six-figure job at MS.
Edit: Source on the last one; the first two were widely reported on in media:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/fired-microsoft-employee-enco...
Undoing colonialism isn't colonialism.
Polling in Israel appears to reflect this[1].
This is a recurring theme in MENA politics: even the most democratically "colored" countries in the region consistently put political preservation over long team regional interests. Israel's recent version of this is arguably the most despicable in terms of outcomes, but it's not particularly unique.
[1]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/breaking-with-pm-74-of-israeli...
The first one seems to be after Microsoft's claim "and Microsoft has said it is reviewing a report in a British newspaper this month that Israel has used it to facilitate attacks on Palestinian targets".
The second one looks similar "Microsoft late last week said it was tapping a law firm to investigate allegations reported by British newspaper The Guardian".
The 3rd one seems to be a genuine example that Microsoft employees were reporting this specific contract violation concern - but I feel like there are more genuine examples I've heard of than just this one report.
The 4th one is a bit unclear, it seems to be a general complaint about the contract - not about specific violations of it.
Perhaps the more confounding question remaining is "what was so different about the report from The Guardian". It's not like these kinds of claims are new, or in small papers only, but maybe The Guardian was able to put together hard evidence from outside that allowed Microsoft to determine things without themselves going in breach of contract details?
and storming a music festival and houses to abduct completely innocent teenagers and even toddlers to use them for leverage?
Honestly?
Now I understand that the UN has specific criteria, etc. But the most famous genocide was the systematic execution of millions in gas chambers. This is not akin to that, is what people are arguing.
The current situation is like somebody commits a murder. Then the community rounds up a posse and goes out to kill the murderer. Then kill the murder's family, their neighbors, the residents of the next neighborhood over, raze the neighborhoods and then take all the land for themselves.
Justice means penalizing the guilty parties, not everyone in their geographical/social group. Your definition of Justice is leaky.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-28/ty-article-ma...
I think we should give props here. This is an important step forward. Thank you Microsoft!
I think we should protest when companies do things that are wrong and we should give them kudos when they make good moves. Carrot and stick.
I am not fans of those that say because you did wrong things in the past, I will never recognize when you change and make good moves.
I want to encourage more companies to correct their involvement in this.
Who is the "they" in this sentence, exactly?
Israelis hit back hard. But they haven't been the ones to declare war on peaceful neighbors.
It wasn't them who stood for thr München massacre or a number of plane hijackings in the 70ies.
It wasn't Israelis who blew up buses in Gaza.
Was it?
We must stop confusing powerful with evil and currently helpless with "innocent".
Now with Trump they state that they have max support for Israel while it seems like all of Europe is turning away from unconditional support for Israel and a massive change in the typical rhetoric around media in the US. That’s odd.
Look to Israel, the source of decades of suffering for everyone in the region, including its own citizens whom it exposes to retaliatory violence in response to the violence it delivers to its neighbors.
There's a couple of sub links off of that one. Not sure if that's what GP was referring too but there is mention in there of employees being terminated related to protests
Or is it kind of logical that when you vote actual genocidal maniacs into power and cheer for them as they return from murder and rape, you hide the hostages they took and refuse to do anything to stop them, then maybe you aren't completely innocent?
I actually don't agree with you that "legal definitions" are as hotly debated or that the existence of debate in general negates consensus on specific topics. And I do think one important point with genocide scholarship is regarding muddying the waters with tom-ay-to/to-mah-to approach to definitions. Treating definitions as inherently transient is an important instrument in normalizing cultural acceptance of genocides when they're unfolding in real time, which is why that tactic is targeted by so much scholarly criticism.
This was after they ignored it and doubled down for almost 3 years*. What was the total gain in profits and how many Palestinians died during that time? You’re going to ignore the full cost because they did the least they could do almost 3 years later?
* if the starting line is set to October 2022 attacks, if not how long were they making money off this contract?
So was the data moved in August to Amazon (AWS)? I am sure the $3.8bn USD the US gives annually will pay for it anyway. Because it is given as a loan, no accountability is required if it were a grant to Israel, and then the US forgives the loan, so there's not payback or interest for borrowing.
Heck, it's usually because one will be punished that doing the right thing is in any manner noble. Otherwise it's just meeting minimum expectations as a human.
“I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility. But the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa” she told the BBC show HARDtalk.
“The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court,” Donoghue said. “It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide—and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media—it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
“It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide,” she added. “But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide, isn’t what the court decided.”
Donoghue’s term on the bench expired a few days after the court delivered its initial ruling on Jan. 26.
https://www.jns.org/former-top-hague-judge-media-wrong-to-re...
(It's sad that I have to say this, but to ensure that my position on I/P is clear: Israel is committing war crimes and is currently litigating a campaign that isn't justifiable on strategic much less basic humanitarian terms.)
"In the aftermath of the protests, Smith claimed that the protestors had blocked people out of the office, planted listening devices in the form of phones, and refused to leave until they were removed by police. " (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-fires-two-employee...)
Protestors (in associated with the firing) also projected "Microsoft powers genocide" on the office wall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft).
It reminds me of a conversation I had with an Israeli a few weeks back. He asked me, "if what Israel is doing is so bad, why does nobody stop it?"
A great question. I don't know. And the bodies of children continue to pile up.
It's important to note that these things never happened, and you're still repeating them years later. The only baby that died on 10/7 was a 10 month old hit by crossfire.
I have no idea of the third, and though I feel sure it's wrong judging by the rest of what you have said, I feel obligated to check. Try it.
Here is a link in case anyone wants to donate https://www.fidf.org to this amazing organization.
A singular terrorist event is not the same as an multi-decade occupation, on-going theft of land, discrimination, annexation plans, and - not least - a 2 year long genocide of tens of thousands of civilians.
So, no, that isn't what Hamas did.
I expect those two categories to behave differently from one another. Do you?
In just the past two weeks Israel attacked a half dozen of its neighboring countries.
Israel itself is a belligerent Western colony that has been ethnically cleansing Palestine since the 1940s.
It is the obligation for an occupied people to resist their occupiers, and according to the UN that is up to and includes violent resistence. The entirety of Palestine has been increasingly under occupation since Israel's inception.
Countless UN resolutions highlight Israels belligerence time and again with only the US and its subservient states like Micronesia voting against the overwhelming voice of the whole rest of the world.
Israel is an evil apartheid genocial settler colonial state that has brought nothing but further war and bloodshed to the region, and nothing Zionists state can change that fact.
I think one strength of the liberal academic tradition is that whether it's philosophy, whether it's law, you get introduced to the "whose to say" archetype early on and get inoculated against it. It's not just that the concepts are well enough established that they're resilient against such skepticism, but even in cases of uncertainty, routine amounts of conceptual uncertainty are not a deal-breaker to investigating and understanding urgent moral issues.
A real argument in the negative would be along the lines of "here's how food truck inspection policies are tied to well-established norms that better explain the outcome of famine than intent to destroy". A not real argument is spontaneous, mid-debate discovery of the transience of linguistic meaning, discovered just in time to skirt the question of genocide.
The trouble with this form of skepticism is it can only ever be hypothesized, never actually consistently embodied by real people. Long before navigating to hacker News, you would look at your computer and be paralyzed by fundamental puzzles like "what is electricity", "what is information", "is there really an external world" and so on. It wouldn't have been discovered mid conversation about genocide.
I suppose it originates from the term "border czar" and others in politics e.g. https://www.politico.com/story/2009/09/president-obamas-czar...
I think you omitted part of it.
Because more Jews were squeezed into Israel than Arabs who were squeezed out.
These Jews also lost everything.
And unlike Israeli Arabs who at least from the declaration of Israel got an invitation to stay there as citizens, this option was not offered to the Jews of surrounding nations.
Furthermore, if you want to go back in history, note that Israel was not originally suggested because of WW2 and Holocaust, but decades before because of Muslim harassment of the Jewish minorities in their countries.
Just like Pakistan was created as a national home for Muslims to protect them from Hindus.
Feel free to see for yourself and also to ask why absolutely nobody in UN or the "unbiased" media or schools has told you this before...
Here's a letter from 514 verified scholars and legal experts calling on IAGS to retract their resolution, along with their rebuttal of the substance of the resolution:
Are we supposed to believe Microsoft was unaware of the contents but decided to terminate coincidentally when reports of what they're doing came out?
It's important that people engaging in such activity are dealt with swiftly and justly. Such behavior further encourages violence and destruction as acceptable behaviors in society, which they are not.
Because you surely mistakenly implied here that All Gazans categorically are responsible for the hostage-taking and "deserve" to be killed as a consequence of that.
Your use of language betrays your feelings. You are disgusting.
It's worth noting that even after finding out the "most moral" army is conducting mass surveillance, they're still happy to provide them services.
Whatever they've been doing on that front doesn't seem to be working so far...
There's nothing stopping people from discussing the events in Gaza as a tragedy and a war crime, but activists are intent on attaching the word genocide to this. Referring to it as a genocide has become a litmus test to be considered pro-Palestinian.
Also ”It’s not Jews vs. Palestine, it’s Israel vs. Palestine!”
This is extremely ignorant. Jews have lived in Israel continuously for 3000 years. The modern Zionist migration, which started in the late 19th century (far from the first such movement for the Jews, and far from the last we've seen globally for all peoples), was met with violence by the Arabs with pogroms and organized violence starting in the 1920s. It was the Arab nations who attacked the Jews in 1948, not the other way around, and both Jews and Arabs were displaced in the war. Prior to then, there was no land "stolen" by Jews, just land legally purchased from Arab landowners. We'll ignore the fact that the Muslim caliphates and Ottomans stole the land in the first place and focus on the modern conflict. We can also ignore the repeated mass-murders / pogroms of Jews throughout Israel and the rest of the Arab/Muslim world in the 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, and prior centuries, since acknowledging that Jews were repeatedly killed in Safed and elsewhere would require you to acknowledge they existed there and were oppressed by the people and dhimmi laws of the Muslim empires.
The Arabs were and are the equivalent of the xenophobic Trump supporters in the US - they didn't want Jews coming in, buying land, working and thriving, etc. Do you also support violence against non-white migrants in the west?
Why wouldn't countries store secret data in Azure, Google Cloud and AWS services? I think that this is quite common.
Reent, published, actual figures (instead of ambiguously attributed early ones) show that they'd be up at the top end of the graph they've produced, not the bottom. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...
Is everyone so quick to forget that the rights we have today in the US were won through violence after all other methods failed? The 40 hour work week we enjoy today was also won through blood.
Now, in this case between employees and Microsoft I'd agree, no, vandalism wasn't necessary at all.
But when it comes to defending our rights and freedoms, there will come a day when its absolutely necessary, and it's just as valid of a tool as peaceful protest is in enforcing the constitution.
I think timing. The world is finally ready to stop ignoring what Israel has been doing so it’s significantly easier for countries, companies, and even individuals to stand up, speak out, and take action.
The crimes of Hamas are well documented, not only by Israel who admittedly might have some bias, but also by several in the OSINT community before Hamas realized their mistake and started deleting.
You questioning it only tells us you don't know much about what happened.
> the argument would be to punish Hamas, and not run around shooting children in the head,
Exactly like we dealt with the nazis and not a single child was hurt, right?
Or maybe take "war 101" and "war 201" and learn a thing or two about both why the laws of war explicitly bans using civilians as shields and also explicitly point out that human shields can be ignored. (Yes, it does. Feel free to look it up, and as homework, consider why the laws of war points this out ao explicitly. Here is a link, I don't expect you to have tje laws of war bookmarked: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...)
The consequences were appropriate, even if I might share some of the protestor's concerns.
And that is also what we see.
When did IDF try to outdo the rape of Nanking?
When did Hamas follow the laws of war ever so slightly?
I've had sales, customer reps, even engineers and customers describe how a customer / they work ... and then I go and look and ... it's not how anyone said they work IRL.
Not only collected by Israel but also by the wider OSINT community.
Except of course Jan 6th, which somehow normalized the belief that the 2020 election was stolen AND gaslit a ton of the country into thinking the violence that occurred did not and therefore doesn’t need to be critiqued.
This admin is truly adept at labeling all forms of dissent or disagreement as unacceptable actions that make discussing the issues at hand impossible.
But you don’t even need to go that sensitive, literally any type of online service might run the risk of handling PII. Which is why CIS, NIST et al have security frameworks that cover things like encryption at rest.
That is what I meant by completely innocent.
edit:
Also, any reason why you mention Ben Gvir but not the many Palestinian Arab leaders who says worse?
Any reason you don't mention the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who fill the street to protest its current government and the absolute lack of anyone who protests Hamas in the streets of Gaza?
It's war, this is the unfortunate truth and why we try to avoid war. Nobody really ends up winning in this.
> This doesn't justify killing civilians, but what do you do when civilians kill you?
Then point at which a civilian picks up a weapon to operate alongside Hamas, they have become Hamas and are no longer civilians.
> It's a nasty situation no matter which side you look at it from.
Yes. But a peaceful solution was almost impossible once Hamas performed their October 7 attack. The other day the UN members agreed to recognise Palestine as a state, and now the only thing left on Hamas' manifesto is the complete destruction of Israel [1]. I suspect Israel is not inclined to negotiate on that demand.
I am curious to see what the ICJ ruling in South Africa's case will be. That would be an actual legal body charged with making a genocide determination.
Hope this helps.
It's bizarre to me to see people litigating ethno religious debate on this tech forum. The continued existence of racism into the 21st century baffles me. It's so obviously irrational to be racist I'm especially surprised to see it represented here.
There's been plenty of slander to try to say they're more arab, but they're essentially close cousins.
Which leads one to believe, perhaps a large amount of the jews in the region simply moved on with the times with the new religion taking hold.
Essentially Israel/Palestine is a fight between cousins, and one side's inlaws who never actually came from the region but converted elsewhere.
So converts vs converts. Do the local converts have a say over the foreign converts?
The idea that land rights can be derived from the bible or spans of 1000s of years is silly, but the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine going back to 1945 is within living memory.
Not withholding UN funds that Israel was tasked with distributing, right?
And it's pretty telling that you chose to say this to me and not the comment I replied to.
No? Hmm, then you should not let Microsoft whitewash its record by taking credit for the very cause those workers were punished for defending
And how could you oppose both the occupation and annexation plans? Annexation is an end to occupation, no? I also think that the occupation has been going on for far too long, though I fault UNRWA and the PA for that as much as I fault Israel.
On Gaza: not a single that I am aware of have tried to help the hostages, not even the toddlers, despite promised financial rewards.
Are we talking about the military or some company?
Are you aware that most of the Arabs of the Holy Land came around the same time period as the Jews? There were Arabs living here previously, of course, as were there living here Jews. Half a century before the British mandate, Jerusalem was already Jewish majority.
> where they've lived for thousands of years.
If the ideas are good then support will build through effectively communicating those ideas. Being noisy is fine but there’s an obvious line that selfish activists cross. The sort of people who want their toys now and don’t want to patiently do the hard work of organically building up a critical mass. So they immediately start getting aggressive and violent in small groups. Which is counter productive.
So you think they managed to destroy so many buildings and only killed ~65k people (about half militants) out of 2 million by not avoiding civilian deaths? If half the buildings are destroyed, we would expect a million dead if there were no efforts to avoid civilian deaths.
Do you think Israel makes no efforts to avoid civilian deaths? If you were presented with easily verifiable proof that they do avoid it (via both their own reporting, international reporting, and Palestinians themselves), would you retract your statement? Are there any facts which would change your mind? I ask because these facts are easily accessible, and I'm happy to provide them with many sources, but only if providing them isn't a total waste of time because it's become a pseudo-religious belief.
that would be a nice compensation package in any first world country
350 000 to 500 000 Germans died in allied bombing.
Did the Germans become the good guys when the German civilian death toll exceeded the UK death toll?
Or even just when US got involved since Germany hadn't attacked US civilians?
No?
Laws are backed by legal, physical violence.
But your employer? They can put whatever rules and restrictions they want on your speech, and with at-will employment, can fire you for any reason anyway, at anytime.
You can say whatever you want, but you aren't free from the consequences of that speech.
> It's important to note that these things never happened
> most of which didn't happen
"Some" ... Microsoft's chief executive was involved in cementing a collaboration for a secret military / intelligence project with an AI component, to spy on people against whom a genocide is ongoing by their colonial occupiers. This only "ended" when the public became aware of it, for political and (possibly) legal reasons, clearly indicating that they would have continued with "business as usual" if the public hadn't become aware of it. What other Israeli projects are Microsoft hiding and supporting, that possibly aids Israel's genocide, is what concerns me ...
tbf I'm not primarily interested in what's a good look.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/israeli-restri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Palestine
And yes it is recording pretty much all calls in Palestine:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
One can be correct in theory and wrong in practice at the same time.
Rape? Like age of consent being different across regions and time? No nuance? Like how half the planet laughs when a boy gets molested by his attractive teacher and the other half calls it rape?
Lebanon’s - hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel on oct 8th 2023 Iraq - fired rockets in solidarity of Gaza Yemen - fired rockets in solidarity of Gaza Syria - fired rockets in solidarity of Gaza Iran - fired the largest array of ballistic missiles to Israel after Israel bombed an consulate in Syria where Hamas and hezbolla were congregating Qatar - that’s the only country that didn’t physically attack Israel, but they did finance Hamas for the past decade, and operate a global information war against Israel via Al Jazeera
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/10/maps-israel-has-att...
This seemed completely glossed over in the article (never revisited beyond this) but seems to imply that Satya must have at least known something about what was happening?
Or was he mislead, told partial truths, or something?
Very curious who within Microsoft knew anything about what was happening.
The idea of a nation called Israel is the invention of Zionists in the 19th and 20th century.
You’re describing what ought to be, not what currently is.
I know a guy that passed BillG in a hallway and said, “hey, Bill, how’s it hangin’?” (Saw him do it; I was mortified.) Just a bottom-tier IC at the time. 20 years later, he still works there. Still an IC, though, so make of it what you will. :-)
So there, now you have another folksy anecdote to balance things out.
Seems like what Israel is doing disproportionately affects poor people.
They're effectively miniature dictatorships. Normalising removing services because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support? Like when they removed Office365 access for a member of the EU parliament.[0]
For me, this is more proof (not less) that I shouldn't rely on US tech giants. Not because I will be collecting data on a population to do god-knows-what with, but because someone believes themselves to be the moral authority on what the compute I rent should be doing and that moral authority can be outraged for the whims of someone completely random, for any reason.
[0]: https://www.aurasalla.eu/en/2025/05/26/mep-aura-salla-micros...
8000*8 Tb / 60s / 60 / 24 = .740740...
24 h *.740 = 17.76 h
I think this has been another case of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" (Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981). Maybe rack units of disks? For very important data I would pay for the privilege of removing my disks at a very short notice.
To be fair in 2021 you'd be laughed out of the room (or be in a DSA conference) if you called what was happening in Palestine a "genocide".
The arrival of Zionist European Jews was a phenomonen of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Zionist Jews that came from Europe brought with them a supremecist ideology that, in their eyes, justified all forms of violence committed against the Muslim, Christian, and yes, Jewish Palestians that opposed their colonization.
I don't know what you're making or misrepresenting in your statememt about Jordan and Jerusalem, but Jews have always lived in Jerusalem since the Muslims first took control of it 1400 years ago when Umar ibn El-Khattab brought back in Jews who had been expelled by the Christian rulers prior to that.
Jews have always prospered under actual religious Muslim rule, whether in Palestine, Spain, Morocco, Iran, or otherwise. Zionism is what drove a rift between Muslims and Jews in past two centuries, as prior to this there never was one.
I think think that violence or vandalism in this case was unwarranted, but there are some other in this thread who believe otherwise.
I guess that I'd say that, probably, vandals/criminals should always be punished, because they're doing clearly illegal things... and it's up to the protestors to judge whether the cause they're supporting is really worth going to jail for. If sufficient numbers of people feel that, you have a revolution.
(And also, a separate issue, whether the violence is actually going to benefit their cause. It probably won't.)
I certainly don't think that we should be in a position where courts are are judging certain crimes as forgivable because of their cause, while supporters of other causes get the full weight of the law for similar actions. I think the vandals on Jan 6th should get the same punishment as, for instance, similar vandals during BLM.
Arab Jews were living peacefully side by side in Palestine before the European Zionist colonizers started coming in the 19th and 20th centuries.
>”Corporations cannot exist without government intervention”
>”Some privates companies and financiers are too big to fail/of strategic national importance”
>”1A does not apply to private entities (including the above)”
>”We have a free, competitive market”
I find it very difficult to resolve these seemingly contradictory statements.
I just don’t think they have anything to worry about. I personally think it’s good what they’re doing here, but I guess I’m too cynical to believe they are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and I don’t think the real reason is that they’re worried about bad publicity.
They are committing a genocide in both word and deed.
Syria is at war with Israel since decades.
Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel and preparing ground attacks. Yemen (or rather the Houtis) keep firing at Israel.
Are these the examples you want to show about Israel being bad?
Edit: Tunisia hasn't been attacked. The influencer convoy was attacked by their own flare and media claimed ot was a drone until every OSINT researchers pointed out it was a flare not a drone.
> The disclosures caused alarm among senior Microsoft executives, sparking concerns that some of its Israel-based employees may not have been fully transparent about their knowledge of how Unit 8200 used Azure when questioned as part of the review.
You think, that is plausible?
To me, Nope, it's just that, the money was too good.
Only after Guardian's report, they realized:
"Oops, we got caught, now do the damage control dance"
And here we are ...
Also, are those employees going to get fired? I doubt. But the protestor, standing up for something, did. Who is more damaging?
Oh right, the protestor, because, they ruined the big cake.
Did the unit that breach the contract lose anything? Nope, they got enough time to move their data safely, and will continue doing the same thing.
It's all evil entities feeding each other, for their own benefit.
Furthermore, why do you think the reactions are knee-jerk? That implies a rather biased attitude on your part.
Israel has been the single most belligerent nation in the middle east, attacking and antagonizing their own so-called allies for its entire existence.
Israel is responsible for attacking the British (King David Hotel), the US (USS Liberty), all of its neighbors, and even others more distant (Tunisia). It in their nature to antagonize their neighbors because they WANT conflict. They occupy lands that once belonged to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. They aspire to occupy far greater regions. They are not interested in peace, only on expanding their borders. They continue to build settlements on what little land people still call Palestine. They are committing a recognized genocide in Gaza. Resisting and stopping this is not just a right, but a mandatory action according to the genocide convention.
If not for the US support of Israel, it could never act with such impunity.
It's like, if someone steals a million dollars and then steals a thousand dollars, you don't reward them for making progress.
I often think of Microsoft as the new IBM, and it's startling to me to watch them buck that reputation.
Sorry if that is unclear.
This is a fireable offense in nearly every company handbook in existence.
"Violence" like stoping the traffic. If that is violence...
Resisting an occupying force is not genocide.
[1] https://amnesty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Amnesty-Intern...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250916081026/https://www.ohchr...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the_G...
Alfred Nobel was known as a "merchant of death" for enabling the use of combat explosives that could do (by the standards of the time) preposterous damage to people, but his argument was that he just sold the dynamite; he wasn't responsible for the anarchists getting it and bombing something twice a week in New York. And even then, his conscience weighed on him enough that he endowed a Peace Prize when he died.
The story is different when the data conversion is being done on machines you own, in buildings you own, in a company you own (for practical reasons in addition to moral / theoretical; if someone wants to stop those computations, they're now going after your stuff, not trying to stop a supply-chain).
Arab colonisation of the middle east and north africa is documented history.
> Arab Jews were living peacefully side by side in Palestine before the European Zionist colonizers started coming in the 19th and 20th centuries.
You can look up historical incidences of Arab violence against Jews at any time you like. Palestine was partitioned into Jordan/Arab state/Jewish state for this reason, much like India and Pakistan was.
https://jewishcurrents.org/antisemitic-zionists-arent-a-cont...
BDS is also about as formidable as a boycott movement gets.
and there wasn't
you have a very narrow historical lens if you think a DSA conference in 2021 is the only place that has treated allegations of genocide seriously.
I'd recommend reading through [0] which has a very nice chronological timeline.
for example, way back in 1982 the UN General Assembly voted to declare the Sabra and Shatila massacre [1] an act of genocide. it was carried out against a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, by a militia allied with the Israeli military, and during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon:
> In February 1983, an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat Seán MacBride, assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, concluded that the IDF, as the then occupying power over Sabra and Shatila, bore responsibility for the militia's massacre. The commission also stated that the massacre was a form of genocide.
there's also a long history of "well...it's not genocide, because genocide only comes from the Geno region of Nazi Germany, everything else is sparkling ethnic cleansing" type of rhetoric:
> At the UN-backed 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism, the majority of delegates approved a declaration that accused Israel of being a "racist apartheid state" guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing". Reed Brody, the then-executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticised the declaration, arguing that "Israel has committed serious crimes against Palestinian people but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide", while Claudio Cordone, a spokesman for Amnesty International, stated that "we are not ready to make the assertion that Israel is engaged in genocide"
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusatio...
Surely if any movement leads to this, it's BDS, likely the most popular and widely-known boycott since before the end of South African apartheid.
They even appear to have a page and a visualization devoted to compiling publicly visible impacts: https://bdsmovement.net/our-impact
Laughing at someone yelling on stage can be entirely orthogonal to what they’re saying. (And it’s not like that outburst did anything.)
That's why I never find it "fine." It's only a matter of time before corporate power finds it's way to your hobby horse. I thought part of the "hacker vibe" was being highly suspicious of any form of authority.
There are more than a couple of us who have Office or Teams imposed on us. There is plenty to complain about that is current and most definitely valid.
Maybe not, but some is better than none, and I'll continue to push more people to do it, rather than tell them nothing they do matters.
> over this?
Maybe it's not just this. Maybe this is the straw that breaks the user's back. Or maybe the next thing is.
My point was to address your belief that they're too big for anyone to make any difference. That isn't true, and the belief that you or any other citizen can't make a difference is their biggest advantage.
(I put this last because I know what HN will say to this, but: are CEOs and other executives not people too? Can they not make principled moves either?)
Would note that this issue has sufficiently polarised that there are thoughtful people in e.g. New York who think it’s an atrocity for even Hamas fighters to be killed. (Same as there are folks who think every Palestinian is safely presumed a terrorist until proved innocent.)
Ohhh and Muslims didn’t treat Jews “peacefully”. They were second class citizens and often massacred. Read some history.
All these people hate on their employer and customers whilst simultaneously drawing a salary.
If they put their money where their mouth is, they can all quit en masse and let the company deal with customers without employees to support.
I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, but I think this argument is overall kind of pointless because one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_in_the...
Yet the US does not allow prosecutions in the international criminal court.
How do you explain Mai Lai what went on more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Intern...
I thought the defeated tone of my post made it clear that it was not meant to be taken that literally. I guess not.
Clearly I get that their jobs and more were at risk, hence why I said they were brave. The only thing unclear is where you got the impression I thought otherwise.
This is some lame right-wing outlet whose front page contains things like:
>The assessment, shared exclusively with the Free Beacon, follows mainstream media claims that cuts to global health funding will endanger life-saving programs
While not mentioning that, yes, the Trump administration's USAID cuts absolutely will kill millions of people.
The rest is shitting on Democrats and supporting Trump. Obviously some right-wing site is going to say whatever they can think of to try to defend Israel's actions.
I think that the only reasons that a cloud provider should be permitted to use to justify termination of service, are illegal activity (in the country of service), non-payment, or attempting to harm or disrupt the service.
I am in no way condoning anything that Israel is doing, just like I wasn’t condoning what people on Parler were saying when AWS axed them in 2021.
No matter how much you like what the people in charge are doing today or who they’re doing it to, sooner or later someone will take the reins who decides that you are the target.
Same with banks, credit card companies, etc. if you are incorporated and your business is to support commerce, you should keep your thumb off the scale.
You are posing a false dilemma where the only thing a person can do to voice there opinion is to destroy or disrupt things.
That's not true though. Instead you can simply voice your options. You can put out manifestos, publish articles in the newspaper, post to social media, or even talk to people in person.
All those methods are how speech and ideas are normally distributed in a normal society. And if people aren't convinced by what you say, then it is time for you to get better arguments.
Not sure what you mean by "what HN will say to this", but for me the answer is clear - they are, they can, and they often do. As do their employees - or at least they push in the direction which is better aligned with their values.
[1] Not sure what they could actually make unusable by revoking licenses, blocking logins, and whatnot. It probably also matters how quickly the effects are felt, Azure would be gone immediately but I am not sure how often Office checks whether its license has been revoked, if at all. If license checks make things stop working over weeks and months, it would still not be pretty, but it would provide at least some time to prepare and avoid the worst.
In fact, part of that pride is calling it an the Arab conquest, even though the colonizer - Salah AlDin - was a Kurd and not an Arab.
This is an interesting comparison—thank you.
That said, did the Poles launch cross-border attacks on German civilians? The closest I can come up with is Bloody Sunday [1], which was an attack on ethnically German civilians, but not a cross-border incursion. (Granted, we can only observe this ex post facto, so your argument still stands.)
Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, UN commission of inquiry says https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8641wv0n4go
Gaza: Top independent rights probe alleges Israel committed genocide https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165856
ICC issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant and Hamas commander https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157286
Israel is a naziesque society through and through.
Spencer has said it will take years of research to confirm this ratio and how it was achieved. He considers it important to understand because the typical ratio in urban wars, including wars the U.S. has prosecuted, exceeds 6 innocent civilians killed per enemy combatant killed. Some urban wars see 12 innocent civilians killed per combatant killed.
I think all of these ratios are horrifying. A low ratio can't be considered either good or exculpatory, as to whether violations of international humanitarian law have occurred. Civilians always bear a disproportionate impact in all urban wars. The case studies that have been completed are worth reading.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/urban-warfare-project/urban-warfar...
Barely gotten started.
This is what made the difference in South Africa, but the boycotts were much bigger
Amazon, Google and Oracle will have to boycott too. I am boycotting them
Israel has too much influence over the US.
If you have better way to differentiate, I will happily pass it to IDF. Don't forget to mention about the last time you risked your own life.
1. Trump criticizes Israel for releasing photos and videos of its devastating war in Gaza - https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-criticizes-israels-pho...
2. Trump ruthless take on Israel's war on Gaza: 'Finish the problem' - https://www.newarab.com/news/trump-israels-war-gaza-finish-p...
3. Satellite photos show Egypt building Gaza wall as Israel’s Rafah push looms - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/16/satellite-photos-sh...
4. Israel’s plan to build Gaza ‘concentration camps’ was rolled out months ago - https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/israels-plan-to-build-gaza-co...
5. Trump’s Gaza takeover all about natural gas - https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/trumps-gaza-takeover-all-about...
Even if it just ruins the day for thousands of people, I have zero sympathy for such assholery. Whether you call it "violence" is unimportant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the...
Wtf? You can't post like this here, and we've banned this account.
I suppose I'd better add that yes, we have banned accounts for posting the reverse as well. Religious flamewar is not allowed here, regardless of which religion people have a problem with. Neither is using HN primarily for political/ideological and/or nationalistic battle, which this account has been doing egregiously—enough so that I'm surprised we didn't ban it earlier.
Palestine is not in Arabia but in the Levant, which was conquered by Arabs from the Byzantine Empire in the 7th c. as part of the Arab-Byzantine wars, and came under the Rashidun Caliphate, the first incarnation of the Arab Empire (which also conquered parts of Europe, BTW, not to mention that people in Morocco or Tunisia speak Arabic for pretty much the same reason people in Peru or Mexico speak Spanish). Warfare in the Levant obviously preceded the crusades by centuries and millenia, and included not only European conquests such as Greek and Roman, but also Persian and Arab conquests.
While it is true that modern Zionism originated in Europe, most Jews living in Israel have no European ancestry whatsoever. Most Jews in Israel have a recent ancestry in the Middle East and North Africa.
Even Ashkenazi Jews of a recent European ancestry (who are a minority in Israel) have genetics pointing to Middle Eastern ancestry. While it is hard to tie any group to ancient Jews, it isn't unlikely that Jews of all origins as well as Palestinian Arabs have ancient Jewish ancestry.
Just as European nationalism excluded Jews as Europeans, Arab nationalism excluded Jews as Arabs, and if there's any group that identifies as Jewish-Arab today, it is vanishingly small.
What Zionism is has not only changed considerably over time, but now, as in the past, there's great disagreement among those considering themselves Zionist on what it means. For example, as recently as a decade ago you could find a small but not negligible group of Israelis who identified as Zionsists yet were in favour of a single multi-national (or non-national) Jewish/Arab state, i.e. the same position was regarded as both Zionist and anti-Zionist by different people simultaneously. Today, many (perhaps even most) of those identifying as Zionists favour a two-state solution.
Well, why wouldn't they? It's Microsoft, they're not exactly stewards of privacy.
I don't think I actually disagree with anything you've said. I am just very cynical, and while I want to believe like you do, I find it very difficult.
edit: "Can they not make principled moves either?" - Yeah, they _could_, but does that _ever_ happen at companies as big as microsoft?
reliance of everything/everybody on cloud platforms already mind-boggling.
One can extrapolate it further - in a near future conflicts both sides may have their data, weapons control systems, etc. running inside the same Big Cloud Provider ... in this case would they need actual physical weapons systems? or may be it would be easier to just let those weapons control systems duke each other out in the virtual battle space provided as a service by the same Big Cloud Provider.
Wouldn't the opposite be incredibly immoral? Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.
Before the current war, Hamas was the governing authority in Gaza, despite the Palestinian Authority being the internationally recognized one. Regardless, whether the surveillance was legal under Israeli law doesn't seem like the correct standard.
Israel brought nothing to the region? Let’s review.
Israel has the highest gdp by a great margin.
Israel is an important exporter of technology to the world, be it cyber tech, water tech, agriculture tech or defense tech.
Israel has the highest number of startups per capita in the world.
Israel has more Nobel laureates than the entire rest of the Middle East.
Last olymipcs Israel won more medal than the rest of the Middle East.
Palestines primary exports pretty much mounts to terrorism and sedition.
So yeah, Israel is an extremely successful country, saying otherwise is either ignorance, or malicious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanian_annexation_of_the_We...
"The Jordanians immediately expelled all the Jewish residents of East Jerusalem.[54] Mark Tessler cites John Oesterreicher as writing that during Jordanian rule, "34 out of the Old City's 35 synagogues were dynamited. Some were turned into stables, others into chicken coops.""
Which is why Palestinians should never get East Jerusalem as their capital, it's simply not theirs, not even in the nebulous way that the West Bank is.
This:
> Jews have always prospered under actual religious Muslim rule, whether in Palestine, Spain, Morocco, Iran, or otherwise. Zionism is what drove a rift between Muslims and Jews in past two centuries, as prior to this there never was one.
Is not true, as even a cursory view of the history will reveal endless massacres of Jews by Muslims.
For some additional context this initial complete siege lasted for roughly two weeks.
For a fuller treatment of the defense of Israel from a secular view point.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38926431-what-justice-de...
I'm grateful that what little good pieces are left in the American right their defense of Israel remains in place.
The concern is who gets to decide what is or isn't a legitimate target? Today's heroes might be tomorrow's victims. I'd rather no one have that much power over others.
Aside from the common carrier concept, operating a significant war-supporting facility makes you a significant target. And I don't just mean a target for criticism. Datacenters risk a security threat on a whole new level if taking them out is important to war operations.
Would you criticize a commercial port in the Black Sea if it turned away Russian warships? Harboring Russian warships makes it extremely likely that your port could become the target of missile strikes. If you want to remain an innocent bystander, don't harbor combatants.
This is not a statement in support of any side of any war.
Fair enough. I’m not buying it—the timeline doesn’t work, and the broader literature on disruptive protest is mixed, leaning towards negative.
What clearly swung the odds was the Guardian reporting on the frankly brazen meetings Microsoft executives decided to take. Without that reporting, this wouldn't have happened. With that reporting and absent the employee protests, this would have still likely happened.
Their laziness, greed and business acumen have left us in the position that the world's dominant personal OS is insecure, unreliable and running a protection racket with virus detection (and virus writers)
This is an ongoing rolling clusterfuck, and is entirely due to MS
If the Armia Krajowa had carried out an October 7 style attack on the German homeland, against German civilians, their memory would be mixed, not the virtually unblemished heroism they deservedly command in the historic record.
This historian[2] argues that openly committing genocide is a feature, not a bug, because it will lead to anti-semitism that will make diaspora Jews feel unsafe and bind them to Israel.
[1]https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/snapins-... [2]https://youtu.be/sS9xidsyxXY?t=330
And if you're only other point is to accuse me of something I never said about an event that was debunked several times, whereas the actual kidnapping and burning of Palestinian babies, women, children, and men is well documented and still ongoing, I think that's all we need to know.
Where to?
Hind Rajab ,literally a child, was brutally killed when fleeing their home, after being asked of course. The ambulance which came to rescue was blown up by the ITF. The Whole world has seen it all, ITF proudly displays it. Maybe it is time to update the Hasbara points.
>Don't forget to mention about the last time you risked your own life.
Why? ITF certainly risks many children's life, just for sport often.
Remember, Israel has already colonised all of Palestine, for many decades now. They have the choice to integrate the Palestinians into their society, and make them equal citizens. Instead, they chose not to, because the religious fundamentalists right-wing in Israel, who have captured power of all Israeli institutions, don't want a secular state - they want Jewish state with a Jewish majority. That is why Israel chose to create an Apartheid society where the Palestinians are treated as worse than second-class citizens, to make them react violently and use that as an excuse to steal more of their land. That is why this genocide is happening under the Israeli-right - to turn the Palestinians into a small minority group that will not be a threat to a future "Jewish" state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_expulsion_from_L...
The idea that everyone can just be convinced with a good argument is a nice fantasy but just never true in reality. You've also rigged the game since you can just dig in your heels are refuse any argument and just say "get better arguments". It's a situation no one else can win. If people could so easily be convinced that different people deserve the same rights then we wouldn't have had to spend over a century trying to get them.
A question suited for ITF and Netanyahu maybe? Ask them spend less. He gets to prolong this Genocide, then he gets to stay out of trial for his previous crimes. Maybe ITF is not in a hurry.
They have certainly had some interesting members[0].
Exactly! The IDF have put a lot of effort in to this genocide.
At no point in the plan for the partitioning of the Arab world was the safety or peace of peoples living there a consideration whatsoever. It was a convenient way to get the Jews out of Europe for the antisemites that lived there and to give the West a vassal colony to continue to serve its imperial purposes in the Middle East for destabilizing lest the Arabs otherwise unify.
Every other government in the Middle East with few exceptions are now, at this point, similarly vassalized and serve the same purpose, and any chance at deviation from that plan has been met with violence of an unsurpassed level with Israel serving as the foothold for that. The minor tribal violence you are alluding to, which was not targeted specifically at Jews, but part of general tribal spats that include Muslim on Muslim violence as well, pales in comparison to the technologized and politicized mass genocial violence in the Middle East that Israel has enabled and actively campaigned for (Iraq, Syria, Iran) for decades.
Don't tell me anything about the actions of the West or Israel in the Middle East aim for peace or reduction of violence. Jews were not spared from violence in Israel during its formation as well, with documented attacks against them in Iraq and Egypt to spur them to flee from the Arab countries to the "safety" of Israel. The Middle East was a much safer place for everyone, including Jews, before Israel was formed.
Also, you are lying about "endless massacres of Jews by Muslims". This is not, has never been, and continues to not be, true whatsoever.
Arabs and Muslims didn't even have antisemitism before Zionism existed. You can only look to times after Zionism with its supremeist ideology to find hostility from Arabs and Muslims specifically targeting Jews for being Jewish. It simply did not exist and they have coexisted for nearly the entirety of the history of Islam. Only when Europeans came down into the Middle East and they segmented and separated the society did this occur.
Avi Shlaim [0], an Israeli and also Arab Jew, talks extensively about the peaceful coexistence Muslims and Jews had for hundreds of years in the Middle East prior to Zionism.
Zionism tried to force a wedge between Arab Jews and Muslims that simply wasn't there beforehand.
What else do you call people who rape and murder civilians, then parade their dead bodies around to cheering crowds?
Hamas will never have any sympathy from most people who watched the October 7 attack footage.
If Azure were providing service to the US Government then that service would be governed by US law even if the employees using the service traveled abroad; the only exception would be if service was initiated by an employee in another country under the terms for the service provider in that country, but even then likely government has contracts with the provider that would shift jurisdiction back to the US.
All of what you said does nothing for the region as they continue to expand their own borders by stealing more and more land from their neighbors (they recently took MORE land from Syria as the new government took shape). Their achievements are marred by their vicious genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and increasingly genocidal behavior in the West Bank as well. Of course you'll economically prosper if you consider stealing and occupying a legitimate right of yours. They achieve all of this by bringing bloodshed and war to the region, which they call for from the US time and time again.
How many times has Bibi Netanyahu gone before Congress to pull the US into another war in the Middle East? The US foots the bill to weaken their neighbors so they stand out more. That's not an economic achievement to be proud of or boasting about.
They can have all the startups they want, but they have the worst human rights record of any country currently, with the largest number of condemnations in the UN of any other country but always vetoed by the US. When you don't have to worry about being judged the same as other countries, then you are free to develop your country without worry about petty things like human rights violations as long as Uncle Sam foots the security bill and sends over more contracts.
Israel and those who unconditionally support it are complicit in its genocide.
Palestine is a relatively recent term. Long before that, the ancestors of today’s Jews occupied this region. We’re talking about the literal Bronze Age. The land NEVER belonged to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria.
The modern state of Israel with its present borders were a creation of the Second World War. But if you go back in time to ~1000 BC, Jewish people occupied the entire region (much broader than just Israel), and they are the only surviving indigenous people of the region. This isn’t even controversial. Virtually all historians and scholars acknowledge this because there is literal physical evidence in the buildings at Temple Mount and elsewhere, which are all dated back to that time.
And yes, Muslims and Jews lived over 1000 years far more peacefully than any time before. Jerusalem and the rest of the Palestine was at peace under Muslim rule except for the Crusades which, surprise, came from Europe.
Or that after they got soundly defeated, Israel was nice enough to give back a lot of their lost territory.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nebius-to-build-a...
"Google and Amazon, both of which already hold the $1.2 billion Nimbus contract with the Israeli government, originally received a preliminary tender for the supercomputer but ultimately withdrew from contention."
I disagree. Your definition of justice inadvertently prevents justice. Holding Hamas accountable for the thousands of rocket attacks and the mass murder / mutilation / rape of October 7 means hunting down all of them, getting rid of their weapons, and freeing hostages. You can only do so with some degree of collateral damage since they’re hiding in civilian populations.
But also, “civilian” is debatable. It’s this same population that voted for Hamas despite their charter explicitly calling for religious genocide. It’s the same population that supports Hamas even after the mass murder / mutilation / rape of October 7, according to multiple polls. It’s the same population that has so many times turned a blind eye to the actions of Hamas.
That's how borders work. (Anything else is, by definition, a border dispute.) If the Armia Krajowa had bulldozed into Lithuania on the logic that they lost it due to foreign meddling, they would have tarnished their record. (Despite the claim being true.)
> Viet Cong, South Africa's ANC, the Suffragettes and civil rights movements all used violence for their causes
On their own turf. And as for the former, against military targets--nobody serious in the Viet Cong or USSR was plotting Al Qaeda-style attacks on the American homeland.
October 7th was a terrorist attack. It was plotted like a military operation. But so was 9/11.
> would you be as careful to keep your resistance peaceful?
Not particularly. But I'd want to be fighting an actual resistance. 7 October attack was a strategic failure. The only reason it might end in a draw is because Netanyahu surrounded himself with maniacs. Even then, permanent damage has been done to the viability of a sovereign Palestine.
(There is also a massive difference between something being understandable and something being justified.)
They are already not doing that
> That it is a religious goal to have a nation of Israel is a new idea driven by Christian Zionists more than Jewish ones and the political, areligious Jewish Zionists enjoy their support and will play any role to achieve their own goals.
It is literally a religious goal of Hamas and the people who voted for them (Gazans) to destroy a religion (Judaism) and to commit genocide. It is literally in their charter. They voted for it. Meanwhile, the nation of Israel has a population that is over 20% Islamic Arab and they are thriving. The reality seems to me to be the opposite of what you’re stating here.
> Jerusalem and the rest of the Palestine was at peace under Muslim rule
It seems to me like you are pro colonization when the rules are Islamic and when the suppressed are Jewish. But not in the reverse? Israel is a democracy. Surely that is preferable to a religious supremacist rule?
Literally how these things are studied.
> can't think of a single movement for good in history that accomplished its goals without pissing people off
Disruptive protest takes the form of interrupting ordinary peoples' lives. (In contrast with targeted protest, which seeks to directly disrupt the problematic conduct.)
They are effective at raising awareness of an issue and rallying the base. Among those who are already aware and have not yet committed to a side, however, they tend (broadly) to decrease sympathy.
> Resisting any form of power tends to result in that power - and the many supporting it - getting quite upset by definition
Of course. I'm talking about broader views.
Sympathy for Israel went up after the Columbia protests because (a) nobody was surprised that there was a war in Gaza and (b) folks breaking into a building and disrupting public spaces doesn't naturally elicit sympathy from undecideds. (It also crowds out coverage of the actual war.)
> any chance at deviation from that plan has been met with violence of an unsurpassed level
Really? I thought it was because Arab leaders keep trying to destroy Israel. I think I got that impression from Arab leaders continuously saying they were going to destroy Israel, and 'the Jews' in the time between the writing of the Koran and the creation of the modern state (also still 'the jews' if you listen to Arab media).
Syria used to be Christian. Lebanon had a significant Christian population. Egypt was Egyptian and Iran was Zoroastrian. All fell after arab colonisation.
"Microsoft changes company slogan to 'Allah Akbar Surveillance for the Future of Glorious Jihad"
"Microsoft Pledges Billions of Dollars to Help Hamas Rebuild Tunnels That Were Used to Invade Israel".
I wonder how the Jewish employees at Micro$oft don't quit en masse...I guess people need income/have families to think about, but still... Preventing Israel from using MS tech to protect itself from terrorist attacks is pretty disgusting. Highly recommend Douglas Murray's (extremely disturbing and sad) book "On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Western Civilization" (warning: includes horrific accounts of extreme violence against Israeli civilians)
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/on-democraci...
https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Democracies-and-Death-Cults-Au...
Let me ask you, who benefits from Palestinians dying? Or did you think that Hamas care about the Palestinian people. They do not - they care only about the Palestinian state.
There's also, I think, an irony that antisemites and Zionists are united in their their efforts to conflate Jewishness with the actions of the Israeli state. I think it's a welcome development that Parker / Stone / Sheila Broflovski aren't going along with it.
Taking both together, nothing you've said justifies what has taken place over the last 2 years.
And your comment on annexation as an end to occupation was truly bizarre, but ... unsurprising at this stage.
The pro-Palestinian narrative adapts and changes as per the tides of war and the media. The Israeli narrative has remained consistent, even when it hurts.
Furthermore, your ideas about the colour of people's skin is an artifact of you dragging American racial issues into a place where they don't belong. The varied skin colours here favour neither side as darker or lighter.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_Zionism#Political_Zio...
Regardless. I accept it's reasonable that sexualised violence took place. I accept the what happened on 7th Oct was a horrible terrorist act.
But, and apologies if this hurts, none of that, absolutely none of that, justifies what has taken place since.
There is no place in this world for genocide. Particularly from a country that preaches "never again".
Nothing you can say will change my opinion on that.
Israel has really fucked up. It destroyed Gaza, yes. But in so doing destroyed it's reputation and standing for at least a generation.
But, and apologies if this hurts, none of that, absolutely none of that, justifies what has taken place since.
There is no place in this world for genocide. Particularly from a country that preaches "never again".
Nothing you can say will change my opinion on that.
Israel has really fucked up. It destroyed Gaza, yes. But in so doing destroyed it's reputation and standing for at least a generation.
> You're right, Gaza was not occupied. It was an open-air prison where people are not allowed to enter or leave, aid was severely restricted,
> and the IDF adopted a policy of "mowing the grass" which was to cull the population periodically. That's worse, but I'm not sure that's the point you were trying to make.
I've heard the phrase mowing the grass. It clearly referred to the Hamas leadership. You can make up interpretations all you want, but I read the sources in both Hebrew (כן, אני מדבר עברית) and Arabic (وانا بحكي عربي كمان). I know exactly what was said, and what was meant. It's usually very clear.
> And if you're only other point is to accuse me of something I never said about an event that was debunked several times, whereas the actual kidnapping and burning of Palestinian babies, women, children, and men is well documented and still ongoing, I think that's all we need to know.
Israel does not deliberately target Palestinian children - there is no benefit to that. Do you know who does benefit when Palestinian children die? Hamas does. They say it clearly. If you really cared about children - Palestinian and Israeli - then you would not perpetuate the blood libel against the side that until recently went out of its way to protect children.
I'm not suggesting cultural destruction is possible or desireable (maybe it is, but it's not my purview), but if a culture is producing a large preponderance of murderous ethnic supremacists it's time to sound the alarm bells. This entire thing wouldn't have been possible if that community didn't make it so.
This is especially compounded given that this group feels above critique from outsiders. That is a dangerous concoction and unfortunately the end result is wanton murder and redirection of resources to abet it. I think we're all about sick of the killing now. With great power comes great responsibility to be a moral agent.
> There is no place in this world for genocide. Particularly from a country that preaches "never again". Nothing you can say will change my opinion on that.
I am showing you that the accusations of genocide against Israel are beyond ridiculous. They are manufactured to favour the side that 1) provides oil, and 2) is in idealogical conflict with the United States. Most countries of the world either need oil or are similarly in an idealogical conflict with the US.
Just for example, the United Nations report that slanders the Jewish State about committing genocide starts off with this prose: "On 7 October 2023, Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza, which included airstrikes and ground operations". Does that sound like a logical summary of that day's events?
I'm not a total fan of Apple here but it's weird to contrast them with Apple in this case when they don't enable a genocide (having a closed ecosystem is a UX decision compared to genocide). You mention that Microsoft is now "pro-Linux", but if that's your measure, many other tech companies contribute significantly more to the Linux kernel. https://lwn.net/Articles/1031161/
With respect to anti-trust, some of their bundling decisions absolutely deserve to be scrutinized (e.g. Teams).
Furthermore, Microsoft is still doing business with the IDF. If your bar is "enabling a genocide" (presumably by being in contract with the IDF), I don't think that's changed too much, just the most egregious example of cloud services in service of that are being challenged (Unit 8200 stuff). It looks like that work is now moving the AWS though.
I have ZERO issue with the IDF killing Hamas. That's what you do in a war. But we have ample evidence that Israel and the IDF is not making any effort to not kill random Palestinians.
They made some stupid AI algorithm to feed data into in order to generate target lists. They accepted something like 10:1 "innocent palestinian":"literal terrorist" ratios. They have no qualms about killing a 10 innocent Palestinians to kill a single Hamas terrorist
This is unacceptable.
Not just dishonest. But sickening, frankly.
No such thing as Palestinian. Just Islamic Arab. Choosing to label yourself the same as one name for the land doesn’t make the land yours. But also - who do you think occupied the land previously?
I'm not American, but you must be if you think racism magically stops outside of America. The racism most Americans and Zionists have towards brown people and the Islamophobia they have towards Muslims are some of their most prejudiced, and at least equal to any form of anti-Semitism you've ever experienced, but for some reason, you only believe in one of those. To be clear, "brown people" don't have to be "brown" just like black people aren't all black, it's a generic term that indicates a rough place of origin, and the point that you're clearly trying to obscure is that racism towards Palestinians is still racism no matter what colour they actually are.
I suspect the sensible ones are keeping a low profile and praying for it all to be over, much like the Palestinians (except they are starving in a wasteland not working for Microsoft).
It is also trivially simply to disprove “It was always Palestine”. It was made up by Romans. Again, much later than when Jewish people lived there.
let's please hear your complete list of evil entities, just curious who else it includes. you can go out in concentric circles from israel, or just start with the most evil worldwide and go till you get to israel and microsoft.
Well, it is difficult to distinguish between the two when you’re hunting down terrorists who hide among civilians. But also, let’s not forget - the civilian population of Gaza VOTED for Hamas. In polls they still show support for Hamas even after October 7. There are videos of those civilians cheering in the streets while the naked bodies of raped / murdered women were paraded down the street by Hamas terrorists. I don’t think you can pretend “random Palestinians” are entirely innocent either.
The IDF's "Wolf" system have been well known for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/19/idf-facia...
It turns out that Gazans call black-skinned Gazans "slaves". I've met black-skinned Bedouins but not black-skinned Gazans, and I don't know if the black-skinned Gazans are also Bedouins. I actually didn't know the word for slave in Arabic, but it was similar enough to the word in Hebrew that I was able to figure it out. I'd later have it confirmed. Not only do they called the black-skinned Gazans "slaves", they treat them as such as well. No lack of colour-motivated racism in the Gaza strip. Yes, I speak with Gazans in Arabic, and before October 7th I'd have conversations with them face to face.
As for Israeli racism - I think that we're the only country in the world who went out to help dark-skinned people immigrate en masse. Israel has a large Ethiopean community. I've had Ethiopean commanders in the army, and I work with quite a few Ethiopeans. I don't feel that they treat me in any unusual way, nor do I treat them in any unusual way.
1. UN Commission of Inquiry: Concluded that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. * Report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c... * Press Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trUcK8hHaIA
2. Amnesty International: Concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. * Statement: https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/end-israels-genocide-aga...
3. B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories): Published their conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. * Report ("Our Genocide"): https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
4. International Court of Justice (ICJ): Ruled in January 2024 that it is plausible Israel's acts could violate the Genocide Convention. * Case Details: https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
5. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention: Issued an "Active Genocide Alert" in October 2023, warning of the high risk of genocide. * Alert: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-genocide-alert-1/acti...
Beyond these formal reports, it's crucial to acknowledge that this has been one of the most documented atrocities in history, often livestreamed by Palestinians on the ground. Their testimonies have been consistent from the beginning, yet they are frequently dismissed until a non-Palestinian, "human" source validates their lived experience.
Israel has been very effective at blurring that distinction, using that attack from Gaza as the pretext to accelerate land theft in the West Bank.
--
For those looking for direct sources on the findings of genocide in Gaza, here are several key reports and legal conclusions from human rights organizations, international courts, and genocide scholars:
1. UN Commission of Inquiry: Concluded that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. * Report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c... * Press Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trUcK8hHaIA
2. Amnesty International: Concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. * Statement: https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/end-israels-genocide-aga...
3. B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories): Published their conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. * Report ("Our Genocide"): https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
4. International Court of Justice (ICJ): Ruled in January 2024 that it is plausible Israel's acts could violate the Genocide Convention. * Case Details: https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
5. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention: Issued an "Active Genocide Alert" in October 2023, warning of the high risk of genocide. * Alert: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-genocide-alert-1/acti...
Beyond these formal reports, it's crucial to acknowledge that this has been one of the most documented atrocities in history, often livestreamed by Palestinians on the ground. Their testimonies have been consistent from the beginning, yet they are frequently dismissed until a non-Palestinian, "human" source validates their lived experience.
Are you really so wrapped up in your tech bubble in Tel Aviv that you can believe that? Here's some reading on a story even I knew off from the top of my head: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-wome.... And here's the rest of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel. Israel is easily the most racist "Western" country in the world, ahead of even the modern US. Hmm, maybe a genocide against Israelis would actually be justified because Israelis are just racist savages that think black people should be forcibly sterilised against their will?
Not that I necessarily agree with what they did here, but I would like to point out that one alternative which has been employed previously would be to silently forward her e-mails to the NSA or state department. Refusing to offer their services is probably the most ethical thing that MS has ever done on behalf of the US federal government.
Regardless, the death toll in gaza (somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000) suggests that this mass surveillance isn’t being used effectively to reduce the death toll. It also doesn’t take mass surveillance to know that bombing hospitals and schools is going to kill innocent people.
I have not seen any hard evidence of this nor have i ever suspected a fellow employee at any of my employers of being a double-agent loyal to a state intelligence agency but it's easy enough to do that there must be hundreds, maybe even thousands of sleeper agents all over santa clara and redmond.
> I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them while advocating for their genocide, and that those conversations make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.
I'll say it clearly. There is no genocide of Arabs, or Muslims, or Palestinians, or Gazans in the Gaza strip. There are many Gazans dying, and many of them are children. Many of them are killed as a result of Israeli actions, and many of them are killed as a result of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other organizations' actions. Israel does not systematically target children, only Hamas benefits from dead children. They say it clearly themselves.
Anyone who watches Israeli news/media in Hebrew knows that Palestinians are not considered human in the Israeli society. Israel dehumanizes and genocides the Palestinians with the intention of wiping them off the face of the earth.
Correction, Gaza was first occupied by Israel for a few months in 1956, then occupied continuously since 1967.
Regardless, by 1984, nearly half of the people in Gaza would have lived their entire lives under occupation, and the most would have lived at least half their lives under occupation.
That would only be true if your goal was not to completely obliterate the population you are attacking and bombing, as Israel has demonstrated.
One baby was killed. Another died 14 hours after birth after its pregnant mother was shot. Only one of those was conclusively shot by insurgents from Gaza (the UN fact-finding report[1], on page 44, notes that many Israelis were killed and injured by "friendly fire")
Out of 1200 non-Gazans killed, 33 were children, or 2.7%, and again, at least some of these deaths can be attributed to the Israeli military response. It should be noted that the casualty rate of Israel's response in Gaza has been at least 30% children.
It's bizarre that you bring up the infant casualties of Hamas October 7, of which there was 1, as evidence for calling it a terrorist attack, when the actual number of babies killed by Israel is an order of magnitude greater than the total number of people killed by Hamas on October 7
[1]: https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/a-hrc-...
Also, Israel has attacked or destroyed most hospitals in Gaza. So the Health Ministry's counting is obviously hindered.
Moreover, their actions didn't improve anything and only serve as further fodder for painting their side here as radical.
Only 34,344 of the GHM estimate are confirmed identities. The rest of either missing but presumed dead or gross adjustments. They are open about using "media reports to assess deaths in the north of Gaza".
The Lancet study published in January 2025 estimated 70,000 as of October, 2024. This is higher than the GHM estimate, but I can't find anything close to your 200k estimate.
So you may believe in your estimates, but they are many multiples larger than any other credible source that I can find... so it's odd to wave these figures around without any sources, links, etc.
Heck, the US Revolutionary war saw the British perpetrated genocide against the Colonists if the military actions following Oct 7 count as a genocide.
You do realize that the said tenant is massacring an entire population as we speak, right? Framing that as just something that's "disagreeable" is one hell of a euphemism.
The absolute bare minimum one can do is to not actively provide the technical means to carry out this atrocity, yet you claim it's only moral to do the exact opposite. This neoliberal fantasy that it's moral and good for society to let powerful corporations do whatever it wants is an absurdity not even worth refuting. But it's downright cruel and tone-deaf when it's used to justify taking part in an officially approved genocide.
Palestine was never a country before 1948, immediately prior to 1948 there was a British Mandate[0] with the name Palestine, but this mandate included land that would eventually turn into countries like Jordan(which just so happens to be a country with a Palestinian majority population). After 1948 and before 1967 the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and Gaza was occupied and administered by Egypt.
The idea of a nation called Palestine is arguably a more recent invention than the nation of Israel.
Or maybe that man is a hamas spy, right?
... any day now. aaaaaany dayyyy now. Yeah.
The Arabs that lived in what is now Palestine simply called themselves Arabs, the same way that Arabs in Israel call themselves Arabs. British Palestine and Ottoman Palestine were multi ethnic states.
The British not only didn't put Israel there, they actually fought against the Jews and supported the Arab armies in 1948, after previously restricting Jewish migration during the Holocaust (contributing to many Jewish deaths). Modern Zionism began 30 years before the Brits took control.
Also, the ICJ only has jurisdiction when states consent to its authority. And the UN security council can veto any decision. It's essentially a show court.
And again, people endlessly debate what is and isn't rape and murder. Judges and juries make the decision at the end of the day, and people still debate whether their decision was correct. If anything, drawing parallels to murder and rape only serve to highlight how subjective it is.
Israel-Palestine used to be really important, because it was a surrogate conflict for Western vs Arab control of the Middle East, and what that is really about is of course oil.
The Arab-Israeli wars of the 1950s/1960s were direct conflicts, but it became apparent that the West wouldn't let Israel lose because Israel represents the latent threat of Western invasion if the Arabs ever really turned off the oil spigot.
So the Palestinians became the thorn for the Middle East to keep Israel at bay, so you get strange bedfellows of Iran and Qatar (Sunni and Shiite) funding them, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But a funny thing happened over 75 years of relative stability of borders and global trade: the status quo established itself, oil price and supply was managed and stabilized, security agreements established and backed up (with the Iraq invasion of Kuwait). Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel in fact are effectively allies against Iran and Turkey.
And the US has its own supply of oil with Dakota shale oil. A FUCKTON of it. So strangely, the Arabian peninsula isn't afraid of the US. They are afraid of Iran and Turkey. And who has the best army to counteract Iran and Turkey?
Israel.
The Palestinians don't have a geopolitical use anymore. The Palestinians used to number around 400,000. Now? They number 4,000,000. That is ... not good. The Palestinians have no economy, and rely almost entirely on external aid. So the scope of a humanitarian burden on Arab sponsors has risen from 400,000 people to 4,000,000 people. AGAIN: the humanitarian burden has risen by a factor of 10, while their geopolitical value has DECREASED, almost evaporated.
And that is without the decreasing value of oil from EVs/alt energy and the long term specter of global warming.
That is NOT GOOD for the Palestinians.
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/press-briefing-francesca...
“65,000 is the number of Palestinians are certain killed, including over, of which 75% are women and children.
In fact, we shall start the thinking of 680,000, because this is the number that some scholars and scientists claim being the real death toll in Gaza.
And it would be hard to be able to prove or disprove this number, especially if investigators and others remained banned from entering the occupied Palestinian territory, and particularly the Gaza Strip.”
The death toll could be that high. I hope to hell it isn’t. But we don’t know and won’t know until the killing stops. We do know that tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed, and at least 150,000 people injured.
Are you claiming that the IDF is trying their hardest to kill all the Palestinians they can, and that this is the best they can do? Really?
> Why
Because there's no shortage of armchair operators that know better how to make split second decisions in combat. Also, they never do anything wrong because they never happen to be in situation where you have to decide between bad and worse.
However, even in the present, the increasing intrusiveness of their update schemes, forcing people to have a Microsoft account even to install Windows, shoving AI into people's faces at every opportunity, etc., would all count as reasons I think they are bad. Also I tend to think in general that simply existing as a giant corporation with large market share is bad.
To be clear, I also think that Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., are also very very bad. I think I'd agree that these days Microsoft is on the lower end of badness among these megacorps. However, that's partly just because it's become somewhat weaker than it was at the height of its badness. You could argue that this isn't "badness" but something like "ability to implement badness" but I see those as pretty closely tied. Basically the bigger a corporation becomes, the harder it has to work to avoid being bad.
Keep in mind deaths published by the Gaza(Hamas) ministry of health do not differentiate civilian vs combatant deaths at all.
> The current official toll is 64,718 Palestinians killed in Gaza and 163,859 injured, since the start of the war on 7 October 2023
You may have been misled by the headline “X killed or injured”.. those are two different things, and we’re talking about the number killed.
I don’t know if those numbers are accurate (the article about the IDF solider claims it is), but I’m not even questioning that. The GP is claiming that an order of magnitude more people have been killed than even GMH claims.
Hopefully you have decades left in your life. One from now, I would be immensely grateful if you emailed me and let me know your perspective on your past-self's defense of genocide.
It is very obvious that the only restraint that the IDF is showing is that they do not kill every single civilian on sight.
The assertion that Microsoft knew what it's customers were doing, that it was inspecting customer data and workloads, comes from ignorance of how cloud providers work.
The only way one could argue that it is no longer occupied is to say there wasn't a continuous Israeli military presence of boots on ground inside of Gaza. It was still being surveilled by satellite and the entire perimeter, people venturing too far at sea from the coast would be shot, drones would occasionally bomb people, everything and everyone going in and out was controlled by Israel (until Hamas tunnels were built), all cell phones allowed in contained surveillance technology, a fence with military outposts was constructed on the perimeter, and Israel bombed the one airport they tried to build.
So arguing it was "no longer occupied" after they pulled out the settlers is disingenuous, unless you're trying to argue that it couldn't be both an occupation and a concentration camp.
And that 65k number does not include indirect deaths - i.e. deaths by starvation, or death from something that could have been easily survived if there were still hospitals instead of rubble. Which is where the 680,000 number comes from - the largest estimate of how many may have been killed directly and indirectly by this genocidal war.
> Halevi stepped down as chief of staff in March after leading the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for the first 17 months of the war, which is now approaching its second anniversary.
> The retired general told a community meeting in southern Israel earlier this week that more than 10% of Gaza’s 2.2 million population had been killed or injured – “more than 200,000 people”.
The point is that we know 64,000 is almost certainly an undercount. Notably it hasn't changed much in the last year since the Hamas ministry of health collapsed.
The commenter above is correct in saying the bound of deaths is very likely between 45,000 and 600,000. We have good reason to suspect it was over 100,000 late last year. We won't know the actual number until an independent assessment can occur.
If you want to let the lack of a specific number hold you up while the killing continues, that’s up to you.
So while 680k (the current highest estimate) is probably higher than reality, god i hope it is, it’s also true that reality is probably much higher than the current GMH numbers.
Obviously if the nazis and hamas had come out and surrendered we wouldn't have had to.
But sometimes one has to take out evil. Be it nazis in Berlin or Hamas in Gaza.
And it also serves as a lesson. A lesson certain countries might soon have to learn the hard way:
don't vote for evil, and if you did, don't be the ones who line the streets to cheer for them like Germans and Gazans did.
Like IAGS whose findings were widely reported until it turned out the biggest qualifications for its 500 expert members was that they had paid a $30 membership fee? And whose openly accessible member list included "Adolf Hitler"?
The emperor has no clothes and no amount of reports from the royal court of UN will change that:
It is plain for everyone to see and the emperors naked butt is disgusting.
It is also insulting to actual victims of actual genocides.
By your logic most of what happened in 1944 and 1945 when 350 000 to 500 000 German civilians died were probably injustice.
But in the real world we need to deal with the people who again and again attack their neighbors in vicious ways.
And we need to finish it.
2. Sure, they can surveil, let them do it on their own data centers. It's actually strange that they would put such data/tech on a 3rd party data center to begin with.
It wouldn't be difficult at all to increase collateral damage, just fight like they did during ww2 and collateral damage would skyrocket.
Israeli government wanted October 7 to happen, because they knew it would provide a good pretext for the genocide they wanted to commit.
It's the same people, on the same land, practicing the same religion, speaking the same language, with the same alphabet, with the same capital, with the same place names, with the same cities, with the same core texts, with the same national holidays.
But that's somehow nothing? At this point you'd have to actually work hard to figure out what's not the same.
Israel is an example of anti-colonialism, where the original inhabitants of the land were able to take it back from invaders.
Don't fool yourself, you are repeating antisemitic slurs. The Jews in Israel never left, and Zionisim is something like 2,000 years old (it's as old the Babylonian exile). Israel is as far from "colony state" as you can get - it's literally the opposite, it's an example of the native people getting their own land back.
During the troubles in Northern Ireland all the phones were tapped. IRA supporters knew this, so would frequently discuss fake bombing plans over the phone, sending the authorities on a wild goose chase.
This is just CYA. That it took Microsoft this long is incorrigible.
So the atrocity continues in Iraq, even to this day.
When this is over, people like you should be forced to go to those graves and the destruction and be made to reflect and be educated.
Just like people are now sent to Auschwitz.
You're the flip side coin equivalent of Holocaust deniers. My condolences on where you've ended up in life. Bye.
The assertion was that "every army" is doing it, not that it's happening in active warzones.
PS: It's also known that for Israel and its AI killing machines, "terrorist" is defined as "male between 14 and 45". Cannot get more "mass targeted" than that.
The goal of the genetic stuff is to point this split out, not delineate races.
Sadly though, this conflict is full of racism. The Gazans are described as "Arabs" and therefore undeserving of the land. If it turns out the Gazans are not Arabs, but also locals to the region, then what does that mean?
They are not the same people. Modern day Palestinians share more ethnic heritage with the land's original inhabitants than European Zionist settlers.
The religion of the region has been different throughout time. Judaism is one religion of that region, and not the only nor even the first.
The language is not the same. Modern Hebrew that is spoken in Israel diverges significantly from the original Hebrew, which is more closely spoke by Yemeni Jews, for example.
Everything else is in your list is done by fiat, as even the the UN and the vast, vast majority of the world do not recognize Jerusalem as the capital.
Israel is the last major European colony and it's an anachronism that will go down in history as the final failed attempt at Western Imperialism.
Considering that your view point is bolstered by a vast ecosystem, I do wonder what propaganda are you thinking of that is responsible for my change in views? Like what do you think I tune into that promotes the viewpoint I hold? I'm asking because I'd love to know what is so that I can listen to more of it! Mine is very hard to find. So if you know where it is - please tell me.
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/12/headlines/israeli_for...
I guess to someone with your ideology collective punishment of Palestinians is normal day, but when the world sees it we are repulsed.
Israel does. There's no need for a two state solution, the project of Greater Israel can be accomplished if they just kill anyone who they aren't able to forcibly expel from the land.
> The goal is not to kill hamas, that was just the excuse, it is to clear the ground for new settlements.
Israel has explicitly stated that this is NOT the goal, are you in a position to change their policy or something? I don't get how you think you can determine their goals for them, unless you are a member of their government (are you?).
Your stated goal doesn't even make any sense - why would they even need to "clear ground" in the first place? Just go live in those houses. And if you mean "kill people", then why are the deaths so low?
From my understanding GHM numbers don't break these figures for those that are combatants either, the population overall is quite young and Hamas is known to use child soldiers as well. Journalists(along with doctors) in Gaza have even been themselves involved in holding hostages for Hamas[0]. There are many issues like this which significantly complicate separating combatant deaths from non-combatant deaths.
> And that 65k number does not include indirect deaths - i.e. deaths by starvation, or death from something that could have been easily survived if there were still hospitals instead of rubble.
The 65k is AFAIU not even advertised by the GHM as confirmed deaths(i.e. deaths with confirmed identities), it's an estimate from an organization(Hamas) which is highly incentivized to report the highest figures that are believable internationally. There are not any incentives for them to underestimate casualties since they use casualties figures for propaganda purposes and will use the highest figures they can come up with while maintaining some level of credibility.
It's also unlikely there are many deaths that can be attributed directly to starvation, while there may be food insecurity issues there is still sufficient aid reaching Gaza to largely prevent deaths from starvation. There are countries in the world where there is actual famine and pictures/videos from those places(i.e. those taken out in the open on the streets) look nothing like those from Gaza. Even organizations like the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have been known to put out(and subsequently walk back) blatantly false information[1] to make it appear the situation is worse than it actually is.
> Which is where the 680,000 number comes from - the largest estimate of how many may have been killed directly and indirectly by this genocidal war.
Numbers 10x those put out by the GHM(which is already highly incentivized to inflate casualty figures) are not remotely credible.
IMO the figures put out by the GHM are likely within the correct order of magnitude, keeping in mind that those figures include combatant deaths. For a conflict like this which involves urban warfare(where similar conflicts historically have had very high casualties) such casualty figures certainly don't appear to be unusually high.
Claims of genocide made against Israel simply do not stand up to scrutiny. Civilian deaths are largely in line with what would expect for a war like this, especially one where enemy combatants are not in uniform and intentionally hide amongst the civilian population and fight from civilian areas(which is of course a war crime). There are strong incentives both internationally and domestically for Israel to minimize civilian casualties as much as feasible.
If intelligence from surveillance increases combatant deaths then it could be expected that the death figures like those from the GHM(which include combatant deaths) may rise even if the actual civilian casualty rate decreases.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/middleeast/gaza-neighborhood-...
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-one-un-leaders-mistak...
More explicitly: 64,718 killed + 163,859 injured =~ "more than 200,000 people"
I don't understand what basis you (and other commenters) have to suggest that these estimates are all wrong, you merely say "we have good reason". What reason?
I think in this war the IDF has a very very good idea of how many civilians they killed. At some point it indicates that they have set targets they are striving to meet before the world stops them.
But those who are well informed agree it the data supports a number above 45k, probably above 65k, and the highest estimate published is 680k. If we use a higher number we are just making shit up. If we use a lower number we are choosing to ignore a data point without a specific reason to write it off. “It defies reality” isn’t an actual reason - it’s just an assertion that it’s wrong. Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
but either way, the tens of thousands of innocents killed and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of gaza is appalling - and arguing about specific numbers is pretty pointless if we don’t agree on that.
It's also non-peer-reviewed, and based on rather arbitrarily picking a multiplier of 15x from a range of past conflicts' multipliers. One author described the figure as "purely illustrative" in a now-deleted tweet.
doctors in hospital testify to something that they didn't see happening ?
and none from what you wrote contradicts that article/whatever parent posted is misleading
It focused on a Jewish home ... centred on gaining Jewish sovereignty ... and was opposed to mass migration until after sovereignty was granted
Definitions are only one part - apartheid is a description of what Israel has achieved, "Political Zionism" is a good candidate to describe the underlying ideology.
However you look at it, it is a catastrophe without a likely, of foreseeable, happy ending. Even the state of happiness the South Africans achieved looks elusive
It does not have to be that way. Jewish people could be secure in Israel and live in peace there, but the Israeli state seems unable and unwilling to make the compromises to bring it about.
"Justice the seed, peace the flower"
The UN is one of the organizations that is heavily responsible for perpetuating this conflict, from promoting terrorism via UNRWA schools[0] to employing terrorists[1] and those who sympathize with terrorists[2]. These[3] sort of biased UN reports in general tend to be deeply flawed and do not stand up to even basic scrutiny[4].
> thinks murdering children is ok because heyyy some of them are child soldiers. Sounds good.
Do you really think 17 year olds can't also be combatants? The Gaza(Hamas) Health Ministry last I checked counts children as anyone below the age of 18.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/your-tax-dollars-are-being-used-tea...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/middleeast/gaza-unr...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-securit...
[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/un-geneva-inquiry-israel-gaza-...
[4] https://unwatch.org/un-watch-rebuttal-legal-analysis-of-pill...
I would love to be "well-informed", but how can I get there with hearsay?
> Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
Once again, the 68k figure is not confirmed! This is already an estimate. The figure for confirmed identifies is much lower, around ~35k. So this is a totally false argument. I'm not saying the estimate is wrong, I'm just saying that if there was a reason for the estimate to be 1/3 of people in Gaza, that's what they would say.
Fact checking services debunking the claim of population not shrinking since October 2023:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/gaza-population-growth-proj...
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics' population estimates, as of July 2025 - down 6% in one year since 2024, which is 10% below original forecasts for 2025:
https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Press_En_... (3rd section of page 2; though the whole document is worth reading)
Massive eyeroll. These stories you've linked to are overcooked propaganda, where any teacher who thinks palestinians are being treated poorly - because they are living in an apartheid state, essentially an open-air prison - is labelled as promoting hate or terrorism.
You could just as easily write a report about israeli schools teaching hate, and promoting terrorism if you sat in and heard how they teach a skewed version of the history of the conflict, or cherry pick teachers who's social media was angry in the wake of oct 7th. Harder story to sell to the ny times tho.
17 year olds can be combatants. Sure. So either all of the dead children are 17 year old combatants or you’re ok with some child murder. Exactly how much child murder are you ok with?
How much journalist murder are you ok with?
How much aid worker murder are you ok with?
How much collective punishment are you ok with?
All of these things are happening - there is no doubt - the only thing we’re debating is exactly how much has happened. Is there a number you wouldn’t be ok with? What specific percentage of the >65k dead would have to be innocent before you’d have a problem with it? 50%… 75%… 95%?
The issue is far more complex than Palestinians being treated poorly, they are also treated poorly by their own rulers. Extremist ideologies are pervasive within Palestine, just look up any Palestinian opinion polling. That a very large percentage of Palestinians are taught and hold extremist ideologies is well documented. Also a military occupation is not equivalent to an apartheid state, Apartheid is segregation/discrimination based on race, the sort of discrimination you see under military occupation in regards to Israel is discrimination based on citizenship, which is a form of discrimination virtually all countries practice to various degrees.
> You could just as easily write a report about israeli schools teaching hate, and promoting terrorism if you sat in and heard how they teach a skewed version of the history of the conflict, or cherry pick teachers who's social media was angry in the wake of oct 7th. Harder story to sell to the ny times tho.
Those UNRWA teachers weren't angry in the wake of oct 7th, they were celebrating the attacks.
What percentage of the population of Palestinian governed territories(i.e. West Bank Areas A/B and Gaza) is Jewish...0%
What percentage of the population of Israeli governed territories is Muslim...around 20%
Seems pretty clear to me which side has the bigger problem with teaching intolerant ideologies.
> 17 year olds can be combatants. Sure. So either all of the dead children are 17 year old combatants or you’re ok with some child murder. Exactly how much child murder are you ok with?
My point was simply that casualty numbers are complex and that one can't simply equate Children to non-combatants/civilians.
> All of these things are happening - there is no doubt - the only thing we’re debating is exactly how much has happened. Is there a number you wouldn’t be ok with? What specific percentage of the >65k dead would have to be innocent before you’d have a problem with it? 50%… 75%… 95%?
There should be 0 civilian casualties, but those civilian deaths that do happen are almost entirely due to Hamas fighting from within civilian areas(which is of course a war crime). Unfortunately causing civilian casualties is part of the Hamas strategy[0]. When one fails to recognize the side is intentionally inducing civilian casualties then finding a solution will be much harder.
From a simple incentives analysis if one allows the strategy of using human shields to be an effective military strategy...then that would further incentivize combatants like Hamas to use human shields even more. The rules of war are deliberately written in a way that allows parties to conduct warfare, otherwise nobody would follow those rules of war. This is one reason why collateral damage is not considered a war crime while deliberately using human shields is a war crime.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/11/middleeast/sinwar-hamas-israe...
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-cu...
Virtually all of the discourse on Israel-Palestine concerns moral righteousness or moral shame. I think the era of moral arguments in geopolitics is coming to an end, because the unipolar or Communist-Capitalist bipolar world combined with the Holocaust that enabled geopolitical moral arguments is basically dead.
It might just be my interest in global affairs spiking to avoid the constant bad news from the Trump administration, but I think we are entering a much more turbulent (and historically normal) period of realist/self-interest directed foreign policy. The US isn't around to be "good cop" (I can't emphasize the quotes around "good" enough).
I think this is why we are surrounded by the sense that authoritarianism is on the rise. The US won't care if you are democratic or authoritarian. The US won't care if you invade your neighbor if it doesn't disrupt them too much. Or the US just plain doesn't care at all.
So it's my general opinion that even if the Palestinians are more morally righteous in the great moral book-pounding, history-pointing, casualty-counting endless debate ... the era where that mattered has come to an end. Alas, I think we are entering a might-makes-right era of world politics, especially in the Middle East, and especially since the US has its own oil now from the Dakota shale fracking.
As to Zionism having an explicit ethnic meaning, that is obvious and non-surprising. Political Zionism was formed in Europe at a time of ethnic and national awakening (and as a result of centuries of oppression against Jews and other ethnicities), and further shaped in the time of national struggle against colonialism and multinational empires. At least until the sixties (if not the nineties), ethnonationalism of ethnic minorities was seen as a progressive position against conservative multi-ethnic/national empires. You can see traces of such "left-wing nationalism" not only in Israel (obviously, I'm not referring to its current ruling coalition), but also in Ireland and in Asia. Ideological (rather than pragmatic) support of a Palestinian state - which is just as "racialised" as a Jewish state - is also a form of that. If you want a "feel" for that in the US, think Malcolm X or the Back-to-Africa movement, and especially Marcus Garvey, who was expressly inspired by Zionism and Irish nationalism.
Of course, even as early as the 1920s and the rise of right-wing nationalism, many on the left recognised that left-wing, "emancipatory", nationalism can quickly turn into right-wing, oppressive, nationalism and warned against that when it came to Zionism as well as other national movements of the time. I think they ended up being proven right in almost every case (including the famous examples of Israel and India), but emancipatory nationalism did play an important historical role in decolonialism, and in the case of Israel, it also helped save the lives of many Jews fleeing the horrors of oppressive nationalism (mostly in Eurpoe, but later also in the Muslim world).
But imagine Black Nationalism had succeeded and become oppressive on a national level, how hard it would have been to talk simply about "Black Nationalism", and how it would have meant different and probably opposite things to different people.
You should look up civilian death rate in previous wars, even recent ones. Civilian deaths typically outnumber combatant deaths by a factor of at least 2:1, often more like 6:1, and sometimes more.
I see your point but I think you are wrong
Political Zionism means the sort of Jewish state (a racial state) in a way that racists in England want an "English" state (which means "white")
A better example of what I think you mean is the role of Māori in New Zealand (Aotearoa).
It is a Māori country, Māori custom forms part of the basic law, but everybody in New Zealand has the same rights
Māori institutions exist, but they are for everybody. (I get services from one, I am not Māori)
In Israel "...only Jews have the right to self determination " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Nat...
That is the problem
I understand the history, that the people who established Israel after WWII were brutalised survivors and they brought that brutality to bear in the process of state creation, but they remain racist genocidal thugs practicing apartheid
Then they (those thugs from the Israeli state) claim they represent all Jews. Makes it very hard for Jewish people everywhere who have any decency
- begins with the high estimate from [2], which uses some very questionable data (like WhatApp chats) to argue that most deaths were not counted by GHM
- extrapolates it to the present, as if the casualty rate were a constant
- multiplies it by 5, which was the multipler that was somewhat arbitrarily picked in that Lancet letter [3]
- forgets that this includes future deaths (attributable to past conflict events), and uses the past tense as if all these supposed indirect deaths already occurred
They also end up with an estimate of "about 380,000 under-five-year-old infant" deaths, which seems unlikely since there were never more than about ~340k children under five in the strip.
Overall, it's about as believable as that letter which claimed Hamas was under-reporting starvations by over three orders of magnitude [4].
[1] https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
For some who identify with it, yes, it means that and for others it means something completely different: a political entity that ensures a national home for Jews. In the early days of political Zionism, still in the age of empires, what they had in mind was some sort of autonomy within the Ottoman Empire.
> In Israel "...only Jews have the right to self determination "
Yes. In many countries (e.g., in America) no ethnic group has a stated right for self-determination. In the UK, it's accepted that Scotland may withdraw from the union and obtain self-determination through some process. But yeah, it's definitely a problem.
> that the people who established Israel after WWII were brutalised survivors and they brought that brutality to bear in the process of state creation, but they remain racist genocidal thugs practicing apartheid
I have no reason to believe that Israelis are any more or less statistically racist than people in other countries. The problem in Israel is not some old ideology that is largely anachronistic, but that the country has, indeed, established apartheid and that it's massacring Palestinians. The past experience of the minority of Israeli Jews with ancestry in Europe that escaped from the holocaust (BTW, those who established Israel got there long before WW2) or the majority with ancestry in the Middle East that escaped Arab nationalism is similarly irrelevant. Their crimes are just crimes.
The way I see it, there are two barbaric, bloodthirsty tribes living on that land, both currently led by illiberal, nationalistic, and increasingly religious-fundamentalist leaders, so while, as a leftist, I can obviously support neither leadership, Israel is guilty of apartheid and horrendous war crimes. I'm not optimistic. At this point my gut says that instead of fighting off British colonialism, they should have begged us to stay. The American colonies aren't doing so well, either.
And yes, I also hate how the Israeli government claims to represent all Jews. Going by the polls, they might not even represent a majority of Israeli Jews. But that's the new fascism. I'm mostly terrified of it making its way to the UK.
Not really. The European colonization of Latin America (and North America in general) was extremely bloody, and rooted in eradication and subjugation and erasure of the local culture. The native languages in the Americas are all but gone and been replaced with Spanish/Portugese/etc. We also saw what they did in the Levant, India, Africa, etc.
On the other hand, the Islamic (not Arab) conquests preserved the local culture. This is why Berber is still spoken in North Africa for example. And this is also why an extremely significant number of famous and prominent Islamic scholars came from Persia and the surrounding region (like Abu Hanifa, Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, and many more to list here). Not to mention countries further east like India and Indonesia as Islam spread. As a matter of fact, there are more non-Arab Muslims than Arab Muslims.
I attended a lecture by a Chinese Muslim who talked about the history of Islam in China - one amusing point he mentioned was how a local martial art was influenced by Wudhu' (Ablution) in Islam. This points to how there was an assimilation and acceptance between Islam and the locals, and was not an eradication.
We are seeing the genocidal calls by the israelis government officials (and polls show a majority of their population agree with them).
Under Islamic law, there is no suppression of minorities, especially People of the Book. They are free to practice and even rule by their own books and laws. Jewish historian shelomo dov goitein admits that Jews lived under the Islamic ruling better than they lived anywhere else in the world.
Of course, Arab colonialism (Arabisation), European colonialism - of both the settler and non-settler type - and Zionist settler-colonialism are all distinct phenomena, with some important similarities and some important differences. Even the violent struggle between settler-colonial forces and colonial forces are very different between, say, America and Israel.
Israel has been taking over palestinian villages for a very long time, murdering the inhabitants. The government is fueling the hate. They aren't even affraid to say it out aloud. I have seen several reports where they are calling for genocide.
Beyond that, everything you wrote is perfectly compatible with the IDF showing tremendous restraint. It is all more or less inevitable with any war in such an environment. All of it happened in Iraq with the Americans, for example.
- Buildings destroyed aren't people
- Documented cases are just that - cases. You need to demonstrate a pattern at scale. Bad cases are inevitable among millions of interactions.
- Investigations opened is a signal of political incentives as much as actions taken.
Now you're saying, okay they do have restraint, but what I really meant was their restraint is driven by the PR concerns, not by their own moral hearts. Well, that's pretty different accusation now.
I'm glad you've conceded the original point that they do indeed have restraint. Thank you.
There are less people physically in Gaza now because a bunch of people emigrated. Not because of deaths.
The overall group of families who lived in Gaza on Oct 7 2023 is about the same number of humans now. A few hundred thousand have emigrated. About 40-60k were killed. About 50k were born.
What is happening in occupied Palestine today—witnessed by the world and actively enabled by certain Western powers—is a tragic chapter in human history. History will judge it with the same moral clarity and horror as the atrocities committed by a certain German regime during and around the WWII era. Already, we are seeing a growing awareness among Western civilians, who are beginning to recognize and challenge what their governments are supporting.
The Arab Empire's conquests are called both Muslim conquests or Arab conquests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests).
> It’s worth remembering that the longest-lasting Caliphate was the Ottoman Caliphate. As I’ve noted, Islam transcends race and ethnicity.
Yes, but I was talking specifically about the Arab conquests that preceded the Ottoman Empire by centuries. The Arab conquests were in the 7th and 8th centuries. The First Crusade was in the 11th century. The Ottoman conquests were in the 14th century.
> Scholars have acknowledged that mistakes were made by some during these conquests, but such actions were contrary to the core teachings of Islam and have been openly recognized as such.
I'm not talking about religion but about history in response to a statement about the crusades having introduced warfare to the Middle East. Not only is that obviously not even remotely true, but the Arab Empire conquered and colonised the Levant, Maghreb, and Europe's Iberian Peninsula centuries before the crusades. All of this happened a long time ago, no one who was there is alive today, and I'm not trying to sit in judgment. This is just something that happened.
> History will judge it with the same moral clarity and horror as the atrocities committed by a certain German regime during and around the WWII era.
Not everything needs to be compared to the holocaust, nor, for that matter, to the atrocities in Syria this past decade that killed over half a million people and displaced almost 7 million. The atrocities in Palestine are bad enough without being "the same horror" as the killing of 80-90% of Eastern Europe's Jewish population. Nothing justifies mass killings, and each of those atrocities stands on its own.
See for example this July 2024 estimate of close to 200k deaths (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) or this more recent estimate of over 600k (https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/ )
Sure, they're estimates not proven statistics, but the situation on the ground means it's impossible for anyone to have an accurate count. What's important is that we don't look at the relatively small (yet still depressingly large) number of confirmed deaths of known named people, tracked by the Gaza health ministry, as if it's a count of the actual number of deaths. Hell, even the IDF recently claimed that there have been 90k deaths (when they were boasting that they had killed 30k Hamas fighters and that they had "only" killed 2 civilians to every 1 Hamas) - and, setting aside the IDF's track record of lying and their incentive to claim less civilian deaths than reality, even if they were telling the truth that would still be limited to deaths they were actually able to track and confirm, not the many other deaths that weren't officially recorded.
If you look at the citation for the latter designation, you will see that it is a non-Muslim/non-Arab source. Never have I heard the term (الفتوحات العربية) in any proper source.
As far as I know "Arab conquests" is a modern phrasing used in English (orientalist historiography). It reflects the ethnic origin of the initial armies (mostly Arab tribes) but is not how pre-modern Muslim sources described them.
> Yes, but I was talking specifically about the Arab conquests that preceded the Ottoman Empire by centuries
If you mean the Rashidun, Umayyad, or Abbasid Caliphates, then those were not simply "Arabian" empires - they were Islamic. Non-Arab peoples were deeply involved at every stage. The unifying goal wasn't to spread Arab nationalism but the spread of Islam.
> Not only is that obviously not even remotely true, but the Arab Empire conquered and colonised the Levant, Maghreb, and Europe's Iberian Peninsula centuries before the crusades
They certainly conquered territory, yes. But the term "colonization" (especially with the European background involved) is very loaded, if not misleading. Unlike European colonialism, which involved stealing natural resources, dispossession, and often depopulation - Islamic conquests generally integrated local populations as I previously pointed out. Andalus was ruled by a combination of Arabs, Berbers, and large numbers of local converts. Likewise, in the Levant and Maghreb, indigenous societies weren't replaced or erased. They remained, adapted, and in many cases thrived under Islamic rule.
> Nothing justifies mass killings, and each of those atrocities stands on its own.
Agreed. But my point was that the Western-backed Israeli regime and WWII Germany share a disturbing structural resemblance: both are rooted in ethno-supremacist, ethnic-cleansing ideologies, and both commit mass killings against civilian populations. At least the nazis tried to hide their crimes; the israeli regime doesn’t even bother, and they boast about it (there are countless video interviews and confessions of israeli soliders that affirm this - several recent ones of israeli soldiers confessing their PTSD symptoms in court because of their crimes are very telling and distrurbing). The so-called "allies" hardly had clean hands either, their own history of indiscriminate mass killings during WWII (firebombing cities, nuclear attacks, colonial massacres) shows the same willingness to treat civilian life as expendable.
On a side note, what happened in Syria was a direct result of French colonial policy when they and Britain colonized the Levant, and israel is trying to follow the exact same play book in post-liberation Syria today. I won't get started on Lebanon either.
You will probably also like to know that the plans for a modern Israel started long before WW2 and Holocaust, and originally not because of persecution of Jews by Europeans in Europe but because of persecution of Jews by Arabs in the middle East.
Admit that 07th of October 2023 wasn't their greatest idea ever (their official position is that it is, but also just a taste of what is to come.)
Well, nationalism is a very modern concept, and things gets murky once we go further back. The very same could be said about applying the moniker "European" to the Roman Empire or even to the crusades. They were no more European than the Arab conquests were Arab.
> But the term "colonization" (especially with the European background involved) is very loaded, if not misleading.
That's true, but that would also apply to Israel and Zionism. There is no kind of European colonialism - of the settler or non-settler variety - that would cleanly apply. Even the Jews living in Europe who were the ancestors of a minority of Israeli Jews, created the Zionist movement because Jews were not considered European or Western by their environment.
The point is that in history, there are often important similarities and important differences, and we need to be careful when it comes to the extent of comparisons.
> both are rooted in ethno-supremacist, ethnic-cleansing ideologies, and both commit mass killings against civilian populations
Yes, and the same, of course, applies to Arab nationalism, which, at least in part, expressly allied itself with Nazi Germany.
There are many prisms of historical analysis. You can look at similarities or at differences; you can look in a specific era or across era. But if you apply different prisms to different groups and then compare them, it starts looking as less of an attempt of historical understanding and more as an attempt to use history carelessly to judge the politics of the present.
Palestinian refugees are defined differently by the UN vs essentially all other refugees.
Palestinian refugees fall under the UNRWA while normal refugees(i.e. refugees from essentially all other countries) fall under the UNHCR. The UNRWA definition is hereditary while the UNHCR definition is not. This hereditary definition is largely why the Palestinian refugee populations can increase over time in other countries so easily vs normal refugees.
There were multiple reason they(or their ancestors) left, there was plenty of violence when Israel was created but it wasn't like it was just one side attacking either. Regardless it's quite strange that someone is still considered a refugee despite potentially having never even been to the country they are supposedly a refugee from, especially since that doesn't happen for refugees from other countries(at least with how the UN defines refugee).
I'm not so sure about that. Are you referring to specific, minority individuals pushing what you are claiming, as opposed to a more systematic approach? And how much of what happened was a reaction to the zionist immigration from Europe?
The fact that by the time of WWII, most Arabs were Muslims - and such an ideology explicitly contradicts Islam. We also know that the movement was heavily in response to (the also misguided) Turkish national movement - Young Turks during the last days of the Ottoman Caliphate.
The Arab nationalist movements in Egypt and Syria were primarily anti-colonial and not really aligned with the Nazis. After WWII, Arab nationalism (e.g. Ba'thism) was shaped by opposition to western imperialism and zionism as opposed to any nazi connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_Nazi_Germany...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_fascism
As to it being a reaction, be careful not to look at things from a perspective that sets out to pass a moral judgment on history. Virtually everything in history is a reaction to something else. Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism and part of a larger trend of national movements; even Nazism was, in a way, a reaction to Germany's defeat in WW1 and what ensued (and a minority ideology until they took control and then that didn't matter anymore) and so on and so on.
It's perfectly okay to say that certain actions in history were morally right, wrong, or complicated, but everyone involved in any of them felt their actions were justified by something they believed or had experienced. There are no good or bad nations. Virtually every society has done both good and terrible things at different points in time.