#in which Israeli authorities say about 1

[planetkiimchi]

"Last Wednesday, the Israeli Supreme Court held a hearing in response to a petition brought forward by Israeli rights group, HaMoked, to reveal the location of a Palestinian X-Ray technician detained from Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza in February. It was the first court session of its kind since October 7."

if people in israel can speak up against this genocide, as someone who will not be subject the legal repercussions they are likely to face, how can you stay silent?

Concentration camp.

They built a concentration camp.

I don't think words can describe what this other than genocide.

[kittyprincessofcats]

ICJ Ruling

Okay, let's get into this.

First of all, I get the frustration at the court not ordering a ceasefire. I was disappointed and frustrated at first too, since a ceasefire was the biggest and most important preliminary measure South Africa was requesting - and of course we just all want this horror to finally end for the people in Gaza. So I get the frustration and disappointment, I really do.

However, I do think this ruling is still a major win for South Africa, Palestine, and international law as a whole and here's why:

The court acknowledged that it has jurisdiction over this case and completely dismissed Israel's request to throw out the case as a whole. It will now determine at the merits stage (that will probably take years) whether Israel is actually commiting genocide.

The court acknowledged that Palestinians are a "distinct national or ethnic group and therefore deserving of protection under the genocide convention". Pull this out next time someone tells you "there's no such thing as Palestinians, they're all just Arabs".

The court acknowledged very unambiguously that "at least some" of Israel's actions being genocidal in nature is "plausible". South Africa has a case, officially. Israel is accused of genocide, in a way the ICJ deems "plausible", officially. This is huge. (And seriously, how freaking satisfying was it to hear all of those genocidal statements by Israeli politicians read out loud and used as justification for this rulling?)

The court might not have ordered a "ceasefire" in those words, but they did order Israel to "immediately end all genocidal acts" (which includes killing and injuring Palestinians) and submit proof that they actually did. How are they going to comply with this ruling without at least severly reducing or changing what they're doing in Gaza?

In fact, this wording might actually be more appropriate for a genocide (vs a war), as author and journalist Ali Abunimah notes on Twitter:

He's completely right. Israel lost today, by overwhelming majority (I mean, 15 to 2? I heard people predict the rulings would be very close, like 9 judges vs 8, but instead we got 15 to 2 (and even 16 to 1 on the humanitarian aid). Holy shit.) The court disimissed almost everything Israel's side of lawyers said, while acknowledging that South Africa's accusations are "plausible".

And this is important especially because of Mr Abunimah's second tweet there^. Because the question is, where do we go from here?

This ruling means that Israel is officially /possibly/ commiting genocide and that should have huge international consequences. The rest of the world now HAS to take these accusations seriously and stop arming and supporting Israel - and if they won't do it on their own, we, the people, have to make them. This is THE moment to rise up all around the world, especially in the countries most supportive of Israel (the US, the UK, Germany): Protest, call your representatives and demand a ceasefire and an end of arms deliveries to Israel.

We now have a legal case to back our demands: If Israel is, according to the ICJ, "plausibly" commiting genocide, then all of our governments are, according to the ICJ, "plausibly" guiltly of aiding in genocide. And we need to hold that over their heads and demand better. We need to do that right now and in huge numbers. Most politicians only care about themselves and saving their skin. We have to make them realize that they could be accused of aiding in genocide.

(As a German, I'm thinking of Germany here in particular: After South Africa's hearing, our government dismissed their case as having "no basis" - how are they going to keep saying that now that the ICJ officially thinks otherwise? Over the last months, people here have been arrested at protests for calling what's happening in Gaza a genocide. How are the police supposed to legally keep doing that now that the ICJ has officially deemed this accusation "plausible"? I used to be scared to use the word "genocide" at protests or write it on my protest signs - not anymore, have fun trying to arrest me for that when the ICJ literally has my back on this one 🖕🏻.)

So yeah - don't be defeatist about this, don't let Israel's narrative that they "won" (they didn't) take over. This might not be everything we wanted, but it's still a good result. Don't let what the court didn't say ("ceasefire"), distract you from the very important things that they did say. Let this be your motivation to get loud and active, especially if you live in any country that supports Israel. Put pressure on your governments to not be complicit in genocide, you now officially have the highest international court on your side.

[xclowniex]

Again, calling what’s happening Palestine a “war” is a crock of bs

Cause last I saw, Israelis aren’t being displaced from their homes and constantly being shuffled around to “safe zones” and then being bombed while at these “safe zones”

Their hospitals and homes and schools are still in tact and they have food and water and shelter

Israeli journalists aren’t being intentionally targeted and murdered

Israelis aren’t having to eat dirt and leaves in order to survive, they’re not being starved to death

All of the above is happening to Palestinians, while the IDF targets them day and night in some weird hope to “wipe out Hamas” even though their efforts have been quite shit and instead are just killing any Palestinian that’s in their way

How is it antisemitism to point out that the lives of Palestinians are being put in danger by the hands of Israelis

It’s never been about Hamas or the hostages it’s full blown ethnic cleansing and genocide, why you need to the “approval” from some “experts” when the evidence is shown day in and day out is beyond me

And quit it with the whole “oh no one should be dying” BS when it’s just “all lives matter” in a different font

1. The safe zones they move to are no longer safe zones because Hamas uses them as military zones and undertakes military business in those zones. Under international law, it is a war crime to use a protected building or zone as it makes it no longer a protected zone and makes Israel allowed to attack the area. Whilst intentionally killing civilians is also a war crime and would be the IDF's fault, if any civilians get caught in the crossfire or get any stray fire, Hamas is at fault for their deaths. If hamas cared for their civilians, they would not carry out military business in safe zones.

2. Journalists aren't being intentionally attacked. Hamas and AL Jazeera misreport who are journalists. For example, a builder who was killed was reported as being a journalist. He was not a journalist. Here is a source which goes into it and shows examples of the lies.

3. It is absolutely terrible that Palestinians are starving, but it is not Israel's fault. Enough aid enters the strip to feed people in Gaza. However Hamas and UNWRA staff (which has links to Hamas), instead of letting aid org deal out aid evenly, steals aid and sells it. Palestinians are literally having to purchase aid from Hamas. Aid that they are supposed to get for free. Source.

4. Saying that i don't want anyone dying is not at all akin to saying all lives matter. One is an opinion, the other is twisting a phrase to change the meaning of the original phrase.

Black lives matter means that obviously all lives matter however black lives need to be focused on due to being at a higher risk. All lives matter twists black lives matter into a false meaning of only black lives matter and no other lives.

Saying that "I don't want anyone to die" is a factual statement of my opinion. It is a fact that i do not want anyone to die. It's not me twisting it to make it seem like Palestinian lives are lesser or that no one should be focusing on Palestinian lives.

Considering your media literally is already poor enough for you to believe misinformation, it is not surprising that you lack the reading comprehension to understand the difference between an actual opinion and a phrase being twisted to change the meaning of another phrase.

Lastly, yeah, I am waiting for people with the authority to call what Israel is doing a genocide as since the last ruling on the matter, Israel was not found to be committing genocide at that point in time yet people were screaming their heads off claiming that Israel was.

I like to wait for people who have the authority because they are more knowledgeable than me. Do you believe that the earth is flat because people scream online that it is? Or do you go by what people who have the relevant qualifications say on the matter which is that the earth is round?

The reason why it's antisemitic to call Israel genocidal, is because the current official rule on the matter is that they are not doing genocide and that false claims of jews being murderous is an antisemitic trope. Like legitimately, it is an antisemitic trope in the proto of elder zion, an infamous antisemitic book. Jews have been plagued for centuries with claims of using children's blood, which is false and antisemitic. I am not going to apologize for calling out the same age old antisemitic tropes repackaged for the modern day

[girlactionfigure]

Hello guys, 

the purpose of this post is to provide you with easy access to every post which debunks a major subject of the Palestinian narrative. Enjoy. 

About the Hamas massacre, and the current Israeli-Gaza war:

1. All documented evidence (so far) of the Hamas massacre on October 7th: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1720536075817398620?t=FWXyYS5JoODZuCfC0xV0cA&s=19

2. The "Israel has killed its' own people" conspiracy: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1742678536681300267?t=-famAhuZaSNsKR8m6ZY-0w&s=19

3. The Hannibal Directive conspiracy: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1739289302071185757?t=VaSEQTmqFyAmAbaAUiHdsw&s=19

4. The "Israel harvests organs from Palestinians in Gaza" conspiracy: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1740493490457362488?t=I-oHWCQSMPa5p0X9EShVBg&s=19

5. Hamas has always been exploiting hospitals in Gaza for military purposes: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1743249465782235381?t=FjFiQdkpmR2CEf1FWBshhA&s=19

6. The "IDF shooting at Palestinians in Gaza" propaganda videos: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1750277607650685205?t=J2jzW4yek5yJrKN9blL7Kg&s=19

7. What the international law really says about the current war in Gaza: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1743024536302350349?t=WEMi9Wimlf2GNYVQZ_hLow&s=19

8. Hamas are faking their numbers of casualties: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1744119191475540176?t=0fAuQuL3H3GP5UrNFhJ7RQ&s=19

9. Palestinian teachers affiliated with Hamas: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1748071720647332286?t=4y4Pb8hagaZHqrgBxs9XuQ&s=08

10. Palestinian journalists are actually terrorists: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1745561440717504520?t=bdE7MWcPa4RuoJfcSR7QUw&s=19

Who really radicalizes their children: 

11. The "Israeli children holding guns" propaganda: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1746081709009821729?t=p7QuekhTipTbfFLYQT6rZA&s=19

12. The child-martyrdom cult of the Palestinian Authority: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1737978763428737268

13. Palestinian children are trained to become terrorists: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1749881558889066565?t=ncU8PZrFgfXy70qa8SF2Ig&s=19

The Palestinian Authority has the same purpose as Hamas:

14. The "10 Point Program" of the Palestinian Authority: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1749143735965794708?t=BENgP47EeaEZGZqqmTWqgA&s=19

15. How Arafat lied to the entire world during the Oslo Accords: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1747387464925212728?t=SLLsUVLbcBzE-VjcwxTsTg&s=08

16. How the Palestinian Authority funds terrorism: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1748385300559069372?t=L-3UeHJcK65kJEUwq-BoYw&s=19

17. What the charters of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority actually say: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1750624196219060256?t=EKGEgU68hvcMXdyU3vf59g&s=19

The "Israeli Occupation" propaganda: 

18. There is no "Israeli Occupation" according to the international law: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1733969873024225660?t=9IeggCxUiiIEQkU79LY9_w&s=08

19. Arab Muslims were massacring Jews since 1920, it didn't start in 1947: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1743753558992814150?t=rwjYcba57rLpFY-XCklhlw&s=08

20. The original "Palestinians" are Jews: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1741936249479352806?t=g10cgm_Zg7jFunI8nkHnRA&s=08

21. Gaza isn't a concentration camp: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1739590303533658372?t=0omGX8JLA5k-xY479kdGqw&s=19

22. What Happened after the Israeli pull-out from Gaza in 2005: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1741574620896022711?t=AXKMHkGjxPi2MaI9BQBzsA&s=19

23. "The Jews came to Palestine as refugees" narrative: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1747224380361396574?t=TILCTBJyBYfFqOoMRiyd2g&s=08

24. Israel isn't an apartheid state: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1747893184154226800?t=cN8vb30yL1q53NxXQpMYuQ&s=08

25. Israel isn't an apartheid state 2: https://x.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1746653096980209724?t=y_th6LgBZmTC6MGqEpIjmw&s=08

26. Israel isn't an apartheid state 3: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1740078451535630719?t=piKK-35XdbLocqCjBDGXSg&s=19

27. UNRWA is an international scam, and are aiding terrorists: https://twitter.com/shlomo_fishman/status/1744840770941551014?t=AKJHGqG18Jxk3-9pfE_QZQ&s=19

Any future posts I find important, will be also added here. Thanks a lot for your support.

Shlomo Fishman

@shlomo_fishman

[edenfenixblogs]

I think that I’ve realized one of the big reasons that antisemites are so anti-Israel—I mean, aside from it being a state where a lot of Jews are.

Israel is a state that protects Jews. It also does a lot of bad things under the Likud government. And it also harms Jews that get in the way of the Likud government. But none of that matters to antisemites.

Because a state is an institution. And the left has been very clear that it’s all about criticizing institutions.

And in the absence of a governing religious body to criticize, the Israeli state is all the leftist antisemites have to criticize.

They can’t seem to fathom that the leadership of Israel is not in anyway synonymous with a religious institution. They cannot seem to fathom that the Likud government isn’t in any way representative of Jewish people as a whole—and not even of Israelis as a whole! (Once again, Israel is a parliamentary system. It’s about who has the largest proportion of votes, not a majority) and that Jews in Israel as well as non-Jews in Israel have a say in who to vote for and often strongly oppose Likud and Netanyahu.

It’s like a whole chunk of otherwise progressive people have been waiting for a way to criticize all Jews by attacking some institution they think speaks for us.

They cannot fathom that we are literally just a small ethnic group with half of our number in one location and would very much like for us and for them to not be victims of violence. That’s the uniting principle.

They’ve continually demonstrated how little they know and understand about Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish history.

I genuinely do not know if they’re aware that there’s no supreme Jewish council or whatever. There’s no Jewish version of the Grand Imam, Grand Ayatollah, Dalai Lama, Celestial Master, or Head/President of the Church.

We don’t even have a main synagogue from which edicts or traditions flow. We did have one. The Wall in Israel was our main institution. But colonizers and invaders destroyed it. And other religions built their institutions on top of it. And the religious governing body of Jews fell apart thousands of years ago.

…so the only thing that holds us together is each other. Rabbis don’t answer to some central authority. We hold traditions together through culture and traditions and connection to our land of origin, like many our even most other indigenous cultures.

But, because there is one (1) place on the entire planet where Jews are a majority of the population and not a minority, suddenly vicious attacks on the character of Jews everywhere are fair game as long as antisemites pretend they are talking about “Israel.” But they aren’t talking about the State of Israel. Because they get mad whenever we tell them to please specify the current government and the Likud party, because they are the ones responsible for carrying out the needless violence.

But they won’t do that. They seem to believe that there is some uniting religious force that exists in the Israeli government. And they seem to think that we are all united by this religious directive of “Zionism.”

That’s the only way any of their criticisms make sense logically. They don’t see themselves as attacking actual humans. They see themselves as attacking institutions. And any Jew who disagrees with them? Well they are just bastards supporting the institution.

But…there is no supreme Jewish institution. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist because they destroyed those institutions.

They’re making themselves feel good by thinking attacking Jews is somehow helping free Palestine. But it’s just attacking Jews.

It’s like a weird continuation of supercessionism. They’re projecting their religious structure onto a religion that is fundamentally incompatible with that structure.

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

The biggest news in my country today, is that Israel has agreed to appear before the International Court of Justice, despite not recognizing the ICJ or its authority.

Why would Israel not recognize it?

The ICJ is the judicial arm of the United Nations. This international body has a KNOWN (and even academically researched) bias against Israel. Which in a sense, is almost unavoidable. The UN as an idea has international representation, with equality for all. No sanctions or a lesser status for non-democratic countries, no sanctions or a lesser status for abusers of human rights, and no sanctions or a lesser status for countries biased against Israel or against Jews (and therefore against Israel, as a Jewish state). Generally speaking, the ADL estimates that about 26% of the global adult population holds antisemitic views. That means that if the UN correctly represents the global population, about 1 in every 4 of its members, is antisemitic. That's before we talk about blocks coming into play (think of the anti-Israel Arab block alone, with its oil and influence. An Israeli diplomat once said, that if Algeria introduced a resolution that the world was flat, and Israel had flattened it, this resolution would pass automatically), or about countries or heads of state, that hold institutional antisemitic positions, such as Iran (where the Islamist regime denies the Holocaust, and has openly been threatening Israel with destruction for years, meaning they are explicitly stating they are looking to kill the biggest Jewish community in the world. Oh, and Iran is currently chairing the UN human rights council).

To appear before the court, is to legitimize it. But there's a catch 22 here. If Israel is being accused at the ICJ of committing war crimes, or even a genocide (which should be harder to prove, because it involves proving intent), and Israel knows it isn't, but it won't appear before the court (to not legitimize it), yet other countries do recognize the ICJ, and no one will defend Israel there if it doesn't appear before the court itself, then how can its innocence of the charges be proven? By not appearing, Israel's conviction is almost a given, regardless of what it actually does.

Yet appearing before the court, and being innocent of the charges, doesn't guarantee an acquittal, when the ICJ is biased. What is worse, a conviction when Israel is absent, where it's clear the trial wasn't fair (since the accused didn't get to defend themselves before the court), or a conviction despite Israel's appearance and innocence, where the trial still isn't fair, but it might not be as immediately evident, since Israel did participate in the trial?

For now, it seems Israel chose to hope the ICJ is not so biased, and decided to appear before it. Let us hope that's not a mistake.

But I can testify from my own experience as a soldier, that we were very much taught to pursue minimal harm to the enemy as an ideal, as a part of the IDF's code of ethics, one of the first things you learn as an Israeli soldier. We were taught that if an order we were given strikes us as immoral (because it carries harm to someone), it is our moral duty to refuse to follow it. I've also heard an interview, with an Israeli fighter pilot, who said he feels calm, knowing every target that he's sent to strike, has been checked by a legal team, that a strike against it does not constitute a war crime. I've also seen strikes being canceled when an Israeli soldier recognized civilians near the target. I'll also say I have heard foreign military seniors say that the IDF fights with a moral standard that they've never seen from any other army. I don't think that's something that any soldier would easily say, since it indirectly criticizes their own army.

So I am as confident as I can be, without serving myself during this war, that if Israel got a fair trial, no court would convict it. Now the only question is whether we would get one. I guess time will tell.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[non-stick-pansexual]

ugh. one of my friends today told me that they were upset that Neal Shusterman, a Jewish and Ukrainian YA dystopian author (who I happen to quite like due to the themes explored in his work), supports Israel, and that they stopped reading a book halfway through and would donate all their books by him. Which just makes me so upset and angry for multiple reasons.

First and most importantly, Neal has NOT expressly stated his support for Israel!! From everything I can find, all he’s guilty of is saying that people are too quick to have a simple mindset for a complex issue (which I agree with) and that everyone, Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish and Muslim, deserves empathy (which I also agree with). And he said this IN A PRIVATE NEWSLETTER!! They’re acting like he’s some Kahanist, genocidal colonizer, or whatever. At MOST, he doesn’t think that Israel should be destroyed. Apparently a controversial opinion for a public figure to have, I guess.

Second— if I were to guess, they probably got their ‘Neal Shusterman is a Zionist’ idea from one of those idiotic “Zionist authors/artists list”, which tend to be lists of almost just Jewish artists, most of whom have done little to nothing to outwardly display their zionist beliefs, if they even have them! This makes me even more upset, because if they don’t consume media from Neal Shusterman, I can only imagine that they’re also blocking out a bunch of other Jewish authors and artists, which just makes me sad and angry.

It’s SO easy to find out Neal’s stated beliefs on Israel and Palestine because it’s the FIRST THING that comes up when you google it, and he’s only ever said 1 thing about it. I’m so mad at my friend for their gullibility, their blind parroting of antisemitic notions. I expected better, but I guess I probably shouldn’t have. They’re one of my closest friends, and I haven’t talked to them about this but I hardly think I can change their opinion.

I don’t know how to describe how I feel. Idk if I’m allowed to be as upset as I am. I don’t want to be this upset at someone this close to me over a passing comment, but it’s so FRUSTRATING.

Sorry, all— I know this isn’t a big deal for most of you~ this happens all the time, but I just weirdly thought I was immune, or something. Just hit a little too close to home is all.

[workersolidarity]

[I originally wrote this article using my own translation of the statement, however I have since downloaded the official translation, so my quotes may not be exact]

🇵🇸🇮🇱 🚨 PALESTINIAN RED CRESCENT REDUCING SERVICES AT AL-QUDS HOSPITAL DUE TO LACK OF FUEL, FOOD AND MEDICAL SUPPLIES

According to a statement by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the al-Quds Hospital located in the Shuja'iyya neighborhood of Gaza City will be reducing the healthcare services being provided at one of the largest and most important hospitals in the Gaza Strip, due to a lack of food, fuel, and medical supplies at the healthcare center.

According to the statement, the reduction of healthcare services will be implemented Wednesday, November 8th, 2024 with the aim of rationing fuel consumption and to continue providing medical services for the next few days.

The report emphasizes the need to conserve fuel, and declares the following measures for extending the life of services being provided to civilians in Gaza City.

1. To stop the hospital's large generator and to use smaller ones instead.

2. Closing the surgical department

3. Stopping the usage of the oxygen generation station, and instead rely on canisters of oxygen.

4. Closing of the MRI and X-Ray Departments.

5. Creating a schedule for the distribution of electricity, whereby each of the three hospital buildings receive 2 hours of electricity per building per day, beginning at 5pm to ensure displaced civilians can access basic services such as charging devices.

The statement goes on to slam the Israeli authorities for refusing to allow fuel into the Gaza Strip, saying it was only able to obtain limited quantities of fuel from gas stations, however, such options expired about two weeks ago as gas sources inside Gaza dried up rapidly under sustained bombardment by Israeli Occupation Forces.

The statement points out that as a result of these actions being taken, the hospital hopes that they will not exhaust their supplies and be forced to close their doors for at least the next few days. The statement also points to the scarcity of food and clean water as a major problem as well, with nearly 14'000 displaced Palestinians sheltering inside the hospital compound.

The Palestinian Red Crescent also highlighted the fact that it has been isolated from the larger Gaza City area due to road closures for the third day in a row from Israeli bombing and shelling, making it that much less likely the healthcare center will be able to acquire further resources.

Lastly, the Palestinian Red Crescent statement accuses Israeli Occupation Forces of targeting Humanitarian Aid convoys bringing aid to the various health centers in Gaza.

"Yesterday, the Israeli Occupation Authorities targeted the humanitarian aid convoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza City which was carrying life-saving medical supplies to health facilities, including the association's Jerusalem Hospital, as the expected aid did not arrive until this moment," the statement reads near its end.

"Accordingly, the Palestine Red Crescent Society appeals to international bodies and organizations working in the health and healthcare sectors to bring in aid urgent humanitarian, essential needs, medical supplies and fuel for Al-Quds Hospital and the Gaza and North governorates."

According to Gaza's Ministry of Health, 10'305 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th, with another 25'000 injured, including 4'237 children killed in Israeli air strikes, and another 2'719 women and 631 elderly people. Another 2'350 civilians are missing, likely buried under the rubble that was the Gaza Strip.

#source1

#source2

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[rahabs]

the fact that you would defend the israeli government after they’ve murdered 30,000 innocents in the largest bombing campaign in modern history is literally despicable and borderline evil. if a genocide documented ad nauseam cannot make you cognizant of israel’s colonial and deeply racist regime, then literally nothing can and you are beyond reasoning with. actually incredible how multiple history degrees have clearly taught you nothing about how a genocide works — or perhaps more concerningly, they have, and you simply don’t care because the victims are palestinian. the fact that you would use those very history degrees to excuse israel’s genocide of palestinians is deeply disturbing and indicative of the rancid hypocrisy within western academia. history will exonerate the indigenous palestinians, and it will be unkind to those like you who defended and cheered on their annihilation.

It‘s so amazing to me that you actually believe this, and that you‘ve so wholeheartedly swallowed the propaganda Hamas (known for using their own civilians as human shields, known for paying their citizens extra for killing Jews) has been peddling. So I am going to paste here some points others have already made that I‘ve saved over the course of information-gathering, though I doubt you‘ll bother to read or learn, judging from your asinine little comments here.

1) Palestine Gaza is a genocidal nation. The goal of the Palestinian government in Gaza is literally to destroy and commit genocide against Israel and kill every Jew by every means possible. This is literally written in their founding charter. "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.

2) Palestine is an apartheid nation that has ethnically cleansed 100% of their Jews and stole their territory after 1948. There used to be tens of thousands of Jews living in the areas of Judea and Samaria, which was renamed to the West Bank by Jordan. However they've all been ethnically after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and 0 Jews are allowed to live in Palestine today. 3) Palestine is an authoritarian dictatorship both in Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas won majority of the votes during an election in 2006, but the Palestinian president simply refused to recognize the results of the election and refused to hand power over to them. This resulted in Hamas siezing power in Gaza, executing hundreds of their political rivals, and they never held another election. Likewise, the leadership in the West Bank also refused to hold any elections and still continue to illegitimately cling to power. Abbas, the president of Palestine had a 4 year term which was supposed to end in 2009. He's still the leader today and has continued to postpone election after election. 4) Palestine supports the outright open murder of innocent civilians. I've already mentioned the charter of the Palestinian government in Gaza above where their goal is to eradicate Israel and genocide Israelis, but the Palestinian government in West Bank is just as horrible. There's the Palestinian Authority Matry Fund where they literally pay a salary / pension to any Palestinians who commmit terrorist attacks against Israelis, be it through stabbings, shootings or suicide bombings, and they've paid out billions so far. The Foundation for the Care of the Families of Martyrs pays monthly cash stipends to the families of Palestinians killed, injured, or imprisoned while carrying out violence against Israel.

5) Palestine is horribly corrupt oligarchy. Palestine receives billions from the USA and Europe in aid every single year. Whatever money isn't spent on paying literal terrorists, or on rockets to shoot at Israel ends up going to corrupt Palestinian leaders. Yasser Arafat, the first Palestinian leader, died a billionaire. Abbas the current President is worth $100 million. The Palestinian leaders in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, Moussa Abu Marzuk and Khaled Mashal have an estimated combined wealth of over $10 billion. Meanwhile the combined GDP of Gaza is only about $2.5 billion, meaning these 3 leaders wealth is equal to 4 years of Gaza's GDP. 6) Palestinians have caused wars and instability in every country that they've sought refuge in. In Jordan, Palestinains assasinated the Jordanian king in 1951, then attempted a coup of a the country in 1970. After they failed, they were expelled to Lebanon where they started a civil war with the Christian Maronites. This war lasted 15 years and killed several times more people than the entire Israel-Palestine war (150k died in Lebanon civil war vs 25k in Palestinian-Israeli wars). In Kuwait, the Palestinians supported Saddam as Iraq invaded Kuwait. In Egypt, they've been hit by several bombings by Palestinians. 7) There is no freedom of speech or equality in Palestine Gaza. No equality of sexes, no equality of races, and definitely no queer rights in the entirety of Palestine where you could be killed for the crime of being openly queer. [If you identify as a liberal, there is literally] no reason to support a country where majority of [your] friends would either have severely restricted rights, be treated like objects, or be thrown off a building just for existing.

Let me reiterate: Jews are indigenous to Israel. Jews have existed and lived in what we now call the Israel-Palestine region for thousands of years before the foundation of Islam, and even before the foundation of Christianity. In the game of “which Abrahamic religion came first?” Islam ranks dead last.

Israel as an identity as a people has existed for thousands of years and has been recorded as far back as the Iron Age on:

i) The Mesha Stele;

ii) The Tel Dan Stele;

iii) The Kurkh Monoliths; and (potentially)

iv) The Merneptah Stele.

While scholars have argued over the translations on the Merneptah Stele, the general consensus among historians, classicists, archaeologist, etc, is that it refers to the existence of Israel at the very least as a collective identity that existed at the time, and was called Israel.

They were eventually repeatedly forced out by other powers such as the Romans and many others, but that doesn’t change the fact that Jews had a continuous existence in Israel before being forced out by what people like you would normally call “colonising powers” were it not so contrary to your own ill-supported arguments. It also doesn’t change the fact that Jews, and Israel, existed before both Christianity and Islam, and long, long before Palestine.

So if your entire argument boils down to "who was here first" and the ideas of "colonialism" and "anti-colonialism" and "decolonisation", then I am telling you, Jews were there first. You could argue Canaanite groups like Moabites and Ammonites were there too, but Moabites and Ammonites don't exist as a continuous group anymore. No matter how you look at it, you are wrong, so let me parrot your horrible argument right back at you:

The fact that you would defend Hamas, a known organisation whose founding Charter literally calls for the annihilation of Jews, who have systematically purged Jews for years, who launched multiple attacks against innocent Jewish people (the music festival, the babies and the woman and the children slaughtered), the fact that there's a Palestinian Authority Matry Fund where they literally pay a salary / pension to any Palestinians who commit terrorist attacks against Israelis, be it through stabbings, shootings or suicide bombings, and they've paid out billions so far; the fact that you defend the existence of the Foundation for the Care of the Families of Martyrs which pays monthly cash stipends to the families of Palestinians killed, injured, or imprisoned while carrying out violence against Israel, etc... that you would defend this is "literally despicable" and not only outright evil, but ignorant to the nth degree.

If the continuous genocidal nature of Hamas against Israel cannot make you cognizant of Hamas' deeply racist, violence, and terrorist regime (to the point where none of the Muslim countries around them will take Palestinians in; even their fellow Muslim countries want nothing to do with them), then I'm not sure what to tell you. You say I am beyond reasoning, but from where I'm standing, your head is so far up your own ass that I don't even know if you're aware of anything that isn't the smell of your own shit.

It's actually incredible to me how you can ignore what multiple historians and scholars are saying because you want to cling to your idea that Hamas are just a bunch of "poor innocent brown people" who need help from the "evil white Israeli regime". Or perhaps, more "concerningly," that is just it: you hate Israel because you erroneously perceive them as white, and so therefore they must be evil. I don't know, but that is what a lot of anti-Israel sentiment seems to boil down to in the world of people like you.

The fact that you would excuse and ignore Hamas' outright horrific acts and ignore history is deeply disturbing and indicative of the rancid hypocrisy within the west, but particularly within western circles that claim to be "progressive", "liberal", and "leftist."

Hamas has said no to every ceasefire. Hamas has said no to every compromise Israel has offered even before October. If Hamas stops fighting, the war ends. If Israel stops, then Israel is annihilated.

History has already shown that Palestinians are not indigenous if we are playing the "who was there first" game with Israel and Palestine, you're just so ignorant that you will refuse to see the evidence right in front of you. You are the one cheering for the annihilation of an indigenous group, and the one history will frown upon is you.

[catdotjpeg]

On February 2nd, the Associated Press analyzed satellite imagery which showed “new demolition along a 1-kilometer-wide path on the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel.” The images, which revealed the recent destruction of Palestinian farmland, warehouses and other buildings, suggested that Israel had started creating what it has called a “buffer zone” in areas of Gaza adjoining the Israeli border, a project that Israeli leaders have been trying to pursue as part of their invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s October 7th attack. Israeli officials claim that such a step is necessary to allow residents of communities in the south of Israel to return to their homes without fear of another attack. “[All along] the Gaza Strip . . . we will have a margin. And they will not be able to get in,” Avi Dichter, Israel’s agriculture minister, told reporters on October 19th. “It will be a fire zone. And no matter who you are, you will never be able to come close to the Israeli border.”

For months, United States and European officials have repeatedly voiced opposition to the idea of Israel’s permanent militarized border zone within Gaza, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying in November that there should be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza” and “no reduction in the territory of Gaza”—both outcomes that would likely result from such a zone. But the AP’s analysis, coupled with other recent events, indicate that Israel is forging ahead with creating its “fire zone” despite such objections. Indeed, on January 23rd, Israeli soldiers in Gaza were actively laying mines in and around two buildings in central Gaza close to the border with Israel, intending to destroy them, when a grenade fired by a Palestinian militant caused the explosives to go off, killing 21 soldiers. In the aftermath of the attack, three Israeli officials anonymously told the New York Times Israel was demolishing the buildings to create a “security zone,” while an Israeli military spokesperson said the soldiers who had died were operating to “create the security conditions for the return of the residents of the south to their homes.”

Israel’s work on the zone comes amid widespread speculation about the future of Gaza after the eventual end of Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault, which has already killed at least 27,000 people. American, Arab, and Israeli officials have debated what comes next for the coastal enclave, with Western governments pushing for a revitalized Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza—which Israel opposes—and far-right Israeli ministers advocating to expel Palestinians from Gaza and build renewed Israeli settlements. Yet even as these policy discussions remain unresolved, Israel is unilaterally exerting control over Gaza’s post-war reality by constructing a militarized zone inside the enclave that materially shrinks the amount of Palestinian land while leaving open room for Israeli Jewish resettlement of the Strip. The strategy recalls Israel’s modus operandi in the West Bank, where Israel has built hundreds of settlements in order to create “facts on the ground” to entrench its control before the international community can do anything about it.

Current and former military officials portray the creation of a militarized Israeli zone inside Gaza as necessary to prevent another attack on southern Israeli communities near the border. “People coming back to their homes [in Israel] don’t want to see someone [in Gaza] take out a rifle or an anti-tank missile or come to the fence, cross it, and kill them,” said Jacob Nagel, a former national security advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative think tank that advocates for US intervention in the Middle East. “We have to show them that the area there is empty. Otherwise, it would be very tough for them to come back.” But Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza, said creating a so-called buffer zone through the demolition of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods will only fuel more violence. “In the areas that were systematically razed and wiped out, you’re giving people a very strong revenge incentive,” he said. “Israel is basically creating a recruitment poster [for Palestinian militant groups].” Indeed, the creation of the zone is likely to add to the list of Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza since October 7th. According to research by Corey Scher, a PhD student at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, and Jamon Van Den Hoek, an associate professor of geography at Oregon State University, Israel has destroyed or damaged 143,900 structures throughout Gaza since October 7th, around 1,329 of which were in the proposed zone. Human rights experts have said that the destruction of civilian buildings and infrastructure may constitute war crimes. And if the Israeli zone continues to be created, more such homes will likely be demolished. “If there are no concrete, direct security grounds for why these houses have to be torn down, the destruction of civilian homes is completely illegal,” said Miriam Marmur, public advocacy director at Gisha, an Israeli human rights group focusing on Gaza. Nagel, however, is not concerned with such complaints: “There are no civilian buildings in Gaza,” he said, claiming that most buildings in the Strip are filled with weapons or contain tunnel entrances.

Keeping Palestinians out of the zone is also likely to involve further violations of international law. Some former Israeli officials have suggested laying mines in the border area, though the Israeli army has not publicly committed to this idea. Nagel predicted that the zone would be enforced by live fire. “I like to call it a ‘killing zone,’ but since ‘killing zone’ is not a nice term, we use the words ‘buffer zone,’” Nagel told Jewish Currents, clarifying that regardless of what the area is called, he thinks that “someone [who] is moving there without permission is going to be dead.” Such a policy would be illegal under international law, said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch. “No territory can ever be a free-fire zone,” he said. Shakir added that, under international law, live fire force can only be deployed during war if it is proportionate—meaning that attacks on a military site must not include harm to civilians that is excessive in comparison to the expected military advantage of an operation—and if it discriminates between civilians and combatants.

There is precedent for Israel using lethal force to limit Palestinians’ access to land near the Israeli border. Since Israel pulled soldiers and settlers out of Gaza in 2005, the army has violently barred most Gazans from coming within 300 meters of the Israeli barrier—a policy that has led to indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians in that zone, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. From 2010 to 2017, Israeli soldiers opened fire 1,300 times in the 300 meter area, killing 161 Gazans there, according to Gisha. In 2018, when Palestinian protestors started the Great March of Return, congregating near the border to call for the end of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and the right of return to lands they were expelled from in 1948, Israeli snipers responded by shooting and killing 223 Palestinians. Over the years, Israeli soldiers have also cracked down on Palestinian farmers and herders working in the zone, sometimes spraying herbicide or razing farmland in order to enforce the prohibition on Palestinians coming near the Israeli barrier. Marmur said that many of these enforcement measures violated international law. “There is little reason to believe that the new buffer zone would be enforced differently, raising concern over an expansion of Israel’s illegal practices,” she said.

The militarized zone Israel is now planning to impose within Gaza would triple the size of the pre-October 7th iteration, severely impacting Palestinians in the Strip. The demolitions would worsen the housing crisis in the enclave, where nearly 70% of homes in Gaza have now been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombs. In addition to leaving potentially thousands with no home to return to, the zone would deepen food insecurity in the Strip, since a third of Gaza’s agricultural land lies in the proposed zone. Due to Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid entering the Strip, Palestinians in Gaza already face a hunger crisis and virtually every family skips a meal every day, with 400,000 people at risk of starvation. The loss of further farmland will only compound this situation. In addition to these dire short term effects, the new Israeli zone may permanently “eat away Palestinian lands, adding to years of systemic dispossession of Palestinians,” Marmur said. Israeli officials claim that their control of this land will be “temporary,” but Nadia Hardman, a researcher in the Refugee and Migrants Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, told Jewish Currents that the scale of the destruction in the region indicates that Palestinians won’t be able to return their homes there “at any point in the foreseeable future.”

A permanent Israeli zone inside Gaza stands to significantly reshape the balance of power in any post-war scenario. In addition to allowing Israel to take over parts of Gaza’s territory—in the process creating, as per Shehada, “conditions that would push people to leave the territory”—such a zone could also pave the way for the building of new Israeli settlements. Resettling Gaza has been a long-standing demand of the Israeli right, one that has gained new momentum since October 7th. Indeed, on January 28th, a thousand Israeli settlers and their supporters—including 12 ministers from the ruling Likud party, along with national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich—joined a Jerusalem conference to promote the resettlement of Gaza. Members of Likud have also proposed legislation to repeal the ban on Israeli civilians entering Gaza, which would allow settlers a foothold in the territory. Observers say a permanent Israeli zone in Gaza is likely to accelerate this process. “We have watched this play out again and again in the West Bank and also in Gaza before 2005: Israeli settlements always start off with a security justification,” said Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It starts with a military base going up somewhere and then the area being declared a no go zone. And then slowly that security justification becomes muted—and then we start seeing settlements.”

Yet even as human rights advocates raise such alarms about the consequences of the zone, the US may be softening its opposition to the project. That opposition was never particularly forceful: “There’s been very little outrage from the US administration about the creation of the buffer zone as it’s been happening in real time,” Hassan said. As a result, Israel has proceeded by simply disregarding the US’s reservations, an approach that seems to have paid off. Last month, Blinken hinted the US may accept a temporary Israeli buffer zone inside the Gaza border, saying there may need to be “transitional arrangements” to ensure Israel’s security and “make sure that October 7th can never happen again.” But according to Hassan, “there’s not a lot of credibility regarding Israeli assertions that these things are going to be temporary.” She pointed to how Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank was originally portrayed by Israeli officials as a temporary security measure, only for it to remain standing 20 years later—with Israeli officials coming to openly describe it as a permanent border between Israel and the occupied West Bank. Israel’s temporary measures, Hassan concluded, “have a way of sticking around for a long time.”

-- "An Israeli “Buffer Zone” Could Shape Gaza’s Post-War Reality" by Alex Kane for Jewish Currents, 6 Feb 2024

[dragoneyes618]

In the room where we often called for G-d to bring peace, the students and faculty around me watched a screen and celebrated like our prayers had been answered.

It was September of 1993, and my classmates and teachers cheered watching the historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

I did not.

A friend berated me.

“What’s wrong with you? You don’t want peace?” he asked.

I was 15 but knew enough about critical thinking to understand that to be for or against something, you need to know the details. I had watched on TV where they said some issues would not be included in the deal and would be left to a later time.

There was tremendous peer pressure back then – as there is today –in order to look virtuous, to proclaim you were in favor or against something.

I attended the Frisch School in Paramus, N.J., which was a rigorous and great school that helped prepare me for life, and from meeting current students I can say without bias that it is one of the best high schools in the country.

But there is a new challenge that all Jewish schools must meet. There needs to be a class called “Debating the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” It should start next year.

The majority of Jewish high schoolers will not go to Yeshiva University. And many will go to Ivy League schools, despite the recent protests, as well as to other schools where professors have been indoctrinating students to believe that Israel is a white colonizer.

Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro and Hillel Fuld all articulate cogent messages about Israel but I don’t know that all Jewish high school students are aware of them.

Jewish schools teach the kashrut question of batel b’shishim. If, for example, a drop of milk fell into a pot of chicken soup, if the drop is not greater than 1/60th of the soup, it may still be deemed kosher.

It’s a good idea to teach that. It’s also a fine idea to teach the same students important facts about Israel so that when they hear slander, they don’t feel like 1/60th of a Jew.

We now live in a reality where people, especially younger people, are inundated with message from TikTok and other social media that are anti-Israel. From watching TV and podcasts alone, I must have seen it said that Israel is committing a genocide at least 500 times, mostly with nobody disputing it.

Two great examples of someone speaking against it were Coleman Hughes, an author and speaker who was the guest on American’s top podcast, “The Joe Rogan experience.” The other was a man named Steven Borrelli, who goes by the moniker of Destiny, who was on a show called Breaking Points, debating Omar Baddar.

Hughes told Rogan (who by his own admission is not knowledgeable on the topic) that if including estimates of those in Hamas who were killed the ratio of combatant to civilian is similar to when American soldiers fought in Mosul, and that if Israel did not go into Rafah, that would create a blueprint for any future group to jump over the border and kill civilians, then go back and hide among civilians with impunity. Rogan had no counterpoint.

Destiny explained the same thing regarding the ratio, and in this and other debates he asked why only Israel is accused of genocide, but America was not for Iraq or Afghanistan, or World War II, and explained that there is a double standard.

We just finished Pesach where we teach about the son who doesn’t know how to ask. Too many Jewish youngsters don’t know how to ask at colleges: What is your definition of a genocide? Why would Israel give warnings? What is the ratio of civilian/combatant?

Another fallacy is that Jews are not allowed to criticize the Israeli government. That is of course, false, but the problem is when too large a portion of criticism is put on Israel and little blame to terrorists. (It is also important to acknowledge the pain and suffering of Palestinians who have been under the thumb of Hamas.)

Another question one must ask: What are the details? You may be in favor of lunch, but not if the waiter then brings you a plate of fire.

Many ignored part of New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s speech when he said Palestinians must drop their demand for a complete right of return (because the demography would mean there would be more Palestinians than Israelis in Israel) and a Palestinian state would be demilitarized. Schumer’s speech likely encouraged these protests, but absent from his talk was that there is no indication Palestinians would agree to both conditions or care what he says in that regard, let alone what the Israeli people want.

There is a video of a UCLA student Eli Tsives who questions a woman who claims to be a professor at UCLA. He does know how to ask, and the woman is so flummoxed she asks for help. The reason she has no answer is that bullying works until you come up against someone who is not afraid and knows how to ask the right questions.

It is very telling that when journalists ask questions to the protestors, most have no answer.

The protests against Hamas are small but should be larger. And Jewish schools should prepare students to be able to know what questions to ask and how to give an answer. Jewish schools in New York should also have trips to the Nova Exhibit which I went to and I interviewed survivors; I also interviewed Hannie Ricardo, a woman whose daughter, Oriya, was murdered by Hamas.

I held back tears as Ricardo told me she took some solace in knowing that while her daughter was murdered, she was not burned or defiled.

On that same day, back in 1993, my Judaic Studies teacher, Mr. Zucker spoke with me.

I asked him if he thought there would really be peace.

“Nobody knows,” he said. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

[samueldays]

I'm rereading Just and Unjust Wars, trying to resolve something that's been niggling at me about war crimes and the laws of war.

I think it might be an insufficient distinction between (gestures vaguely) law-as-command, the decree of a legislating authority to subjects; and law-as-custom, the agreement of peers about how to behave with each other.

Rules about war crimes necessarily lean towards law-as-custom, because war is the business of sovereigns who are not subject to any other authority's decree.

Yet many people treat war crimes as entirely law-as-command: wanting to call the War Cops on you for violating War Law with your War Crime and the War Judge will give you a War Trial before putting you in War Jail. (I caricature a little to illustrate the sentiment, they don't say "War Cops", they say "The Hague".)

Here's HRW as an example of law-as-command thought:

The Israeli military’s repeated, apparently unlawful attacks on medical facilities, personnel, and transport are further destroying the Gaza Strip’s healthcare system and should be investigated as war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. Despite the Israeli military’s claims on November 5, 2023, of “Hamas’s cynical use of hospitals,” no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.

On the view of law-as-command, Hamas committed crime #1 by using hospitals and ambulances for military purposes, and Israel committed crime #2 by then attacking hospitals and ambulances. HRW is speaking as though on behalf of a Global Sovereign who is in charge of everyone, saying that such-and-such statute prohibits such-and-such action of the nominally sovereign state of Israel. Law-as-command is enforced by the Global Sovereign sending in the War Cops.

On the view of law-as-custom, there was an implicit agreement which sounds something like "I'll leave the hospitals and ambulances out of it if you will", and when Hamas stopped holding to this agreement, it ceased to have any force on Israel as counterparty. Law-as-custom is enforced by the threat of losing the protection of the agreement if you violate it.

Both of these views have (gestures vaguely again) unsatisfying philosophical gaps, I think.

The gap in the law-as-command view is that the de facto Global Sovereign of the past fifty years has been the United States of America, and so "war crimes" de facto reduces to whatever the USA won't let you get away with. The HRW cites the Rome Statute, which neither America nor Israel are party to, slightly more weighty than citing "My uncle who works at Nintendo said so".

The gap in the law-as-custom view is that it entitles Israel to target Palestinian hospitals more broadly now, because their protection only arose from a mutual agreement in the first place, which Hamas has now un-agreed to. Sucks for the Palestinians.

Of course, philosophical gaps very rarely move people with guns in the short term.

[mariacallous]

About three years ago, some of Google’s security engineers came to company attorneys with a gigantic mess.

The security team had discovered that Google unwittingly was enabling the spread of malicious software known as Glupteba. The malware had corrupted more than 1 million Windows computers, turning them into vehicles to mine cryptocurrency and spy on users. By hijacking Google accounts, purchasing Google ads to lure in users, and misusing Google cloud tools, the hackers behind the operation were on their way to infecting even more computers.

Tech giants such as Google long have had a playbook for destroying botnets like Glupteba. They call up fellow companies and US authorities and together coordinate a massive takedown operation. Sometimes, the cops file criminal charges. But this time around, Google’s legal team recommended an approach that the company hadn’t pursued in years: Sue the hackers for money.

The eventual lawsuit against two Russian men and a dozen unnamed individuals allegedly behind Glupteba would be the first of a run of at least eight cases that Google has filed against various hackers and scammers, adding to a sporadic few filings in the past. The tactic, which Google calls affirmative litigation, is meant to scare off would-be fraudsters and generate public awareness about scams. Now, for the first time, Google is opening up about this strategy.

Leaders of Google’s security and legal teams tell WIRED they believe going after people in court has paid off. Google hasn’t yet lost a case; it has collected almost all of the more than $2 million that it has won through the legal process, and forced hundreds of companies or websites to shut down. The awards are trivial to Google and its parent Alphabet, a $2 trillion company, but can be devastating for the defendants.

“We’re disrupting bad actors and deterring future activity, because it’s clear that the consequences and the costs are high,” says Chester Day, lead of the three-person “litigation advance” team at Google that’s focused on taking people to court. Google, he adds, is “making it clear that we’re willing to invest our resources into taking action to protect our users.”

Google blog posts and similar content about the lawsuits and the underlying scams have drawn more than 1 billion views, according to the company. Google representatives say that the awareness increases vigilance among consumers and shrinks the pool of vulnerable targets. “Educating people about how these crimes work may be the best thing we can do to stop the crime,” says Harold Chun, director of Google’s security legal team.

Several Big Tech companies have pursued affirmative litigation, though not necessarily under that name and with varying strategies. Microsoft has filed more than two dozen lawsuits since 2008 with a focus on securing court permission to dismantle botnets and other hacking tools. Amazon has been a prolific complainant since 2018, filing at least 42 cases over counterfeit products, 38 for reviews fraud, three for copyright abuse, and, recently, two for bogus product returns. Amazon has been filing so many counterfeit cases, in fact, that the federal court in western Washington assigned three magistrate judges to focus on them.

Since 2019, Meta has filed at least seven counterfeiting or data theft cases, with settlements or default judgments in four so far, including one in which it won nearly $300,000 in damages. Like Meta, Apple has sued Israeli spyware developer NSO Group for alleged hacking. (NSO is fighting the lawsuits. Trials are scheduled for next year.)

Some attorneys who’ve studied how the private sector uses litigation to enforce the law are skeptical about the payoff for the plaintiffs. David Noll, a Rutgers University law professor and author of a forthcoming book on state-supported private enforcement, Vigilante Nation, says it’s difficult to imagine that companies could bring the volume of cases needed to significantly stop abuse. “The fact that there is a small chance you might be named in a suit isn’t really going to deter you,” he says.

Noll believes the big risk is that Google and other tech companies could be burdening the court system with cases that ultimately secure some favorable headlines but do less to make the internet safer than the companies could achieve through investing in better antifraud measures.

Still, of the six outside legal experts who spoke to WIRED, all of them say that overall Google deserves credit for complementing the work of underfunded government agencies that are struggling to rein in online abuse. At an estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars per case, it’s a low-risk endeavor for the tech giant, former prosecutors say.

“Reliable and regular enforcement when folks step outside the law brings us closer to a society where less of us are harmed,” says Kathleen Morris, resident scholar of law at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. “This is healthy and robust collaboration on law enforcement by the public and private sectors.”

Google’s general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, tells WIRED she wants to send a message to other companies that the corporate legal department can do more than be the team that says “no” to wild ideas. “Legal can be a proactive protector,” she says.

Marketing Scams

DeLaine Prado says that from its earliest days, Google has considered pursuing litigation against people abusing its platforms and intellectual property. But the first case she and other leaders within Google recall filing was in 2015. Google accused Local Lighthouse, a California marketing company, of placing robocalls to dupe small businesses into paying to improve their ranking in search results. Google alleged trademark infringement, unfair competition, and false advertising. As part of a settlement, Lighthouse stopped the problematic calls.

Since then, Google has filed complaints against five similar allegedly scammy marketers, with three of them ending in settlements so far. A Florida business and its owners agreed to pay Google $850,000, and a Los Angeles man who allegedly posted 14,000 fake reviews on Google Maps agreed to stop. Terms of the third deal, with an Illinois company, were not disclosed in court files, but Google spokesperson José Castañeda says it involved a seven-figure payment to Google.

Castañeda says Google has donated all the money it has collected to recipients such as the Better Business Bureau Institute, the National Consumers League, Partnership to End Addiction, Cybercrime Support Network, and various US chambers of commerce.

Another genre of cases has targeted individuals submitting false copyright complaints to Google to get content removed from the company’s services. A man in Omaha, Nebraska, whom Google accused of falsely claiming ownership of YouTube videos to extort money from their real owners, agreed to pay $25,000 to Google. Two individuals in Vietnam sued by Google never responded—a common issue.

In 2022, Google won default judgment against an individual in Cameroon who never responded to charges that he was using Gmail to scam people into paying for fake puppies, including a $700 basset hound. After the lawsuit, complaints about the scammer dried up, according to Google.

But legal experts say the most fascinating cases of Google’s affirmative litigation are four that it filed against alleged computer hackers. The suits emerged after months of investigation into Glupteba.

Security engineers at Google realized that eradicating Glupteba through the typical approach of taking down associated servers would be difficult. The hackers behind it had designed a backup system involving a blockchain that enabled Glupteba to resurrect itself and keep pilfering away.

That’s in part why Google’s attorneys suggested suing. Chun, the security legal director, had pursued cases against botnets as a federal prosecutor. “I thought this would be something good to do from a civil angle for a company as well,” he says. “Law enforcement agencies have limits on what they can do. And Google has a large voice and the litigation capacity.”

Chun and other attorneys cautioned their bosses that the hackers might use the lawsuit to reverse engineer Google’s investigation methods and make Glupteba more evasive and resilient. But ultimately, DeLaine Prado, who has final say over lawsuits, signed off. Chun says his former colleagues from the government applauded the complaint.

Google sued Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov, alleging that they were the Russia-based masterminds behind Glupteba after linking websites associated with the virus to Google accounts in their name. The search giant accused the duo (and unknown co-conspirators) of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The lawsuit also alleged a trademark law violation for hiding Glupteba in a tool that claimed to download videos from YouTube.

Google argued that it had suffered substantial harm, having never received payment for ads it had sold to the hackers, who allegedly were using fraudulent credit cards. Users also had their experiences with Google services degraded, putting them at risk and impairing the value of the company’s brand, according to the lawsuit.

In court papers, Starovikov and Filippov stated they learned of the lawsuit only through friends and then decided to hire a New York attorney, Igor Litvak, to fight on their behalf. The defendants initially offered innocent explanations for their software related to Glupteba and said that their projects had not targeted the US market. At one point, they countersued Google for $10 million, and at another, they allegedly demanded $1 million each to hand over the keys to shut down the botnet. They eventually denied the allegations against them.

Following an ordeal over whether the defendants could obtain Russian passports, sit for depositions in Europe, and turn over work files, Google’s attorneys and Litvak traded accusations of lying. In 2022, US district judge Denise Cote sided with Google. She found in a 48-page ruling that the defendants “intentionally withheld information” and “misrepresented their willingness and ability” to disclose it to “avoid liability and further profit” from Glupteba. “The record here is sufficient to find a willful attempt to defraud the Court,” Cote wrote.

Cote sanctioned Litvak, and he agreed to pay Google $250,000 in total through 2027 to settle. The jurist also ordered Starovikov and Filippov to pay nearly $526,000 combined to cover Google’s attorneys fees. Castañeda says Google has received payment from all three.

Litvak tells WIRED that he still disagrees with the judge's findings and that Russia’s strained relationship with the US may have weighed on whom the judge trusted. “It’s telling that after I filed a motion to reconsider, pointing out serious issues with the court’s decision, the court went back on its original decision and referred [the] case to mediation, which ended with … me not having to admit to doing anything wrong,” he says in an email.

Google’s Castañeda says the case achieved the intended effect: The Russian hackers stopped misusing Google services and shut down their marketplace for stolen logins, while the number of Glupteba-infected computers fell 78 percent.

Not every case delivers measurable results. Defendants in Google’s other three hacking cases haven’t responded to the accusations. That led to Google last year winning default judgment against three individuals in Pakistan accused of infecting more than 672,000 computers by masquerading malware as downloads of Google’s Chrome browser. Unopposed victories are also expected in the remaining cases, including one in which overseas app developers allegedly stole money through bogus investment apps and are being sued for violating YouTube Community Guidelines.

Royal Hansen, Google’s vice president for privacy, safety, and security engineering, says lawsuits that don’t result in defendants paying up or agreeing to stop the alleged misuse still can make alleged perpetrators’ lives more difficult. Google uses the rulings as evidence to persuade businesses such as banks and cloud providers to cut off the defendants. Other hackers might not want to work with them knowing they have been outed. Defendants also could be more cautious about crossing international borders and becoming newly subject to scrutiny from local authorities. “That’s a win as well,” Hansen says.

More to Come

These days, Google’s small litigation advance team meets about twice a week with other units across the company to discuss potential lawsuits. They weigh whether a case could set a helpful precedent to give extra teeth to Google’s policies or draw awareness to an emerging threat.

Team leader Day says that as Google has honed its process, filing cases has become more affordable. That should lead to more lawsuits each year, including some for the first time potentially filed outside the US or representing specific users who have been harmed, he says.

The tech giants' ever-sprawling empires leave no shortage of novel cases to pursue. Google’s sibling company Waymo recently adopted the affirmative litigation approach and sued two people who allegedly smashed and slashed its self-driving taxis. Microsoft, meanwhile, is weighing cases against people using generative AI technology for malicious or fraudulent purposes, says Steven Masada, assistant general counsel of the company’s Digital Crimes Unit.

The questions remain whether the increasing cadence of litigation has left cybercriminals any bit deterred and whether a broader range of internet companies will go on the legal offense.

Erin Bernstein, who runs the California office of Bradley Bernstein Sands, a law firm that helps governments pursue civil lawsuits, says she recently pitched a handful of companies across industries on doing their own affirmative litigation. Though none have accepted her offer, she’s optimistic. “It will be a growing area,” Bernstein says.

But Google’s DeLaine Prado hopes affirmative litigation eventually slows. “In a perfect world, this work would disappear over time if it’s successful,” she says. “I actually want to make sure that our success kind of makes us almost obsolete, at least as it relates to this type of work.”

[girlactionfigure]

Disclaimer: the intent of this post is not to delegitimize the right of either Israelis or Palestinians to sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination. There is no future in Israel and Palestine without both Israelis and Palestinians. Nor is this post an endorsement of any Israeli policy.

Rather, after a conversation in the comment section of a recent one of my posts regarding population density in Mandatory Palestine, I decided to rework an older post into this. Personally, I find it really interesting, and I think it’s a key piece in understanding the continuing conflict. It’s also important to dispel false propaganda about the Jewish presence in Israel that has now been accepted as fact.

POPULATION OF PALESTINE

For various centuries, the population of what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories had remained stagnant. Travelers at the time described Palestine as an abandoned backwater province of the Ottoman Empire. That’s not to say that it was empty or that nobody lived there, of course, but it was sparsely populated, according to the official Ottoman censuses. However, the sudden population boom between 1850 and 1900 did not come from natural population growth but rather, from Arab immigration.

"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies."

Mark Twain, 1867

"Many are Israel's forsaken places, and great is the desecration. The more sacred the place, the greater the devastation it has suffered. Jerusalem is the most desolate place of all."

Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides), 1267

During the Ottoman period (1517-1917), modern-day Israel and the Palestinian Territories were a part of the Ottoman province of Syria, which was further divided into smaller vilayets (administrative divisions). Palestinian Arabs would not identify as “Palestinians,” but rather, identified primarily with their religion and clan. At best, they would call themselves “southern Syrians.” Until 1920, Palestinian Arabs advocated for Palestine to become a part of an Arab state in Greater Syria.

IMMIGRATION FROM EGYPT

The most significant factor in the population growth in Palestine between the turn of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century was Arab immigration, particularly from Egypt. At the turn of the 19th century, a famine prompted as much as 1/6 of Egypt’s population out of Egypt, with a significant percentage settling in Palestine.

The wave of Egyptian immigration continued in 1829, after thousands of peasants fled harsh labor laws imposed by the Egyptian ruler, Mehmmet Ali Pasha. Travelers during this period wrote that Bedouin tribes accompanied the peasants as well. In 1831, Egypt invaded Palestine. Over 6000 Egyptian peasants crossed into Palestine during the invasion; various Bedouin tribes also arrived with the Egyptian army. Others fled to Palestine as a result of blood feuds between different clans. Many Egyptian soldiers and administrators also chose to stay in Palestine.

By the late 19th century, the city of Jaffa had Egyptian neighborhoods all over town.

When the British invaded Egypt in 1882, scores of Egyptians fled to Palestine. A news report from the time stated: “Many of the people come here from Egypt to wait until the danger passes.” But very few actually returned to Egypt. To this day, the third most common Palestinian surname is El Masry, literally translating to “the Egyptian.”

IMMIGRATION FROM NORTH AFRICA

Following a rebellion against French rule of Algeria in 1850, a number of Arabs and Imazighen from North Africa settled in Palestine, particularly in the Galilee region and Safed.

IMMIGRATION FROM CIRCASSIA

Between 1863-1878, Russia murdered between 1.5-2 million Circassians in the Circassian Genocide. Another 1-1.5 million were expelled from their homes in Circassia. The Ottoman authorities then settled many of the deportees in the Levant, hoping that their presence would curb Bedouin and Druze influence, as the Druze were not always receptive to Ottoman rule, and the Ottomans hoped to squash sentiments of Arab nationalism.

The Circassians, who are Muslim, developed a good relationship with the Yishuv -- the Jewish community in pre-state Israel -- and are now one of the groups with mandatory conscription into the IDF. Like Jews once did, however, Circassians still dream of returning to their homeland, from which they were stolen.

SLAVERY

The Ottoman Empire began issuing decrees to reduce and ultimately terminate slavery in 1830, but these laws were rarely strictly enforced, especially in places such as Palestine. Throughout the 19th century, slave ships continued docking on the shores of Palestine, with the majority of the slaves coming from Ethiopia and Sudan, with a minority coming from Circassia. The last slave ship to arrive to Palestine docked on the shores of Haifa in 1876, though Arabs in Palestine continued holding slaves well into the 1930s.

JEWISH IMMIGRATION (19TH CENTURY)

Between 1881-1903, some 25,000 to 35,000 Jews -- most of them Ashkenazi Jews escaping massacres in Eastern Europe -- immigrated to Ottoman Syria, to the region now encompassing Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Only 15,000 of them stayed, due to harsh economic conditions and disease.

Between 1880-1914, about 8% of all Bukharian Jews immigrated from modern-day Uzbekistan to Jerusalem, escaping brutal persecution. In that same time span, 10% of all Yemenite Jews immigrated to Palestine. Most settled in Jerusalem and Jaffa.

THE "THREAT" OF JEWISH IMMIGRATION

The Ottoman Empire did not abolish the “dhimmi” status for Jews -- that is, second-class citizenship -- until 1856. Dhimmi taxation in Palestine was especially brutal, economically marginalizing religious and ethnic minorities. The Jews in Palestine relied on charity from Jews in the Diaspora for survival. The Samaritans, our closest ethnoreligious cousins, did not have a Diaspora community to come to rely on. Thanks to harsh persecutions, they were nearly wiped out during Ottoman rule.

Though dhimmi status was abolished in 1856, the Arab Muslim majority in Palestine had become accustomed to a certain social order, in which Jews were tolerated so long as we were subjugated. Thus, Zionism and Jewish immigration presented a threat to the status quo.

In 1899, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Yousef al-Khalidi, wrote to the chief rabbi of France, “Who can deny the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good lord, historically it is your country!…But in practice you cannot take over Palestine without the use of force…” The chief rabbi of France forwarded al-Khalidi's letter to Theodor Herzl, who was quick to send a reply, assuring al-Khalidi that the Zionist movement had no intention of displacing the Muslim and Christian populations. It’s worth noting that during this period the mass influx of immigrants -- predominantly Muslim immigrants -- didn’t seem to bother al-Khalidi. It was Jewishimmigration that felt like a threat.

In 1882, the Ottomans prohibited Jews from immigrating to the Ottoman Empire. In 1893, the Ottomans prohibited all Jews -- “Palestinian” or not -- from purchasing land in Palestine. Thus, Jews in the region “enjoyed” less than four decades of equality under the law. No such restrictions existed for Arabs.

IMMIGRATION IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Unlike the population boom in the second half of the 19th century, the huge spike in the population of Palestine in the 20th century did come primarily from Jewish immigration. Between 1904-1914, some 35,000 Jews fled violence, mostly in Eastern Europe, and sought refuge in the region under the Ottomans. Between 1919-1923, another 40,000 Jews arrived to Palestine -- now under the British -- from Europe. Another 70,000 Ashkenazi immigrants arrived in the 1920s, as well as some 10,000 Mizrahi immigrants, predominantly from Yemen and Iraq. 

Prior to the Holocaust, another massive influx of Jewish immigrants — between 225,000-300,000 — arrived from Europe. This angered the Arab leadership in Palestine, which responded with violence. To appease the Arabs, the British passed the 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 people over a period of five years and limited Jewish land purchases to 5% of the Mandate Palestine Territory. 

Between 60,000-100,000 Arabs immigrated to Palestine between the two world wars. There are numerous reasons for this migration, most notably, new economic opportunities. In March of 1926, a railroad from Egypt to Palestine was completed, which prompted many young Egyptians to leave by train to seek employment in Palestine. In the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, the coastal plain between Gaza and Jaffa, as well as the area between Gedara and Ness Ziona, Ramle, and Lod became densely populated with Egyptian immigrants. 

During World War II, when Jewish immigration was essentially squashed, the British brought Syrian and Lebanese laborers to Palestine. Civilians also employed foreign contractors, many of whom came to Palestine without the legal paperwork. Government records from this period state that there were some 14,000 Egyptian and Lebanese laborers. The population increase along the southern coastal plain during this period was almost completely due to Arab immigration. In the area of Israel now known as “the Triangle,” over 35% of the population consisted of immigrants from Egypt. 10-15% of the Israeli Palestinian population today lives in that region.

LAND OWNERSHIP

Jewish land purchases took place in sparsely populated areas and as a matter of official Zionist policy, the Zionists avoided purchasing land occupied by fellahin, or Arab farmers. Out of the lands Zionists purchased, 52.6% were unoccupied, belonging to foreign landowners; 24.6% belonged to Palestinian Arab landowners; 13.4% belonged to the government, churches, or foreign companies; and only 9.4% belonged to Palestinian Arab fellahin.

In the 1920s, David Ben Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel, wrote, “Under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them...Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.”

The 1937 Peel Commission corroborated this, stating: “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased.” In 1931, the British created a register for landless Arabs; only 664 Arabs out of a total of nearly 900,000 met the criteria.

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Gilead Ini

January 12 Update:

AP Amends False Claim

After CAMERA informed journalists of the problems detailed here, the Associated Press changed its piece, noting that a study of damage in Gaza counted structures that were "likely either damaged or destroyed" as opposed to "destroyed." The other misrepresentations were not substantively addressed, and no appended correction informs readers of the change. See below for a detailed update.

On Thursday, the Associated Press argued that Israel’s fight against Hamas “now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in history.”

Before sunrise the next morning, the language was quietly changed to instead cite wars in “recent” history. But the stealth edit did little to redress the many glaring problems in the piece, the latest in a parade of news stories that invent, distort, or otherwise misuse statistics to unfavorably compare the Gaza war with others across the globe wars.

An image by researchers Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek refers to "likely damaged or destroyed" buildings.

The reason for this assembly line of manipulations, it seems, is precisely to support overblown charges like the one that opens the AP story: Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre is the most destructive… the deadliest… the biggest… the worst….

Urban combat is a notoriously destructive endeavor. Add subterranean warfare — the need to deal with the combat tunnels that snake below Gaza’s neighborhoods and serve as a lifeline for Hamas militants and a death trap for Israelis — and there’s no shortage of ruin in Gaza that could be discussed on its own terms.

But apparently that wouldn’t suffice. So cue the embellishments — like the one at the very center of the AP piece:   

Israel’s offensive has destroyed over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, experts in mapping damage during wartime.

Destroyed? The satellite data used by the study’s authors can suggest which buildings have been damaged, but not whether they have been destroyed. When we double-checked with the researchers, Van Den Hoek reiterated that they only count structures as “likely damaged or destroyed” because, he explained, “we don't yet have means of distinguishing categories of damage severity.”

Which means the AP’s claim is egregiously false. And that’s hardly its only manipulation.

The second sentence, meant to support the lead sentence’s claim about the Gaza war being among the “most destructive” wars, reads:

In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.

The worst… what? By what measure of damage does Gaza surpass these conflicts? The Associated Press doesn’t say.

The most destructive… the deadliest… the biggest… the worst…

The piece later claims that 33 percent of buildings across Gaza and two-thirds in northern Gaza have been “destroyed” (again, a falsehood counting any degree of damage as destruction). But the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which the AP has frequently cited in the past, has assessed that in Mariupol, one of the AP’s points of comparison, “up to 90 per cent of residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed.” The Associated Press itself had reported that Russian munitions left their mark “on nearly every building” in Mariupol. 

Is the AP referring to the absolute number of damaged houses rather than the percentage? Maybe. But it would be an odd comparison, since Mariupol is less than half the size of the Gaza Strip. Aleppo, too, is half as big as the Hamas-run territory — and the relevant land area is even smaller, since the rebel militias that came under devastating Syrian and Russian bombardment had only occupied a portion of the city.

So does the claim refer to the density of destruction? If so, then again, it is dubious comparison. The damage in Aleppo was not nearly as densely packed as other in Syrian cities, including Raqqa, Homs, Deir ez Zor, Damascus, and Hama. Why would the AP ignore more extreme examples?  

Whatever the reporter means to compare, it’s clear that the piece doesn’t play fair. Consider this passage:

During the 2014-2017 campaign to defeat IS in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country, according to Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts. By comparison, the Israeli military said last week it has conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza.

The most…. But not really. The Associated Press cherry-picked this particular Iraq war, but chose to ignore entirely the 2003 Iraq war, in which US-led forces dropped over 29,000 munitions on Iraqi targets in the first 30 days of fighting — double the rate of Israel, which dropped the same estimated number of munitions but in twice the time.

And what does the AP mean when claiming, at the top of the piece, that the Gaza offensive has caused more destruction “proportionally” than the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II?

The author later elaborates:

By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. Between 1942 and 1945, the allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas, said Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian. Pape said this amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to over 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 140 square miles (360 square kilometers).

In other words, the proportion of destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip is greater than in Germany only when comparing the small, densely packed Strip to the entirety of Germany, which in its current borders is nearly 1000 times larger than Hamas’s territory, and which was spaced out to a small fraction of Gaza’s population density. We can consider a closer equivalent within Germany: The city of Hamburg, which is far closer to the size of the Gaza Strip, and where during just eight-days in 1943, four Allied bombing killed around 40,000 people and destroyed over half of the city’s homes.

And if the Associate Press considers Allied bombing during World War II an informative point of comparison, why pick and choose? In just two days of bombing in 1945, the US killed about 100,000 civilians in Tokyo and destroyed 250,000 buildings.

We can forgive the AP for failing to find a perfect analogy. “[N]o military in the world has faced the context Israel faces today,” says John Spencer, a top expert in urban warfare. “No military in the world has fought a war against a military of 30,000 plus fighters (defenders) embedded in underground cities purposely interwoven into the dense civilian population” while dealing with incessant, indiscriminate rocket fire into their own cities. But that doesn’t excuse the AP “hunting for data,” as Spencer termed it, to promote a narrative.

Nor would the “everybody is doing it” excuse suffice — though it is true that plenty of others, including some of the largest and most influential newspapers, are likewise guilty of inventing and manipulating statistics.

A Parade of Distorted Statistics

• Less than a week into the war, the Washington Post reported that Israel had already dropped the same quantity of munitions on Gaza as the US dropped on Afghanistan in its most intense full year of bombing:

"Israel is dropping in less than a week what the U.S. was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area, where mistakes are going to be magnified," said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser at the Dutch organization PAX for Peace and a former U.N. war crimes investigator in Libya. He helped plan airstrikes for the Pentagon during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The highest number of bombs and other munitions dropped in one year during the war in Afghanistan was just over 7,423, Garlasco said, citing U.S. military records. During the entire war in Libya, the NATO alliance reported dropping more than 7,600 bombs and missiles from planes, according to a U.N. report.

But this is wildly false. The US had dropped 17,500 munitions on Afghanistan in just 76 days of bombing in 2001. The newspaper eventually corrected after outreach by CAMERA, but not before the fake statistic was echoed by the Los Angeles Times’ managing editor, NBC’s Mehdi Hasan, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, J Street, and members of Congress.

• In a front-page story published on Nov. 26, the New York Times claimed that “Israel has killed more women and children than have been killed in Ukraine.” This is a flagrant misrepresentation, which relied on Ukraine casualty figures that, per the newspaper’s own source, are “considerably” lower than the actual number of civilian deaths. The paper stealthily changed its language online, but it left the error uncorrected in print.

The piece also claimed that “more women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003,” citing estimates from a group called Iraq Body Count. But again, data from the Times own source revealed the newspaper’s egregious dishonesty. The overwhelming majority the Iraq casualties occurred in a just over a month of fighting, after which the regime was overthrown and major combat operations had ended. So contrary to the newspaper’s argument, the rates of claimed civilian casualties in the two conflicts were essentially equal. The newspaper refused to correct.

• Both the Times story cited above and a piece in the Wall Street Journal had misrepresented comments by a senior State Department official about casualties in Gaza. The Times reported, “Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told a House committee this month that American officials thought the civilian casualties were ‘very high, frankly, and it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited.’” Similarly, the Journal claimed that “The U.S. State Department’s highest official for Middle East affairs said that the civilian death toll in Gaza is likely higher than estimates suggest.” The official, though, wasn’t speaking about the civilian death toll, but rather the total number of deaths, Hamas included.

• This week, on Dec. 22, the Washington Post reported that the displacement of two million people in Gaza’s population was “the largest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948.” On Syria, just on the other side of Israel from Gaza, 12 million people have recently been displaced, according to the United Nations. In Yemen, over four million have been displaced.

The image of a New York Times headline shared on X by Aviva Klompas.

• That same day, the print edition of the New York Times ran a large headline announcing, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab War Losses in 40 Years,” a reference to the Hamas government’s claim of 20,000 deaths in its fight against Israel. The same New York Times had previously reported on 470,000 deaths counted in Syria’s war; 150,000 deaths counted in Yemen’s war; 150,000 deaths counted in Lebanon’s civil war; 500,000 Iraqi deaths counted from the country’s war with Iran; and 150,000 Iraqi deaths during the gulf war. (The text of the article itself correctly referred to “Arab conflicts with Israel,” though that doesn’t help those who relied on the newspaper’s headline to be accurate.)

The Associated Press piece fits neatly into this parade of flamboyant distortions, and serves as just the latest example of how a zeal to push a narrative of Israeli excesses sends sober journalism slinking ever further into the distance. 

Update: Associated Press Corrects

After CAMERA informed AP editors of

the inaccurate claim that an analysis by Scher and Van Den Hoek counted “destroyed” buildings as opposed to damaged ones;

the questionable claim that the Gaza war has wreaked more destruction than Russia’s offensive in Mariupol, despite UN estimates showing more damage in the latter; and

the arbitrary comparison of Israeli airstrikes to those in 2014-2017 Iraq, while inexplicably ignoring the much larger number of airstrikes in 2003 Iraq

the agency redressed the first issue. Where the piece had characterized a study as finding that "Israel’s offensive has destroyed over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza," it now correction notes that the study looked at "likely either damaged or destroyed."

A minor modification was made to the language about Mariupol. Rather than account for the UN estimate of destruction there, AP changed the statement of fact that "the offensive has wreaked more destruction than" the razing of Mariupol to instead state that "researchers say the offensive has wreaked more destruction."

The cherry-picked data about Iraq was left unchanged.

While the date at the top of the story was changed from Dec. 22 to Jan. 11, there is no indication that a correction was made to the story, as journalistic norms would call for. 

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

Another Palestinian terrorist attack today, this time we're talking about a shooter, who opened fire at an Israeli minibus, and managed to injure several people, at least one is critically wounded, and 2 are in serious condition. The terrorist has been neutralized after a 5 hour chase, and his identity has been confirmed. His past includes both having served time in an Israeli prison for terrorist activity, and having served in the Palestinian Authority chief's guard. According to the army, he was using a snipers rifle, and had prepared in advance several organized sniping posts.

Iran, the country which funds at least 3 of the terrorist organizations currently attacking Israel (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis), and which has directly targeted Israelis as well (through cyber and physical attacks), has had its ambassador summoned over Iran's suspected complicity in the attempted synagogue attack by a German Iranian in 2022.

The US brought a resolution to the UN security council, which suggests an immediate ceasefire AND an immediate releasae of all the Israeli hostages. 11 countries voted for it, only Russia, China and Algeria voted against it. But because Russia and China used their veto, the resolution was rejected. Next time you hear an official from Russia, China or Algeria claim to care about the lives of those in this conflict, please remember they could have saved people on both sides of it (including kidnapped Israelis of Russian or Chinese descent), and chose not to. Russia's excuse for it is especially ludicrous. If Hamas had released the hostages immediately, then Israel would have been obligated by this resolution to cease fire, and then there'd be no operation in Rafah.

After Canada, Sweden and Australia, now Finland has announced that it would renew its financing of UNRWA, the UN agency whose employees are complicit in the Hamas massacre, and in having symbiotic ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations. That's while some countries have never stopped funding UNRWA, and Saudi Arabia has even announced an increase in it. And I will mention each one as often as I can, for their complete disregard of Israeli lives, because this IS a STAIN on the so-called morality of these countries.

Speaking of Canada. The same country happy to continue financing an organization complicit in anti-Israeli terrorism, which shows a complete lack of care for the lives of Israeli civilians, has also been doing a lot of posturing as if it's oh so moral, and therefore will no longer sell weapons to Israel. So here are a few reminders of why it's indeed nothing more than posturing:

As I mentioned, Canada is fine with resuming the funding of UNRWA, without this UN agency being properly investigated, and without any assuraance that the Canadian money going to it, won't end up responsible for the murder of innocent civilians in Israel, including ones with Canadian nationality.

Canada has resumed its sales of military-used systems to Turkey, despite the fact that its known these systems have been used against ethnic Armenians, simply because Turkey agreed to Sweden joining NATO, not because it promised to change in any way its use of these systems.

3. Canada isn't actually selling weapons to Israel, it's selling components for weapons, for an annual worth of about 22 million dollars. Meanwhile, Canada is buying weapon systems from Israel at an annual worth of about a billion dollars.

4. According to Israeli reporters, about 99% of Israel's weapons and weapon components are bought from 3 countries, Canada is not one of them. In other words, Canada's sales to Israel don't make up even 1% of Israeli military imports, and make little relative difference for Israel's ability to continue its war, but it does mean that while Canada says Israel has the right to self-defense, in practice it acts like Israel doesn't, which begs the question, why does the Canadian government think Israeli civilians don't deserve to be militarily defended from a genocidal, antisemitic terrorist organization? (to make the below screenshot clear: it shows the countries Israel has bought munitions from between 2019 and 2023, with Canada being just one of the countries that compose the yellow block of 1% of Israel's puchases. See how well you can spot it)

(here's a screenshot slightly zoomed in on the yellow block, to give you kind of a better view)

I'll add to this that Israel has already dealt in the past with full or partial weapons embargo from the US, France and 3 times from the UK. And Israel's still here, still with one of the strongest armies in the world (because we have no other choice). So yeah, that's how likely this embargo is to make a noticeable difference.

5. Here's an interesting op ed, suggesting that the ban was kind of in place anyway, explaining why Canada was selling so little to Israel in the first place, and that this official ban has more to do with internal Canadian politics, than whether Israel deserves the ban or not.

As US President Biden continues to berate Israel for not conducting our military operations well enough, obviously based on his extensive experience from his many years of not serving in the army, let alone leading one, I got to hear on TV an Israeli expert on our relations with the US reminisce on about the time when Biden was the Vice President, and in 2010 berated Israel for intending to take over a sailing ship by having IDF soldiers propel down ropes onto its deck. "You guys need to come here and learn from us how it should be done," Biden said, according to this expert. Israel took the suggestion seriously, and prepared a delegation of army seniors, ready to fly to Wasngton, meet up with US army seniors, and learn from them. Not long before the plane was about to take off, they got a phone call. "Don't come. Our apologies, but we've checked, and there's no other way our people would do it, either."

This is 22 years old Libby Cohen Meguri (on the left side of the pic) with her mom, Shelly.

On Oct 7, Libby was at the Nova music festival. Together with friends, she was fleeing the scene in a car, when the terrorists got to them. She managed to call her parents, and tell them that one of her friends is dead already, and she's been shot as well. "My biggest regret," Shelly said in a recent interview that I will never forget, "is that I didn't realize it was the end. I was screaming at my husband to do something, to save her, and that's how my daughter died, hearing me screaming instead of hearing me telling her that I love her. I'm not angry with myself for not understanding back then, because the truth is, I still don't understand. But I do regret it. Libby understood that it was the end. She was calm, she asked to talk to each one of us, to tell us all that she loves us. Then another group of terrorists got to the car. Her body was found outside the vehicle, with dozens of bullets in it. Killing her and her friends wasn't enough, they had to desecrate the bodies, too. But I'm not going to let those terrorists take being Libby's mom away from me. We work and do everything for our kids, so that's what I'll continue to do, I'll keep working to make sure that people know her, know who she was as a person. Libby's sister knew her IG password, so we turned her account into a commemoration page. Please, to anyone listening, go and have a look at it. Remember that such a wonderful girl as Libby existed. It would mean everything to us." I found Libby's IG page here.

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