Comment by JumpCrisscross
1 month ago
I think OP’s point is Israel’s legitimate surveillance needs have risen alongside their credibility crashing. This isn’t a simply reduced problem unless one has a horse in the race.
1 month ago
I think OP’s point is Israel’s legitimate surveillance needs have risen alongside their credibility crashing. This isn’t a simply reduced problem unless one has a horse in the race.
I understand that, and I am sympathetic to those needs to some degree. They do have increased legitimate surveillance needs. But they've lost all of their good will. Partnering with them is too morally and PR-ily hazardous.
I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, but I think this argument is overall kind of pointless because one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland.
> one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland
This is an interesting comparison—thank you.
That said, did the Poles launch cross-border attacks on German civilians? The closest I can come up with is Bloody Sunday [1], which was an attack on ethnically German civilians, but not a cross-border incursion. (Granted, we can only observe this ex post facto, so your argument still stands.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1939)
Israel's incursion into Gaza in October 2023 was more justifiable than Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, yes. I wasn't trying to provide a full comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel, and I prefaced the sentence appropriately. My only point is that a nation having legitimate surveillance needs to protect their soldiers' and civilians' safety isn't a reason to support their surveillance efforts by itself.
Why would being cross-border matter when the entire land was previously Palestinian land before being handed over by colonial powers and then "won" in subsequent "wars" (read: massacres) on the barely-armed villagers living there? The Viet Cong, South Africa's ANC, the Suffragettes and civil rights movements all used violence for their causes. Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with the occupation in 1948. If your country was occupied and members of your family killed, would you be as careful to keep your resistance peaceful?
10 replies →
There was the Warsaw uprising.
4 replies →
>I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany
oh, that's generous of you
Nah, it's pretty undeniable. But this is mainly because Nazi Germany was singularly more of a force for evil than any other nation or organization in many centuries. They were uniquely horrible. So it's hard for anyone to be as bad as they were.