Comment by tick_tock_tick

Militaries do that too. Signals Intelligence has been thing since radios were used by the military. I bet you that in Ukraine the moment you fire up any RF emitter it's showing up on someone's spectrum analyzer. And if it's unencrypted or a broken encryption they'll probably be decoding and logging the transmission.

Given lackluster response to the recent attempts of the "democratic" governments to do very much the same to their own citizens, I daresay not many are particularly impressed.

Additionally, there is observation AI face tracking of all movements of Palestinians in the West Bank, who live under occupation. While other governments may also conduct monitoring of their citizens to varying degrees, the distinction is that they are monitoring citizens, not using monitoring to enforce military apartheid.

And not in a war zone, even. (West Bank is governed by Israel.)

I case of Hezbollah it was very much worth it.

You're assuming the objective is to lower the civilian casualties. From the statements of prominent Israeli ministers and the actual behavior of the bombardment it's pretty clear that, for the Israeli government, killing civilians is a feature, not a bug

> Regardless, the death toll in gaza (somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000) suggests that this mass surveillance isn’t being used effectively to reduce the death toll.

Keep in mind deaths published by the Gaza(Hamas) ministry of health do not differentiate civilian vs combatant deaths at all.

Even the Gaza Health Ministry claims only 68,000, so I presume that your 600,000 is a typo.

While I agree the "who is more morally right" is owned to a higher degree by the Palestinians than the Israelis at the moment, I think people are missing a key shift in global politics.

Virtually all of the discourse on Israel-Palestine concerns moral righteousness or moral shame. I think the era of moral arguments in geopolitics is coming to an end, because the unipolar or Communist-Capitalist bipolar world combined with the Holocaust that enabled geopolitical moral arguments is basically dead.

It might just be my interest in global affairs spiking to avoid the constant bad news from the Trump administration, but I think we are entering a much more turbulent (and historically normal) period of realist/self-interest directed foreign policy. The US isn't around to be "good cop" (I can't emphasize the quotes around "good" enough).

I think this is why we are surrounded by the sense that authoritarianism is on the rise. The US won't care if you are democratic or authoritarian. The US won't care if you invade your neighbor if it doesn't disrupt them too much. Or the US just plain doesn't care at all.

So it's my general opinion that even if the Palestinians are more morally righteous in the great moral book-pounding, history-pointing, casualty-counting endless debate ... the era where that mattered has come to an end. Alas, I think we are entering a might-makes-right era of world politics, especially in the Middle East, and especially since the US has its own oil now from the Dakota shale fracking.

In 1945, about ~90k people died over 2 days from the Tokyo Firebombing. Do you think it would be difficult for any modern millitary - that intentionally wanted to cause as much collateral damage as possible - to greatly exceed that number?

Since the Oct 7 attacks the Palestinian population has not shrunk. War deaths have roughly equalled births.

Are you claiming that the IDF is trying their hardest to kill all the Palestinians they can, and that this is the best they can do? Really?