Why would a big tech company be hosting an event with a state committing genocide? That (and working with said regime) is the problem, not people protesting.
It's not possible to be a consumer brand and support Israel. The world is too divided and it's not getting any less so.
I don't agree with you and I'm actively boycotting all companies that work with Israel. This is why consumer brands can't support Israel, I'm not alone.
Both side in that war are behaving badly and nobody should take either side. I look forward to the day when allying with any theocracy is recognized as an ethical mistake.
Both sides have resorted to terrorism. In fact that seems to be the modus operandi for both sides. What Israel does every day is also terrorism. The random bombings on civilians, the targeted bombings on key entities (doctors, journalists, authors, peace activists, ....), the detention without judicial recourse of Palestinians, the torture and rape, beating and murder, that happens during those detentions. The stealing of homes in the west bank, the evictions, the harassment of non-Jews (and even some non-Zionist Jewish sects) in Jerusalem and the west bank. The illegal settlement and the constant bullying and taunting of the armed settlers with their rifles and their IDF body guards. The destruction of all Palestinian means of production, whether it be shops or olive orchards. That is all terrorism and that has been happening for decades.
But that the end of the day, Israel IS the oppressor and the Palestinians are their victims. That is a very important distinction.
Most major news outlets are still wildly pro-Israel. My and most people's opinions on the subject tend to not to drive from main stream media accounts, but research and journalistic investigations into the situation there.
I don't personally know anyone who has walked down the path of doing real research into the issue and not come out of it horrified with Isreal's actions and this has been long before Oct, 7 2023. Most people who are "fine" with the situation are the ones getting their opinions from the news.
> I don't personally know anyone who has walked down the path of doing real research into the issue and not come out of it horrified with Isreal's actions and this has been long before Oct, 7 2023.
I'm slightly ashamed to admit that until Israel's propaganda and genocidal response to the Al Aqsa Flood attack, I believed Israel were basically The Good Guys doing their best against terrorist neighbours. I feel like most people in the UK thought like that, and I rarely saw any negatively portrayals of Israel in the MSM.
From what I've learned since, I've been... horrified - and like you said, by their actions going way back.
The case against Israel brought forth by South Africa states quite clearly South Africa asserts Israel is violating the Genocide Convention [0]. The ICJ never corroborated this claim meaning there was not enough evidence to substantiate it.
ICJ was not asked to convict Israel of committing genocide. That was not in the initial ask.
The ask was to force Israel to stop its military operation.
The ICJ's provisional verdict was _actually pretty bad_ for Israel:
"The aforementioned facts and circumstances are sufficient to conclude that at least some rights of the Palestinians to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts in Article 3 of the Genocide Convention, and the rights of South Africa to seek protection of these rights."
It was to __prevent genocide__, not to determine guilt of committing genocide. This is going to take years, and it's going to be ongoing into the future. It is not going to happen while an incident is happening.
The ICJ explicitly said that there's enough evidence to merit this case.
Just 3 quotes from South Africa's case which I linked above:
"South Africa’s case is that those acts and omissions are genocidal in
character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy
Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group."
"South Africa is acutely aware of the particular weight of responsibility in initiating proceedings
against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention. However, South Africa is also acutely aware
of its own obligation — as a State party to the Genocide Convention — to prevent genocide. Israel’s
acts and omissions in relation to Palestinians violate the Genocide Convention."
" More gravely still, Israel has engaged in, is
engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those
acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on
them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group."
The ICJ case wasn't intended to say "yes/no" to "is Israel committing genocide?" - the purpose was see if there was that risk. They found there is a plausible risk that Israel is committing genocide.
US-backed Israel has recently been shown to have misrepresented itself to the ICJ multiple times - I can dig up a link later if you're curious.
And in January Netanyahu said: “No one will stop us, not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anyone else" - I don't think what the ICJ says matters one jot to US-backed Israel.
I won't go into what people have been able to see with their own eyes for the past 5 months, despite the incredible level of bias in MSM, censorship on social media, and the best efforts of Israel's Hasbara.
This is not accurate. The initial hearing was only to determine if there was a risk of genocide, and if any provisional measures were to be taken. An actual verdict on genocide could take several years.
The court ordered provisional measures that included:
"Take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
"Take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip"
Israel has shown utter contempt to the court, going by Netanyahu's words (e.g. "nobody will stop us... not the Hague..."), by senior ministers words, the IDF's actions, the actions of civilians blocking aid to starving people, the Gaza real-estate conferences, breaking the Geneva convention to parade prisoners held in their dungeons on national TV... almost every conceivable way, really.
I think the problem is that folks look at things in a bizarre black and white manner and see it as either 1.) Israel has every right to defend itself from further terrorist attacks and isn't doing anything wrong, or 2.) Israel has no right to retaliate at all.
I think the more moderate view is that Israel suffered a heinous terrorist attack perpetrated by a terrorist group in power. Israel has a right to defend their people from such attacks and a military response shouldn't be surprising given the extent of the crimes. However, the people in Gaza (non terrorists) are also human beings who should be treated that way. Not everyone supports the terrorist actions (apparently Hamas is incredibly unpopular amongst the people, but they have little discourse if they don't want to disappear) and the military response from Israel seems to have gotten to a point where children being blown up and starving to death somehow comes with the territory. Surely there is a way to reduce the casualties of innocent bystanders. Surely Israel should provide food and aid to the people after bombing all their infrastructure into the stone age.
I admit not being as informed as I should be, but just how many times are we going to have genocide before we learn to stop? Just since the Holocaust we've had genocide in Cambodia, Serbia, Rwanda, China, and now Gaza. In the more distant past it was even more common (e.g. trail of tears).
Just to correct you, the genocide was in Bosnia, not Serbia, as a culmination of years of ethnic cleansing of the muslim (and to a smaller extent the ethnic Croat) population of Bosnia by the Serbian ethnic group during the period of 1992-1995.
In a quiet email to the CEO which will promptly get deleted, and will never hit any big media or HN's frontpage is what a lot of commenters here would argue for.
Being "polite" is nice if the person you're talking to is also nice. If the guy wanted to bring attention to the fact he did it very well.
I mean, this may be a good way to take a stance, for someone who deeply cares about a particular issue. But it's also definitely going to result in being fired, from any company. The two things aren't incompatible. Lots of good ways to take a stance have deprived lots of people taking those stances of far more than just their jobs, like their freedom, temporarily in many cases (like Dr. King) and permanently in many others (like Navalny). Making a stand is often laudable, but also often personally consequential.
What US-backed Israel is doing is utterly abhorrent, and protesting makes sense; I can understand why an employee wouldn't want to aid them in any way - but with oil and gas off the coast of Northern Gaza, the US about to build a port for it, and the US, UK, France and Germany govs supporting Israel to the hilt, real sanctions are not going to happen. Hell, the west is still supplying Israel with weapons, and Israel hasn't even been kicked out of EuroVision!
But... one person disrupting a meeting will have limited effect, and is guaranteed to result in a firing.
IMO a better plan would have been a petition, signed by as many employees as possible. Failing that, looking at strike action through union(s) could be a good idea. A single employee has very little power - but if a significant number banded together, their power is much greater.
The manager's preferred way is with them in private so they can keep their thumb on the network effects and optics, or just bury it altogether.
Any means of generating substantive resonance within an org is jealously reserved by those at the top of an organizational hierarchy.
It's a Catch-22, but part of Activist 101. If you aren't drawing ire, getting retaliated against, or getting surveilled by someone, odds are you aren't being a terribly effective Activist.
Others have commented on different avenues and the consequence of it. I will introduce you to another way. Organizing. If you dislike a stance your company or community has, organize others that feel this way and plead your case to the company or community. Unions do this. Student Orgs do this. Political dissent does this. It's probably the most effective method for getting the unheard, heard.
The guy should have started a movement, or a group, using the points from the guest speaker on why they shouldn't have had that speaker, etc etc... This organization of people holds more weight than an individual. This is the way.
Almost every state now has at-will employment laws. The company doesn't need a reason to get rid of you.
I mean Aaron Bushnell could have written angry letters to his representatives, but he didn't. He lit himself on fire outside of the Israel embassy after declaring he would not take part in genocide and screamed "free Palestine" with his dying breath. And because of that, today I am writing about what he had to say.
If you think the correct response to genocide is politically discussing it with management then I don't think you really understand the gravity of the situation.
tech unions are unlikely to support random employees disrupting company events like this. they would instead provide an internal system for routing complaints in a consistent way.
Of course, one person's ethical stance is another person's inane diversion. Imagine someone started disrupting a PR event by calling Biden a pedophile or whatever the outrage du jour is. Do they deserve protections?
Sometimes people use the phrase "adults in the room" and I think anyone who is not capable of separating a specific issue from a specific policy or not adults. Clearly, as you said, it would be chaos if exceptions for not following rules were given at the discretion of how popular a political issue is.
If the person thinks the cause is worthy of being fired of that's completely their choice, but that doesn't mean the rule itself is immoral.
Honest question: Is this a common function of a union? For instance, I don't seem to recall hearing much about auto-workers taking ethical stances and being protected from termination by their union. But it's also not something I've paid much attention to, so maybe this is indeed something unions do. I'm genuinely curious.
Historically yes it is a massive part of what unions have done and continue to do. For example there have been many examples of dock workers refusing to transport South African or Israeli goods. That this is done as a collective action organised by union is what protects workers from individual retaliation.
Unions are to defend employees rights, not to defend ethical stance on random topic. For political issues there exists normal democratic process, where you can take your stance to the streets, boycott, vote, be elected etc. You must understand that stable and successful democracy is a sophisticated mix of checks and balances, including what powers are given to unions and worker councils. Give them too much power beyond the original scope and the consequences can be disastrous for society. Imagine pro- and anti-immigrant activists halting operations of a big business and you can do nothing to them, because taking one side will result in the protest from another side. What value does that bring? Don’t they have other venues?
I love the built in assumption there that generating value is more important than a stable polity.
Generation of value comes after people have settled themselves into a stable, working equilibrium. Prioritizing value creation above that is just adding a bias meant as a mechanism of control wirlded by those who have already "escaped" that control.
Look back at 1940's for indications of the attitudes when "Unions" were considered too powerful. Shipyard workers were striking for better working conditions at a time when much of the country were worried about the existential threat represented by the Axis Powers.
That war effort generated negative value by any sane definition. Yet the stability of the populace was so prioritized that we fairly effectively neutered the network effects of collective bargaining as a result. To a degree that any European union member would find befuddling. (And never had a concommitant restoration force after the existential pressure was dealt with. Funny how that ratchet works).
The 70's with the ATC strikes and the Administrative response were another example.
Stable and consenting polity > value creation. As evidenced by the fact we will destroy value to achieve a new working equilibrium to build from.
Mass layoffs are part of the Faustian bargain you accept when you sign the offer letter to work at the behemoths of capitalism. These are the biggest like top 10 companies in the whole world.
It’s just business.
But then again even those making 400k plus TC make appeals to emotion instead of rational thinking.
There are plenty of jobs for these people where they can make 200k TC and not risk getting fired, which is still a good salary.
If you want more and more, you must play with the devil. It’s really not that complicated.
I'm not specifically saying layoffs are good or bad, I was giving an example of how something being common (layoffs) doesn't automatically make it good (it's of course not good for the fired people).
Of course, certainly not for many of the fired people (although depending on severance and situations--once I would have been happy to have been laid off). And layoff, and the way they're conducted, can certainly be conducted poorly and with less empathy than is called for. (Though, in reality empathy mostly=money in this context.)
Sure, common practice doesn’t mean it’s automatically right but it is an indication that it’s generally accepted for reasons that may be valid. So it’s reasonable evidence to cite, and is a method of explaining that your argument now has to account for the general case.
I partially/mostly agree, I think it's more of "it's good enough because it's either good or it's close enough to not bother speaking/complaining/doing anything about it". Eg targeted ads are accepted, but banning them takes massive effort and "people can use ublock anyway". But yeah that's splitting hairs.
Sure, I'm not in favor of them but neither do I consider them right or wrong for all parties. But the parent comment seemed to imply that firing him was justified, because any company would do the same. I disagree with the part about it being justifiable just because it is a common practice.
I'm confused by your logic here, the fact that all other big tech companies would do something is hardly grounds for considering an action "right" in any moral framework I know of.
"Unsurprisingly so" I can get behind. But "rightfully" is a stretch I wouldn't agree with.
The most common, plain meanings of the phrase “rightfully so” do imply a basis in morality.
It’s fair to say that it can mean that the “rightness” is derived from other sources, but pretending that the primary meaning of the phrase doesn’t imply morality is just being intentionally obtuse.
Lotta people reading this comment as if it is taking a moral stance (siding with Google). I didn't read it that way but rather as a comment on the state of the current environment. Did I misread?
The wording and tone are common for broad agreement, both practical and moral (curtness, appeal to popularity, etc). Otherwise, one would normally use a wording that expresses the scope of one's tone, e.g. "Regardless of the issue, I think it's the right call to resort to firing to enforce this rule."
(It's hard to come up with a good example that demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about, because the topic is highly subjective, highly emotional, and has a few different angles. There are a million different things the parent could have said to communicate an attitude that doesn't imply an emotional, moral, or political distaste for the context of the protest itself. My example isn't necessarily "correct" for the parent.)
Yeah that's fair. I could see it going either way. But I think when ambiguous it doesn't hurt to ask. And there's a lot of fighting and arguing so I'd rather ask than escalate conflict if there is a misunderstanding. I think we all know how easy it can be to miscommunicate.
The employee clearly wanted to be fired, wanted to vilify the company, and wanted the news to broadcast the matter.
Who in their right mind who says “I refuse to build technology that ____” wouldn’t already be planning to quit barring outrageous hypocrisy? Who in their right mind screams it out in the middle of a presentation without expecting to be dragged out?
Quite possible, in which case he's likely achieved his goal.
Personally I don't think firing him helps Google's PR, rather it makes them look even more "evil". (To clarify, I am NOT saying that it is unexpected for a company to fire such a person. Expectations != what's the morally correct != reality, I'm just commenting on a part of the equation.)
It used to be, at work one would not talk about politics or religion. And, to some degree, salaries... but that was thrown out the window and companies encouraged activism, bring your pets to work, bring your freakishness to work, let it all hang out. You didn't just keep it to yourself and best friends anymore --the company was "your family and friend".
The chickens are coming home to roost and they don't like it so much anymore.
During a keynote speech, an employee in the company’s cloud division protested publicly, proclaiming “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.” The Google Cloud engineer was subsequently fired, CNBC has learned, marking another dark moment for Google
In grade school, it was universally known that if you use violence before attempting to run away, you're getting in trouble. I don't know why companies haven't made an equally clear universal rule that "if you say something publicly before running it by us, you're getting fired".
There's a difference between standing up in the middle of a PR session and violence, much like there's a difference between whatever might happen in a school and what Google is doing.
because the company pitched itself as "socially responsible" and attracted a large number of people who believed they could work there and change the world to look like what they wanted it, and then google sort of changed directions for business purposes that aren't compatible.
Also I think the "we are all Google" borg/hivemind thing plays a part, other companies like Amazon or Apple are organized more like a lot of smaller companies so when people join they have different expectations towards corporate and feedback up and down and internal dissent work different.
For the record they changed it to (paraphrasing) "googlers shouldn't do evil" without much commentary at the time but significantly shifting the emphasis away from the corporation to individual employees. From a mission statement to HR guideline.
Because many other kinds of companies have unions that give the employees a means to redress issues without such stunts. Our tech lord masters have done a good job of convincing us in the industry that crushing unions as if they were the robber barons of the past is a good idea.
Google deliberately instituted a cultural policy where employees were told to "bring your whole self" to work. The belief was that a person does their best work (and the company performs best as a result) when people bring the totality of their values and interests to work. This made it so internal discussion forums covered topics that would be completely inappropriate at most other workplaces, and people are encouraged to voice their opinions in company meetings. Likewise, there was a spirit (in principle though definitely not in practice) of "everyone here is equal," which again encourages people to be very loud.
I don't have a good answer although I will say that in past such stories discussions about internal forums of various types, some employees came to say that the more "advocacy" (I don't know of a good word here) type forums were dominated by a few voices and had relatively low participating rate compared to say ... everyone who could participate. They indicated that many employees had / wanted nothing to do with those forums.
In this example we have one person, that might be telling.
So while it might be a problem, I'm not sure how widespread it is.
Because it encouraged people "to bring your whole self to work", and during previous years it supported and encouraged employee being vocal and protecting about certain issues. They like to "amplify" certain voices and suppress others, so to speak. It's in their DNA both as a company culture as well as their main business - moderating social sites.
What some employees haven't quite learned yet is how to read between the lines. They are certain topics which are ok to protest and be vocal about, but others, are not, like unions or this case. To be safe, it's better to think of "bring your whole self to work" as a gullibility trap. It may not be that, but effectively it will function as such. It catches the naive troublemakers so later on they can be filtered out.
Agree, it was part of the culture, and now it is a trap. Googlers will learn pretty quick (with examples like these) that their freedom from the old days is gone.
Because smart moral people don't let themselves be used for evil and smart people also have options to work elsewhere. The guy knew he was going to get fired and he did not care because he was already determined not to work for an evil employer.
He could have left quietly, but he decided to take a personal hit to bring awareness to the issue. That makes him a hero in my eyes.
I admit I think there are reasons beyond that. I realize it's anecdotal, but I rarely hear about this type of event at Amazon or Microsoft or even Apple. Google attracts a lot of disputes like this.
I would speculate it has something to do with what age range they like to hire or their branding. But I'm not sure.
Because computer science was one of the most in demand fields for many years, attracting the most ambitious and talented undergrads -- that is to say, the average google employee is pretty well educated likely via a liberal education institution.
Those who are educated are more able to clearly understand the consequences of their actions or inactions and understand lack of solidarity for others means lack of solidarity for yourself.
The purpose of liberal education is to teach people how to critically think and build a world that they themselves would like to live in, so when a liberally educated ambitious person realizes that they are contributing to building a lesser world it becomes problematic and they correctly feel a need to take responsibility for building a better future.
Add in a legacy of declaring that "don't be evil" is a founding principle and you are going to find people being pretty upset about being lured in with promises of social responsibility and like-minded peers, only to find an ethically devoid pursuit of next quarters profit that can be found at nearly any company in America.
Do you think any other company wouldn't fire an employee who made a scene at a PR event?
I suspect, though, that in most companies the employees already know what would happen, and would not do things like that - first, because they don't feel entitled using the company's resources for personal goals, and second - because the consequences may be too heavy for them. But in Google, one probably can be both rich enough already to be fired and not sweat about it too much, and entitled enough to feel like something like this is the right thing to do.
Who says it's not a problem in other companies? I think it just doesn't make the news as much.
At my previous company, at an offsite retreat, one of the guys got drunk and started chewing out the company's founders and the main office manager. Sure enough, he was fired by the time the retreat was over, and was never seen in the office again. A similar thing happened to someone who had a huge blowout argument and emailed the entire company his manifesto (of sorts).
This seems pretty reasonable as falling under the “unprofessional behavior” intelligent behavior.
In my org, if I disrupted someone’s presentation over any topic I’d be fired. Or maybe severely reprimanded.
This behavior surprises me because these are private orgs. So doing unprofessional things will result in firings or whatnot.
It seems odd to me that people think it’s appropriate to protest within a company. If you don’t want to “build technology that powers genocide” (kind of comical considering how huge and pervasive google is) then quit. Similarly if I don’t want to make bombs, I shouldn’t work for a bomb company.
Finally, it just seems stupid to think this would change corporate decision making. What kind of reasoning and logic ends up with “disrupt a meeting -> google changes business policy regarding Israel?”
Regarding your last question: we just went through a period where shaming people publicly had huge effects. However, partially as a result of that, and other important factors, people changed their tolerance and rage parameters in a way that is less likely to call for change in the progressive direction.
It's appropriate to protest within a company, because human beings are free to choose what is important enough to their own personal values to be worth taking actions that will have consequences, and to choose which actions they believe are worth doing. But certainly the base case expectation people should have is that such actions will result in being fired. And personally I also agree with you that this does not turn out to be a very effective form of protest. But people get to make their own choices!
I don't know the opinions of this particular speaker but my feelings towards the actions of the Israeli government make me opposed to any business relationship with that country until they end their genocide against Gaza.
It says he was protesting Project Nimbus which is Google cloud/AI for the Israeli government and military.
You can also see the conference he was attending itself hardly shies away from the political/military connections, e.g.
“The Israeli tech ecosystem is built on very strong foundations. We have the academia, we have the manpower, and we have the special military units,” said Dina Pasca-Raz, Partner and Head of Technology at KPMG Israel. “There are many, many areas of strength [0]
Israel's ambassador to the UN also gave an extremely emphatic "no ceasefire" speech at this totally apolitical Google-sponsored tech conference with no connection to the war.[1]
My questions weren't just rhetorical, there is nothing in the posted article about the political connection of the meeting / conference that was disrupted.
Cloud computing and AI technology is at the heart of the modern battlefield.
Let's say it was a speech by the Google Palestine director in charge of selling cloud computing and AI technology to the military wing of Hamas, at a conference where a Hamas spokesman was also giving a speech. Would you also consider there to be no political connection there?
If you support the Palestinian peoples and the cause for peace or one of the various proposed solutions for long term peace, there’s no problem. Debate and differing opinions are expected.
Hamas though is a terrorist organization. Internationally recognized as such almost universally. They started this war with rape, murder, and kidnapping of innocent civilians. If you do business with them you’re breaking the law. If you give voice to them or publicly support them you are an enemy not only of your own country, but of peace and good sense. I have nothing but the harshist judgement for someone openly claiming to support Hamas.
If I found out my company had relations with Hamas I wouldn’t protest, quit, or cause a scene, I’d call the FBI. That is not a political issue, it is a serious legal and moral issue.
> Hamas though is a terrorist organization. Internationally recognized as such almost universally.
I have to correct you on the latter because these details matter. According to the Wikipedia page about it [0], it is designated as a terrorist group by Israel, USA and the 5 eyes, the European Union organization, Japan, Argentina and Paraguay. That is essentially Israel, USA and countries that are under direct American influence through NATO, which is far from "almost universally", and really is a smaller fraction of countries in the United Nations.
Your parent has been flagged to death, but they are simply wrong. All ceasefire agreements so far have called for the release of all hostages. By far the majority of released hostages got their freedom via a temporary ceasefire. A call for ceasefire is by extension a call for the release of hostages.
Hamas has always maintained that they are willing to release the hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.
On the international stage it is actually the actors who are against ceasefire (primarily the USA) who have vetoed all resolutions which calls for the release of hostages.
It is actually the reverse, those against a ceasefire are those who are preventing the hostages from being freed.
I think it completely make sense. Google is private company and it was private event. No matter how important your message, you cannot go to any event stop people from doing business.
All power to that engineer. From an HR standpoint, Google might be right, in the same way that VW would have been right to fire an employee who disrupted meetings when they built cars for the Nazi regime.
Another big tech, big money, little conscience problem. So disappointing that there is so much willingness to make money regardless of what it supports but that that courtesy is not extended to those who do the actual money making.
This doesn't exactly work when companies themselves make political stances. When companies grow larger than nationstates they are inherently political.
A lot of work can be inherently political. If your company pivots into mass surveillance is it unreasonable to speak up if it's against your ethics framework?
That's the beauty of the free market, you have the freedom of choice. You can vote with your wallet or your feet. You can leave if your personal ethics and morality no longer align with the organization you're working for. A business doesn't owe you a paycheck simply because you think you're on the moral high ground.
I'm not saying you're entitled to a paycheck - a company has the right to fire you for your differences in politics. But if you frame it as a relationship, communication can help both sides as long as it's done with some mutual understanding. There are times companies listen to their employees and change their stance. And if they don't then you still have the ability to leave. That said it also matters how differences in views are expressed, I doubt there are many cases where yelling is effective..
It’s perhaps a cultural difference. I grew up in an era (90s, 00s) where people who were overly political were mocked and ridiculed. Certainly you’d never run into it in the workplace. That’s not to say you should never voice your political beliefs, but there is a time and a place for it.
What that means is "only status quo opinion and politics". It's implicit support of the mainstream ethos of corporate America, one which has well established it values profits over people.
Management works to serve those corporate interests, so it is in their interest to convey the message that the appropriate thing to do is be silent and comply.
Google dug itself into a hole where they hired a bunch of DEI folks when it was trendy, but now that that turned out to be just another psuedo-religion, they are trapped in a religious mire.
It's like hiring a bunch of Christians because the "Jesus loves you" PR angle was hot at the time, and now almost a decade later your company struggles to acknowledge the existence of gay people. Don't hire ideologues, especially en masse.
The faster google can get these people out the door, the better. Focus on the tech, not social issues.
There's politics and then there's writing code that some Israeli fascist might directly plug into a system that will decide which apartment complex to bomb next.
At best he is simply wrong, everything is political, at worse he means only your politics. Picture it like this: Surely the owner of the company may be almost as political as they want? Your obedient acceptance would then be a political choice.
Its just a job they lost, its not like they are 5 years old, watched their parents slowly bleed out after bombardments while starving to death - mkay?
Its arguably a good way to get fired. Even said they want no part in it.
> My old manager put it best: No politics and religion in the workplace.
No politics for you. The corporate strategy, governance, hiring, dealmaking, etc... will all be politically informed. All your work will contribute to the political beliefs of leadership. It's such a strange abstraction to believe that you're somehow separate from that.
When I have my client's money rattling around in my bank account, I find other avenues to express my annoyance with them. Mainly complaining to my wife :) If the annoyance becomes unbearable, I quietly find some new position to work at.
It's ingratitude at some level. If workers should not be grateful to their employers for their jobs, that's a different conversation, but yeah, sabotaging an external PR event -- what employer is going to giggle, clap, and congratulate this person's "bravery" ?? termination had to be expected here.
Amusingly, the employee now gets 6+ months of unemployment benefits to contemplate the means of their activism.
"No politics" mostly means only politics that suit those in power. E.g fundraisers for Ukraine is, but not fundraisers for Gaza. Company-sponsored LGBTQ events, but none about collective bargaining rights.
Google did this to themselves by spending years encouraging radical politics at work. They harmed themselves, maybe irrevocably, and the entire industry by normalizing this behavior.
Now it's politics they don't like and they want to close Pandora's box. I feel no pity for them or the fired employee.
This is why we have social norms to keep politics private.
No, of course not, and I don't even think you meant that question in good faith.
More explicitly: you can be (and are encouraged to be) anti-genocide at google. However, disrupting a public company meeting is definitely a fireable offense.
Why not? Palestinian children are exploded into a million pieces and scattered throughout the road and rubble by US-funded munitions signed with pithy 3000 year old history lessons, the least we can do is accept the wanton disregard for human life by America's most important ally is akin to others in our modern history.
And that still sucks. For me, it's a principles thing. Personally, I think charging Israel with "genocide" is stupid. But I also think it's shitty he got fired. But I also think companies have a right to fire people. Short of some insight or prescription coming out of those set of opinions, it just makes me hate Google more than I already did. :D
Doesn't being complicit in a plausible-Genocide bring about reputational, and by extension financial, damage to the business?
Therefore by your standards the GCP execs relating to engagements to the Israeli Einsatzgruppen Force and their co-conspirators (including the U.S military) should be fired.
Why do zionists have unlimited justifications for executing a holocaust against the prisoners of the Gaza death camps just so zionists can expand their illegitimate lebensraum?
I'm not saying it is, but technically, yes, it could play a role. For example, US-backed Israel has used an AI system to decide where to drop bombs. They likely need lots of storage for videos of their drones killing people. They likely used databases with the locations of journalists so they could murder them. Just a few examples, but compute and storage can definitely play a part.
As an unrepentant racist who's bored enough to post about your racist beliefs on Hacker News, you're overly political and naive, so who are you to talk?
>It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
And this is a quote that ever technologist should also know. Anyway Israel is hardly engaged with a genocide currently, and even if it was there is absolutely no evidence that google cloud is having any kind of participation in it.
So once again - just political grandstanding like the dimwits that throw soup at the mona lisa and glue themselves to the asphalt that think that this performative crap is cost free. Thankfully this time it was not cost free.
Wouldn't this be expected? He announced himself as a Google employee and this "represented." I do think it is dumb we act as if some random employee acts as a representative for their company, but here we are with all our social media taglines "my views are that of my own and not of my sugar daddy." I'll totally stand by these peoples' rights to make such protests. You gotta ruffle some feathers for what you believe in. But ruffling feathers has consequences. (This is regardless of my views on the situation, which is that there are no good/righteous sides in a war).
Works at Google and says he *refuses to build technology that enables surveillance*!? Who do you think you've been working for?
I've been acutely aware for a very long time that anything I post on the Internet or say at a conference, whether explicitly public or to people who are all trusted to keep it private (and good luck with that as they repeat it to one or two people), could be attributed to me as a company employee in print. Maybe you get far enough away from your professional context or have a pseudonymous personal social media account but it's pretty risky to believe there is any hard separation between personal and professional sphere. And this is not a new thing.
I'm not saying it is a new thing or even a weird thing. I just think this it is odd that anyone would assume an employee of a company is a meaningful representative of a company and its values unless that employee is explicitly speaking on the company's behalf in their specialized role. Like a company spokes person, or an engineer giving a presentation at an event the company sent them as a representative to (and even then I'd only see them as a technical representative).
It was more side commentary on how any large organizational structure is non-homogeneous. I mean we can say the same about countries: America, Israel, Palestine, China, Russia, <insert whatever here>. I believe we have words for aggregating (pigeon holing) the views of diverse nonhomogeneous groups based on a shared physical attribute of said group that has no causal relationship to said views. A person is not their {company,country,race,religion,political group} or many other things. I thought that was the point of our cultural progression: to recognize that a tree is not a forest. Even if it can help to talk about a forest at times, it would be absurd to think all the trees are the same. Must be pretty dense ;)
I'm all for some good old civil disobedience as far as every day choices go in the outside world.
However, I also think if you're employed somewhere there are reasonable expectations as far as workplace behavior goes that would prohibit the same "protest" or "civil disobedience" type behavior.
It is interesting that the protestor immediately declares that they don't wan to work for such a company. It sorta begs the question of "Then why do you?". It seems like their choice is obvious.
I partially agree, depending on the topic being protested. I was writing a reply to the above commenter before it got killed, but it is an open question to all who oppose such demonstrations.
> Would you have any suggestions of what else could the guy have done, that would've brought similar media attention to the topic?
> The line between "annoying/childish protestors" and "folks legitimately raising awareness" is ill defined for me, perhaps if anyone else has better suggestions I would be happy to hear them.
The trouble is that "reasonable expectations" are set by those in power. Slave overs set "reasonable expectations" for slaves, feudal lords set "reasonable expectations" for peasants.
In such a world "reasonable expectations" by their nature foster a continuation of the existing power structures. Behavior that challenges "reasonable expectations" does so precisely because of the belief that the continuation of the status quo as perpetuated by those in power has become untenable.
Many people "reasonably expect" nations and companies to not be complicit in genocide, where is their recourse?
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Surely you recognized there is a context to the "no interrupting meetings" guideline. The protester felt that meeting was playing part in the support and facilitation genocide, I think that's adequate grounds to interrupt a meeting.
And what do you find absurd about the "slave owner" comparison? I'm not arguing that modern day employment is slavery or anything of the sort, just pointing out that the terms of "reasonable expectations" are always defined by those in power, and not once in history has working within "reasonable expectations" caused a shift in those power dynamics.
Nobody owes you or anybody to validate your beliefs. Employee, however, owes the company certain standards of behavior. If you violate them, you get fired, and can continue holding your beliefs outside of employment.
There are none. Power is the currency of the world. I don’t personally like it. However I want to see the world as it is and not live in a make believe fantasy bubble.
Laws and rules are created and enforced by people in power. They are designed to force the less powerful to behaving in a certain way. It has nothing to do with “morals” or “justice”. You might happen to agree morally with certain laws or rules and not with others. However that doesn’t matter unless you are powerful enough to change those laws.
In the case of companies, the people in power can make whatever rules they want. Unless more powerful people (the government/large groups of costumers/powerful unions) threaten the company with repercussions if those rules aren’t changed.
Imagine (for example) a group of Vegans becoming powerful enough to outlaw eating meat. With heavy penalties (including death by execution) for anybody buying or selling meat for consumption. That is absolutely something that could happen. With the most extreme Vegans feeling morally justified in enforcing those rules. The only thing stopping this from happening is their lack of power.
Another example is religion. Do as your told or you will go to hell. If you truly believe there is a hell then this threat is the most extreme usage of power you can possible imagine. We are talking about being tortured all the time in every conceivable way forever.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that because you took a position, you forfeit any rights to decide a company has crossed your ethical line in the sand, or that you shouldn’t use a unique opportunity–even at your own risk–to appeal to other employees and leadership to adjust course. Growing up, I was told by family, mentors, educators that you effect change from within. Protest only when it’s safe and convenient is easily dismissed thus counterproductive.
It’s up to the individual to decide if this employee was right or wrong about the issue at hand, but puzzling over whether or not they’re some sort of fool for strongly believing in something seems a bit obtuse.
He could have worked on the inside, but it would have taken years of hard work building his credibility and power within the organization.
He chose a much simpler path. Disruptively virtue signal knowing he would be fired. Now he can slide into a smaller progressive tech company where he will be lauded for his virtue, used by the company for PR, and ultimately not judged by the quality of his work.
This was a thoughtfully orchestrated career strategy first, protest second. It was well done and I think he’s set himself up nicely for the next 5-10 years.
If you disagree and think he was risking his future instead of securing it, I would humbly ask why? Both the media and Google’s response were 100% predictable.
If I were him I’d try to move into a fuzzy, semi-technical role with some public presence. Something like DevRel seems the ideal target and maximizes the PR benefit for his employer.
So, immediate termination is ok for just yelling a few words, none of them being an f word against the CEO? I think they could just reprimand him and not fire him. This company is becoming a fear- and power-fueled autocracy of the board. Which won't bring any good to them.
Depending on the words, yes. Obviously, they disagree on what is the best way for the company to behave. In this case, the management of the company, by definition, has the priority, and if the differences are large enough, ending the employment relationship looks like the right way to go. Working at google is not some kind of right that belongs to everyone, it's a relationship between two sides, and each side can end it. Staging a protest on a keynote sounds like a good reason to end it.
To Gaza? That's an interesting idea, but I don't think it'd work out very well.
> Remind employees they can work in other areas?
I don't think somebody who can't figure that out by themselves is really a very valuable asset. But also I don't think that's the problem. The person did that not because they weren't aware there are other people in Google working on other things - literally everybody is aware on that. They didn't just requested a transfer to another group. They staged a protest because they wanted to influence Google's decisions by publicly threatening the withdrawal of their contribution. Turns out, Google is ok with that scenario. When you bluff, you should always consider what happens if you're called.
> Google had shutdown the private forum without a proper discussion
As I understand, the reverse had happened - the forum was overflown with the inflammatory activist messaging having no relation to the topic it has been created for, and had to be shut down, because it could no longer serve the function it was created for. "Proper discussion" has never been the activists' intent (and in general, experience teaches us these kinds of activists are a lot more into shutting down and deplatforming opponents than properly debating them). Not that Google has ever lately been on the frontlines of enabling proper discussion - as most major tech companies, they have abandoned this idea years ago in favor of serving as a gatekeepers and the pretorian guard - but in this particular case, it seems to be pretty clear no proper discussing was intended.
> What if they were denouncing racism?
What if Google was literally run by Hitler? You can always make an inflammatory hypothetical. But I don't see much point in discussing it - there's an infinite things that could happen, you can't discuss them all. Better to concentrate on things that are actually happening.
I'm sorry. You sound like a Google activist. No offence intended.
> Offer to relocate the employee first?
> Remind employees they can work in other areas?
I was not clear with the meaning of that.
I was thinking of rethorical public speech. As part of de escalation and call for order. Pulling the trigger first and asking later is an explict toxic culture manifestation.
You shouldn't be yelling at your boss's boss's boss in a large company forum. That's rank insubordination, and easily punishable with firing. Hell it could be punished with much worse than insubordination in other kinds of organizations; imagine a private yelling at a general when the entire corps is being reviewed.
Companies are indeed hierarchical, and sometimes it feels like people forget that. You can indeed be fired at any time, and this is exactly the kind of situation you can put yourself in to have it happen to you.
Army consequences are not comparable (Jail or death vs unemployment), hierarchy is absolute and clear (nobody is "his own manager"), no BS discourse (speak your mind, we respect rights, etc) You can't resign as easily, specially when deployed
> immediate termination is ok for just yelling a few words, none of them being an f word against the CEO?
Context matters. If someone just called the CEO an f-word in public, that’s one thing, and imo it doesn’t necessarily deserve getting fired on its own.
But interrupting a major conference during a keynote, and then saying those things? Yeah, that would land you into trouble, almost no matter what you said.
I fully and honestly believe that even if the employee took the pro-Israel stance with their “interrupt the keynote” protest, they would have been fired just the same.
"In recent weeks, more than 600 Google workers signed a letter addressed to leadership asking that the company ..."
Old twitter post acquisition would have terminated those 600 employees, too?
I hope "west" society isn't demanding either obedience or cancelling your ideas. That much happens in Venezuela.
It would be morally correct to allow a little leeway for expressing a shared opinion, then call for order, and remind collaborators to follow proper channels to "continue discussion". And, of course, not shutting down nor ignore such continued discussion.
This just shows that employees have 0 power and companies like Google are more than ready to fire you if you get in their way.
Businesses that live and breathe billions do not care and any attempt to cave into employee demands, then the investors will move in and force it through their changes. (Especially public companies)
You can't have employees disrupting company events to promote their political causes. This guy absolutely should be fired, and I'd be saying the same thing if his message had been pro-Israel.
Write an open letter with signatures of many of your colleagues, or in extreme cases organize a walk-out or a strike in protest. Don't disrupt a meeting by yelling that you refuse to do your job, especially when it seems the meeting had nothing at all to do with the war and it was just that the presenter was Israeli and working in Israel... that's not so much a protest and more just racist.
You work in tech, probably in silicon valley. It was created by the department of defense.
Unfortunately lost in the debate over free speech & how private companies have a "right" to suppress people with certain viewpoints is the amount of power these tech companies have over us - I would argue that Google has more power over us now than King George III had over his subjects in 1773, and certainly has more power in stifling information and suppressing speech. Americans can tut-tut Russia and China for suppressing dissent, but American corporations are doing the same thing, just with a different coat of paint. New boss, same as the old boss.
>I would argue that Google has more power over us now than King George III had over his subjects in 1773
This is not the first time I have seen bizarre hyperbole like this - it's quite strange. Russia, China, and King George III all have and had people killed for dissent. Google didn't murder this engineer, imprison him, or anything of the sort. They just stopped paying his salary.
No, you're right. In Russia, China and 18th century England, suppression of speech is done either out the barrel of a gun or whisking people off to jail. In America it's done by sending the speaker to the unemployment line, or the food bank, or the homeless shelter - it's very likely that this employee will be blacklisted by the industry and never have the opportunity to live a stable life again. Apparently this outcome is fair & just, because the government wasn't involved.
I really doubt that Google has the power to blacklist someone from the industry, or that they would take steps to do so in this instance even if they did have such power. I have yet to see an example of Google doing so or anything that makes me believe they have such power.
Even if they did - it would be a significantly lesser power than the ability to execute people, and would belong to the 'low justice' in a feudal era, not 'high justice' which the King possessed. So rather than the power of King George, Google would have the power of a Manorial Court.
really hoping dang doesn't let this get flagged off the front page like similar threads on this subject, even though it's obviously contentious. this is a conversation that needs to be had and also recorded for posterity.
If this guy thinks what Google is doing is "powering genocide", and Google is not going to change what it does, then he is just saying he's not going to do his job, right? So this move allows him to not work on powering genocide.
I mean I’m sure he was hoping that it would change somebody’s mind, but you’ve got to know that’s a long shot.
Is there a word for the "If I don't get paid for building a baby-killing-machine someone else will" type of regressive attitude that many self-deluded contrarians exhibit in the tech industry? Many such people would be diligent VW/Mercedes/Tesch and Stabenow/Degesch employees during WW2.
Imagine being such a pseudo-contrarian that you say you'd be an employee of the makers of Zyklon B (Tesch and Stabenow/Degesch) with the words "I would, with no regrets".
You mistake manufacturing Zyklon B like a good little wagie for professionalism. You also mistake a moral position as conformism, which enables you to make immoral (by your own standards) statements.
You do not need to act in favor of something if you don't want to publicly oppose it. You can quietly do a shoddy job, for example. But if you value professionalism over human life... I don't really have much to comment on.
I suppose the only similarity between us in this regard is that if we had to choose between humanity and professionalism, neither of us would have a doubt.
Israel is an inherently inequitable and therefore likely terminally conflict-ridden ethnostate. Israel is a reasonable reaction to a long and terrible history of ethnic persecution. What's going on in Gaza is an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack. There are players on both "sides" of this conflict that are driving it because they actually want the conflict, people who never wanted it and desperately want it to stop, and most are caught like bits of air in this conflict hurricane that even the head of state in a world hegemonic power can do scarcely more to dictate terms to than an actual hurricane.
I don't know what the answer is, and I appreciate the urgency of feeling that causes people to protest, but at this point I'm pretty sure most protest gestures do little other than feed the tribal vortex at the heart of the hurricane, especially the farther away from any actual leverage points on the dynamic that they are. And an Israeli tech exec existing and doing tech exec things is probably not close to a leverage point, nor is protesting them doing tech exec things doing anything worth levering.
Yeah, the Google employee should've done this in front of Biden or Bibi. Nevermind feeling as though they had no choice but to protest in whatever way they could against a plausible-genocide.
> an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack.
I think this is important to reiterate. Because forces us to pay close attention to the details. There are extremely reasonable justifications for both sides because both sides have committed atrocities. This conflict goes a long way back and I'm in no position to claim who started it. But I can recognize that one atrocity does not justify another. I can recognize that justifying or dismissing the committing of an atrocity only further enables the conflict. Whichever side you land on, if you do not take a highly nuanced approach you are only further enabling conflict. For that's a key reason the conflict continues today. War always includes psychological warfare because you have to convince humans to do the inhumane. There is no such thing as a righteous war.
War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
- [0]
There has never nor ever will be justification on the side of an occupying force to fight back against armed resistance against oppression on stolen land.
Israel didn’t collect taxes out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ve collected them due to the Oslo Agreement, giving Israel the power to collect the taxes. This allows Israel to control the tap and punish the Palestinians whenever they see fit, as they’ve done over and over again for years.
This line of logic is so low level, why did a non-governmental party..not build a government..in a walled off open air camp...where an occupier controls what goes in or out & has destroyed things like seaports & airports.
Your argument isn't very strong either. Gaza wasn't walled off forever. The walls were built in response to attacks from Gaza into Israel. No attacks and there'd be no wall.
Israel didn't occupy Gaza so how is an "occupier" controlling everything? What about Egypt? If Israel controlled everything then how did lathes for making rockets, trucks, machine guns, RPGs, grenades, assault rifles, mines, get to Gaza?
Your "open air camp" is my "Singapore". It was up to the Gazans to decide what to do on this piece of land they were given control over. Even if they aspire to have the entire of Mandatory Palestine they could have chosen not to do this using violence.
Israel didn't destroy airports or seaports. Gaza never had a deep seeport, the water is shallow, and the fishing ports exist. Israel does have a naval blockage on Gaza so that Hamas couldn't get tanks and artillery and more weaponry in to attack it with, a fairly reasonable position. Similarly Israel will not allow airplanes to fly in either, for the same reasons.
I'm not following on "non-governmental party", didn't Hamas win the elections and rule Gaza as its government?
> Up until Hamas attacked Israel, Palestine relied on Israel to collect taxes. Collecting taxes is the bmost basic government function there is.
> Hamas had twenty years to become a government. It was uninterested in doing so.
This isn't true. Hamas taxes the inhabitants of Gaza [0].
Israel collects taxes on imports and exports from Gaza, and income tax on the pay of Gaza residents who were employed inside Israel. But transactions which occur entirely inside Gaza are not taxed by Israel, only by Hamas.
It's not an ethnostate either. There's 2 million muslim arab people living in Israel with full citizenship and all the rights that go with it--including the right to vote in democratic elections. It's no more an ethnostate than, say, France or Germany.
But, to be fair, there is some validity to the idea that it's an ethnostate, in that there is automatic "right of return" only to ethnic Jews. Not to mention there is some legal discrimination against non-Jews (like the new nation-state law) and also a whole lot of non-legal discrimination.
I don't agree with this reasoning - but the situation is complicated so I understand why some people argue otherwise. Like you, I'd say that Israel is just like France - it defined some group of people to be citizens (or the equivalent of "expat" citizens), which included all Jews in the world, and also included the non-Jews on the land at the time. And from then on, acted like any other state. This is very similar to France/Germany/anyone (and Zionism was started as part of the same worldwide move towards nationalism).
> What's going on in Gaza is an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack.
Why is one a humanitarian tragedy but the other an unnacceptable attack. You're trying to absolve Israel of its role in the killing of 30,000 civilians over 5 months, to the condemnation of the entire world.
Israel is not entitled to kill civilians under any circumstances, not even if Hamas makes it hard to attack Hamas directly. If you look at the statements of Israeli leaders, it is clear that the killing of Palestinians is intentional [1]. As has been the long policy of apartheid and annexation of the West bank (where, you might remember, there is no Hamas).
Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.
I don't think much of what Israel has done in Gaza is justifiable, but "cannot kill civilians under any circumstances" can't possibly be the standard; if it was, the Nazis might still control most of Europe.
You twisted my words: I said "not entitled". Accidental civilian killings are not acceptable but yes of course they happen. Deliberate killing of civilians are war crimes.
We must hold the IDF to the same standard as we hold Hamas. Neither is allowed kill civilians, neither is allowed starve a population, neither is allowed detain civilians (whether as "hostages" or "administrative detainees"), neither is allowed to commit rape, neither is allowed commit war crimes.
The issue is that the IDF is much worse than Hamas on all these things:
- Israel has killed 30,000 (though the number is suspected to be as high as 50,000 now, and it continues to increase), while Hamas killed 700 civilians (I'll leave aside the very credible claims that Israel killed a good number of it's own)
- Israel has a much worse ratio of civilians to valid military targets (possibly between 5/1 and 8/1 ratio, while Hamas has 2/1 ratio during Hamas' attack, and it is believed many of those were killed by the IDF)
- Hamas has only killed civilians during the Oct 7 attack. Israel is killing hundreds of civilians per day, and has used rhetoric that indicates this is deliberate [4]. Even Biden, who claims he is a zionist, called Israeli bombing of civilian areas "indiscriminate" [5]. There are plenty of videos online of the IDF killing civilians, including today an old deaf man was killed by a soldier, and congratulated by his squad [11].
- Hamas has apologized for killing civilians; Israel has justified killing and claims it can and will continue to do so, including by denying aid (a war crime)
- Israel denies aid to civilians, directly causing a famine; Hamas does not starve civilians
- Hamas has by all accounts treated its detainees well; Israel tortures and rapes and sexually abuses its detainees [1]
- Israel is deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure (it claims Hamas is hiding there, which does not excuse it and this is a war crime)
- Hamas has been alleged to have committed a total of 3 acts of sexual violence (this is heavily disputed, see [2]). However the IDF has committed dozens of acts of torture [9] and rape [1] (this is only counting since Oct 7, but Israel has been killing, torturing and committing sexual violence against Palestinians since 1948, eg [12] )
- Hamas took 250 detainees, Israel had over 1000 before Oct 7 [10] and it increased to over 2000 since Oct 7 [3]. After releasing detainees as part of the short ceasefire, Israel recaptured some of the same people. An Israeli sniper shot a child who celebrated the return of a family member.
- There are multiple credible reports of execution of civilians by the IDF outside of combat situations (that is, they came into a place, expelled the women and children, and executed all the men and older boys) [6] [7]
- Israel has been killing thousands of Palestinians for years, including thousands in Gaza in 2021 and 2014, and of course 15,000 killed and 750,000 displaced in the massacres during the original invasion of Palestine by the settlers who created Israel. [8]
There's all sorts of stuff in here I disagree with ("Hamas has by all accounts treated its detainees well"? There's video footage!) but it doesn't matter. We're not going to resolve Israel/Palestine on an HN thread. I have a very limited point to make here, which is that it can't possibly be the case that a party to a war can't kill civilians under any circumstances. If you agree with that, there's nothing for us to debate.
To restate: why is Hamas' attack on Oct 7 bad? It's because they killed civilians. If we condemn that, then we must condemn all the IDF killings of civilians. If we do not, what basis do we have to condemn Hamas?
Israel's killing of civilians is a horrendous war crime. No we are not doing a carve-out because they really want to kill Hamas fighters. Absurd and horrific to suggest that.
Hamas has an objective of killing civilians. You will of course argue that Israel does as well, but that will be an argument, not a plain statement of fact.
How do you expect to have a curious conversation when you phrase questions that way? If that's not what you're after on this topic, fair enough! I don't like that people are trying to hash this out on HN either. But that's the rule for this place.
Hamas had 40,000 combatants before Oct 7th. It started a war on Israel and is still continuing that war. This war can be over today. It could have been over 3 months ago. It could have not started at all.
Generally the areas leveled and bombed were evacuated from civilians. Yes, there were definitely many cases where civilians died from bombs but your statement is not relevant in the way you claim it is.
If you were Israel, and you have 40,000 combatants in Gaza that want to rape, kill and mutiliate your citizens, and say they will never stop, hold hostages, what do you do? Do you have a magical solution that removes them from the fortified, full of tunnels and booby traps Gaza?
So yes, it's totally up to debate. I am sure there have been cases of civilians being targeted. I am also sure that the finger on the trigger is very light on the Israeli side. But this is very different than intentionally targeting civilians as a matter of policy. There is plenty of proof that is not the case, civilians have evacuated under IDF security from many parts in Gaza and were not killed. Hamas does not differentiate civilians from combatants, uses child combatants, and while maybe the total number is in the ballpark the details are manipulated. This is not to excuse or make light of the heavy price of this conflict in human life.
I know, now we're going to unravel the entire conflict. Talk about Israel's right wing crazies and government, Occupation, resistance, apartheid, genocide, open air prison, etc. No we don't need to unravel the entire conflict. We can judge this from Oct 7th because the significance of that event in scale and barbarism eclipses the entire conflict. If you want to unravel the entire conflict I'm happy to do that too.
You're not approaching this discussion in good faith. It's a war and you're going to find many example of civilians get hit. There are many more incidents than what you list and it proves nothing (Other than the media bias and your manipulation by it, assuming you started from a neutral position). The bit about the UN top court is just political bullshit and you know it. But if your moral authority comes from UN countries like China, Russia, Iran, or the many other authoritarian regimes that routinely commit crimes without anyone giving a damn then go for it.
200 people per day is also not a reasonable metric. Would you prefer a 100 people per day over twice the time? Why do you think this means anything? There were many days in the war in Ukraine where more people died per day under completely different conditions and ofcourse the total number of people killed in that war is significantly higher as well. War. Look at comparable campaigns like the Battle of Mosul. And yes, I already acknowledged many civilians died from bombs and Israel after Oct 7th is certainly concerned less about that than before Oct 7th, but still following the rules of war and not targeting civilians intentionally. If there are 40,000 combatants scattered in a densely populated area and in tunnels and they're being attacked from the air with hundreds of bombs/day what are the expected civilian casualties? Do you think Israel should have done nothing? Would anyone else? Do you think Israeli ground forces should have walked into the area without bombing it so they can get slaughtered/ambushed/blown up? Israel would like nothing better than not having had to have this war.
The number of dead people is terrible, and the fault for all this lies squarely on the Hamas. The total number and the breakdown of civilians/combatants is not really known at this point. I don't trust the numbers from Hamas because they are motivated to manipulate them as is evident by us having this discussion. But for sure many people have died which again is terrible. But reducing the argument to "Israel kills people Israel bad" where provably nobody else in this world would do any different (See 9/11 or the war against ISIS) and provably Hamas initiated this cycle of violence and the evidence (despite your list) is that Israel isn't waging this war in a way that deviates significantly from other wars is an emotional response, not a rational one. We know why people aren't having these responses to the conflict in Yemen where 400k people were killed, the conflict in Syria where IIRC one million people were killed, or many other bad things going on in the world, it's because the media is pumping photos of Gaza destruction 24/7 and couldn't give a damn about what's going on anywhere else (including Ukraine).
I am going to answer your first question in good faith despite you not reciprocating. It's based on my knowledge of human nature and similar war circumstances. Anyone fighting in these situations would have a very light trigger finger because the difference between you being dead and the enemy being dead depends on that. You just have no idea what's going on in the ground, the tactics being used by Hamas etc.
EDIT: there have also been many friendly fire incidents and lots of IDF soliders killed by IDF fire, and the famous incident of the hostages being killed by the IDF. This is again indicative of the "light trigger finger" (because otherwise it's you that's dead) and the tactics used by Hamas.
You're not approaching this discussion in good faith.
I'm showing you real information from multiple worldwide news sources. You are writing huge paragraphs with no links to try to ignore a genocide in progress while repeating unsourced propaganda like "Gaza that want to rape, kill and mutiliate your citizens"
When you kill 1% of a population you are imprisoning in four months, destroy their homes, hospitals, infrastructure and water sources then kill people trying to bring them aid, that's genocide. If this was reversed you would call it genocide. If it was happening anywhere else you would call it genocide.
If Hamas on Oct 7th managed to kill 1% of Israel's population I would not call it genocide. Don't tell me what I'd do. If they killed 5% of Israel's population I would still not kill it genocide. I can give plenty of evidence to the genocidal intent of Hamas but that coupled with killing 1% of Israel's population is not a genocide.
Your "unsourced propaganda" comment is offensive bullshit, but here are some sources:
I don't think you can take these terrible crimes and extend them to 10s of thousands of people's motivations. Any time you hear someone say that a city worth of people all only want to 'rape and mutilate' you should question if that is an attempt to paint one side of a conflict as inhuman.
How many people need to die before you call something genocide?
"The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews. (Hamas Charter, Article 7)."
If you're going to quote Hamas, a bit dishonest of you to quote their 1988 document instead of their 2017 one.
"16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."
No. It's dishonest of you to claim that: "Islam does not allow killing of civilians in war, so this would surprise me. I googled for it and haven't found anything other than pro-Israeli groups saying it." and say that you couldn't find evidence of it when clearly in 1988-2017 Hamas did exactly what you're so surprised of. Is this a new tenant of Islam that came into force after 2017?
Also you know that quote is from the Quran, which takes precedence over the Hamas Covenant...
What about ISIS? Al Qaeda? PIJ? Taliban? I'm not even going to count the millions of civilians killed by civil wars in Muslim countries. The idea that Hamas won't kill civilians because it goes against Islam is so ridiculous and disconnected from reality that I don't think we live on the same planet.
Hamas continues to attack and kill civilians, intentionally, throughout. Including after 2017. Including Oct 7th. You can't seriously say you Googled this and it doesn't exist.
Here's how many civilians were killed before Oct 7th:
Just tell me how many references you need and I'll find that number.
EDIT: You should also watch footage from Oct 7th and listen to the testimonies of survivors. Hamas raped and mutilated civilians. They live streamed and filmed some of their actions. They called parents on the victims phone to show them they're killing them. Hamas threw hand grenades into shelters where civilians were trying to hide. It burnt civilian houses down to kill the families hiding inside them. It is a diabolic, fanatical, psychopathic, evil entity. This claim that somehow Hamas doesn't target civilians is just - crazy.
Hamas's on Oct 7th aimed to kill civilians. Not only did they aim to kill them they aimed to rape, torture and mutilate them. Oh and kidnap some of them.
You assertion is also ridiculous because it ignores the order in which things happened. First Hamas attacked civilians. Then Israel responded. During that response civilians were killed.
Israel's killing of civilians is a war crime only under certain conditions. Killing of civilians during war isn't automatically a war crime. If there are war crimes, then we should certainly condemn them.
There's a reason this topic gets flagged off the front page relentlessly, and it has something to do with the fact that even a comment that begins with the sentiment "I largely agree with you" elicits a full-page response complete with citations to "isitgenocide.com" and the Wikipedia page for the Nakba. This isn't curious conversation; it isn't even conversation. Be introspective for a second: do you feel like you're trying to have a conversation with me?
Some see things like this [0] and chalk it off as cost of war or whatever, and are not outraged or worse justify it, but they can't demand the same of others.
> This isn't curious conversation; it isn't even conversation
Agree. Due to the conflict's very public nature, the narratives have deep-seated irreconcilable differences mixed with a good dose of racism/supremacism/moralism, while the moderate voices are the most feeble, because they're also outnumbered [1].
this seems about right. i think we might be living in the most orwellian times ever. numerous, independent sources of info showing that Israeli soldiers doing things far more barbaric than what hamas millitants do and we've got the entire media apparatus apparently just admitting it exists to defend and cover for israel. I feel like we are entering a new era, kind of like the start of world war 1 where the rules change and nobody is going to be relying on international law or universal standards of human rights. there was something like norms a few months ago and now there are not. nobody will take us seriously when we criticize over it. we've been hypocritical before. this is just in your face, open and blatant lying. these agreements have been murdered by members of the very community it was created for, after they had received some of the worst oppression in human history. what an utterly horrifying and tragic story. one of those "this ends in the worst way possible" kinds.
If there was another secular power like maybe the EU that had the ability to match the US then some of this could be contained. Right now the US does not really need to care about any of the (valid) issues you listed. Why would they?
> Israel has a much worse ratio of civilians to valid military targets (possibly between 5/1 and 8/1 ratio, while Hamas has 2/1 ratio during Hamas' attack, and it is believed many of those were killed by the IDF)
The IDF ratios are indeed atrocious. For journalists, for example, in another thread I tried to calculate some detailed estimates, and concluded that given the casualties up to 01/03, if one journalist and one Hamas militant were statistically put side by side, IDF is ~3x more likely to shoot the journalist. See:
> Why is one a humanitarian tragedy but the other an unnacceptable attack. You're trying to absolve Israel of its role in the killing of 30,000 civilians over 5 months, to the condemnation of the entire world.
If you want to argue with someone who said any of that, find someone who actually said it. Pointing out that Israel is an inherently inequitable ethnostate should have made it pretty clear I'm hardly trying to "absolve" Israel of anything, and that's not the only clue in my comment.
If you're having trouble parsing out what I actually said, you're welcome to ask actual questions rather than rhetorically leading ones (much less wildly putting words in my mouth).
You might also find how I responded in another branch helpful:
as well as meditating the difference between speaking in terms of the understandable and the excusable.
> Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.
You might imagine Google has leverage (that perhaps a sufficiently large number of employees could apply themselves to) with Israel to get them to abandon their current policy by threatening to withdraw from their contract. It's pretty likely that they don't, even assuming what Google provides isn't fungible.
One of Hamas' goals is apparently to provoke Israel to continue to kill civilians in hopes that it ruins Israel's relations with various western institutions. If that starts to actually work even with smaller stakes players like Google, it's likely enough they'll do more of what works.
And it actually gets traction fairly easily because there are people in the Israeli government who, as you point out, apparently prefer unrestrained aggression as a strategy for advancing various internal agendas. And some of them have the talent for actually consolidating internal power as international criticism and isolation increases.
This conflict is happening both because real grievances provide the groundwork and because there are actors on both sides of the conflict who genuinely think they have something to gain from acting as they have since October, even in the face of unconscionable slaughter (which can, after all, be converted to grievance fuel). The United States government can barely bring to bear pressure that restrains it. The idea that Google can do much seems even thinner.
(I agree, by the way, that Israel has responded in ways that are wrong morally and probably wrong strategically. It's similar in some ways to US mistakes post 9/11, and our eventual transition to more focused counterterrorism criminal and military ops seems to have worked out much better for us, though Israel has enough plausibly different problems I'm sure there are some apples and oranges.)
This is more eloquently put than I could write however it feels quite pessimistic (understandably so)
I personally have felt a bit more optimistic about the long term future.
Coming of age in post 9/11 America and going from the warm embrace of playing my Nintendo 64 everyday to seeing regular people go full on hate for people like me was a depressing era that I thought would never end. It certainly shaped how I view myself as a human. I guess you can say the haters got to me. A lot of things I aspired to in middle school completely ended in high school because of this self-hate.
I felt renewed hope during the Obama years in college but never really shook off this feeling. After all long term damage was already done regarding the path I took in life.
When Trump got elected, I felt all depressed all over again because all those terrible people came right back out of the shadows yet again but I eventually realized (finally) that I cannot keep letting this affect me. I had to focus on how lucky I am to have what I have and do the best I can.
When this attack happened, I thought oh no not again. Overnight all those people came out of the shadows yet again. But this time I saw something amazing. I saw countless numbers of people organizing against the Israeli siege: all over the world including the US. My initial thought was this is just a temporary blip and people will get tired and move on. Nope: protests continued even in the US which I was sure would just move on from caring about Muslims. It sometimes feels like the US will not come to the defense of Muslims like they would other groups. We see it in the favorability polling. But these protests: I have seen first hand, how this has really scared a lot of those people that normally come out of the shadows. The first time I have seen this in my life.
Now the protests are being dismissed as if they are nothing. Attempts are being made to silence any avenue they use to communicate. Meta platforms were already blocking this stuff, they deployed the standard bucket of tricks to silent dissent on Youtube and Reddit(thank god for HN) and now the potential banning of the 400lb gorilla in the room: Tiktok. This tool of potential Chinese propaganda helped serve a useful purpose: it amplified conversations that are normally taboo in the US.
So going back to why I feel a bit optimistic? Well I believe this is a signature event for Millennials and especially Gen Z. Gen Z is a generation that grew up with so many problems thrown in their faces (the mental illness caused by smartphones, graduating into a terrible job market, no prospects of owning property, having to live to see climate change etc.)
As a result they started out of the gate super pessimistic about the powers that be. I saw the unbelievable boost in Bernie Sanders's candidacy thanks the the efforts of these people. We really could be seeing a future Gen Z president who is in one of these pro-Palestinian protests.
Lets not even get into Gen-Alpha. They are on track to be the first majority non-white generation in America. How will that affect their world views?
Meanwhile where is Israel? This country that has continually gotten the benefit of the doubt my entire life has severely damaged its reputation in the eyes of young people world wide. The people that are about to take power. At the same time, they can't even get their own house in order regarding their government. This attack has proven that despite their supposed brilliance in war technology (Unit 8200, Stuxnet, etc.) they can really mess up and look like a bunch of dopes shattering the image that they are invincible.
In all Israel is trying to hold together by pushing back against "political" entropy, at some point given all the things that have transpired, entropy will win. How long will it take? Who knows. But I don't think you can make young people "unlearn" their views on Israel at this point and thats the challenge groups like AIPAC are going to have to face.
Why is your response as a Muslim to the horrific attack of Oct 7th a worry about backlash to you personally? vs. e.g. feeling for the victims of that attack?
This feels very tribal to me. Do you really think this is the right framing?
If Israelis suffer, is that somehow going to fix your problem? Are we trying to make things better to all or make things worse for all but feel like we're doing something? It seems to me the protests are doing the latter. I think, and I might be naive, that if the global Muslim community engaged with the intent of finding ways to make this win-win, we could get somewhere. But it seems the community is engaged in lose-lose (or maybe lose-lose-lose).
Great, why is the United States taking sides in an ethnoconflict? How many voters even care about this issue vs how many are being dragged into it? Why do both presidential candidates speak at AIPAC?
Makes 0 sense for us to take sides in this conflict.
> Israel is an inherently inequitable and therefore likely terminally conflict-ridden ethnostate. Israel is a reasonable reaction to a long and terrible history of ethnic persecution
How can these two thoughts go together? Either its a horrible "ethnostate" or its a reasonable construct due to Jews special history.
The same way any number of understandable or even reasonable reactions can end up being suboptimal or even counterproductive. See the prisoner's dilemma.
Any history of ethnic suffering creates a situation where it's natural to suspect outgroup society can't be trusted to reliably treat the ingroup adequately well. So in response, they might create institutions that privilege the ingroup and prioritize its security and prosperity. Outgroup rights & dignity may even become negotiable or disposable in the name of ingroup priorities, sometimes even basic rights like property, freedom of movement, or life.
This of course guarantees the outgroup will have legitimate and serious grievances (along with any less legitimate ones they may or may not have), which will eventually mean they too may feel justified in approaching the problem from a never-again ingroup-first perspective, probably eventually including organized violence and whatever system oriented around these values that they can.
Voilà: self-sustaining conflict dynamic. And everything seemed at least locally justifiable all along the way. After all, what's wrong with providing ingroup security, and punishing outgroup aggression?
So you're basically saying it made sense at the time (and perhaps it still does) but it also created a mess with the Palestinians? I can agree with that.
Yet here we are, what are we going to do now? Going back in history to prevent the holocaust and many other atrocities towards Jews before (and even after) is not possible. Preventing Zionism is not possible. For some reason the intellectual elite seems to be convinced the only possible way out of this is the elimination of Israel - how come? I can understand why Palestinians or the Iranians would want that, I don't understand the huge support in the West for this type of thinking though.
I don't think the idea of an "intellectual elite" in general is very useful, but assuming any reasonable definition of such an elite that would have to include people who influence real policy, the specific idea of one that's uniformly hostile to Israel's existence in the West runs strongly counter to the observable reality of consistent material and political support for Israel across the political spectrum.
Even among those who see its behavior as a driver of the conflicts it is embroiled in -- even among those who may see Israel as an oppressor -- there doesn't seem to be anything like a coalition around any specific plan for its outright elimination, let alone one that could get traction.
There are some substantial academic criticisms of Israel's behavior or even status as a colonizing oppressor and I think what happens is that when those enter the popular discourse, they get conscripted into simple sympathies and boiled down side-taking (which mostly feeds the conflict dynamic).
One thing I think systems thinkers (hackers, academics, intellectual elites, whatever) do tend to understand is this:
As long as Israel exists in a form where outgroup rights & dignity & lives are disposable, it will be contributing to the conflict.
That's a dynamic-descriptive statement, not a singular prescription. It implies several possible paths: Israel could be dissolved/replaced, Israel could grow into accepting the responsibility of materially valuing outgroup rights & dignity & lives itself even when it's inconveniently in tension with other immediate pressures, Israel could cede some control (and territory) to a larger system that will take on that responsibility for it, or we could accept the status quo.
It's a bit less common to hold that understanding at the same time as another systems reality:
As long as Israel and its ingroup are under existential threat, judging outgroup rights & dignity to be disposable will have broader internal appeal, consolidating the power of those who choose that as their pitch or hold it as part of a fundamental worldview.
This probably is the location of the mistake you have a feeling some in the West are making. When we use rhetoric or steer towards policy whose end seems like Israel's dissolution, we're not just dealing with a question about whether our sympathies are most appropriately placed with Israeli/Jewish people or dispossessed Palestinians, we are exerting force on a lever of the conflict system and the likely outcome is an equal and opposite reaction or a transfer of angular momentum into the circular conflict rotation. It encourages Israeli perspectives like "we're right to aggressively do whatever it takes to fend for ourselves because nobody else is really on our side." It might even tells actor like Hamas that their plan works, that they really can drive a wedge between Israel and the rest of the world by merely provoking Israel into treating tens of thousands Palestinian civilians as collateral damage (basically turning people Hamas hadn't converted into actual soldiers yet into a kind of conscript after the fact, to say nothing of the survivors that might be radicalized).
Why do we do it? I don't know. Maybe thinking in terms of sympathies instead of systems does require more effort. Maybe human nature to simplify. Maybe many of us have the luxury of little actual skin in the game, so we can choose sympathies and symbolic values over the substance and mechanics of the system (though on the other hand, skin in the game also often makes sympathy more immediate).
I kinda hope that in the software era / information age that modestly trains more people to think about some specific systems at least, maybe we can figure out how to do better, but OTOH all the decreased friction of discourse has had mixed results.
> there doesn't seem to be anything like a coalition around any specific plan for its outright elimination, let alone one that could get traction.
Not everyone agrees on how to do it - the Iranians and their axis are trying to do it by violence. Western sympathizers don't outright support violence but don't outright condemn it either (oppressed people can't commit terror etc, minimizing what happened on October 7th etc) and at the same time they are trying to create the conditions for Israel to not be able to defend itself: attempts for arms embargo, economic and diplomatic isolation and as mentioned above creating an atmosphere that tolerates the violent destruction of Israel.
All this is meant to allow the 'Right of Return', where descendants of Palestinians refugees from 76 years ago (!) are still refugees in places like Lebanon, Syria and even Jordan, and to the best of my knowledge are the only people who are kept in an eternal status of refugees so they can return a century later to their 'original' homes.
And using the term intellectual elite is inaccurate but its not wrong - a Harvard professor for gender studies or oriental studies is much more likely to support the plan I outlined above than any other type of solution. So not all intellectuals, but way more than you'd expect.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadRightfully so. Name me the big tech company who wouldn't fire such an employee instantly.
It's not possible to be a consumer brand and support Israel. The world is too divided and it's not getting any less so.
I take the side of those loosong their homes, families and lives in Gaza deapite doing nothing at all.
But that the end of the day, Israel IS the oppressor and the Palestinians are their victims. That is a very important distinction.
Most major news outlets are still wildly pro-Israel. My and most people's opinions on the subject tend to not to drive from main stream media accounts, but research and journalistic investigations into the situation there.
I don't personally know anyone who has walked down the path of doing real research into the issue and not come out of it horrified with Isreal's actions and this has been long before Oct, 7 2023. Most people who are "fine" with the situation are the ones getting their opinions from the news.
I'm slightly ashamed to admit that until Israel's propaganda and genocidal response to the Al Aqsa Flood attack, I believed Israel were basically The Good Guys doing their best against terrorist neighbours. I feel like most people in the UK thought like that, and I rarely saw any negatively portrayals of Israel in the MSM.
From what I've learned since, I've been... horrified - and like you said, by their actions going way back.
Is ONU considered a propaganda news outlet nowadays? https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-i...
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/key-takeaways-worl...
[0]: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
https://global.upenn.edu/perryworldhouse/news/explaining-int...
The ask was to force Israel to stop its military operation.
The ICJ's provisional verdict was _actually pretty bad_ for Israel:
"The aforementioned facts and circumstances are sufficient to conclude that at least some rights of the Palestinians to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts in Article 3 of the Genocide Convention, and the rights of South Africa to seek protection of these rights."
Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/icj-president-c...
It was to __prevent genocide__, not to determine guilt of committing genocide. This is going to take years, and it's going to be ongoing into the future. It is not going to happen while an incident is happening.
The ICJ explicitly said that there's enough evidence to merit this case.
"South Africa’s case is that those acts and omissions are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group."
"South Africa is acutely aware of the particular weight of responsibility in initiating proceedings against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention. However, South Africa is also acutely aware of its own obligation — as a State party to the Genocide Convention — to prevent genocide. Israel’s acts and omissions in relation to Palestinians violate the Genocide Convention."
" More gravely still, Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group."
https://global.upenn.edu/perryworldhouse/news/explaining-int...
US-backed Israel has recently been shown to have misrepresented itself to the ICJ multiple times - I can dig up a link later if you're curious.
And in January Netanyahu said: “No one will stop us, not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anyone else" - I don't think what the ICJ says matters one jot to US-backed Israel.
I won't go into what people have been able to see with their own eyes for the past 5 months, despite the incredible level of bias in MSM, censorship on social media, and the best efforts of Israel's Hasbara.
The court ordered provisional measures that included:
"Take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
"Take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip"
Israel has shown utter contempt to the court, going by Netanyahu's words (e.g. "nobody will stop us... not the Hague..."), by senior ministers words, the IDF's actions, the actions of civilians blocking aid to starving people, the Gaza real-estate conferences, breaking the Geneva convention to parade prisoners held in their dungeons on national TV... almost every conceivable way, really.
[0] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/making-sense-of-the-icj...
I think the more moderate view is that Israel suffered a heinous terrorist attack perpetrated by a terrorist group in power. Israel has a right to defend their people from such attacks and a military response shouldn't be surprising given the extent of the crimes. However, the people in Gaza (non terrorists) are also human beings who should be treated that way. Not everyone supports the terrorist actions (apparently Hamas is incredibly unpopular amongst the people, but they have little discourse if they don't want to disappear) and the military response from Israel seems to have gotten to a point where children being blown up and starving to death somehow comes with the territory. Surely there is a way to reduce the casualties of innocent bystanders. Surely Israel should provide food and aid to the people after bombing all their infrastructure into the stone age.
I admit not being as informed as I should be, but just how many times are we going to have genocide before we learn to stop? Just since the Holocaust we've had genocide in Cambodia, Serbia, Rwanda, China, and now Gaza. In the more distant past it was even more common (e.g. trail of tears).
Just to correct you, the genocide was in Bosnia, not Serbia, as a culmination of years of ethnic cleansing of the muslim (and to a smaller extent the ethnic Croat) population of Bosnia by the Serbian ethnic group during the period of 1992-1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide
Being "polite" is nice if the person you're talking to is also nice. If the guy wanted to bring attention to the fact he did it very well.
What US-backed Israel is doing is utterly abhorrent, and protesting makes sense; I can understand why an employee wouldn't want to aid them in any way - but with oil and gas off the coast of Northern Gaza, the US about to build a port for it, and the US, UK, France and Germany govs supporting Israel to the hilt, real sanctions are not going to happen. Hell, the west is still supplying Israel with weapons, and Israel hasn't even been kicked out of EuroVision!
But... one person disrupting a meeting will have limited effect, and is guaranteed to result in a firing.
IMO a better plan would have been a petition, signed by as many employees as possible. Failing that, looking at strike action through union(s) could be a good idea. A single employee has very little power - but if a significant number banded together, their power is much greater.
Any means of generating substantive resonance within an org is jealously reserved by those at the top of an organizational hierarchy.
It's a Catch-22, but part of Activist 101. If you aren't drawing ire, getting retaliated against, or getting surveilled by someone, odds are you aren't being a terribly effective Activist.
The guy should have started a movement, or a group, using the points from the guest speaker on why they shouldn't have had that speaker, etc etc... This organization of people holds more weight than an individual. This is the way.
Almost every state now has at-will employment laws. The company doesn't need a reason to get rid of you.
Which is why we all continue to support our corporate overlords.
The being fired is an implicit sign that the people trying to control the collective narrative of the organization feel their grip slipping.
Nothing about screaming in the middle of a meeting is effective. It's just a selfish tantrum. It doesn't change anyone's mind.
> The being fired is an implicit sign that the people trying to control the collective narrative of the organization feel their grip slipping.
Fantasy thinking, pure and simple. Being fired is a sure sign that the employee did something dramatic and pointless, and suffered the consequences.
I mean Aaron Bushnell could have written angry letters to his representatives, but he didn't. He lit himself on fire outside of the Israel embassy after declaring he would not take part in genocide and screamed "free Palestine" with his dying breath. And because of that, today I am writing about what he had to say.
If you think the correct response to genocide is politically discussing it with management then I don't think you really understand the gravity of the situation.
Google is known to retaliate in backhanded ways when people take a stance in a way that is allowed, such as Ms Koren in 2022
> Agree to move to São Paulo, Brazil, within 17 business days or lose your job.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240226163002/https://www.nytim...
https://www.globes.co.il/news/article.aspx?did=1001460684#ut...
If the person thinks the cause is worthy of being fired of that's completely their choice, but that doesn't mean the rule itself is immoral.
I don't think such behavior would be tolerated most anywhere.
https://uaw.org/uaw-statement-israel-palestine/
Generation of value comes after people have settled themselves into a stable, working equilibrium. Prioritizing value creation above that is just adding a bias meant as a mechanism of control wirlded by those who have already "escaped" that control.
Look back at 1940's for indications of the attitudes when "Unions" were considered too powerful. Shipyard workers were striking for better working conditions at a time when much of the country were worried about the existential threat represented by the Axis Powers.
That war effort generated negative value by any sane definition. Yet the stability of the populace was so prioritized that we fairly effectively neutered the network effects of collective bargaining as a result. To a degree that any European union member would find befuddling. (And never had a concommitant restoration force after the existential pressure was dealt with. Funny how that ratchet works).
The 70's with the ATC strikes and the Administrative response were another example.
Stable and consenting polity > value creation. As evidenced by the fact we will destroy value to achieve a new working equilibrium to build from.
Your argument gives me pause. Maybe it's not that good of an idea.
Just because something is done by most companies doesn't make it okay. Are mass layoffs "rightful" in any sense of that word?
Mass layoffs are part of the Faustian bargain you accept when you sign the offer letter to work at the behemoths of capitalism. These are the biggest like top 10 companies in the whole world.
It’s just business.
But then again even those making 400k plus TC make appeals to emotion instead of rational thinking.
There are plenty of jobs for these people where they can make 200k TC and not risk getting fired, which is still a good salary.
If you want more and more, you must play with the devil. It’s really not that complicated.
People can rightly protest the way layoffs are conducted but the idea that a company is "wrongful" to have a layoff sometimes is silly.
Maybe I should've used another example like lobbying or politicians' insider trading as a practice that's common but not necessarily right.
I don't see those as inherently right or wrong.
"Unsurprisingly so" I can get behind. But "rightfully" is a stretch I wouldn't agree with.
It’s fair to say that it can mean that the “rightness” is derived from other sources, but pretending that the primary meaning of the phrase doesn’t imply morality is just being intentionally obtuse.
(It's hard to come up with a good example that demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about, because the topic is highly subjective, highly emotional, and has a few different angles. There are a million different things the parent could have said to communicate an attitude that doesn't imply an emotional, moral, or political distaste for the context of the protest itself. My example isn't necessarily "correct" for the parent.)
Who in their right mind who says “I refuse to build technology that ____” wouldn’t already be planning to quit barring outrageous hypocrisy? Who in their right mind screams it out in the middle of a presentation without expecting to be dragged out?
Personally I don't think firing him helps Google's PR, rather it makes them look even more "evil". (To clarify, I am NOT saying that it is unexpected for a company to fire such a person. Expectations != what's the morally correct != reality, I'm just commenting on a part of the equation.)
The chickens are coming home to roost and they don't like it so much anymore.
But I guess I'm that guy who still resents that since then Google has fully evolved into yet another mindless corporate greed machine.
In grade school, it was universally known that if you use violence before attempting to run away, you're getting in trouble. I don't know why companies haven't made an equally clear universal rule that "if you say something publicly before running it by us, you're getting fired".
I had to go through training that said what happens if I do something like this.
In this example we have one person, that might be telling.
So while it might be a problem, I'm not sure how widespread it is.
What some employees haven't quite learned yet is how to read between the lines. They are certain topics which are ok to protest and be vocal about, but others, are not, like unions or this case. To be safe, it's better to think of "bring your whole self to work" as a gullibility trap. It may not be that, but effectively it will function as such. It catches the naive troublemakers so later on they can be filtered out.
He could have left quietly, but he decided to take a personal hit to bring awareness to the issue. That makes him a hero in my eyes.
I would speculate it has something to do with what age range they like to hire or their branding. But I'm not sure.
Those who are educated are more able to clearly understand the consequences of their actions or inactions and understand lack of solidarity for others means lack of solidarity for yourself.
The purpose of liberal education is to teach people how to critically think and build a world that they themselves would like to live in, so when a liberally educated ambitious person realizes that they are contributing to building a lesser world it becomes problematic and they correctly feel a need to take responsibility for building a better future.
Add in a legacy of declaring that "don't be evil" is a founding principle and you are going to find people being pretty upset about being lured in with promises of social responsibility and like-minded peers, only to find an ethically devoid pursuit of next quarters profit that can be found at nearly any company in America.
I suspect, though, that in most companies the employees already know what would happen, and would not do things like that - first, because they don't feel entitled using the company's resources for personal goals, and second - because the consequences may be too heavy for them. But in Google, one probably can be both rich enough already to be fired and not sweat about it too much, and entitled enough to feel like something like this is the right thing to do.
At my previous company, at an offsite retreat, one of the guys got drunk and started chewing out the company's founders and the main office manager. Sure enough, he was fired by the time the retreat was over, and was never seen in the office again. A similar thing happened to someone who had a huge blowout argument and emailed the entire company his manifesto (of sorts).
In my org, if I disrupted someone’s presentation over any topic I’d be fired. Or maybe severely reprimanded.
This behavior surprises me because these are private orgs. So doing unprofessional things will result in firings or whatnot.
It seems odd to me that people think it’s appropriate to protest within a company. If you don’t want to “build technology that powers genocide” (kind of comical considering how huge and pervasive google is) then quit. Similarly if I don’t want to make bombs, I shouldn’t work for a bomb company.
Finally, it just seems stupid to think this would change corporate decision making. What kind of reasoning and logic ends up with “disrupt a meeting -> google changes business policy regarding Israel?”
There are some issues that are worth speaking up about. There are some issues that are worth being fired over.
An Israeli presenter who is based in Israel is being protested. Was there any connection beyond that to the war?
I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, you do you.
You can also see the conference he was attending itself hardly shies away from the political/military connections, e.g.
“The Israeli tech ecosystem is built on very strong foundations. We have the academia, we have the manpower, and we have the special military units,” said Dina Pasca-Raz, Partner and Head of Technology at KPMG Israel. “There are many, many areas of strength [0]
Israel's ambassador to the UN also gave an extremely emphatic "no ceasefire" speech at this totally apolitical Google-sponsored tech conference with no connection to the war.[1]
[0] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjlvv676t
[1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ryymzd7a6
Let's say it was a speech by the Google Palestine director in charge of selling cloud computing and AI technology to the military wing of Hamas, at a conference where a Hamas spokesman was also giving a speech. Would you also consider there to be no political connection there?
Hamas though is a terrorist organization. Internationally recognized as such almost universally. They started this war with rape, murder, and kidnapping of innocent civilians. If you do business with them you’re breaking the law. If you give voice to them or publicly support them you are an enemy not only of your own country, but of peace and good sense. I have nothing but the harshist judgement for someone openly claiming to support Hamas.
If I found out my company had relations with Hamas I wouldn’t protest, quit, or cause a scene, I’d call the FBI. That is not a political issue, it is a serious legal and moral issue.
I have to correct you on the latter because these details matter. According to the Wikipedia page about it [0], it is designated as a terrorist group by Israel, USA and the 5 eyes, the European Union organization, Japan, Argentina and Paraguay. That is essentially Israel, USA and countries that are under direct American influence through NATO, which is far from "almost universally", and really is a smaller fraction of countries in the United Nations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
Sending a bunch of people to rape, burn, and mirder civilians sounds like terroism to me.
https://www.oct7factcheck.com/index
Hamas has always maintained that they are willing to release the hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.
On the international stage it is actually the actors who are against ceasefire (primarily the USA) who have vetoed all resolutions which calls for the release of hostages.
It is actually the reverse, those against a ceasefire are those who are preventing the hostages from being freed.
Irony is we applaud those whom resisted Nazism. Rightly.
I invite everyone to read Norman Finelstein whos father was a resistor to Nazism explain the similarities to concentration camps and Gaza.
https://theintercept.com/2018/05/20/norman-finkelstein-gaza-...
Seriously, it's as simple as that. We are here to work, not philosophize about politics and current events.
The moral and ethical thing to do would be to not work for that company.
Supporting a state, that is actively committing a genocide, with cloud services is a political choice.
Management works to serve those corporate interests, so it is in their interest to convey the message that the appropriate thing to do is be silent and comply.
It's like hiring a bunch of Christians because the "Jesus loves you" PR angle was hot at the time, and now almost a decade later your company struggles to acknowledge the existence of gay people. Don't hire ideologues, especially en masse.
The faster google can get these people out the door, the better. Focus on the tech, not social issues.
Its just a job they lost, its not like they are 5 years old, watched their parents slowly bleed out after bombardments while starving to death - mkay?
Its arguably a good way to get fired. Even said they want no part in it.
No politics for you. The corporate strategy, governance, hiring, dealmaking, etc... will all be politically informed. All your work will contribute to the political beliefs of leadership. It's such a strange abstraction to believe that you're somehow separate from that.
It's ingratitude at some level. If workers should not be grateful to their employers for their jobs, that's a different conversation, but yeah, sabotaging an external PR event -- what employer is going to giggle, clap, and congratulate this person's "bravery" ?? termination had to be expected here.
Amusingly, the employee now gets 6+ months of unemployment benefits to contemplate the means of their activism.
Now it's politics they don't like and they want to close Pandora's box. I feel no pity for them or the fired employee.
This is why we have social norms to keep politics private.
More explicitly: you can be (and are encouraged to be) anti-genocide at google. However, disrupting a public company meeting is definitely a fireable offense.
I'm going to stop responding to this thread because comparing the IEF to the SS is not a worthwhile thing to do in an internet thread about protests.
Wow, I guess everyone who has ever fought in war is like the Nazis.
What a wild worldview.
But it could be, in an alternate universe.
And that still sucks. For me, it's a principles thing. Personally, I think charging Israel with "genocide" is stupid. But I also think it's shitty he got fired. But I also think companies have a right to fire people. Short of some insight or prescription coming out of those set of opinions, it just makes me hate Google more than I already did. :D
So yes, it is a fireable offense because "We're actually the good guys" to suggest otherwise will label you a bunch of names.
Therefore by your standards the GCP execs relating to engagements to the Israeli Einsatzgruppen Force and their co-conspirators (including the U.S military) should be fired.
Well google cloud can't power genocide, so what is your problem?
Can't we just assume that the person is bored, overly political and naive?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39605689
There is a book every technologist should read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
As the proverb says, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
And this is a quote that ever technologist should also know. Anyway Israel is hardly engaged with a genocide currently, and even if it was there is absolutely no evidence that google cloud is having any kind of participation in it.
So once again - just political grandstanding like the dimwits that throw soup at the mona lisa and glue themselves to the asphalt that think that this performative crap is cost free. Thankfully this time it was not cost free.
Works at Google and says he *refuses to build technology that enables surveillance*!? Who do you think you've been working for?
It was more side commentary on how any large organizational structure is non-homogeneous. I mean we can say the same about countries: America, Israel, Palestine, China, Russia, <insert whatever here>. I believe we have words for aggregating (pigeon holing) the views of diverse nonhomogeneous groups based on a shared physical attribute of said group that has no causal relationship to said views. A person is not their {company,country,race,religion,political group} or many other things. I thought that was the point of our cultural progression: to recognize that a tree is not a forest. Even if it can help to talk about a forest at times, it would be absurd to think all the trees are the same. Must be pretty dense ;)
However, I also think if you're employed somewhere there are reasonable expectations as far as workplace behavior goes that would prohibit the same "protest" or "civil disobedience" type behavior.
It is interesting that the protestor immediately declares that they don't wan to work for such a company. It sorta begs the question of "Then why do you?". It seems like their choice is obvious.
Some folks do a sit in one day, they make themselves heard, there ya go.
There are of course limits.
> Would you have any suggestions of what else could the guy have done, that would've brought similar media attention to the topic?
> The line between "annoying/childish protestors" and "folks legitimately raising awareness" is ill defined for me, perhaps if anyone else has better suggestions I would be happy to hear them.
In such a world "reasonable expectations" by their nature foster a continuation of the existing power structures. Behavior that challenges "reasonable expectations" does so precisely because of the belief that the continuation of the status quo as perpetuated by those in power has become untenable.
Many people "reasonably expect" nations and companies to not be complicit in genocide, where is their recourse?
I wouldn't want another employee interrupting my meeting like that either.
As for the rest of your "salve owner" commentary I think that's an absurd comparison.
And what do you find absurd about the "slave owner" comparison? I'm not arguing that modern day employment is slavery or anything of the sort, just pointing out that the terms of "reasonable expectations" are always defined by those in power, and not once in history has working within "reasonable expectations" caused a shift in those power dynamics.
This is getting your post more downvotes than your opinion is. It hurts your opinion.
Laws and rules are created and enforced by people in power. They are designed to force the less powerful to behaving in a certain way. It has nothing to do with “morals” or “justice”. You might happen to agree morally with certain laws or rules and not with others. However that doesn’t matter unless you are powerful enough to change those laws.
In the case of companies, the people in power can make whatever rules they want. Unless more powerful people (the government/large groups of costumers/powerful unions) threaten the company with repercussions if those rules aren’t changed.
Imagine (for example) a group of Vegans becoming powerful enough to outlaw eating meat. With heavy penalties (including death by execution) for anybody buying or selling meat for consumption. That is absolutely something that could happen. With the most extreme Vegans feeling morally justified in enforcing those rules. The only thing stopping this from happening is their lack of power.
Another example is religion. Do as your told or you will go to hell. If you truly believe there is a hell then this threat is the most extreme usage of power you can possible imagine. We are talking about being tortured all the time in every conceivable way forever.
It’s up to the individual to decide if this employee was right or wrong about the issue at hand, but puzzling over whether or not they’re some sort of fool for strongly believing in something seems a bit obtuse.
He chose a much simpler path. Disruptively virtue signal knowing he would be fired. Now he can slide into a smaller progressive tech company where he will be lauded for his virtue, used by the company for PR, and ultimately not judged by the quality of his work.
This was a thoughtfully orchestrated career strategy first, protest second. It was well done and I think he’s set himself up nicely for the next 5-10 years.
If you disagree and think he was risking his future instead of securing it, I would humbly ask why? Both the media and Google’s response were 100% predictable.
If I were him I’d try to move into a fuzzy, semi-technical role with some public presence. Something like DevRel seems the ideal target and maximizes the PR benefit for his employer.
>"Staging a protest on a keynote sounds like a good reason to end it."
Google had shutdown the private forum without a proper discussion. Remind employees they can work in other areas?
Going tangent: What if they were denouncing racism? Would it still be correct to fire them immediately? What about alleged genocide?
To Gaza? That's an interesting idea, but I don't think it'd work out very well.
> Remind employees they can work in other areas?
I don't think somebody who can't figure that out by themselves is really a very valuable asset. But also I don't think that's the problem. The person did that not because they weren't aware there are other people in Google working on other things - literally everybody is aware on that. They didn't just requested a transfer to another group. They staged a protest because they wanted to influence Google's decisions by publicly threatening the withdrawal of their contribution. Turns out, Google is ok with that scenario. When you bluff, you should always consider what happens if you're called.
> Google had shutdown the private forum without a proper discussion
As I understand, the reverse had happened - the forum was overflown with the inflammatory activist messaging having no relation to the topic it has been created for, and had to be shut down, because it could no longer serve the function it was created for. "Proper discussion" has never been the activists' intent (and in general, experience teaches us these kinds of activists are a lot more into shutting down and deplatforming opponents than properly debating them). Not that Google has ever lately been on the frontlines of enabling proper discussion - as most major tech companies, they have abandoned this idea years ago in favor of serving as a gatekeepers and the pretorian guard - but in this particular case, it seems to be pretty clear no proper discussing was intended.
> What if they were denouncing racism?
What if Google was literally run by Hitler? You can always make an inflammatory hypothetical. But I don't see much point in discussing it - there's an infinite things that could happen, you can't discuss them all. Better to concentrate on things that are actually happening.
> Offer to relocate the employee first? > Remind employees they can work in other areas?
I was not clear with the meaning of that. I was thinking of rethorical public speech. As part of de escalation and call for order. Pulling the trigger first and asking later is an explict toxic culture manifestation.
Companies are indeed hierarchical, and sometimes it feels like people forget that. You can indeed be fired at any time, and this is exactly the kind of situation you can put yourself in to have it happen to you.
I say with no uncertainty that an army is different from any other institution. They even have their own judiciary (martial court).
Comparing Google to an army is... wrong in not only one sense.
Maybe the US army is less violent and more civil
Context matters. If someone just called the CEO an f-word in public, that’s one thing, and imo it doesn’t necessarily deserve getting fired on its own.
But interrupting a major conference during a keynote, and then saying those things? Yeah, that would land you into trouble, almost no matter what you said.
I fully and honestly believe that even if the employee took the pro-Israel stance with their “interrupt the keynote” protest, they would have been fired just the same.
Old twitter post acquisition would have terminated those 600 employees, too?
I hope "west" society isn't demanding either obedience or cancelling your ideas. That much happens in Venezuela.
It would be morally correct to allow a little leeway for expressing a shared opinion, then call for order, and remind collaborators to follow proper channels to "continue discussion". And, of course, not shutting down nor ignore such continued discussion.
TLDR: Google is evil all the way down.
Businesses that live and breathe billions do not care and any attempt to cave into employee demands, then the investors will move in and force it through their changes. (Especially public companies)
If a person disagrees with Google's policies, and are not in a position (as VP) to change them, they should simply quit the company.
If instead, they decide to take deliberate actions which hurt the business (and thereby their peers), then the company should quit them.
A single employee has almost no power at all, which is rightful.
Write an open letter with signatures of many of your colleagues, or in extreme cases organize a walk-out or a strike in protest. Don't disrupt a meeting by yelling that you refuse to do your job, especially when it seems the meeting had nothing at all to do with the war and it was just that the presenter was Israeli and working in Israel... that's not so much a protest and more just racist.
You work in tech, probably in silicon valley. It was created by the department of defense.
This is not the first time I have seen bizarre hyperbole like this - it's quite strange. Russia, China, and King George III all have and had people killed for dissent. Google didn't murder this engineer, imprison him, or anything of the sort. They just stopped paying his salary.
Even if they did - it would be a significantly lesser power than the ability to execute people, and would belong to the 'low justice' in a feudal era, not 'high justice' which the King possessed. So rather than the power of King George, Google would have the power of a Manorial Court.
I have no doubt they actively work in forums like these and try their best at applying pressure for which works sometimes and other times does not.
I mean I’m sure he was hoping that it would change somebody’s mind, but you’ve got to know that’s a long shot.
This is "Professionalism" to you, jfc.
You mistake conformism with a moral position about something.
You either don't know the meaning of professionalism, or are arguing in bad faith. I will presume cognitive limitations instead of malice.
> You also mistake a moral position as conformism, which enables you to make immoral (by your own standards) statements
There is nothing moral or immoral to conforming to society. I don't make the rules. I just follow.
Sounds familiar.
If you don't know what being a professional means, I don't know what to say.
I don't know what the answer is, and I appreciate the urgency of feeling that causes people to protest, but at this point I'm pretty sure most protest gestures do little other than feed the tribal vortex at the heart of the hurricane, especially the farther away from any actual leverage points on the dynamic that they are. And an Israeli tech exec existing and doing tech exec things is probably not close to a leverage point, nor is protesting them doing tech exec things doing anything worth levering.
I think this is important to reiterate. Because forces us to pay close attention to the details. There are extremely reasonable justifications for both sides because both sides have committed atrocities. This conflict goes a long way back and I'm in no position to claim who started it. But I can recognize that one atrocity does not justify another. I can recognize that justifying or dismissing the committing of an atrocity only further enables the conflict. Whichever side you land on, if you do not take a highly nuanced approach you are only further enabling conflict. For that's a key reason the conflict continues today. War always includes psychological warfare because you have to convince humans to do the inhumane. There is no such thing as a righteous war.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUeBMwn_eYcEver.
Hamas had twenty years to become a government. It was uninterested in doing so. Israel is not the genocidal agent here.
VERY low level.
Israel didn't occupy Gaza so how is an "occupier" controlling everything? What about Egypt? If Israel controlled everything then how did lathes for making rockets, trucks, machine guns, RPGs, grenades, assault rifles, mines, get to Gaza?
Your "open air camp" is my "Singapore". It was up to the Gazans to decide what to do on this piece of land they were given control over. Even if they aspire to have the entire of Mandatory Palestine they could have chosen not to do this using violence.
Israel didn't destroy airports or seaports. Gaza never had a deep seeport, the water is shallow, and the fishing ports exist. Israel does have a naval blockage on Gaza so that Hamas couldn't get tanks and artillery and more weaponry in to attack it with, a fairly reasonable position. Similarly Israel will not allow airplanes to fly in either, for the same reasons.
I'm not following on "non-governmental party", didn't Hamas win the elections and rule Gaza as its government?
> Hamas had twenty years to become a government. It was uninterested in doing so.
This isn't true. Hamas taxes the inhabitants of Gaza [0].
Israel collects taxes on imports and exports from Gaza, and income tax on the pay of Gaza residents who were employed inside Israel. But transactions which occur entirely inside Gaza are not taxed by Israel, only by Hamas.
[0] see e.g. https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/2024/01/23/hamas-fundin...
But, to be fair, there is some validity to the idea that it's an ethnostate, in that there is automatic "right of return" only to ethnic Jews. Not to mention there is some legal discrimination against non-Jews (like the new nation-state law) and also a whole lot of non-legal discrimination.
I don't agree with this reasoning - but the situation is complicated so I understand why some people argue otherwise. Like you, I'd say that Israel is just like France - it defined some group of people to be citizens (or the equivalent of "expat" citizens), which included all Jews in the world, and also included the non-Jews on the land at the time. And from then on, acted like any other state. This is very similar to France/Germany/anyone (and Zionism was started as part of the same worldwide move towards nationalism).
Why is one a humanitarian tragedy but the other an unnacceptable attack. You're trying to absolve Israel of its role in the killing of 30,000 civilians over 5 months, to the condemnation of the entire world.
Israel is not entitled to kill civilians under any circumstances, not even if Hamas makes it hard to attack Hamas directly. If you look at the statements of Israeli leaders, it is clear that the killing of Palestinians is intentional [1]. As has been the long policy of apartheid and annexation of the West bank (where, you might remember, there is no Hamas).
Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.
[1] https://isitgenocide.com/
We must hold the IDF to the same standard as we hold Hamas. Neither is allowed kill civilians, neither is allowed starve a population, neither is allowed detain civilians (whether as "hostages" or "administrative detainees"), neither is allowed to commit rape, neither is allowed commit war crimes.
The issue is that the IDF is much worse than Hamas on all these things:
- Israel has killed 30,000 (though the number is suspected to be as high as 50,000 now, and it continues to increase), while Hamas killed 700 civilians (I'll leave aside the very credible claims that Israel killed a good number of it's own)
- Israel has a much worse ratio of civilians to valid military targets (possibly between 5/1 and 8/1 ratio, while Hamas has 2/1 ratio during Hamas' attack, and it is believed many of those were killed by the IDF)
- Hamas has only killed civilians during the Oct 7 attack. Israel is killing hundreds of civilians per day, and has used rhetoric that indicates this is deliberate [4]. Even Biden, who claims he is a zionist, called Israeli bombing of civilian areas "indiscriminate" [5]. There are plenty of videos online of the IDF killing civilians, including today an old deaf man was killed by a soldier, and congratulated by his squad [11].
- Hamas has apologized for killing civilians; Israel has justified killing and claims it can and will continue to do so, including by denying aid (a war crime)
- Israel denies aid to civilians, directly causing a famine; Hamas does not starve civilians
- Hamas has by all accounts treated its detainees well; Israel tortures and rapes and sexually abuses its detainees [1]
- Israel is deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure (it claims Hamas is hiding there, which does not excuse it and this is a war crime)
- Hamas has been alleged to have committed a total of 3 acts of sexual violence (this is heavily disputed, see [2]). However the IDF has committed dozens of acts of torture [9] and rape [1] (this is only counting since Oct 7, but Israel has been killing, torturing and committing sexual violence against Palestinians since 1948, eg [12] )
- Hamas took 250 detainees, Israel had over 1000 before Oct 7 [10] and it increased to over 2000 since Oct 7 [3]. After releasing detainees as part of the short ceasefire, Israel recaptured some of the same people. An Israeli sniper shot a child who celebrated the return of a family member.
- There are multiple credible reports of execution of civilians by the IDF outside of combat situations (that is, they came into a place, expelled the women and children, and executed all the men and older boys) [6] [7]
- Israel has been killing thousands of Palestinians for years, including thousands in Gaza in 2021 and 2014, and of course 15,000 killed and 750,000 displaced in the massacres during the original invasion of Palestine by the settlers who created Israel. [8]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/22/claims-of-isra...
[2] https://www.oct7factcheck.com/sexual-violence
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-ho...
[4] https://isitgenocide.com/)
[5]
To restate: why is Hamas' attack on Oct 7 bad? It's because they killed civilians. If we condemn that, then we must condemn all the IDF killings of civilians. If we do not, what basis do we have to condemn Hamas?
Israel's killing of civilians is a horrendous war crime. No we are not doing a carve-out because they really want to kill Hamas fighters. Absurd and horrific to suggest that.
https://time.com/6696507/palestinian-death-toll-gaza-israel-...
1 in 100 people have been killed in gaza since october 7th.
Entire neighborhoods have been leveled by bombs and bulldozed.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/07/world/middlee...
All this and you are saying it's up for debate that that they are trying to kill civilians.
Generally the areas leveled and bombed were evacuated from civilians. Yes, there were definitely many cases where civilians died from bombs but your statement is not relevant in the way you claim it is.
If you were Israel, and you have 40,000 combatants in Gaza that want to rape, kill and mutiliate your citizens, and say they will never stop, hold hostages, what do you do? Do you have a magical solution that removes them from the fortified, full of tunnels and booby traps Gaza?
So yes, it's totally up to debate. I am sure there have been cases of civilians being targeted. I am also sure that the finger on the trigger is very light on the Israeli side. But this is very different than intentionally targeting civilians as a matter of policy. There is plenty of proof that is not the case, civilians have evacuated under IDF security from many parts in Gaza and were not killed. Hamas does not differentiate civilians from combatants, uses child combatants, and while maybe the total number is in the ballpark the details are manipulated. This is not to excuse or make light of the heavy price of this conflict in human life.
I know, now we're going to unravel the entire conflict. Talk about Israel's right wing crazies and government, Occupation, resistance, apartheid, genocide, open air prison, etc. No we don't need to unravel the entire conflict. We can judge this from Oct 7th because the significance of that event in scale and barbarism eclipses the entire conflict. If you want to unravel the entire conflict I'm happy to do that too.
Based on what? Killing 200 people per day? Bombing people that are evacuating their homes after telling them to do it?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/16/middleeast/israel-palestinian...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-wa...
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-10-13/israel...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/world/middleeast/israel-g...
Israel's plan to "destroy" Gaza comes from "the highest level of state", the UN's top court has heard.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67942983
200 people per day is also not a reasonable metric. Would you prefer a 100 people per day over twice the time? Why do you think this means anything? There were many days in the war in Ukraine where more people died per day under completely different conditions and ofcourse the total number of people killed in that war is significantly higher as well. War. Look at comparable campaigns like the Battle of Mosul. And yes, I already acknowledged many civilians died from bombs and Israel after Oct 7th is certainly concerned less about that than before Oct 7th, but still following the rules of war and not targeting civilians intentionally. If there are 40,000 combatants scattered in a densely populated area and in tunnels and they're being attacked from the air with hundreds of bombs/day what are the expected civilian casualties? Do you think Israel should have done nothing? Would anyone else? Do you think Israeli ground forces should have walked into the area without bombing it so they can get slaughtered/ambushed/blown up? Israel would like nothing better than not having had to have this war.
The number of dead people is terrible, and the fault for all this lies squarely on the Hamas. The total number and the breakdown of civilians/combatants is not really known at this point. I don't trust the numbers from Hamas because they are motivated to manipulate them as is evident by us having this discussion. But for sure many people have died which again is terrible. But reducing the argument to "Israel kills people Israel bad" where provably nobody else in this world would do any different (See 9/11 or the war against ISIS) and provably Hamas initiated this cycle of violence and the evidence (despite your list) is that Israel isn't waging this war in a way that deviates significantly from other wars is an emotional response, not a rational one. We know why people aren't having these responses to the conflict in Yemen where 400k people were killed, the conflict in Syria where IIRC one million people were killed, or many other bad things going on in the world, it's because the media is pumping photos of Gaza destruction 24/7 and couldn't give a damn about what's going on anywhere else (including Ukraine).
I am going to answer your first question in good faith despite you not reciprocating. It's based on my knowledge of human nature and similar war circumstances. Anyone fighting in these situations would have a very light trigger finger because the difference between you being dead and the enemy being dead depends on that. You just have no idea what's going on in the ground, the tactics being used by Hamas etc.
EDIT: there have also been many friendly fire incidents and lots of IDF soliders killed by IDF fire, and the famous incident of the hostages being killed by the IDF. This is again indicative of the "light trigger finger" (because otherwise it's you that's dead) and the tactics used by Hamas.
I'm showing you real information from multiple worldwide news sources. You are writing huge paragraphs with no links to try to ignore a genocide in progress while repeating unsourced propaganda like "Gaza that want to rape, kill and mutiliate your citizens"
When you kill 1% of a population you are imprisoning in four months, destroy their homes, hospitals, infrastructure and water sources then kill people trying to bring them aid, that's genocide. If this was reversed you would call it genocide. If it was happening anywhere else you would call it genocide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_qaxLu-e6I
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/31/1222337109/the-israeli-army-a...
https://www.msf.org/attacks-humanitarian-workers-gaza-make-v...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/23/israeli-airstr...
Your "unsourced propaganda" comment is offensive bullshit, but here are some sources:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/oct-7-sexual-violence-united-n...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67629181
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-hamas-used-sexual...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-at...
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/24/feminism-sexual-violence...
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/uk/2024/02/03/hamas-raped-a...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13005021/october-ge...
https://www.businessinsider.com/hamas-sexual-violence-octobe...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/world/middleeast/hamas-se...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/israeli-activists-say-worl...
https://news.sky.com/story/womens-genitals-systemically-muti...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/witnesses-confirm-rap...
https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/12/29/horrific-new-evidence-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sj62yy7na
https://nationwideradiojm.com...
How many people need to die before you call something genocide?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/ha...
If Islam does not allow the killing of civilians then what exactly happened at the Nova festival or in all the settlements attacked on Oct 7th?
"16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."
Also you know that quote is from the Quran, which takes precedence over the Hamas Covenant...
Hamas killed hundreds using suicide bombers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
What about ISIS? Al Qaeda? PIJ? Taliban? I'm not even going to count the millions of civilians killed by civil wars in Muslim countries. The idea that Hamas won't kill civilians because it goes against Islam is so ridiculous and disconnected from reality that I don't think we live on the same planet.
Hamas continues to attack and kill civilians, intentionally, throughout. Including after 2017. Including Oct 7th. You can't seriously say you Googled this and it doesn't exist.
Here's how many civilians were killed before Oct 7th:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/comprehensive-listing-o...
Indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilians:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestinian-rocket-and-...
"Wiesenthal Centre Alert: "Hamas Charter 'Fatwa' to Murder all Jews Still in Effect" " - https://www.wiesenthal.com/about/news/wiesenthal-centre-aler...
Just tell me how many references you need and I'll find that number.
EDIT: You should also watch footage from Oct 7th and listen to the testimonies of survivors. Hamas raped and mutilated civilians. They live streamed and filmed some of their actions. They called parents on the victims phone to show them they're killing them. Hamas threw hand grenades into shelters where civilians were trying to hide. It burnt civilian houses down to kill the families hiding inside them. It is a diabolic, fanatical, psychopathic, evil entity. This claim that somehow Hamas doesn't target civilians is just - crazy.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-un-rape-oct7-...
You assertion is also ridiculous because it ignores the order in which things happened. First Hamas attacked civilians. Then Israel responded. During that response civilians were killed.
Israel's killing of civilians is a war crime only under certain conditions. Killing of civilians during war isn't automatically a war crime. If there are war crimes, then we should certainly condemn them.
Some see things like this [0] and chalk it off as cost of war or whatever, and are not outraged or worse justify it, but they can't demand the same of others.
> This isn't curious conversation; it isn't even conversation
Agree. Due to the conflict's very public nature, the narratives have deep-seated irreconcilable differences mixed with a good dose of racism/supremacism/moralism, while the moderate voices are the most feeble, because they're also outnumbered [1].
[0] https://twitter.com/ytirawi/status/1766912143444656544
[1] https://twitter.com/AdlerJoelle/status/1766974185094492610
The IDF ratios are indeed atrocious. For journalists, for example, in another thread I tried to calculate some detailed estimates, and concluded that given the casualties up to 01/03, if one journalist and one Hamas militant were statistically put side by side, IDF is ~3x more likely to shoot the journalist. See:
Part I: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39603300
Part II: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39603311
Part III (Python source code): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39603322
If you want to argue with someone who said any of that, find someone who actually said it. Pointing out that Israel is an inherently inequitable ethnostate should have made it pretty clear I'm hardly trying to "absolve" Israel of anything, and that's not the only clue in my comment.
If you're having trouble parsing out what I actually said, you're welcome to ask actual questions rather than rhetorically leading ones (much less wildly putting words in my mouth).
You might also find how I responded in another branch helpful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662944
as well as meditating the difference between speaking in terms of the understandable and the excusable.
> Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.
You might imagine Google has leverage (that perhaps a sufficiently large number of employees could apply themselves to) with Israel to get them to abandon their current policy by threatening to withdraw from their contract. It's pretty likely that they don't, even assuming what Google provides isn't fungible.
One of Hamas' goals is apparently to provoke Israel to continue to kill civilians in hopes that it ruins Israel's relations with various western institutions. If that starts to actually work even with smaller stakes players like Google, it's likely enough they'll do more of what works.
And it actually gets traction fairly easily because there are people in the Israeli government who, as you point out, apparently prefer unrestrained aggression as a strategy for advancing various internal agendas. And some of them have the talent for actually consolidating internal power as international criticism and isolation increases.
This conflict is happening both because real grievances provide the groundwork and because there are actors on both sides of the conflict who genuinely think they have something to gain from acting as they have since October, even in the face of unconscionable slaughter (which can, after all, be converted to grievance fuel). The United States government can barely bring to bear pressure that restrains it. The idea that Google can do much seems even thinner.
(I agree, by the way, that Israel has responded in ways that are wrong morally and probably wrong strategically. It's similar in some ways to US mistakes post 9/11, and our eventual transition to more focused counterterrorism criminal and military ops seems to have worked out much better for us, though Israel has enough plausibly different problems I'm sure there are some apples and oranges.)
I personally have felt a bit more optimistic about the long term future.
Coming of age in post 9/11 America and going from the warm embrace of playing my Nintendo 64 everyday to seeing regular people go full on hate for people like me was a depressing era that I thought would never end. It certainly shaped how I view myself as a human. I guess you can say the haters got to me. A lot of things I aspired to in middle school completely ended in high school because of this self-hate.
I felt renewed hope during the Obama years in college but never really shook off this feeling. After all long term damage was already done regarding the path I took in life.
When Trump got elected, I felt all depressed all over again because all those terrible people came right back out of the shadows yet again but I eventually realized (finally) that I cannot keep letting this affect me. I had to focus on how lucky I am to have what I have and do the best I can.
When this attack happened, I thought oh no not again. Overnight all those people came out of the shadows yet again. But this time I saw something amazing. I saw countless numbers of people organizing against the Israeli siege: all over the world including the US. My initial thought was this is just a temporary blip and people will get tired and move on. Nope: protests continued even in the US which I was sure would just move on from caring about Muslims. It sometimes feels like the US will not come to the defense of Muslims like they would other groups. We see it in the favorability polling. But these protests: I have seen first hand, how this has really scared a lot of those people that normally come out of the shadows. The first time I have seen this in my life.
Now the protests are being dismissed as if they are nothing. Attempts are being made to silence any avenue they use to communicate. Meta platforms were already blocking this stuff, they deployed the standard bucket of tricks to silent dissent on Youtube and Reddit(thank god for HN) and now the potential banning of the 400lb gorilla in the room: Tiktok. This tool of potential Chinese propaganda helped serve a useful purpose: it amplified conversations that are normally taboo in the US.
So going back to why I feel a bit optimistic? Well I believe this is a signature event for Millennials and especially Gen Z. Gen Z is a generation that grew up with so many problems thrown in their faces (the mental illness caused by smartphones, graduating into a terrible job market, no prospects of owning property, having to live to see climate change etc.)
As a result they started out of the gate super pessimistic about the powers that be. I saw the unbelievable boost in Bernie Sanders's candidacy thanks the the efforts of these people. We really could be seeing a future Gen Z president who is in one of these pro-Palestinian protests.
Lets not even get into Gen-Alpha. They are on track to be the first majority non-white generation in America. How will that affect their world views?
Meanwhile where is Israel? This country that has continually gotten the benefit of the doubt my entire life has severely damaged its reputation in the eyes of young people world wide. The people that are about to take power. At the same time, they can't even get their own house in order regarding their government. This attack has proven that despite their supposed brilliance in war technology (Unit 8200, Stuxnet, etc.) they can really mess up and look like a bunch of dopes shattering the image that they are invincible.
In all Israel is trying to hold together by pushing back against "political" entropy, at some point given all the things that have transpired, entropy will win. How long will it take? Who knows. But I don't think you can make young people "unlearn" their views on Israel at this point and thats the challenge groups like AIPAC are going to have to face.
Now I do want to give an opposite ...
Why is your response as a Muslim to the horrific attack of Oct 7th a worry about backlash to you personally? vs. e.g. feeling for the victims of that attack?
This feels very tribal to me. Do you really think this is the right framing?
If Israelis suffer, is that somehow going to fix your problem? Are we trying to make things better to all or make things worse for all but feel like we're doing something? It seems to me the protests are doing the latter. I think, and I might be naive, that if the global Muslim community engaged with the intent of finding ways to make this win-win, we could get somewhere. But it seems the community is engaged in lose-lose (or maybe lose-lose-lose).
Makes 0 sense for us to take sides in this conflict.
How can these two thoughts go together? Either its a horrible "ethnostate" or its a reasonable construct due to Jews special history.
Any history of ethnic suffering creates a situation where it's natural to suspect outgroup society can't be trusted to reliably treat the ingroup adequately well. So in response, they might create institutions that privilege the ingroup and prioritize its security and prosperity. Outgroup rights & dignity may even become negotiable or disposable in the name of ingroup priorities, sometimes even basic rights like property, freedom of movement, or life.
This of course guarantees the outgroup will have legitimate and serious grievances (along with any less legitimate ones they may or may not have), which will eventually mean they too may feel justified in approaching the problem from a never-again ingroup-first perspective, probably eventually including organized violence and whatever system oriented around these values that they can.
Voilà: self-sustaining conflict dynamic. And everything seemed at least locally justifiable all along the way. After all, what's wrong with providing ingroup security, and punishing outgroup aggression?
Or is there something wrong with it?
So you're basically saying it made sense at the time (and perhaps it still does) but it also created a mess with the Palestinians? I can agree with that.
Yet here we are, what are we going to do now? Going back in history to prevent the holocaust and many other atrocities towards Jews before (and even after) is not possible. Preventing Zionism is not possible. For some reason the intellectual elite seems to be convinced the only possible way out of this is the elimination of Israel - how come? I can understand why Palestinians or the Iranians would want that, I don't understand the huge support in the West for this type of thinking though.
Even among those who see its behavior as a driver of the conflicts it is embroiled in -- even among those who may see Israel as an oppressor -- there doesn't seem to be anything like a coalition around any specific plan for its outright elimination, let alone one that could get traction.
There are some substantial academic criticisms of Israel's behavior or even status as a colonizing oppressor and I think what happens is that when those enter the popular discourse, they get conscripted into simple sympathies and boiled down side-taking (which mostly feeds the conflict dynamic).
One thing I think systems thinkers (hackers, academics, intellectual elites, whatever) do tend to understand is this:
As long as Israel exists in a form where outgroup rights & dignity & lives are disposable, it will be contributing to the conflict.
That's a dynamic-descriptive statement, not a singular prescription. It implies several possible paths: Israel could be dissolved/replaced, Israel could grow into accepting the responsibility of materially valuing outgroup rights & dignity & lives itself even when it's inconveniently in tension with other immediate pressures, Israel could cede some control (and territory) to a larger system that will take on that responsibility for it, or we could accept the status quo.
It's a bit less common to hold that understanding at the same time as another systems reality:
As long as Israel and its ingroup are under existential threat, judging outgroup rights & dignity to be disposable will have broader internal appeal, consolidating the power of those who choose that as their pitch or hold it as part of a fundamental worldview.
This probably is the location of the mistake you have a feeling some in the West are making. When we use rhetoric or steer towards policy whose end seems like Israel's dissolution, we're not just dealing with a question about whether our sympathies are most appropriately placed with Israeli/Jewish people or dispossessed Palestinians, we are exerting force on a lever of the conflict system and the likely outcome is an equal and opposite reaction or a transfer of angular momentum into the circular conflict rotation. It encourages Israeli perspectives like "we're right to aggressively do whatever it takes to fend for ourselves because nobody else is really on our side." It might even tells actor like Hamas that their plan works, that they really can drive a wedge between Israel and the rest of the world by merely provoking Israel into treating tens of thousands Palestinian civilians as collateral damage (basically turning people Hamas hadn't converted into actual soldiers yet into a kind of conscript after the fact, to say nothing of the survivors that might be radicalized).
Why do we do it? I don't know. Maybe thinking in terms of sympathies instead of systems does require more effort. Maybe human nature to simplify. Maybe many of us have the luxury of little actual skin in the game, so we can choose sympathies and symbolic values over the substance and mechanics of the system (though on the other hand, skin in the game also often makes sympathy more immediate).
I kinda hope that in the software era / information age that modestly trains more people to think about some specific systems at least, maybe we can figure out how to do better, but OTOH all the decreased friction of discourse has had mixed results.
Not everyone agrees on how to do it - the Iranians and their axis are trying to do it by violence. Western sympathizers don't outright support violence but don't outright condemn it either (oppressed people can't commit terror etc, minimizing what happened on October 7th etc) and at the same time they are trying to create the conditions for Israel to not be able to defend itself: attempts for arms embargo, economic and diplomatic isolation and as mentioned above creating an atmosphere that tolerates the violent destruction of Israel. All this is meant to allow the 'Right of Return', where descendants of Palestinians refugees from 76 years ago (!) are still refugees in places like Lebanon, Syria and even Jordan, and to the best of my knowledge are the only people who are kept in an eternal status of refugees so they can return a century later to their 'original' homes.
And using the term intellectual elite is inaccurate but its not wrong - a Harvard professor for gender studies or oriental studies is much more likely to support the plan I outlined above than any other type of solution. So not all intellectuals, but way more than you'd expect.