This isn't a good answer for why a major cybersecurity story that largely throws the idea of doing business with any Israeli company ever into jeopardy (any company could be a state malware operation in disguise) to the 5th page when it was upvoted as much as it was.
I know HN's algorithm is weird, but this story deserves to stick to the front page for more than the couple of hours the last thread lasted. I don't agree with the algorithm automatically deplatforming controversial topics.
A company from countryX does something unkosher -- this means all companies from country X do everything unkosher :)
Good luck operating under these assumptions -- Show me a company that is a leader in tech or business that is not from a country where some companies did unkosher things
The story probably is being curated off the front page, but to be fair I understand the motivation. There aren’t many subjects that inspire as many high emotions as Israel. Everyone has strong options. The mods probably think it’s not worth the trouble to police the threads and they’re probably right. Nobody is going to change any minds in any of those threads anyway.
Suppression implies intent, no? There was/is no such intent. The submission got penalized by software for various reasons (mostly unrelated to the topic), as well as flagged by users. We've turned that off now.
If, instead of assuming sinister deeds, you (or anyone) would simply give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com, we could fix it sooner. This is what eventually happened.
Edit: it turns out a submission of the original report has been on the frontpage for the last 9 hours, so I've merged the other threads into that one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101813.
You (and HN as a whole) have a pretty good track record of intervention when automated moderation fails. I certainly don't mean to accuse you of any malicious intent here.
But it's pretty clear that there was a concerted effort to suppress those posts by various actors who did have such intent. I do think it's a failing of the automated system that such suppression can be done at all.
Powerful corporations and nation states have always tried to maintain control over the flow of information. It was never really rules or regulations that kept them in check, but the practicalities of budgets and resourcing constraints. Now that those barriers are crumbling, I think the challenge of moderation will be much harder for all discussion going forward.
My question is, why is Israel so good at this? It seems to be at least the 4th cyber power of the world, after the US, Russia and China, if not actually on par or better.
I guess it is because it has been under the threat of larger enemies from its birth, so it must leverage whatever it has to survive. And once you grow an organization and let it loose, you don't have much control over it anymore, and it grows in the wild like a flower.
US gets away with it because no one can challenge their military might, Israel gets away with it because any criticism of the state is “anti-Semitic”. Not the same thing
...Did you just emerge from a bunker that you entered in 1946? Here in 2026 we're on quite a losing streak against MUCH weaker opponents. I mean I get it, you're doing the "Jewish conspiracy" thing and reality, truth, words having meanings are all inconsequential to you, but you have to try harder than this.
Even the US had big scandals with Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, with big public debates. Even if this was just about public image and hypocritical, not about real values, it shows some capacity for shame.
Though this may be changing now with Trump and the israelification of america.
Big scandals that led to... prosecutions of the people involved at a high level? Systemic change?
Come on... Snowden told us that we were all being spied on and we made some movies, some books, a lot of blog posts and that was it.
Abu Ghraib? The people literally on film doing things were prosecuted, and it was passed off as an essentially low-level problem.
Gitmo still exists and has prisoners.
We invaded Iraq on a lie, literally lied to the UN about a nuclear threat that didn't exist. Elected that guy a second time, just like Reagan and Nixon and Trump.
What we're good at is public debate that goes nowhere and losing wars in the Middle East.
I am just saying that if your country can be openly evil without having to resort to hypocrisy, the rot in your society is much deeper than if your politicians at least have to pretend to be good.
What if instead of “hypocrites pretending to be good, and the wicked not even pretending,” everyone thought they were good and largely trying to do the right thing from potentially radically different circumstances and attitudes?
Because it's clearly untrue that "everyone thought they were good". Even David Ben-Gurion knew what's up: "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country." [0]
All normal countries spy on their enemies and all normal countries spy on their friends. All normal countries use cyber-espionage. All normal political groups condemn the actions of groups they oppose and excuse the same actions when committed by those they support.
You just listed some of the most sanctioned countries in the world #1 and #3.
China doesn't have large sanctions because it plays a key role in the economy, but the US had massive regime change intelligence operations against them in the 90s, but they failed and were dismantled.
It’s an interesting question. I would also guess that this kind of behaviour would be illegal for private companies in many countries even if you don’t do it domestically.
Because Israel is beset on all sides, geographically, digitally and conceptually, by forces hostile to western civilization who want to destroy them at the first opportunity. Being competent at cyber is useful defensively and offensively and the existential nature is highly motivating for the people working at it every day.
It's wild to me that if you wrote a fictional account of a vassal state that was constructed in the center of "hostile" territory, who exercised brutal violence on all it's neighbors, including strictly for the purpose of territorial acquisition, who was funded and supplied implements of war from it's super-state that vastly exceeded it's own production capabilities, which it used to win every conflict it found itself in, and who's officials regularly make the news for calling for outright genocide, everyone would call them the bad guys. Meanwhile in the real world we just call that Israel, and waive vaguely at "complicated politics."
Or if we are to be historically correct, Israel is a result of nation building as a result of breaking a British empire, just like 35 other countries across Asia, the Carribean and the Middle east.
That includes India, Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, UAE, Yemen and others.
> Livestreams himself gratuitously raping & killing innocent children on Oct 7
That literally never happened. No matter how much as they (& you) claim it did, and want it to be true, not a single shred of evidence ever substantiated those claims. In fact the prisoners of war that were captured all claimed they were treated fairly, even given the squalid conditions their captors were forced to live in.
Cope harder. The US guarantees the security of many nations, including many of the failed states in the Middle East. Look at Saudi Arabia, being completely helpless and begging everyone for help with the Houthis.
That's been the status quo for decades, but between Trump convincing folks that the US won't protect them and Iran convincing folks that the US can't protect them, and Hegseth focusing more on culture war stuff rather than policy objectives it's a guarantee that's looking a bit thin.
Iran isn't convincing anyone. It's a rogue terrorist state that has pissed off all of its neighbors by launching missiles at them and harassing their ships in international waters. The country is sinking, inflation and unemployment are rampant, its currency is worthless, but the mullahs will do whatever it takes to stay in power.
Back when I was a tech journalist, back in the 90s I visited Israel once and interviewed a number of their tech companies - admittedly most in the cyber-security space.
They ascribed a lot of the tech innovation to conscription - lots of the founders had learned a lot while in technical posts in the army and put that to use when they left.
Most people have heard of the Mossad, but Unit 8200 of the IDF deserves the same notoriety. The state selects bright young techies and trains them in the absolute state-of-the-art in cybercrime. What could go wrong?
>The unit is composed primarily of 18–21 year olds. As a result of the youth of the soldiers in the unit, and the shortness of their service period, the unit relies on selecting recruits with the ability for rapid adaptation and speedy learning. Afterschool programs for 16–18 year olds, teaching computer coding and hacking skills, also serve as feeder programs for the unit. Former Unit 8200 soldiers have founded and hold top positions in many international IT companies, including in Silicon Valley.
>According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
The same reason around 25% of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish. Because the Ashkenazi IQ is much higher than average, due to selection pressures in the middle ages when they were banned from manual labor and so had to do well at more intellectual professions to survive.
No, why? Apart from the not very plausible explanation with selection pressures in the middle ages, Jewish intelligence is pretty obvious if you look at the data- just as obvious as it's Jewish economic and media power, Jewish influence in Western politics, Jewish contributions to arts and literature, and so on. It really couldn't be more obvious. I think we need to recognise it and find ways to deal with it, from both sides.
Multiple reasons. America gives Israel special protection for everything they do, Ashkenazi and general Jewish culture values education more than anyone outside of East Asia, and a lot of Soviet Jewish scientists had to work for the military so they came to Israel with cryptography or spy tech experience.
> Ashkenazi and general Jewish culture values education more than anyone
I would recommend you to visit Israel and traditional orthodox jews. Women are serving as "birthing machines", constantly pregnant, and doing all house chores. Education for women is strongly discouraged. Men are "studying", but useless memorizing of old texts.
Normal education in western sense is strongly discouraged in traditional jewish culture!
Two things can be true at the same, although I agree with your assessment of future prospects - and the recent OECD report on school performance could be read that way too (or blamed on the war as the government has).
Israel is not just one homogeneous people, there are some orthodox jews who study biblical texts, treat women as birthing machines, and (personal opinion) contribute little to our society.
Yes, orthodox jews are a significant part of the population (~1.4 million in 2025 [1]), and I wouldn't go there looking for modern ideas like women's rights, but go a couple km in any direction and you'd find completely different people, living modern lives just like in the rest of the western world. Schools, research universities (Tel Aviv University, Waitzmann Institue of Science, Technion), tech companies, startups, makerspaces, and many more.
Traditional Judaism has this really weird (to me, a goy) emphasis on finding loopholes in rules. I always remember these ropes they place around New York City and other places so they can stay "indoors" on, I think it was, the Shabbat, by walking underneath the rope, which is a type of ceiling.
As I understand it, they know God's not stupid and sees right through this sort of thing, but they believe God put rules like "stay indoors on the Shabbat" in place so that He could entertain Himself by watching the creative loopholes humans come up with. Other Shabbat loopholes include putting things on timers the day before, paying a non-Jew to do things that Jews are forbidden to do, or legally transferring ownership of the cupboard full of bread to a non-Jew for the one day a year when Jews aren't allowed to own bread.
And as I understand it, they do this with all things, from a young age. Cultivating this mindset definitely has something to do with their cybersecurity prowess.
> Traditional Judaism has this really weird (to me, a goy) emphasis on finding loopholes in rules.
As an atheist Jew, it's weird to me as well...
> stay "indoors" on, I think it was, the Shabbat
Can't say I'm familiar with that one. What I'm generally familiar with is that you're not allowed to "work" on Shabbat, and the definition of work is extremely broad. For example, lighting a fire is considered work, turning a light switch on creates a tiny spark between the contacts, that counts as fire, so it's work.
This extends to pretty much every electrical device, so for those who observe Shabbat, using a computer or phone, turning the AC on or off, is all disallowed.
As a result there are many workarounds as you've described, timers, non-Jews (though you can't ask directly! You can say "it's hot in here", but not "Please turn the AC on"), fridges without a light bulb inside, and more.
> they do this with all things, from a young age.
Religious families do, to varying degrees. But I've met plenty of extremely talented programmers and hackers who do not follow any of the Jewish law.
And also it has help, it is unlikely it acts alone. Example Stuxnet. Israel has the talent so they are a convenient and willing proxy too for getting shady shit done.
Don't forget the compounding effect. Say, one country (or city or community) decides to invest their efforts into area X (e.g. clock making in Switzerland). They do it and become better and better. As long as they keep doing that they can become #1 in the world. Regardless of any reasons "why them".
There's no reason Netherlands are better at chip lithography except that they're doing it (Dutch agriculture success can be attributed to good soils/climate/geolocation, but not chips). There's no reason Hollywood is better at filmmaking. Kinda chaos theory -- small changes to initial state leads to huge changes in the later outcomes.
I would like to give a real world example of this too.
If you want to do something artistic or start a business based around Art, Montreal is perfect for it, for the very same reason above.
Initially the govt invested in the arts to preserve French culture, which resulted in a lot of art infrastructure being made, cheap ateliers, fabric suppliers, paint suppliers, &c. Which attracted a lot of artists, which then increases the demand for the art infrastructure, which makes the city easy to make art in.
It makes it stupid easy to make stuff and find the skilled artisans you need to make it. Much easier than any other Canadian city I've lived in.
Depends what "best" means. Best city for cheapest workers in that area? Best city for highest paying employers in that area? Just these two would yield different cities.
The Hollywood case has a quirk that is relevent to the extensional content of HN:
West coast filmmakng started in the Bay Area (at the time the largest conurbation in the west) but moved south because of the year 'round weather.
But why the west? Because Edison controlled the filmmaking patents and demanded not just royalties but script oversight as well. By moving west, they could ignore the patents because they were simply too hard to enforce from such a long distance.
So ironically, given how things worked out, IP piracy is at the root of Hollywood.
Yep, but Edison is long gone, while Hollywood kept compounding over time. There's zero other reasons Hollywood is _currently_ better than any other place for filmmaking.
This, plus all jewish folks I've ever met are naturally smart (not genetically of course, more like societal pressures/expectations/upbringing), hard working like few others, and seem to genuinely veer towards numerical jobs - banking and finance, math, applied math like security, cryptography, trading and so on. Very similar to Iranians to be fair, if US and British MI6 wouldnt be meddling in Iranian internal politics and supporting corrupt shah to steal all the oil cheaply those 2 would be together a superpower on global scale. Israel was very very lucky to not have any oil on their territories.
Plus very much present in US politics and power circles for some reason.
2 examples out of many - my boss is a prime example, every thought somehow infused with money (I work in a bank). My ex gf was exactly the same (she is a successful commodity trader). Just very, very different mindset to the core to say typical european one (I mention folks who are europeans and I've never been to Israel, so extrapolating a bit here).
It has always been at odds with its neighbors and has persecuted its occupied people, for far too long. It has further facilitated other tyrant governments in the control of their people. The cyberwarfare industry in Israel is directly part of the controlled Defense Industry.
It is not under threat. It has sought to be a formidable threat to everyone.
Israel is definitely a threat to its enemies, but even if you think it's all their fault and they deserve it (I do not think that), it's pretty obvious that Israel also faces many threats.
Perhaps you don’t know the history or simply choose to ignore it. Initiating bombing, ethnic cleansing, stealing land, property and occupation of people for eight decades, while publicly declaring a desire to invade all the regional nations to create a greater Israel apartheid regime does generate pushback. Imagine that.
See professor john mearsheimer on the history & future of israel
What I meant was, I don’t think Israel is the only guilty party in that decades old conflict, nor the only side with agency to choose how to react in the conflict.
Read the Hamas charter, Iran’s statements about Israel, etc. Israel is not unique in choosing violence.
The Hamas charter is more-or-less isomorphic to the Likud charter, Likud being the currently ruling political party of Israel. So it's not fair to assign asymmetric blame to those charters.
This is a multi-sided conflict. Ignoring reality and history won't help, even if you feel very strongly that one of those sides is right.
- 1948 - Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon invade Israel
- 1956 - Israel invades the Sinai
- 1967 - Israel preemptively strikes Egypt in response to military buildup
- 1973 - Egypt and Syria invade Israel
- 1982 - Israel invades Lebanon
- 2006 - Hezbollah attacks Israel
The idea of Israel being under threat has been inculcated into every Israeli and Zionist. Significant casualties of historical facts had to occur such as The first arab israel war is described as arab world fighting Israel, Even though Israel conquered significant parts of UN partitioned Palestine. The arab govts were too new to be a threat. And they were too disunited then and now. Since inception, Israel has been behind every attack and disruption to peace.
Not really. Most countries don't face realistic threat of invasion, especially post world war 2.
Over the last 50 years, the probability of anyone invading france, canada, australia, etc has been next to 0. The only countries that really had to worry are the ones that straddle the regions of influence during the cold war.
Pre-1967 Israel didn't control the West Bank or Gaza. So most of the bad stuff people claim about Israel today didn't really exist.
Yet all its neighbours wanted to destroy it.
Lebanon who in theory should have no dispute with Israel bombarded it with ten's of thousands of rockets, mortars, anti-tank munitions etc. After Oct 7th.
The bit you're missing in your overly simplistic analysis is that Israel is really surrounded/attacked by a single religious/political ideology. There is no "everybody else here".
And what you are missing is that Israel acts don't call for friendship even in the people that would want this friendship.
Israel has stolen as much secrets from US as they could grab. Has violated every international law. There are strong suspicions to be behind Epstein honey trap for riches and politicians all around USA and Europe. Has funded Hamas. Has an horrible record with human rights, longer than the bible. Has put spy devices in friends phones each time they could. Has left each politician that supported them, alone and hanging dry in the elections, from Biden to Merz.
US does not want the demise of Israel, but Israel does not even try to pretend that they respect the opinion of US. Even after all this time, is all grab and cash. And US is always cleaning the mess that they left behind.
China has stolen x1000000 secrets from the US. Everyone spies on everyone. Israel relatively less. So that assumption is just baseless.
"Has violated every international law". Baseless. Violates less "international laws" than most western countries, not to speak of the rest of the world. I mean "international law" isn't really a thing, it's a series of treaties.
Called non-Jews "human animals". Just the Hamas and the perpetrators of Oct 7th. And rightly so. I mean animal is a compliment to those people. (all humans are animals really).
I don't know where you're getting all of this from. But it's an alternate reality. It is not factual. It is putting Israel under a microscope when most of the world behaves much worse. There are dozens of countries with much worse human rights violations than Israel is even accused of. And many of those accusations are outright lies. That's not to say every Israeli soldier is perfect or that Israel is perfect, but it's certainly better than e.g. anything the west did when it went after ISIS/ISIL or Al Qaeda or pretty much any other war waged by the west. And the west is better than the rest of the world by far.
You are just echoing propaganda here. And that's the reality of why people hate Israel. Because they are bombarded by propaganda that tells them to hate Israel. If you actually are able to zoom out of that you will see it as well. That plus antisemitism.
EDIT: You are right that Israel isn't spending a ton of cycles trying to get e.g. Europe and Americans to "like it". Between the choice of e.g. winning the war in Gaza and e.g. giving up to Biden's demands (e.g.) Israel has chosen that it must win the war. The American left, media, and universities, e.g. are structurally biased against Israel. They are regurgitating cold war USSR narratives. This is the result of more than two decades of anti-Israeli propaganda. Israel sometimes has to cut its losses. It can't out compete the resources of Qatar, Russia, and China e.g. who are out to splinter the US by whatever means possible. It could do better but between "making friends" and a decisive win against Hamas which is crucial for its future security it will pick the decisive win.
Look at the media coverage regarding Israel's continued pressure on Hamas since the ceasefire. Israel keeps eliminating Hamas commanders, it's eliminating people who were part of the Oct 7th raid into Israel, it's eliminating infrastructure used for military purposes, it's eliminating people who have held hostages. What the media is reporting is simply that Israel is "violating the ceasefire" and "killing Palestinians". That narrative is false. If you believe it then you're going to "hate Israel" as you are programmed to do. But Israel like any other country has the right to win against Hamas in this war Hamas started.
Maybe the downvoters can actually provide some real sort of evidence to support their case. If Israel "steals more secrets from the US than China" as is asserted let's see that proven. If human rights in Israel are worse than lessay China, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Qatar, lets see something to support that. Well- that something doesn't exist.
But that's mostly true, because those countries are rich and fly half the world away to attack poorer countries and usually by bombing them from far away. Eg syrians can't realistically gather enough money and weapons and planes and bombs to bomb paris. Or iraqis london. Etc. On the other hand, they can gather a few fanatics, give them guns and have them shoot a bunch of people, or bomb something, or worse. But then we get the "why did those people get radicalized? was it GTA?" articles.
TBH, considering the number of dead in palestine and the number of people in europe/us who literally lost everyone who ever mattered to them, the number of "terrorist" attacks seems relatively low.
Why is that relavent? The point is that some countries have more immediate security fears then others. It doesn't matter what structural factors lead to that. Countries with realistic security fears are going to invest differently than those that don't. Countries like people do whatever they think is in their best interest.
If your point is the world is unfair, then yes obviously that is true, nobody disputes that.
If france decided they needed to exert their "political pressure" over eg. germany, they'd have the same problem and all the realistic security fears, because germany is a rich country and they share a border. Same for the opposite direction with a few more historic events related to that. Same with france vs uk wars, and many many other wars in europe.
But hey, having your capital cities bombed is expensive, transport is cheap, and so it's easier to bully countries in a different continent, eventually bomb and invade them, becuase you're pretty sure they won't be able reach you back home with conventional war means (planes, rockets, tanks,...).
And yes, it's relevant, some politicians in one of those "safe" countries decided to bomb some country in a different continent, and you, a normal football fan or a party goer get killed when those people come and fight back in "unconventional means" (eg 2015 in paris). Somehow no one treats those as "we're at war with them, we bombed them first, they're just fighting back".
To a certain extent, i think its because Israel benefits from being seen as "scary" so there isn't as much pressure to keep this sort of thing on the down low, where in any other countries there is more pressure to keep grey-area stuff like this secret to prevent blowback.
A few potential possibilities that may or may not be popular here.
- Compulsory military service means the government captures the best and brightest of the country.
- An extraordinarily outsized number of nobel prizes belong to Ashkenazi Jews, and other indicators of intelligence (lack of propensity for violent crime, lifetime earnings, etc) are also quite high for the whole group.
We have had viruses leaked by other countries in the past, with US and Germany coming to mind. If I remember right it was around 2005-2010 when democratic nations officially started to state that they had a right to use malware against criminals and military targets, and from that on it has just kept going. As I recall, Bruce Schneier and FSF made a bit of articles and talks where they tried to get people to understand that once democratic nations starts to use malware offensively they also generally stop protecting their citizens from those security holes.
That we don't hear about it more often seems to me that nations that develop this stuff seem to have gotten better in making malware more precise in what they target and less leaky to the general population, but it could also be that media just don't report about it as much. When a gangs anonymous chat get hacked, or a tor hidden service website get taken down, news seems more interested in talking about the crime than what security vulnerability that the police used.
Unit 8200 [1]. Also, Israel doesn't extradite its own citizens and seems to turn a blind eye to criminals doing nonsense abroad. (Similar to Russia and China.)
That unit is a symptom of their prodigious skill not the cause. Israelis are good at cyber for the same reason the US is good, and the same reason Russia is good. They have an outsized tech industry.
> That unit is a symptom of their prodigious skill not the cause
"Unit 8200 was established in 1952," and apparently the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was founded in 1912 [2]. I don't think Israel became a tech centre until the 1980s or 90s.
I'm not an expert on this. But similar to how military spending created Silicon Valley, I think Israeli military structure created its tech industry.
Because Apple, Intel and Samsung have huge engineering labs there and employ IDF & intelligence people to work in those corporation’s labs. It means they have very detailed knowledge of their products as they have all internal documents and also design software & hardware.
That is why both Apple & Samsung have malware from Israel on their phones. The USA has the NSA building and exploiting products for surveillance and penetration globally.
Netanyahu recently was on a US broadcast, he held up a phone and stated to the reporter interviewing him, that Israel can penetrate any device obtaining it contents and then blackmail or discredit the owner of said device.
The USA now examines phones at airports to see if people are saying things the current administration doesn’t like.
Because they are arrogant as fuck, barge their way in, shove everyone else out of the way and genuinely believe they are gods chosen people. Are you surprised that a country that regularly spits on Christians and turns cities into concentration camps while running the world's biggest pedo blackmail ring, "right to return for pedos" offer, exploding pagers and spyware operations - happens to be the best?
For the same reason Russia is so good at producing mobsters - the government turns a blind eye or even acts as an incubator for scammers. Your question is like asking why the Philippines is so good at sex tourism.
"Researchers also recommend that users at high risk of targeting use ad blockers, disable ad tracking, and regularly reset mobile ad IDs.". Not "recommend". Everyone must use uBlock Origin or at least some type of ad blocker in every device.
Then also mandatory pi-hole on every house.
Even if you are used by Windows OS, you must use an adblocker. Even if you use Chrome. On every browser.
Internet without ublock origin looks and feels horrible, something about insulting basic human decency with o slaught of ads desperately taking so much space.
148 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 11.1 ms ] threadStories about Israel generally devolve into factional fighting with no useful content.
Users flag & vote accordingly.
I know HN's algorithm is weird, but this story deserves to stick to the front page for more than the couple of hours the last thread lasted. I don't agree with the algorithm automatically deplatforming controversial topics.
Good luck operating under these assumptions -- Show me a company that is a leader in tech or business that is not from a country where some companies did unkosher things
On other hand a story Saudi national spying on OpenAI this week got 6 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078176
If, instead of assuming sinister deeds, you (or anyone) would simply give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com, we could fix it sooner. This is what eventually happened.
Edit: it turns out a submission of the original report has been on the frontpage for the last 9 hours, so I've merged the other threads into that one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101813.
But it's pretty clear that there was a concerted effort to suppress those posts by various actors who did have such intent. I do think it's a failing of the automated system that such suppression can be done at all.
Powerful corporations and nation states have always tried to maintain control over the flow of information. It was never really rules or regulations that kept them in check, but the practicalities of budgets and resourcing constraints. Now that those barriers are crumbling, I think the challenge of moderation will be much harder for all discussion going forward.
Edit: er, moved again to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101813.
I guess it is because it has been under the threat of larger enemies from its birth, so it must leverage whatever it has to survive. And once you grow an organization and let it loose, you don't have much control over it anymore, and it grows in the wild like a flower.
In that one incident, they killed and injured more than double the number killed and injured by Al Qaeda in the attack on the USS Cole.
That’s as much as your mom knows.
But yeah the country under an eternal international microscope is the one “getting away with it.”
...Did you just emerge from a bunker that you entered in 1946? Here in 2026 we're on quite a losing streak against MUCH weaker opponents. I mean I get it, you're doing the "Jewish conspiracy" thing and reality, truth, words having meanings are all inconsequential to you, but you have to try harder than this.
Though this may be changing now with Trump and the israelification of america.
Come on... Snowden told us that we were all being spied on and we made some movies, some books, a lot of blog posts and that was it.
Abu Ghraib? The people literally on film doing things were prosecuted, and it was passed off as an essentially low-level problem.
Gitmo still exists and has prisoners.
We invaded Iraq on a lie, literally lied to the UN about a nuclear threat that didn't exist. Elected that guy a second time, just like Reagan and Nixon and Trump.
What we're good at is public debate that goes nowhere and losing wars in the Middle East.
It's hard to tell, on the surface it looks a lot like the usual "Sinister conspiracy" stuff that leaks out of sewer gratings online.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12250339-david-ben-gurion-w...
Russia, China and America each have notable offensive cyberwarfare capabilities. (Pyongyang is a nuclear-armed cybercrime ring at this point.)
China doesn't have large sanctions because it plays a key role in the economy, but the US had massive regime change intelligence operations against them in the 90s, but they failed and were dismantled.
That includes India, Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, UAE, Yemen and others.
That literally never happened. No matter how much as they (& you) claim it did, and want it to be true, not a single shred of evidence ever substantiated those claims. In fact the prisoners of war that were captured all claimed they were treated fairly, even given the squalid conditions their captors were forced to live in.
Israel is not particularly skillful: they're a little bully getting in some punches while a big bully holds back the rescuers. Ooh, tough guy!
But good on you for recognizing that we have a pattern of this kind of thing, even if you've stopped just short of noticing that it's a problem.
I think its pretty clear to everybody now that we cannot protect you if your enemies are:
- sufficiently crazy
- willing to spend $1 attacking for every $50 we spend "defending"
It's now a very different kind of bargain.
"The people I don't like are always unskilled." You shouldn't hate your enemies; it affects your judgement.
They ascribed a lot of the tech innovation to conscription - lots of the founders had learned a lot while in technical posts in the army and put that to use when they left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200
>The unit is composed primarily of 18–21 year olds. As a result of the youth of the soldiers in the unit, and the shortness of their service period, the unit relies on selecting recruits with the ability for rapid adaptation and speedy learning. Afterschool programs for 16–18 year olds, teaching computer coding and hacking skills, also serve as feeder programs for the unit. Former Unit 8200 soldiers have founded and hold top positions in many international IT companies, including in Silicon Valley.
>According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
The same reason around 25% of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish. Because the Ashkenazi IQ is much higher than average, due to selection pressures in the middle ages when they were banned from manual labor and so had to do well at more intellectual professions to survive.
Although laureats of Asian descent have been on the sharpest upward trajector in the recent decades
Sources:
https://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asian_Nobel_laureates
I would recommend you to visit Israel and traditional orthodox jews. Women are serving as "birthing machines", constantly pregnant, and doing all house chores. Education for women is strongly discouraged. Men are "studying", but useless memorizing of old texts.
Normal education in western sense is strongly discouraged in traditional jewish culture!
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-plummets-to-worst-ever-...
Yes, orthodox jews are a significant part of the population (~1.4 million in 2025 [1]), and I wouldn't go there looking for modern ideas like women's rights, but go a couple km in any direction and you'd find completely different people, living modern lives just like in the rest of the western world. Schools, research universities (Tel Aviv University, Waitzmann Institue of Science, Technion), tech companies, startups, makerspaces, and many more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism
As I understand it, they know God's not stupid and sees right through this sort of thing, but they believe God put rules like "stay indoors on the Shabbat" in place so that He could entertain Himself by watching the creative loopholes humans come up with. Other Shabbat loopholes include putting things on timers the day before, paying a non-Jew to do things that Jews are forbidden to do, or legally transferring ownership of the cupboard full of bread to a non-Jew for the one day a year when Jews aren't allowed to own bread.
And as I understand it, they do this with all things, from a young age. Cultivating this mindset definitely has something to do with their cybersecurity prowess.
As an atheist Jew, it's weird to me as well...
> stay "indoors" on, I think it was, the Shabbat
Can't say I'm familiar with that one. What I'm generally familiar with is that you're not allowed to "work" on Shabbat, and the definition of work is extremely broad. For example, lighting a fire is considered work, turning a light switch on creates a tiny spark between the contacts, that counts as fire, so it's work.
This extends to pretty much every electrical device, so for those who observe Shabbat, using a computer or phone, turning the AC on or off, is all disallowed.
As a result there are many workarounds as you've described, timers, non-Jews (though you can't ask directly! You can say "it's hot in here", but not "Please turn the AC on"), fridges without a light bulb inside, and more.
> they do this with all things, from a young age.
Religious families do, to varying degrees. But I've met plenty of extremely talented programmers and hackers who do not follow any of the Jewish law.
There's no reason Netherlands are better at chip lithography except that they're doing it (Dutch agriculture success can be attributed to good soils/climate/geolocation, but not chips). There's no reason Hollywood is better at filmmaking. Kinda chaos theory -- small changes to initial state leads to huge changes in the later outcomes.
Same thing with Israel -- if they had some easier way to make moneys they would go for it. But constant demand from their defense kept if afloat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
If you want to do something artistic or start a business based around Art, Montreal is perfect for it, for the very same reason above.
Initially the govt invested in the arts to preserve French culture, which resulted in a lot of art infrastructure being made, cheap ateliers, fabric suppliers, paint suppliers, &c. Which attracted a lot of artists, which then increases the demand for the art infrastructure, which makes the city easy to make art in.
It makes it stupid easy to make stuff and find the skilled artisans you need to make it. Much easier than any other Canadian city I've lived in.
West coast filmmakng started in the Bay Area (at the time the largest conurbation in the west) but moved south because of the year 'round weather.
But why the west? Because Edison controlled the filmmaking patents and demanded not just royalties but script oversight as well. By moving west, they could ignore the patents because they were simply too hard to enforce from such a long distance.
So ironically, given how things worked out, IP piracy is at the root of Hollywood.
The only reason I even commented was because IP issues are popular and relevant on HN
Plus very much present in US politics and power circles for some reason.
2 examples out of many - my boss is a prime example, every thought somehow infused with money (I work in a bank). My ex gf was exactly the same (she is a successful commodity trader). Just very, very different mindset to the core to say typical european one (I mention folks who are europeans and I've never been to Israel, so extrapolating a bit here).
It has always been at odds with its neighbors and has persecuted its occupied people, for far too long. It has further facilitated other tyrant governments in the control of their people. The cyberwarfare industry in Israel is directly part of the controlled Defense Industry.
It is not under threat. It has sought to be a formidable threat to everyone.
See professor john mearsheimer on the history & future of israel
https://www.youtube.com/live/z8wooQEYyzc?si=_STtJSdEjDUwIl72
What I meant was, I don’t think Israel is the only guilty party in that decades old conflict, nor the only side with agency to choose how to react in the conflict.
Read the Hamas charter, Iran’s statements about Israel, etc. Israel is not unique in choosing violence.
As everybody else in the planet. Israel is not special in that sense.
Over the last 50 years, the probability of anyone invading france, canada, australia, etc has been next to 0. The only countries that really had to worry are the ones that straddle the regions of influence during the cold war.
Good for them. They learned to cooperate with their neighbors, created alliances and friends, and restrained to kill other people.
If you have one enemy, the enemy is the problem
If everybody else is your enemy, YOU are the problem.
Check your behavior and see if you can improve as human being.
Pre-1967 Israel didn't control the West Bank or Gaza. So most of the bad stuff people claim about Israel today didn't really exist.
Yet all its neighbours wanted to destroy it.
Lebanon who in theory should have no dispute with Israel bombarded it with ten's of thousands of rockets, mortars, anti-tank munitions etc. After Oct 7th.
The bit you're missing in your overly simplistic analysis is that Israel is really surrounded/attacked by a single religious/political ideology. There is no "everybody else here".
Israel has stolen as much secrets from US as they could grab. Has violated every international law. There are strong suspicions to be behind Epstein honey trap for riches and politicians all around USA and Europe. Has funded Hamas. Has an horrible record with human rights, longer than the bible. Has put spy devices in friends phones each time they could. Has left each politician that supported them, alone and hanging dry in the elections, from Biden to Merz.
US does not want the demise of Israel, but Israel does not even try to pretend that they respect the opinion of US. Even after all this time, is all grab and cash. And US is always cleaning the mess that they left behind.
"Has violated every international law". Baseless. Violates less "international laws" than most western countries, not to speak of the rest of the world. I mean "international law" isn't really a thing, it's a series of treaties.
Called non-Jews "human animals". Just the Hamas and the perpetrators of Oct 7th. And rightly so. I mean animal is a compliment to those people. (all humans are animals really).
I don't know where you're getting all of this from. But it's an alternate reality. It is not factual. It is putting Israel under a microscope when most of the world behaves much worse. There are dozens of countries with much worse human rights violations than Israel is even accused of. And many of those accusations are outright lies. That's not to say every Israeli soldier is perfect or that Israel is perfect, but it's certainly better than e.g. anything the west did when it went after ISIS/ISIL or Al Qaeda or pretty much any other war waged by the west. And the west is better than the rest of the world by far.
"Has killed thousands of journalists, doctors, nurses and NGO staff without even trying to pretend that they care." -> totally false again. Many of these were Hamas combatants, e.g.: https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/the-press-files/does-the-id...
You are just echoing propaganda here. And that's the reality of why people hate Israel. Because they are bombarded by propaganda that tells them to hate Israel. If you actually are able to zoom out of that you will see it as well. That plus antisemitism.
EDIT: You are right that Israel isn't spending a ton of cycles trying to get e.g. Europe and Americans to "like it". Between the choice of e.g. winning the war in Gaza and e.g. giving up to Biden's demands (e.g.) Israel has chosen that it must win the war. The American left, media, and universities, e.g. are structurally biased against Israel. They are regurgitating cold war USSR narratives. This is the result of more than two decades of anti-Israeli propaganda. Israel sometimes has to cut its losses. It can't out compete the resources of Qatar, Russia, and China e.g. who are out to splinter the US by whatever means possible. It could do better but between "making friends" and a decisive win against Hamas which is crucial for its future security it will pick the decisive win.
Look at the media coverage regarding Israel's continued pressure on Hamas since the ceasefire. Israel keeps eliminating Hamas commanders, it's eliminating people who were part of the Oct 7th raid into Israel, it's eliminating infrastructure used for military purposes, it's eliminating people who have held hostages. What the media is reporting is simply that Israel is "violating the ceasefire" and "killing Palestinians". That narrative is false. If you believe it then you're going to "hate Israel" as you are programmed to do. But Israel like any other country has the right to win against Hamas in this war Hamas started.
Here's some actual data, human rights index: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem?t...
Worst ten:
North Korea 0.08 0.02 -0.06 -71%
Afghanistan 0.12 0.04 -0.08 -67%
Eritrea 0.05
Nicaragua 0.08
Myanmar 0.10
Turkmenistan 0.11
Laos 0.16 0.14 -0.02 -9%
Palestine/Gaza 0.17
Tajikistan 0.17
Equatorial Guinea 0.17
But haters will hate.
Because morality is a numbers game?
If Israel nuked everyone but one of their enemies, would they be in the right, as then they would have only one enemy?
Depends. Their current friend will most likely become their enemy by then.
TBH, considering the number of dead in palestine and the number of people in europe/us who literally lost everyone who ever mattered to them, the number of "terrorist" attacks seems relatively low.
If your point is the world is unfair, then yes obviously that is true, nobody disputes that.
But hey, having your capital cities bombed is expensive, transport is cheap, and so it's easier to bully countries in a different continent, eventually bomb and invade them, becuase you're pretty sure they won't be able reach you back home with conventional war means (planes, rockets, tanks,...).
And yes, it's relevant, some politicians in one of those "safe" countries decided to bomb some country in a different continent, and you, a normal football fan or a party goer get killed when those people come and fight back in "unconventional means" (eg 2015 in paris). Somehow no one treats those as "we're at war with them, we bombed them first, they're just fighting back".
Wat.
Sure, maybe if NATO stopped the USSR in the Fulda Gap. But you know that the USSR's war plans definitely involved invading France, right?
And don't make the mistake of judging probability with the benefit of hindsight, that'd be a terrible intellectual tarpit to fall into.
- Compulsory military service means the government captures the best and brightest of the country.
- An extraordinarily outsized number of nobel prizes belong to Ashkenazi Jews, and other indicators of intelligence (lack of propensity for violent crime, lifetime earnings, etc) are also quite high for the whole group.
That we don't hear about it more often seems to me that nations that develop this stuff seem to have gotten better in making malware more precise in what they target and less leaky to the general population, but it could also be that media just don't report about it as much. When a gangs anonymous chat get hacked, or a tor hidden service website get taken down, news seems more interested in talking about the crime than what security vulnerability that the police used.
Unit 8200 [1]. Also, Israel doesn't extradite its own citizens and seems to turn a blind eye to criminals doing nonsense abroad. (Similar to Russia and China.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200
"Unit 8200 was established in 1952," and apparently the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was founded in 1912 [2]. I don't think Israel became a tech centre until the 1980s or 90s.
I'm not an expert on this. But similar to how military spending created Silicon Valley, I think Israeli military structure created its tech industry.
[1] Wikipedia
[2] https://ats.org/explore/videos/1912-today-the-institution-th...
That is why both Apple & Samsung have malware from Israel on their phones. The USA has the NSA building and exploiting products for surveillance and penetration globally.
Netanyahu recently was on a US broadcast, he held up a phone and stated to the reporter interviewing him, that Israel can penetrate any device obtaining it contents and then blackmail or discredit the owner of said device.
The USA now examines phones at airports to see if people are saying things the current administration doesn’t like.
American money, tech and intel, plus they are vastly overstaffed for the size of territory they want to defend.
The wig fallacy is in full effect here.
Look to the Netherlands, UK, Scandinavia and others for governments who aren’t getting caught doing this.
Then also mandatory pi-hole on every house.
Even if you are used by Windows OS, you must use an adblocker. Even if you use Chrome. On every browser.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
Wonder what the world's most boring ideological argument will bring us in the year 3027.
It's pretty sad that these "actors" are always trying to control the media.