Israel has deployed a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7th attacks, uses technology from Google Photos as well as a custom tool built by the Tel Aviv-based company Corsight to identify people affiliated with Hamas.
Fair. I guess I saw something in the original post that wasn’t there. I see and hear a lot of the “they should know better” argument when that’s not an argument at all, and unfair to anyone on the receiving end of that argument. I might have concluded that too soon.
I believe we should be very careful to stick the label nazism to everything we find abhorrent. I’d like to judge situations on their own merit, not compare them to other atrocities in our history. The socio-political situation in Gaza is so different than 1930’s Germany. Even experts are having a hard time really putting the finger on all the mess that has been Israel-Palestine situations for the past 600 years. Calling everything Nazism has a sideeffect of devaluing and maybe even downplaying said words in the long run.
But maybe I’m just rambling on semantics. I think we all agree that what is going on now in Gaza is a mess and a violation of human rights. And something needs to be done about that.
True enough, but the ideology itself is very similar. The methods and forms of injustice differ, but the idea that the ubermench have the right to kill the untermench/enslave them/drive them from their homes/all of the above (also known as Lebensraum) is a very important point of similarity that actually allows us to better understand Israel’s actions and ground them in reality. Comparisons with Nazis are usually unproductive, but in this case they serve to take away the air of Israeli exceptionalism Israel has spent 70 years creating, in the sense that if you logically evaluate the proposition that Israel = Nazi you find it having a lot more merit than you’d expect at first glance. Way too much merit to coexist with the idea that Israel is acting in self-defense. Gonna go on a bit of a tangent, but you’ll find Israeli ideology similar to Manifest Destiny, aka the Nazis’ inspiration. In the end it’s all settler colonialism.
Why specifically 600 years? AFAIK the modern conflict started about 100 years ago with the Balfour declaration.
Hmm, I see your point. I remember seeing some terrible comments from Israeli politicians about the nature of Palestinians . But in the past, there have been many attempts by the governments to reconcile Israel and Palestine. They have failed (I believe partly?) because after every agreement, it seemed some terrorist would explode something somewhere to fuel the conflict. So I have a hard time believing it’s always been part of the Israeli plan. I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t partly self-defence, turned into a (terrible) revenge-raid.
But I’ll be the first to admit I’m very much a layperson when it comes to the whole of this conflict. And that is, to me, the most important thing in this whole affair. I believe we as westerners really have no clue of the actual day to day mess that was, and is, Gaza. We jump to conclusions without actually really understanding the full breadth of the situation. Seeing comments on this conflict on average feels like one big Dunning Kruger mess. I guess that’s what sort of sparked my original comment, a mess of “not devalue words” and “let’s not pretend we understand this conflict”. I’m not always great at getting points across I guess.
The 600 years wasn’t a specific amount. I just remember hearing in a podcast that the history of the Isralian conflict comes from way before second world war. Might have misremembered the specifics of that fact, or put the wrong facts into my brain.
Thank you for taking the time to respond in a reasonable manner. It helps me organize my thoughts on this horrible conflict, and gain some new insights.
I left another comment to you elsewhere about this, but no this conflict is not ancient. Israel likes to claim it is as justification of their actions, but Arab Jews and Arab Muslims lived together reasonably peacefully in this area for centuries. The current conflict was created by the European Jews immigrating, buying land, and refusing to hire anyone except Jews for jobs the Muslims typically held. It removed any hope of creating a livelihood from these people and giving them resistance as the only option left available. This is where the violence starts. It’s only about 100 years or so.