Engadget frames Israel’s surveillance of Palestinian telecommunications as extraordinary, but such practices are common in national security contexts. The U.S. National Security Agency, for example, collects vast amounts of metadata and content under laws like FISA and EO 12333. Surveillance of hostile entities is standard policy in many democracies. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-f...
Israel faces real and ongoing threats from groups such as Hamas, which has a record of carrying out attacks on civilians and is officially designated a terrorist organisation by the U.S., EU and others (https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/terrorism-and-illici...). Monitoring communications within the territories controlled by such entities is a rational, defensive measure.
As for storage on Microsoft servers, Israel, like many governments, uses U.S.-based cloud services with strict contracts and data protections. The U.S. government itself stores classified data on Microsoft Azure through its government cloud services (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/government/). The implication that Microsoft’s involvement is unusual or illicit is misleading.
Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context. The article omits this.
westpfelia · 1d ago
What the NSA is doing should be considered illegal wiretapping. None of this is ok. And trying to justify it is insane. Look at the Snowden leaks. Lets you know everthing you need to know about what our "spy" agencies are actually doing.
nelox · 1d ago
Arguing that “none of this is ok” overlooks the security context in which states operate. Israel is not conducting indiscriminate mass surveillance of its own citizens. It is monitoring communications in territories largely controlled by designated terrorist organisations such as Hamas (see: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/terrorism-and-illici...). That is not equivalent to the NSA intercepting Americans’ domestic calls.
Even Snowden’s own disclosures differentiated between the problematic scope of domestic collection and the more accepted targeting of hostile foreign entities (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...). You may oppose both, but equating them as equally unjustified weakens the argument.
Israel has experienced decades of terror attacks, rocket fire and armed conflict originating from Gaza and the West Bank. That fact matters. Countries routinely intercept communications from adversarial regions, whether it’s the NSA, GCHQ, or Shin Bet. Calling this “insane” suggests a disregard for the protective responsibilities of a state.
laimewhisps · 20h ago
Hamas does not control the West Bank and most of the world has designated Israel as a genocidal terrorist entity.
7952 · 1d ago
Funny to talk about "context" while narrowing the frame of reference.
Another piece of context is polling showing that a majority of Israeli citizens support the forced expulsion of Gazan citizens and even Arab Israeli citizens.
> Engadget frames Israel’s surveillance of Palestinian telecommunications as extraordinary, but such practices are common in national security contexts
It's still bad
> Israel faces real and ongoing threats from groups such as Hamas
Israel helped put Hamas in power, FWIW. Maybe instead of stealing Palestians' land, Israel should give them citizenship and voting rights. It's the moral thing to do.
> Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context
Criticism of Israeli policy should account for their colonialism and war crimes. It's a moral issue. The rest be damned.
nelox · 1d ago
Israel did not “put Hamas in power.” Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. These were monitored by international observers, including the Carter Center, who confirmed the vote was largely fair: https://cartercenter.org/news/pr/palestine_013006.html. The idea that Israel created Hamas is a misrepresentation of historic tactical decisions in the 1980s, when Israel tolerated some Islamist activity as a counterweight to the PLO. That is not the same as “putting Hamas in power,” and certainly not a reason to ignore Hamas’s current actions.
As for land and citizenship, roughly 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab, including Muslims and Christians, with full voting rights. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not Israeli citizens because they are governed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas respectively, per the Oslo Accords. Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed. See: https://ecf.org.il/issues/issue/153.
Calling the situation “colonialism” ignores the fact that both sides claim historic ties to the land and have engaged in multiple rounds of negotiations. That includes offers of statehood rejected by Palestinian leadership, notably in 2000 and 2008. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28israel-t.html.
Security and morality are not mutually exclusive. Both sides deserve accountability and safety.
7952 · 16h ago
Talk of colonialism often descends into semantics. I think the main issue with Israeli policy in this regard is that Israelis are attempting and succeeding to expel people from their homes. That is happening on the west bank now.
The problematic actions under discussion are the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
> Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed
So you're saying they wouldn't go for it? Let's ask them.
> both sides claim historic ties to the land
You act as if the land was empty when the Zionists showed up.
> Security and morality are not mutually exclusive
Depends how you define security. Israel is defining it as genocide. And we're not even mentioning the horrible actions happening in the West Bank. Or in Syria and Lebanon for that matter.
> Both sides deserve accountability and safety
This is not symmetrical. One side has modern weapons, surveillance, air power, an modern army and an embargo on the other with the backing of the US (and other Western states.)
spwa4 · 1d ago
> Calling the situation “colonialism” ignores the fact that both sides claim historic ties ...
There is an old saying: “The antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence, then takes something for himself.”
And this idiotic argument ignores muslims, as in islam, the system, is colonization. Not Israel. The Palestinians. As in that's how all muslim countries worked until 1954 and most until at least 1975. All muslim empires, including the Ottoman empire, which is where Palestinians get their historic claims from, were attempts to bring back the Roman empire, whose entire economy works almost exclusively like this: conquer new lands, kidnap its population as slaves, run the economy in the center of the empire with slave labor. That's what "black gold" was, and frankly is (slavery in the middle east has only theoretically ended. Qatar, Saudi Arabia don't just have slaves, their entire system runs on slavery. "Employees" cannot leave)
Islam itself is a reaction against Christianity, and specifically, against Christianity's attitude to slavery. Abolishing slavery, which is what slowly happened when Eastern Roman Emperors became Christian, destroyed the colonies' economies and made their workforce disappear in the Roman colonies. So it's more specific: islam is an attempt to bring back the early Roman empire, to reintroduce slavery-based economies.
That people now use "anticolonialism" as a rationale to bring back and defend slavery-based empires is not an honest argument, and frankly should be fought like the evil farce that it is.
spwa4 · 1d ago
Your demand is nothing short of the end of Israel, the end of self-determination of a large population that cannot even run away, to say nothing of the cost. This is completely and totally unreasonable and the answer to that is no.
Palestinians have made violently made clear, many times, if they would live in peace with Israel and Israeli citizens. That answer was no. In other words: you're asking millions of people to live under constant physcial threat. This is totally unreasonable. The answer is no.
On top of that, the muslims of the middle east have been eradicating minorities, and a lot of them, since the end of WW1. They are still doing it whenever they get the chance, for example in Syria, in Egypt, arguably even in Sudan. Asking the Jews (and 10 other even smaller groups) to become a minority without self determination is nothing short of asking them to die.
It also won't solve the problem. Palestine, if truly left to itself, would face immediate economic collapse. The only economic activity, the only way for Palestinians to get goods from outside, is to fight Israel. That is what gets them funding. That is the only basis of their economy. The middle east and Iran are not sponsoring Palestinians out of the goodness of their hearts, they're doing it out of racism against Jews, against Jews having self-determination.
Oil use, and price, will collapse and the aid to Palestinians will dry up and the situation will "resolve".
nielsbot · 12h ago
Your comment is all paranoia and tired Habara tropes.
> Your demand is nothing short of the end of Israel
Israel as an apartheid state.
> you're asking millions of people to live under constant physcial threat
And yes that's exactly what Israel (with US support) has done to Gaza and the West Bank.
> the end of self-determination of a large population that cannot even run away
This is not a request for Israelis to run away or leave.
> to say nothing of the cost
Sure, fall back to "practical issues"
> On top of that, the muslims of the middle east have been eradicating minorities, and a lot of them, since the end of WW1
Smear an entire religion now. Also, "we can commit war crimes and steal land because they would do that same". Fear not based in reality.
> become a minority without self determination is nothing short of asking them to die
Sorry but being a minority in a democracy is not a death sentence. That's absolute racist hysteria.
> Palestine, if truly left to itself, would face immediate economic collapse
They must be subject to occupation, control, starvation and murderous war crimes because they'd be poor on their own! Never mind that the reason for Gaza's poverty is the Israeli embargo. Nothing gets in our out of Gaza without Israel's permission.
We haven't even started on the cruelty and dispossession happening illegally, with the government's support, in the West Bank.
laimewhisps · 20h ago
Why would Palestinians "live in peace" with the people who have been ethnically cleansing them and stealing their land for the better part of a century? Israel should be ended, and spying and murdering people is just business as usual for the Zionist entity.
No comments yet
laimewhisps · 20h ago
Israel faces a "threat" from the people it's been ethnically cleansing for 80 years. Also, this is in the West Bank, so has nothing to do with Hamas (not that it would be ok to do this in Gaza). That the U.S. and EU also violate human rights at scale, doesn't make it ok for Israel to do the same. Only they go one step further and actually murder people based on the information they've spied.
CLPadvocate · 12h ago
I think your confusion results from the fact that "Palestinians" was the name used to call the Jews basically for nearly two thousand years, until the early 20th century. And, yes, they have been ethnically cleansed by arabs basically since the arab invasion in the 7th century.
The arabs themselves never wanted to be called Palestinians - they used the name "Syrian Arabs". Yassir Arafat, former leader of the PLO, was one of the most prominent opponents of the word "Palestinians" with regard to the arab population - he only changed his mind as Jordan and Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, because he wanted to distance himself from these "traitors".
One of the problems he (and also most arabs) had with the word "Palestina" - it has exactly ZERO relationship to arabs and to Arabic languages. It's a greek word with actually Hebrew roots. It means "land of the Philistines" - and the Philistines, according to many historians, are a mixed group of people, mostly from western Mediterranean (modern-day Italy, France, Spain, northern Africa), also called "the sea people", or, in other words - pirates. The Romans introduced this name to the region to wipe out the original names Judea and Samaria (which IS actually a sign of a genocide).
Daishiman · 1d ago
> Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context. The article omits this.
The context of being an occupying power also factors into this too?
nielsbot · 1d ago
It would be nice of Microsoft would decline this business. Wonder if we can muster enough public pressure to force them to.
gbil · 1d ago
Too many connections on too many levels for this to happen, from MS having a huge R&D office in Israel to political connections between the countries involved etc.
SanjayMehta · 1d ago
If they had been using a NAS, the outrage would have been against the NAS manufacturer?
I don’t understand the point of this article.
laimewhisps · 20h ago
If the CEO of Synology met with the head of the Israeli spy unit and was aware that Israel would be storing millions of phone calls on their hardware, they would deserve outrage too.
SanjayMehta · 8h ago
As CEO his responsibility is to his shareholders and employees to turn a profit.
What next? We are anti-cat, so you can only store dog pictures?
laimewhisps · 8h ago
He has to operate both within the confines of the law and the values espoused by their brand. This is neither, it's facilitating a crime against humanity and engaging in mass surveillance.
SanjayMehta · 6h ago
Laws, yes.
Values are subjective.
laimewhisps · 5h ago
Spying on civilians and genocide are bad for the brand.
SanjayMehta · 4h ago
By this logic every government (especially the US and almost all European governments) in the world is guilty
Every vendor who even supplied a paperclip to any such government is guilty.
(was flagged, because of course)
Israel faces real and ongoing threats from groups such as Hamas, which has a record of carrying out attacks on civilians and is officially designated a terrorist organisation by the U.S., EU and others (https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/terrorism-and-illici...). Monitoring communications within the territories controlled by such entities is a rational, defensive measure.
As for storage on Microsoft servers, Israel, like many governments, uses U.S.-based cloud services with strict contracts and data protections. The U.S. government itself stores classified data on Microsoft Azure through its government cloud services (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/government/). The implication that Microsoft’s involvement is unusual or illicit is misleading.
Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context. The article omits this.
Even Snowden’s own disclosures differentiated between the problematic scope of domestic collection and the more accepted targeting of hostile foreign entities (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...). You may oppose both, but equating them as equally unjustified weakens the argument.
Israel has experienced decades of terror attacks, rocket fire and armed conflict originating from Gaza and the West Bank. That fact matters. Countries routinely intercept communications from adversarial regions, whether it’s the NSA, GCHQ, or Shin Bet. Calling this “insane” suggests a disregard for the protective responsibilities of a state.
Another piece of context is polling showing that a majority of Israeli citizens support the forced expulsion of Gazan citizens and even Arab Israeli citizens.
It's still bad
> Israel faces real and ongoing threats from groups such as Hamas
Israel helped put Hamas in power, FWIW. Maybe instead of stealing Palestians' land, Israel should give them citizenship and voting rights. It's the moral thing to do.
> Criticism of Israeli policy should account for its security context
Criticism of Israeli policy should account for their colonialism and war crimes. It's a moral issue. The rest be damned.
As for land and citizenship, roughly 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab, including Muslims and Christians, with full voting rights. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not Israeli citizens because they are governed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas respectively, per the Oslo Accords. Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed. See: https://ecf.org.il/issues/issue/153.
Calling the situation “colonialism” ignores the fact that both sides claim historic ties to the land and have engaged in multiple rounds of negotiations. That includes offers of statehood rejected by Palestinian leadership, notably in 2000 and 2008. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28israel-t.html.
Security and morality are not mutually exclusive. Both sides deserve accountability and safety.
I said helped put Hamas in power. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
> not a reason to ignore Hamas’s current actions
The problematic actions under discussion are the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
> Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed
So you're saying they wouldn't go for it? Let's ask them.
> both sides claim historic ties to the land
You act as if the land was empty when the Zionists showed up.
> Security and morality are not mutually exclusive
Depends how you define security. Israel is defining it as genocide. And we're not even mentioning the horrible actions happening in the West Bank. Or in Syria and Lebanon for that matter.
> Both sides deserve accountability and safety
This is not symmetrical. One side has modern weapons, surveillance, air power, an modern army and an embargo on the other with the backing of the US (and other Western states.)
There is an old saying: “The antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence, then takes something for himself.”
And this idiotic argument ignores muslims, as in islam, the system, is colonization. Not Israel. The Palestinians. As in that's how all muslim countries worked until 1954 and most until at least 1975. All muslim empires, including the Ottoman empire, which is where Palestinians get their historic claims from, were attempts to bring back the Roman empire, whose entire economy works almost exclusively like this: conquer new lands, kidnap its population as slaves, run the economy in the center of the empire with slave labor. That's what "black gold" was, and frankly is (slavery in the middle east has only theoretically ended. Qatar, Saudi Arabia don't just have slaves, their entire system runs on slavery. "Employees" cannot leave)
Islam itself is a reaction against Christianity, and specifically, against Christianity's attitude to slavery. Abolishing slavery, which is what slowly happened when Eastern Roman Emperors became Christian, destroyed the colonies' economies and made their workforce disappear in the Roman colonies. So it's more specific: islam is an attempt to bring back the early Roman empire, to reintroduce slavery-based economies.
That people now use "anticolonialism" as a rationale to bring back and defend slavery-based empires is not an honest argument, and frankly should be fought like the evil farce that it is.
Palestinians have made violently made clear, many times, if they would live in peace with Israel and Israeli citizens. That answer was no. In other words: you're asking millions of people to live under constant physcial threat. This is totally unreasonable. The answer is no.
On top of that, the muslims of the middle east have been eradicating minorities, and a lot of them, since the end of WW1. They are still doing it whenever they get the chance, for example in Syria, in Egypt, arguably even in Sudan. Asking the Jews (and 10 other even smaller groups) to become a minority without self determination is nothing short of asking them to die.
It also won't solve the problem. Palestine, if truly left to itself, would face immediate economic collapse. The only economic activity, the only way for Palestinians to get goods from outside, is to fight Israel. That is what gets them funding. That is the only basis of their economy. The middle east and Iran are not sponsoring Palestinians out of the goodness of their hearts, they're doing it out of racism against Jews, against Jews having self-determination.
Oil use, and price, will collapse and the aid to Palestinians will dry up and the situation will "resolve".
> Your demand is nothing short of the end of Israel
Israel as an apartheid state.
> you're asking millions of people to live under constant physcial threat
And yes that's exactly what Israel (with US support) has done to Gaza and the West Bank.
> the end of self-determination of a large population that cannot even run away
This is not a request for Israelis to run away or leave.
> to say nothing of the cost
Sure, fall back to "practical issues"
> On top of that, the muslims of the middle east have been eradicating minorities, and a lot of them, since the end of WW1
Smear an entire religion now. Also, "we can commit war crimes and steal land because they would do that same". Fear not based in reality.
> become a minority without self determination is nothing short of asking them to die
Sorry but being a minority in a democracy is not a death sentence. That's absolute racist hysteria.
> Palestine, if truly left to itself, would face immediate economic collapse
They must be subject to occupation, control, starvation and murderous war crimes because they'd be poor on their own! Never mind that the reason for Gaza's poverty is the Israeli embargo. Nothing gets in our out of Gaza without Israel's permission.
We haven't even started on the cruelty and dispossession happening illegally, with the government's support, in the West Bank.
No comments yet
The arabs themselves never wanted to be called Palestinians - they used the name "Syrian Arabs". Yassir Arafat, former leader of the PLO, was one of the most prominent opponents of the word "Palestinians" with regard to the arab population - he only changed his mind as Jordan and Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, because he wanted to distance himself from these "traitors".
One of the problems he (and also most arabs) had with the word "Palestina" - it has exactly ZERO relationship to arabs and to Arabic languages. It's a greek word with actually Hebrew roots. It means "land of the Philistines" - and the Philistines, according to many historians, are a mixed group of people, mostly from western Mediterranean (modern-day Italy, France, Spain, northern Africa), also called "the sea people", or, in other words - pirates. The Romans introduced this name to the region to wipe out the original names Judea and Samaria (which IS actually a sign of a genocide).
The context of being an occupying power also factors into this too?
I don’t understand the point of this article.
What next? We are anti-cat, so you can only store dog pictures?
Values are subjective.
Every vendor who even supplied a paperclip to any such government is guilty.
Where do you draw the line?