It is a similar situation with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
You can argue that the government of Israel isn't the will of the people of Israel (in the same way the US government isn't the will of the people of the US), but in my opinion there's more of a separation between 'Palestine' and 'Hamas' than there is between 'Israel' and 'the will of the people of Israel'.
There's a lot of wrongdoing, which means there are a lot of innocents being harmed, and the harming of innocents is the greatest wrongdoing. Harm by inaction is also wrong. Harm by preventing aid and assistance is also wrong.
None of this stuff is easily answered.
The joys of ideology, or maybe more correctly, the joys of living amongst those who take ideology so seriously that they attempt to enforce their fantasies upon the real world.
In my personal logic bubble: Protesting in support of Palestine is not protesting in support of Hamas. Declaring support for Israel is protesting against Hamas and their acts of terrorism against Israel. I can do both of these things without being hypocritical (like I said, in my personal logic bubble).
The history of middle East for the last 5000 years (since Sargon of Akkad) is replete with 'the king X "pacified" (the most commonly used euphemism) the people in the conquered territory'. It has never gone well for the victors under successors of king X, often within a generation or two.
In today's age when access to technology and information is such that any small sufficiently competent and motivated group can cause massive destruction, is it wise to keep creating motivated enemies and expect they will somehow never become competent or that the competent won't become motivated? It is doubly ironic given Israel's own defense industrial complex is filled with such small motivated and competent groups and the evidence of Ukraine/Russia conflict is staring in the face. This situation will blow up I fear within a generation unless Israeli society chooses different leaders.
None are futures he wants. I wonder what the long term vision is? If the Palestinians have a hard enough time they'll just migrate away faster than they have children?
Don't forget that Israel financially supported Hamas for this exact reason.
And an even bigger mystery: why are there never conspiracy theories about hamas and the PLA? I mean, hamas is a conspiracy. There's no serious doubt about that. Obviously while there is a problem in Israel, Palestinians aren't behind hamas, unless they get very well paid. Many very bad state actors support Palestinian organizations, going back a loooong time. The PLA was created with the help of the KGB, imagine that. That's not a theory, that's a fact. Iran supports hamas. Qatar supports hamas. I mean, for hamas there's no doubt. It very much is a conspiracy, against Israel, against Jews (the KGB are the authors of "the protocols of the elders of zion" and the source of the whole Jews wanting to massacre the world theory) and against "the west" in general. China, massacres muslims and "reeducates" them in China, with hamas support btw, and supports hamas ... Do you think the KGB wants to support palestinians? Or muslims? Do you think China does? Do you think Iran wants to support Sunni religious nutcases? How do they treat those in Iran?
I agree that support for Palestine is not necessiarly support for Hamas and collective punishiment for Palestine from Hamas's actions is horrible but their is something to playing a useful idiot. And I think Israel and Palestine protesters both do this. Israel could 100% kill Hamas leadership and cause a democracy movement to elect a reasonable leadership in Palestine but they don't and don't want to. Palestine protesters actively persue a 1 state solution in its extreme to model it on the US and I don't think it works that way especially with such a vocal majority in Israel opposed to it. Hamas also don't really want a 2 state solution either because that would be real long term concessions and also a degradation of their authority because they are murders and losers but they are "protecting" some Palestians from Israel. Israel game here is they want prolong conflict and attacks like Oct. 7 because it justifies more annexation and attacks like Oct. 7 do give strong affimative arguments to take action against Hamas and Palestine whether you like it or not.
Long winded way of saying its a quagmire but if the US wanted to spend less and solve the problem they need to strong arm their ally to engage in generating a democractic uprising against Hamas in exchange for concessions of land (mostly settler land) after a new democratic state reins in their radicals. I think Palestians would jump at that idea but Hamas would be extremely anti that idea because they would be the pariah in their society. Its pragamtic solution but also 1 that requires long term follow through that is also likely to fail. To me that the Kotkin approach no one is happy but progress is possible
Yet every Palestine support protest includes Hamas symbols and chants to exterminate a certain group of people.
If anything is to be learnt, it is that individuals should be judged as individuals, or at least that individuals should not be judged by the worst actions of a group that they may (only appear to) be a part of.
A good way for "one side" to trivialise or demonise "the other side" would be to seed "the other side" with extremist messaging.
Pulled all their military out? Oh, they still controlled their airspace, critical infra, borders tho? Sounds very self determined!
Serious, bad faith or extremely reductive misrepresentation that I can't tell is borne from ignorance willful or accidental.
your comment is the equivalent of acting like cuba's economy is all their own choosing, without analyzing the immense damage sanctions (and why sanctions were there in the first place) have done to the country, or accosting haiti without knowing why their struggles exist. context matters.
Considering that about 60% of the Gaza population is age 20 or younger, that means about 18% of the current population voted for Hamas.
And of course Israel directly helped this by arresting a huge number of Hamas politicians right before the elections, and openly interfering with the election process in general.
So no, Hamas does not represent the will of the people in Gaza, and calling it "democratically elected" is at this point a straight-up lie.
[0] https://www.972mag.com/netanyahu-hamas-october-7-adam-raz/
Congratulations for using a heuristic that resulted in 9/11! Osama’s rationalization at least had a more accurate premise that the American people continued to be able to vote — unlike in Palestine. So congrats on having either a worse moral compass or worse reasoning skills than Bin Laden!
That's like saying the Nazis were not Germany and vice versa.
That is technically correct.
Hamas governs Palestine (to be precise, Gaza).
1. Is Israel an apartheid state?
2. Is Israel committing a genocide?
At this point (IMHO) you need to do some serious mental gymnastics not to answer "yes" to both questions. As soon as you do, it gets real simple. The existence of Hamas doesn't justify either of these things.
The people who bring this up are engaging in respectability politics or engaging in weaponized cvility. Instead of addressing the underlying issues, the focus is on the methods and the actions of the oppressed when it is the oppressor that sets the level of violence. As Nelson Mandela put it:
> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.
People understood this quite clearly with apartheid South Africa. Can you imagine protesters having to do the performative "does apartheid South Africa have a right to exist?" pledge? No, me neither.
people will eventually start filtering out narratives they don't want to hear, and/or just tuning out entirely.
this serves those in power, as they have the ability to now shape the narrative.
see also: "the russian firehose of falsehood" https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
Depending on one's biases, my previous statement will likely elicit some sort of reaction, especially to college grads of this generation, without me ever stating a position.
This all to me is a rather unfortunate place for academia and intellectualism to have landed in the past decades. Or was it always this bad? I don't think so, I do think that always-online and recommendation engines and gameification of social media has created an acceleration of this.
But it pains me to think about where this is evolving to, and how these graduates will navigate life in the extremely complicated, suboptimal, often hateful or self-interested world we live in, if this is where they get to after graduating from a top institution.
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate here, and speak to your "without ever stating a position" line. I'd argue that's just careful wording hiding under the mask of intellectualism.
The argument against Israel is, as you say, that it is "essentially" genocide. Speaking as one of the cohort (although slightly older than new grad) of which you're referring, every argument against Israel is to my view quite straightforward. Killing innocent people is bad, doing so for political reasons is worse, and when you do it to an entire city/nation/people you have genocide ipso facto. While it's not a very complex take, it really doesn't need to be when there is a preponderance of evidence.
Contrasted with the defense of Israel's actions, and you have a vast array of whataboutisms, downplaying, justifying by means of referring to authority (in Israel), calling critics anti-Semitic, etc.
In my personal experience I find the majority of pro-Israel arguments to be at heart anti-intellectual.
So when you dress up a complex situation by emphasizing how above and beyond all understanding it is, to me that feels you are intentionally muddying the waters to try to obfuscate the real problem. And that, I would say, is also anti-intellectual.
Just because we have generational problems with anti-intellectualism does not mean this particular circumstance belongs in that category.
At least in the 1990s and 2000s it felt they were doing some good stuff for humanity. But the 2010s and 2020s the masked pretty much slipped.
These pre-recorded keynotes we get nowadays are just bland and AI-generated.
He was smart & very successful. I wouldn't call him relatable to most humans.
When it comes to business, I think Jobs would grovel at the feet of Trump just as much as Cook has.
(You may disagree with the opinion of course, but "bold" is a counterintuitive adjective here)
What does it actually look like?
I still think a two state solution is the only realistic plan.
Once they have a state, the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank will finally have defined borders and a single sovereign. And history shows they can be relied upon to launch another genocidal war on Israel more or less immediately.
Then it will be a war between two nation-states, not a nation-state vs. an unaccountable terrorist organization that pretends to be a proper state when convenient.
The Israel vs. Palestine conflict will then fall neatly into the framework of Westphalian nation-states and when Israel proceeds to utterly defeat Palestine, demands their unconditional surrender, kills all who resist, annexes their territory, and forcibly re-educates any who remain (post-WWII style), it will all be 100% kosher according to customary international law.
They'll certainly have learnt a lot from Israel in that respect.
(5) There are also complete idiotic and anti-semitic forces on the other side, who demand Israel to completely disappear.
What solution will be accepted as realistic by multiple sides of this conflict and acceptable enough for most sides to get everyone back to the negotiations table?
I have a very unrealistic idea about what should happen, which is directly opposed to factors (1) to (4):
Israel needs to return all stolen land and return to internationally recognized borders as a first step of showing good will. Israel needs to prosecute its own military personell for war crimes and for supporting armed mobs chasing people out of their own houses in the West Bank. Netanyahu and his gang need to be brought to Den Hague, and be put in front of the International Criminal Court. This is just the base justice level.
On the other side Hamas needs to disarm at least in majority. No more rockets launched. Also no more rockets launched from Hezbolla etc. Is the hostages situation still ongoing? Of course they need to be returned, if any still actually alive.
Next, Israel starts financing rebuilding efforts in Palestine.
Sounds realistic? Probably not, but that would at least be somewhat fair. Just not gonna happen with a US-supported dictator and his gang on one side and a guerilla militia on the other side.
Maybe the point is, that "realistic" probably != fair, and that is extremely painful. Maybe the point is, that fairness can only be achieved via a lengthy decades long process of first getting the weapons to cool down, and then holding all parties responsible at international courts. But guess what, Israel would never consent to be judged, because they do whatever the f they want.
Impressive conviction but no one needs a bucket full of gumballs.
Most "free Palestine" protestors probably don't care an awful lot about the final outcome of the conflict, they just want the mass killing of innocent people to stop.
There's a reason the movement only flared up when Israel started carpet bombing Gaza, and not during the mostly-quiet years before.
He should step down.
Remember, transformers were invented at Google. They could have been the first to market starving out OAI and Anthropic. That they did not is clearly a huge failure from Pichai. Its astonishing he wasn’t removed for this blunder.
He probably came out of retirement because LLMs were showing promise to a life long dream.
Save the money, fund the humanities with it. Maybe then the people planning these speakers would realize why people are booing and walking out.
And remember how much going to it cost. Mine wanted a couple hundred for the outfit and paper and folder thing, which certainly didn't go to the materials! that can't have cost more than about $5 cumulative, almost all of that going toward the extremely cheap leather on the certificate-folder-thing. The only people who weren't complaining about that afterward were the ones who made their own (which were universally much nicer or more fun) and refused to pay.
Technically, that just means at least two people at the Pentagon who qualify as leaders disagreed.
But it seems like broad opinion.
Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine.
> But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.
Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI.
The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.
An outsider community forms in a down-market neighbourhood. Lacking money and power, it makes its own culture. That becomes "hip," and those with money start buying property in that neighbourhood, displacing the very people who made it hip to begin with.
As with "hackers," so also with artists, musicians, bicycle messengers, dirtbag rock climbers, frisbee players, &c. &c.
I wish more people had the guts to reject Google and the panopticon they’ve built.
