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The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.

The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.

Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.

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That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:

> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.

"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.

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> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are

IDF trains them.

https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...

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That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing

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Pretty sure police brutality was invented way before Israel existed.
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David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.

The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.

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Everybody thinks the War on Drugs is about "keeping people safe". It never was, it was always about manufacturing a tool to oppress "others".
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> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are'

American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/

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A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.

No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.

(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)

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Technology IS politics.

Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.

There must be guardrails

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Considering this news article has absolutely nothing to do with technology, yes I think this doesn't belong here.
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i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
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I was shadowbanned for mentioning Iryna Zarutska. Most political topics can be connected to technology: technology after all is often how we hear of and discuss these things.
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> this is war 101

The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.

I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.

Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.

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> You can't then say that the West Bank is not responsible for what the rest of Palestine did.

Collective punishment is a war crime.

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Wrong.

Gaza and the West Bank aren't countries, they have no autonomy. Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.

Palestinians are people, must like Jews are people. Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel, the west bank, and gaza.

Much like all Jews aren't responsible for the actions of Israel, All Palestinians aren't responsible for the actions of Hamas. Even the residence of Gaza.

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> Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.

In the 40s, the British were ruling Palestine as a mandate, I wouldn’t really call that a country.

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Fair enough. I should say that it was the name of the region as they've basically not been fully autonomous in modern history. But prior to the establishment of Israel, they were basically just left alone by both the Ottomans and Brittan.
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What am I incorrect about?
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> this is war 101, every day.

Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).

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completely deranged way of thinking that calls for a hard self-reflection.
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I don’t think anyone is going to forget about this
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> this is war 101

genocide 101

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