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.
Way easier than having them wear an armband.
So, hot take here: preface this with saying I absolutely condemn the surveillance by Israel here.
But I think it’s wrong to judge a nation by what they’ve gone through themselves, with an attitude of " they should know better". Just because the Holocaust happened, doesn’t mean that Israel has better morales or values, or that they would never do such things themselves. Humans are humans. With the wrong people in power, horrible things happen.
It’s perfectly reasonable and necessary to argue that Israel is currently violating human right laws. We should keep doing that.
It is not reasonable to keep pointing at the holocaust and nazi germany as a stick of " look, you became the thing you suffered under", unless in a context of learning from history. “You should know better” creates unreasonable expectations where some nations ought to have higher morales somehow.
Edit: I ment condemn, not condone. Apologies
That’s because they ought to have better morals than Nazis.
I’m gonna play devils advocate here… it’s easy to say “don’t hate these people in that other country” when these two countries have decades, if not hundreds of years of violence, hatred and conflict between them. You cannot look at what’s happening while ignoring the past 600+ years.
In ww2, there was no actual reason to hate jews. In this situation, the two parties have had actual conflict with actual victims for hundreds of years.
It only takes the wrong people in power at the right time to have this timebomb explodes like it did.
Is it right? Hell No. But the morales at play here are grounded in a vastly different way than with the nazis.