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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

> On Tuesday, a group of 250 concerned "Jewish and allied Googlers" released a signed letter penned to CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding the tech behemoth provide relief to Palestinians suffering from the ongoing humanitarian crises that have erupted during the violent conflict between Israel and Hamas

> The letter penned by an unofficial Google group calling themselves the Jewish Diaspora in Tech accuses the official Jewish ERG ... of silencing voices critical of Israel's current military strategy and historical combative relationship with Palestinians. "We object to the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people," the Jewish Diaspora in Tech leaders wrote in their letter.

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Doesn't Google employ 10s of thousands of people? 250 concerned voices doesn't seem newsworthy.

10s of thousands of Jewish people?

How many of the 250 are actually Jewish.

I dunno, how many Jews do they probably employ? Say 100k Google employees, say 2.5% of the US population is Jewish - maybe 2.5k employed at Google?

So 250 signatures out of ~2.5k Jews is order-of-magnitude 10% of the Jews people employed at Google.

So if they were literally all Jewish, which they probably aren't, this still doesn't really tell us what Jews at Google think. Even if we do care what Jewish Googlers think. There is nothing here.

250 people risking their cushy jobs in a matter of people half-way across the globe - i think it is worthy of attention. And anyway, the extremes like visible activism is usually just a tip of the iceberg.

I don't envy Google leadership here, though they may have to partially blame themselves:

"This new internal political divide at Google sheds a spotlight on a long-standing diversity effort: designated employee resource groups (ERG) intended to celebrate employees with marginalized identities. But in today's climate, these groups may be sparking more political controversy than Google ever expected. "

I mean you start organize people around their ethnic/etc. identities, and as a result you may deepen the divides and raise the tensions. Reminds the situation of Indian caste system which was really formalized and strengthened by the British.

British one was different. They recognized some castes as martial races etc.. but didn't do identity politics on them.

Whatever caste system is today there in India, it was before arrival of Europeans as well, but little more flexible compared to the strict categorisation they did.

Really refreshing and important to see this call coming from a Jewish group.

oy vey, there is probably no worst enemy of Israel than leftist ultra-liberal Jews, some of whom live in Israel and even control Israeli media like Ha-Aretz and whatnot.

People sarcastically call them Yafei Nefesh (יפי נפש), "beautiful souls".

I don't know if it's proverbial Jewish self-hatred or plain stupidity.

Why are people against slow ethnic cleansing trough the settlements and such enemies of Israel?

By slow ethnic cleansing you mean 70 years of wars and constant rocket bombings of Israeli people?

You can also point out that there are 2 law systems ... one of them makes it a crime, punishable by death, to give someone of the other group shelter (whether letting them stay, or even selling them a house).

That law ... is a Palestinian law.

https://www.dw.com/en/us-palestinian-jailed-for-life-over-se...

Might have something to do with the slow disappearance of Palestine with settlements after evictions.

Besides. It's not like Israel recognises Palestine as a state and consequently it's justice system.(even tho making people stateless goes against human rights.)

Uh making people stateless against human rights is about stripping people of their last citizenship. Israel is not doing that at all (in contrast to most EU countries these days I might add, who are doing this, which shows once again just how empty human rights really are).

It is very much not about allowing a new state to spring up in the middle of an existing country. Especially not when rockets are involved.

>Uh making people stateless against human rights is about stripping people of their last citizenship.

Most of the world recognises Palestine as a state. Israel does not and is making it disappear thus making these people stateless. It could annex these people's land with or without without recognising Palestine and hand em citizenship in the process but that's generally not the case.

>in contrast to most EU countries these days I might add, who are doing this, which shows once again just how empty human rights really are

I find this a bit unrelated but am curious non the less. I haven't heard of this so can you provide examples? (Ones not being fought in court atm) The cases i've heard had all had a non-eu citizenship.

>It is very much not about allowing a new state to spring up in the middle of an existing country.

I suspect you are being wilfully obtuse when you ignore nothing is springing up out of nowhere and the borders of said existing country have been constantly shifting to grow. It sounds like you're talking about the creation of Israel if anything which is probably too far back to be worth discussing much.

EU states stripping their citizens of their citizenship:

https://www.dw.com/en/revoking-citizenship-how-it-works-acro...

Generally this is done with (of course alleged) terrorism as an excuse, although this does not seem to be the case in practice. In Belgium, there were two cases where citizenship was stripped, one involving an orphan and one involving lying to the state unemployment agency about owning foreign "property" (a shack, not rented out ...) In both cases, I find it very hard to believe either person had anything remotely to do with terrorism, yet that's what happened anyway.

The second "big" cause of revoking citizenship is people who acquired more than one citizenship (and aren't rich, then there is no problem ...) and don't "do their utmost to cancel their previous citizenship".

> I suspect you are being wilfully obtuse when you ignore nothing is springing up out of no

Sorry. I realise now that "springing up" is indeed not the correct term for the Israel-Palestine situation. That wording can be much improved. I'm saying that the legislation is about states depriving their own citizens of citizenship, and doesn't apply to the semi-almost-but-not-entirely 2 state situation in Israel.

Likewise there is nothing in this legislation that prevents property from being confiscated.

No, no I mean this slow push for lebensraum and the expulsion of palestinian people from their homes and land. (yeah, they're people too.)

I met some of these pacifist Jews and they are not stupid. They told me many horror stories of how Palestinian soldiers use children to protect rocket positions and so on. Nevertheless, they say the current policy of the state of Israel is against the best interest of Israel in the long run and obviously doesn't work, causing bloodshed on both sides. With some good will on the part of Israel, at least there is a chance things could be improved.

Is this self-hatred? I'd say it simply being human.

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