Gavriel Raanan

Israel. Software. AI. Crypto. Politics. Judaism. (and everything else too).

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent. Mais il repose sur trois erreurs factuelles, et ça vaut le coup de les regarder calmement.

Erreur 1 : la fortune d'Elon n'est pas un tas d'argent. C'est de la propriété d'usines, de fusées et de satellites. "Prendre la moitié de sa tune", concrètement, ça veut dire forcer la vente de la moitié de SpaceX et Tesla. L'argent ne sort pas d'un coffre, il sort des entreprises elles-mêmes, qui passent sous contrôle de fonds étrangers ou d'États. Tu ne redistribues pas du cash, tu démantèles un outil de production. C'est la différence entre récolter des pommes et découper le pommier.

Erreur 2 : "ça résout énormément de problèmes dans le monde". Cette expérience a déjà été tentée, en vrai. En 2021, le directeur du Programme Alimentaire Mondial de l'ONU a affirmé que 6 milliards de Musk pouvaient "résoudre la faim dans le monde". Réponse d'Elon : décrivez-moi exactement comment, comptabilité publique à l'appui, et je vends mes actions Tesla immédiatement. Le PAM a publié son plan. Verdict : ce n'était pas "résoudre la faim", c'était nourrir 42 millions de personnes pendant un an. Un an. Puis il faut re-payer, pour toujours. Le PAM avait d'ailleurs levé 8,4 milliards l'année précédente, et la faim était toujours là. Les ONG traitent les symptômes en boucle, jamais les causes, parce que leur financement dépend de l'existence du problème.

Erreur 3, la plus importante : tu cherches ce qui sort vraiment les gens de la pauvreté. Bonne nouvelle, on a la réponse, et elle est massive. En 1990, 36% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Plus d'un milliard de personnes sorties de la misère en 30 ans. Par quoi ? Pas par la charité ni par l'aide internationale (plus de 1 000 milliards versés à l'Afrique en 60 ans pour un résultat à peu près nul). Par l'ouverture des marchés, l'industrialisation, le commerce. La Chine seule a sorti 800 millions de personnes de la pauvreté en abandonnant le collectivisme, pas en taxant ses entrepreneurs.

Donc fais le calcul complet. Option A : tu confisques 500 milliards, tu finances quelques années de programmes, l'argent est consommé, et tu as détruit la machine qui produisait les fusées, les voitures électriques et l'internet des zones rurales. Option B : tu laisses le meilleur allocateur de capital de sa génération réinvestir 100% de sa fortune dans des industries qui baissent les coûts pour tout le monde et emploient des centaines de milliers de personnes. L'option A soulage ta morale pendant 18 mois. L'option B sort des populations entières de la pauvreté pour toujours.

La pauvreté ne se redistribue pas. Elle se résout par la création. C'est contre-intuitif, c'est frustrant, mais c'est ce que disent 200 ans de données.

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

The USS Liberty conspiracy theory asks you to accept that Israel, a nation of 2.5 million people fighting for its literal survival on six fronts simultaneously against 110 million Arabs equipped with Soviet tanks, Soviet aircraft, and Soviet warships, and with no formal American alliance, no American weapons, and no guarantee that anyone was coming to save them, is chose day four of that existential war to deliberately attack the one country on earth that might eventually become their ally, in broad daylight, in international waters, leaving 174 survivors who could identify the attacking forces, while fourteen separate investigations across two governments found zero evidence of intent, while Israel’s own military had accidentally bombed its own armored column the day before proving how catastrophically identification fails in wartime chaos, and while not a single one of the conspiracy theory’s proponents in nearly six decades of trying has ever managed to agree on what Israel was actually trying to accomplish by doing it.

Heavy lift.

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

Yes, I had a very severe reaction to my second Moderna shot. But part of being a responsible scientist with a large platform is not extrapolating my personal experience to the entire population.

I also have a rare autoimmune condition called Parsonage-Turner syndrome (diagnosed in 2013), so I may have been particularly vulnerable to side effects.

Given my bad experience with the first mRNA vaccine I've ever taken, I have made the personal decision to avoid them in the future.

However, it would have been incredibly unscientific and highly irresponsible of me to take this personal experience of mine and start telling millions of people online to not get vaccinated for COVID.

There's a reason quack alternative medicine practitioners plaster personal testimonies all over their websites. They sound convincing to a lot of people. But it's purely manipulation. Personal testimony, even a large collection of them, isn't a substitute for real, population-level data.

I am not an expert on vaccines, the COVID vaccine, or epidemiology in general. So when I experience a serious side effect taking something with a non-zero rate of serious side effects, I understand that my personal experience likely isn't an indication that we're all being lied to about safety.

You should understand that as well.

The impulse to extrapolate a very negative personal experience to the entire population is very strong. But responsible scientists, and especially those with large public platforms, should resist that impulse.

[Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 @elderofziyon]

1/The @EUCouncil just sanctioned an Israeli NGO for "serious and systematic human rights abuses."
Its crime, in the EU's own words: filing petitions in court and lobbying the government.
That's it. That's the abuse. 🧵

[Jacob L @JacobL1994_]

The Einsatzgruppe Trial established in law that there is no moral or legal equivalent between collateral damage from war, and going door to door executing civilians because of their race.

As such, no amount of collateral damage, however tragic it is, will ever be morally or legally equivalent to the mass deliberate extermination of Jews carried out by Hamas and their accomplices.

Remember that the crime of genocide is determined by intent. Thus, men with rifles and gasoline going house to house looking for Jews to burn is genocide, and military operations to prevent them from doing that again, which unfortunately result in civilian casualties, is not.

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

I'm a middle eastern historian. My own family were made refugees. And this is my honest view of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) - the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1947–49 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

A thread. 🧵

[Gavriel Raanan @GavrielRaanan]

@DefiantLs Wait, I thought all we were talking about was banning assault knives

[John Aziz @aziz0nomics]

There are more Muslims living in Israel as full-citizens than there are Jews living (as citizens or not) in the 49 Muslim majority countries put together.

This should be the only argument you need to debunk the false claim that Israel is an ethnostate.

[Tammy Rahamimoff-Honig @RahamimoffTamar]

This CNN article is a classic case of journalism abandoning neutrality and professional standards and turning instead to narrative building and advocacy.

Here are some examples:

- Israeli positions are often hedged signalling doubt as to their veracity

- The displacement of Israeli civilians from northern Israel is entirely ignored, while several interviews with displaced Lebanese are featured

- Hezbollah’s sustained, ongoing attacks on Israel- largely targeting civilians- are reduced to a brief mention of a single March 2 incident, creating the impression of a one-off rather than continuous Hezbollah barrages

- No mention of Hezbollah’s violations of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon

- No reference to the basic principle of international law requiring states to prevent their territory from being used to attack other states

- No mention of UNSC Resolution 1701, which explicitly demands no Hezbollah operatives or weapons south of the Litani River

- Minimizing the fact that Hezbollah has embedded itself extensively in civilian and other protected buildings which endanger local populations and run counter to international norms

- No strategic context that explains that Hezbollah operates as an Iranian proxy, aligning its violent actions with Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions and interests

- No acknowledgment of numerous recent statements by Lebanese officials criticizing Hezbollah’s destabilizing role which contradict Lebanon’s core national interests

- No mention of polling indicating strong Lebanese support for limiting weapons solely to the Lebanese army

I could go on, but the pattern is clear: this article isn’t professional nor fair. Its construction shapes a one sided narrative rather than tell a straightforward and factual story.

Is it too much to expect reporting that is complete, contextualized, and fair?

[Gavriel Raanan @GavrielRaanan]

@mehdirhasan It isn't antisemitic to conflate Jews with Israel, obviously. Nice try. What is antisemitic is to demonize Israel in ways that would be considered antisemitic if you had just used the word Jew instead of Israel or Zionist (because they are indeed so tightly related).

[Gavriel Raanan @GavrielRaanan]

@canarymission She's almost right. Hamas in Gaza has indeed done nothing to instigate a holocaust either. But they did instigate an overwhelming military defeat.

[Colin Wight (not Colin Wright) @colwight]

The international community says Hamas must disarm, but Hamas says they won’t. So who’s going to disarm them? They say Hezbollah must disarm, but who’s going to make them?

The fact is that global condemnation of Hamas and Hezbollah without meaningful action leaves Israel alone to deal with them. That’s fine; I expect Israel sees it as their lot in life.

But to insist that Hamas and Hezbollah should be disarmed, do nothing about it, and then complain when Israel tries to do what you’ve called for seems incoherent to me. Especially when it’s Israel that’s mainly picking up the consequences of those wishes not leading to action.

[Jeremy Boreing @JeremyDBoreing]

The current anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish sentiment online is a social contagion, no different than transgenderism or autism before it.

Of course, there is actually a condition known as gender dysphoria. But every family in Hollywood didn't suddenly and coincidentally have at least one child with gender dysphoria at the exact same time by natural processes.

And of course there is actually a condition known as autism. But every family in Manhattan didn't suddenly and coincidentally have at least one child with autism at the exact same time by natural processes.

You aren't an Israel skeptic, and you didn't start "noticing." You were told, and shown by interested parties, and you were rewarded with attention and dopamine by the tellers and showers.

And as with every social contagion, what you have been told and shown is an overwhelming quantity of selectively chosen half-truths -- or full-truths with half-context.

You believe you are a free thinker, but when every "free thinker" arrives at the same conclusion at the exact same time... well, the thinking isn't as free as you believe it is.

[David Wurmser @Wurmserscribit]

So?

India, Pakistan and Israel decided to go it alone outside the NPT nuclear club since they all felt they needed a nuclear program but none of them wanted to cheat and enter in bad faith, as Iran and North Korea did.

Israel thus gave up access to nuclear technology after 1970 when the NPT came into effect, had no ability to buy uranium, was completely severed from the world on all matters nuclear. It was choice they made and for which they paid a price.

Iran entered the NPT and enjoyed all its technological and material benefits, while cheating profoundly in trying to get a bomb that it could not have even begun to develop even by 10% had it gone it alone like israel.

So Israel’s program is legal. Iran’s is not.

[Mark Issa | مارك عيسى @MarkIssaTexts]

Yesterday I posted about growing up in Lebanon with Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the shelves of Arabic book fairs; books I held before I ever held a Quran. That post went viral. And the most common response I am receiving is this:
"So it's okay to kill people based on the books they read?"

Let me be direct: no one said that. And you know no one said that.

I am one of the children I described. I was handed that literature before I was old enough to choose for myself, and no one in my community thought that was strange. So I am not talking about punishing anyone. I am talking about what we were given; and what it did to us.

We do not hesitate to analyze how Nazi propaganda shaped an entire generation of Germans. We do not flinch when scholars examine how Soviet literature produced authoritarian thinking across the Eastern Bloc. But the moment someone points to the same dynamic inside Arab and Islamic culture, the conversation immediately collapses into: "are you calling for violence?"

That is not a response. That is a way of avoiding one.

Ideas have consequences. Culture has consequences. What children are handed shapes what they become; that is not a controversial claim, it is the most basic principle of education. The question worth sitting with is not whether I am justifying harm. The question is why you are so determined to change the subject.

You cannot protect the next generation of Arab and Muslim children from ideological poison if every attempt to name that poison is treated as an act of aggression. The most honest thing I can do for my own people is tell the truth about what we were given to read; and refuse to pretend it did not matter.

[Green Beret Nap Time @GBNT1952]

Well, @ShawnRyan762, I know my comparing you to @maddow seems like a joke to some, but I can assure you that it is not.

As a former SEAL that has sat in briefing rooms in theater, run ops against jihadist networks, and built a platform interviewing many sharp people in both operations and intelligence, you of all people should understand how strategic warfare actually works.

Despite all of that, you are sitting here and pushing posts like a cable news commentator with rimmed glasses on a communist news network, framing decisive pressure against the world's leading state sponsor of militant jihadist terrorism as "chaos" and "loss."

Let's cut through this selective timeline you laid out:

Trump issued a brutal, unmistakable warning over the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint Iran's regime was weaponizing to strangle global energy and fund its proxies.

That wasn't just some bluster for fun, it was quite literally combatant messaging 101 in asymmetric conflict against an enemy that only respects raw and credible power.

Jihadist Islamists like the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their ilk don't negotiate in good faith or respond to polite diplomacy, and you absolutely know this.

They only respond to negotiations from positions of strength.

If you do not negotiate that way, they will probe weaknesses, exploit hesitation, and interpret restraint as invitations to push attacks.

History from the Beirut barracks to the USS Cole to Benghazi and to decades of proxy attacks has proven that.

You've had guests that have spoken about these things, yet you act ignorant of them now?

This apocalyptic rhetoric is the only language these people understand, and you know it.

Iran blinked because of that rhetoric, floated a ceasefire tied to reopening the strait, and the administration secured a pause to lock in gains. That is not "lighting the world on fire then calling the fire department," you two bit propagandist, that is literally the way war has always worked.

It is coercion through strength: downgrade the enemy's capacity, signal willingness to escalate decisively, then offer the off ramp on your terms.

It's wild that you are ignorant about this.

And then you cry about Israel hitting Beirut like the soft lefty you have turned into... Beirut is in Lebanon, mind you, which is a completely different country than Iran.

Perhaps you need a geography lesson as well as a lesson on strategic level warfare?

So yeah, that is not Trump chaos, that is Israel finishing the job against an Iranian proxy that has quite literally fired thousands of rockets and embedded itself among civilians in Lebanon for decades.

And Lebanon was explicitly carved out of the US and Iran ceasefire for a reason, so even bringing it up here is silly and meant to distract.

Also, Iran quickly "closed" the Strait back up because they are purveyors of taqiyya style negotiations, just like jihadists always are.

But let's talk about how they "closed" the Strait, because everyone is being dishonest about that as well.

They didn't actually close anything, they are just signaling that they will attack ships that cross through it.

All it takes is one drone or one missile hitting one tanker and 20% of the world's oil shipping halts until insurance companies feel confident that the crazy Islamic terrorist regime in Iran won't sink any more hundred million dollar tankers.

You also conveniently leave out the real reason for this war from the get go, which is curtailing China and China's Belt and Road Initiative and re-establishing the world order firmly behind the United States.

I miss the days just months ago when you weren't a fully captured op... seeing what you and guys like Kent have become is truly disheartening.

I hope the money is worth it.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

Just so I understand your logic here:

Israel couldn't stop the U.S. from agreeing to a cease-fire that Israel clearly opposes and forcing it on Israel... but they definitely control D.C. anyway, because they kept bombing Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the Trump admin says wasn't part of the ceasefire, Israel says waasn't part of the ceasefire, and, most importantly, Lebanon itself says wasn't part of the ceasefie (Lebanon's govenrment says Iran does not speak for them and can't make deals on their behalf).

Makes total sense.

This actually proves the opposite. Israel has its own interests, but is a junior partner, and Trump dictates the overall direction. If Trump wanted them to stop in Lebanon, they would. But Trump, unlike some others, has no special interest in protecting Hezbollah, and it makes no sense to do so to appease the Islamic Republic.

If there will be a ceasefire in Lebanon, it should be between Lebanon and Israel.. not unrelated parties.

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @__Injaneb96]

An Israeli guy joined our space tonight. His whole family is in bomb shelters back in Israel right now.
He said they’ll happily stay there if that’s what it takes, for a free Iran and no more threats to Israelis.

The people of Israel are so strong.

It humbles me every time I talk to them. Even though the Islamic Republic has been trying to destroy them for decades, they still wish us Iranians well.
They’re sitting in bomb shelters, and every single time, without exception, they tell me:

“It’s worth it. If this is the price we have to pay to free Iran and remove the existential threat against Israel, we will do it.”

What a strong and admirable nation.

They started from ashes and built one of the most powerful and advanced countries in the world.
That’s why, even if the entire world came together against them, Israel will survive.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

One of the biggest false claims made against Israel is that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

Israel has Military Advocate Generals (MAGs), the equivalent of our Judge Advocate Generals (JAGs), deployed with commanders in the field.

MAGs engage in precisely the kind of cost-benefit analysis that the law of proportionality requires before strikes are carried out. That underscores the extent to which Israel is neither committing genocide nor violating the laws of war.

Here in the U.S., when JAGs give instructions to a commander in the field, those instructions are precatory. They are advisory. The commander can override them; he does not have to follow them.

In Israel, if MAGs tell a commander not to strike a target because of the collateral consequences for the civilian population, that is not a precatory instruction. It is a mandatory order that must be followed unless the commander wants to go up the chain of command, which can ultimately lead to a court of justice that would rule on whether the strike was appropriate given the collateral consequences.

When I took a group of federal judges to Israel, we witnessed video after video of MAGs waving off strikes at the last moment because they discovered civilians in the area. That is just a small piece, but a critical piece of evidence in the legal case showing that Israel did not commit genocide in Gaza.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

@christopherrufo @micsolana As a huge fan of this platform, I can't help noticing that the noise to signal ratio here has deteriorated. Monetisation has created an incentive structure that is conducive to neither authentic discussion nor quality content.