Personally I think that defensive technology like this is fantastic. It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones. Israeli civilians have faced bombardment by tens of thousands of rockets from Gaza for the last 20 years [1].
Outside the Middle East there's many areas threatened by combatants with similar cheap missiles. Perhaps Ukraine is an obvious one. We're seeing rises in conflicts across parts of Africa, Cambodia/Thailand, Pakistan/India. Many governments are looking into buying these to protect their countries.
This technology hopefully can protect populations from destabilizing forces funded on the cheap by foreign powers. Machine guns changed warfare [2] and drones have been a similar massive change in warfare making it cheaper and easier to attack and destabalize regions. Though of course there's downsides as well [3].
> It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones
One could also hope that e.g. Iran starts focusing its economy on the wellbeing of its people versus playing regional cop to America’s world police.
They have economic related riots starting as we speak so the progressive end result (a few riots down the line) might either be this or regime change
Riots are going to end predictably badly when those participating do not have guns. Just like a couple years ago other there. Probably a lesson here.
It's usually progressive until the people with guns are too afraid to shoot, as in the fall of USSR
Although I will believe there are a few more iterations before this regime falls
They haven't done so in decades. You think they'll start now?
> You think they'll start now?
No. But I can hope.
Three thoughts:
1. Just to repeat myself from another comment on this thread, there is no such thing as a defensive weapon. Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.
Let me pose this question to you: if these were purely defensive technologies, why don't we give them to everyone, including the Palestinians? and
2. Israel has already ruled out giving Ukraine the anti-missile (and assumedly anti-drone) defenses [1]; and
3. Many people, yourself included it seems, need to examine these conflicts around the world through the lens of historical materialism.
Take the genocide and conflict in Sudan. The SAF are arguably the ones with the "cheap rockets" here. Should we be giving the RSF anti-drone technology? The RSF are backed by the UAE using US weapons. Why? To loot Sudanese gold.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Territory, access to the Black Sea, resources and to create a land bridge to Crimea that had otherwise become extremely expensive to maintain as a colonial outpost. Like, just look at a map of controlled territory.
But why is it in a stalemate? In part because Russia is a nuclear power but also because the West is unwilling to let Ukraine do the one thing it could do to defend itself properly and that is to attack Russian energy infrastructure. Despite the sanctions, Russia is still allowed to sell oil and gas to places like Hungary, Slovakia, France, Belgium, India and China.
Back to the Middle East, we have Yemen, who was devastated by war and genocide at the hands of another US ally, Saudi Arabia.
The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.
> Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.
I'm not sure that's true, before Iron Dome, Israel would respond to many rockets from Gaza by firing mortars back at where the rocket was launched from, often the roof of an apartment building or similar, causing civilian casualties.
After Iron Dome, a lot of rockets were simply intercepted and ignored, because there was no longer political pressure from Israelis seeing rockets land in their villages and wanting to hit back.
> The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.
Collectivism will not save us. The day after we abolish markets, prices, and capitalism, there will be as many disagreements about resource allocation as there were the day before. Some of those disagreements will spiral into conflict.
'people shouldn't have locks on their doors, they discourage them from improving society'
'moving from wooden shingles allows society to be negligent when it comes to fire/forestry management and makes the world worse'
This is a good article. I disagree with its implications. I would agree that the average us citizen is much too far removed from the defense industrial complex and that creates these situations where a Google engineer (not necessarily this guy) is perfectly willing to help destroy American society with his advertising tech but balks at automating image tagging for the dod's big data lake because would rather have another 9/11 than be responsible for a false positive in the ME.
How is cell phone tracking going to prevent another 9/11? And looking at the historical track record, the DoD has done a lot of killing and very little 9/11 prevention in the past 24 years.
Do they have a public log of preventions we can look at? Seems fascinating to look at the numbers
The heuristic is that it would be in their interest to trumpet their successes.
Not if revealing success also reveals methodology and “trade” secrets.
hey man what country were the 9/11 hijackers from? What counties did we invade and which did we give f-35’s to?
This is designed to save people.
Sure, until someone says "hey can we stick this on a truck and use it against cars?" "Hey can we stick this on the belly of a plane and use it on a building?" "Hey what happens if we do a flash of this at protestors?"
Which will happen because it always happens
Then when that happens that might be morally objectionable. But probably like any other weapon that already exists, a rocket, missile or gun.
While not everyday a new defense systems is invented that is targeted at statistical weapon that terrorizes civilians.
In Batman Begins, the villian just makes the drinking water toxic. With todays AI and Biotech, one can create a new bacteria or virus and cripple water supply of cities. I am sure a suitable trained AI can get more creative with such low cost attack vectors.
Nah. You can't just engineer some sort of pathogen which will survive water purification treatments, or grow and reproduce in pure water without any nutrients. Real life isn't like the movies.
This just means, the addition of the pathogen has to happen after purification treatments. Viruses can stay dormant and activate only within human body, no need for food.
It’s not going to do anything useful against cars, let alone buildings. It would blind people, and that would be bad, but it’s a very expensive way to hurt people. I think this one is for what it says it’s for.
"It's a very expensive way to hurt people" has historically never been a real deterrent to motivated nation states to bring costs down
Countries dont generally invest in shitty weapons when they already have good weapons. Bombs & missiles already exist and are much better than lasers if your goal is to destroy a stationary target.
The point is, why would they bother when there’s cheaper and easier ways to do it? A high tech laser system is great for shooting stuff down because it replaces missile systems that cost even more. If you want to cripple people, why would you use it instead of a cheap gun or baton?
“It could be used to hurt people” doesn’t mean much. You at least need “it could be used to hurt people, and it’s better at it in at least one way than what’s already available.”
Does anyone really think the country that spent millions of dollars building explosive-laden pagers that blinded and maimed children, then spent tens of millions of dollars gloating about it in public, gives a solitary thought to the cost-benefit ratio?
They have rules that say it's okay to kill 100 civilians as long as a single "operative" is also killed.
This is a country whose leadership cares only about executing terror. Just like the USA.
Yet the pager attack did help wipe out most of the Hezbollah leadership and shortened the war overall.
Without it, Lebanon might be looking a lot more like Gaza right now.
Could definitely be used in an offensive capacity. I don't think it'll be a red alert 2 style prism cannon, but I do think it can be used to gain air superiority. With a long enough runtime, this thing could definitely take out a plane.
That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.
There is no such thing as a defensive weapon.
You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
> There is no such thing as a defensive weapon
I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.
That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.
> the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield
This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces. Through out history, disease and malnourished caused more death by a large margin than actually violence in combat, and many war campaign stopped suddenly because one or both sides became unable to continue.
> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
I would still say "what about a missile shield?".
If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.
If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.
> As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
Lol no, Iran was utterly humiliated in this conflict, and outed as a paper tiger.
That’s gross. You’re basically saying that hundreds of millions of people need to be held as hostages to ensure good behavior, and that trying to rescue those hostages is morally wrong.
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Settlements in West Bank are Israel’s great crime.
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it's almost as if it is unrelated to the article discussed
100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy.
The re-edited title frames this as an anti-drone system but this was foremost developed as an anti-rocket system.
Hamas and Hezbollah MO since the 1990s was based on bombing Israeli towns with statistical rockets and this system is supposed to reverse the cost equation (cheaper than those cheap rockets)
Today this is also used for drones though
Statistical rockets?
The rockets are very imprecise, but a large number of them, hitting the territory of a town, will deal damage, bodily harm, and death at random, due to statistics. It's Monte Carlo bombing of sorts :(
It's quiet the power requirement. I wonder how long it has to focus on a drone to eliminate it. Like how long is this thing consuming 100kW?
Good question, probably depends a lot on how much energy actually makes it to the target some distance away. And then how much is actually absorbed. Probably depends more on the power density then, rather than total power?
Can't imagine they get a very small spot at multiple km unless they use gigantic lenses or multiple independent laser focused on the same spot
I also wonder the extent to which the effectiveness is reduced by painting the projectile white or wrapping it in aluminum foil. Maybe 100kw is so large that it simply does not matter at that power level.
Maybe it involves multiple converging beams to reduce transmission losses?
yes it does
Even small divergence angles add up if they’re trying to intercept at visual ranges outside of traditional munitions.
That being said, probably ~10kW/m^2 is enough to overheat or disable a UAV
It'll get a lot of time to react at that energy as it's not going to "instantly" fry anything*. That's probably less energy/m2 than consumer heat guns, especially if consider that these drones are likely going to get sprayed in reflective paint. Easy defense for the drone would be just: get into a spin to get roasted evenly -> shut off -> fall for a few hundred meters, cooling using air that rushes by to counteract the laser further -> catch itself once it lost the laser.
That would force these laser systems to point each drone until it either visibly goes up in flames or impacts the ground (which means you also need to be able to track them all the way down), otherwise you can't be sure it won't just snap back to life once you started engaging the next drone.
I don't feel like 10kw/m2 would be anywhere near useful. It's gotta be more than that.
* Stadium floodlights aren't going to instantly grill any bird that flies in front of them either, and they reach that ballpark.
Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?
A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications.
> Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?
Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier.
The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame
> The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago.
Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades.
Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast.
I took 'power delivery' to mean the systems that facilitate driving the energy into the weapon, not the beam itself -- although now under consideration of the technology I think we should probably avoid the use of the phrase 'power delivery', without a projectile being involved that's essentially the entire concept.
Wouldn’t they be able to just use radars?
I guess they are using it in pulsed mode, continuous mode would be a little bit much power
Hm, you think longer than the laser is firing? Could there be windup?
I imagine there's some sort of storage system, like a huge bank of ultra-capacitors, that are constantly kept charged.
The wind up would be if that bank is depleted and they need to recharge. Delivering 100kW for a short period of time is definitely a feat.
If these things are even 50% efficient, then power delivery is really not a problem these days. Most EVs have no problem delivering 200kW for quite a few seconds at a time, limited mostly by components getting warm. Higher-end EVs are generally rated for 300-500kW.
It would by amusing to see one of these lasers mounted on an EV, possibly with a small range extender to recharge it on the go.
Ah, good point, that seems likely.
few seconds. it (lower power version) was deployed during war with hezbollah and intercepted 40 drones (big one, not fpv).
there is footage of intercepts out there. was released about half an year ago
from what I understand, problem with drones is first of all detection
Well there's drones, then there's prop driven cheap cruise missiles.
I think we're talking the second.
let me up the ante, drones intermixed with kamikaze pigeons.
They say it's first operational system in it's class, but it seems very similar to the Australian Apollo system, with Apollo being able to go up to 150kW
It's also similar to the British DragonFire and US HELIOS
I think the major difference here is that the Iron Beam is operational, as in finished trials, delivered to an armed force and actually was in active use in the previous war for more than a year
apollo range according to site is 3km. iron beam 10km
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A lot of comments decrying new weapons tech, but I think drone defense tech is particularly critical right now and going to save a lot of lives. Put another way, I don't think we would be against new clothing that made bullets less effective, even if it remains terrible that such clothing is needed.
Especially as AI becomes better and cheaper and suicide drones become more nimble and autonomous. If you have seen any of the horrifying footage out of Ukraine you will understand how badly we need more effective and cheaper drone defense as soon as possible.
Maybe Hi Tech weapon is impressive but that could lure us into false sense of security. Israel learnt the lesson the hard way in the October 7 attack.
Yeah, I see this as ultimately a wash.
In Russia/Ukraine, drones have proven to be a very real threat to deal with (arguably also in Iraq).
What this means is wealthy nations will snatch up or recreate this and deploy it. That will stop smaller resistance forces from either defending or attacking. Depending on the nation in question this could both good or bad. Just like drones, guns, or tanks.
Effectively, this puts the status quo back to where it was before mass drone deployments.
Which, IMO, is better than having swarms of cheap bombs flying around.
Taken to the extreme, I also prefer the current status quo vs. everyone having a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and would welcome a countermeasure if cheap ICBMs became a thing.
That laser station will not last in Ukraine an hour and will be destroyed either by missiles or drone swarm.
What Ukraine have found a net launcher is effective and cheap solution against drones and may allow more use of tanks and heavy armor vehicles again in 2026. Then shotguns with a special ammunition is effective. Then against fiber drones a fence with moving wire works surprisingly good to cut the fiber.
Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.
Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.
Each Iron Dome interception cost many times more than the cost of the rockets. This will make it cheaper for other poorer nations to afford and operate.
Are you factoring in the cost in human lives?
Lets send some over to Ukraine.
And Putin gives a nuke to Iranians then it's game over since Iranians don't care about MAD doctrine. Anyways the risk of the tech falling into Russia's hands is too high. Ukrainians have the smarts to develop it themselves now that it is proven as a viable tech.
Why would Russia give nukes to Iran? The Russians themselves would be harmed by an open nuclear exchange.
No, Putin's threats to Biden and Trump were more along the lines of, 'See the Houthis shooting shipping, imagine that capability spread to rebels and terrorists worldwide'
iran has a religious rule against making nukes, to the same extent that it has religious decrees calling for an end to israel.
iranians arent gonna nuke anyone without first toppling their religious government
Similarly the insane far-right government of Israel seem hell-bent on making "Greater Israel" a reality. Iran aren't going to nuke anyone. They have no nukes nor a religious call to bring the end of times.
Christian Zionism, on the other hand, does seem to want this to happen.
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> seeing kids shot at intentionally from drones
Anytime somebody makes a claim about a drone operating a firearm, you should be extremely skeptical. There's a reason everyone uses explosive drones, not "drone with a machine gun". Small flying machines trying to fire off rounds doesn't work out.
> submarine launched drones throwing incendiary munitions at a flotilla
Per the Greek coastguard, someone left a lit joint by a fuel canister. Maybe the Greeks are in on the deep conspiracy.. or potheads are just forgetful.
whenever you see someone making the claim that a gun won't work on an aircraft, I urge you to look at our entire aviation history of vehicles with guns strapped on. Planes, helicopters, jet-packs, 'manned platforms', whatever your fancy.
we're not talking about glocks ductaped to DJIs here, and all of these mysterious engineer efforts that 'just doesn't work out' are hurdles that man has faced and conquered before.
What I would suggest is that if anyone trying to give you a technical reason that ends in "It just doesn't work" they are probably unprepared to accurately brief you on the topic.
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So will we get drones coated in mirrors and temperature sensors that automatically move them away from these weapons quickly? Or is the laser just too powerful?
Its really hard to make near perfect mirrors that stay perfect in rough conditions. Mirrors arent a reasonable defense to laser weapons outside of scifi.
what about mirrors with tiny little windshield wipers?
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FYI that source is associated with Hamas presence in Europe, acts as a Hamas propaganda piece and previously invented news such as Palestinian organ theft by Israel.
> The genocide started decades ago. The retaliation for Oct 7th began soon after.
In that case, the article you linked to is even more off.
(I’m not well-informed enough to comment on the rest, so I won’t.)
> Countless surgeons from The West have testified that Israeli drones have shot the hell out of people of all ages
How do the surgeons know it was a drone?
There was a genocide committed against Bangladeshi Hindus by Pakistan and another being done right now by Bangladeshi govt in power now.
A genocide is being committed in Nigeria by boko haram. Another in Sudanese war committed and funded by uae and other Arab nations.
But let me guess, the only genocide worth committing your verbiage is the one where a certain people belonging to the favorite religion is facing issues after voting in a terrorist organization by the name of Hamas which went in and attacked a community which was persecuted and butchered for close to 2500 years. All provoked by a religious ideology and Arab theocratic pan nationalism.
Also in Myanmar! Or any of several states and the Rohingya.
I love the whataboutery Hasbara angle. It never gets old.
My genocide is better than your genocide. What a time to be alive.
It is exceedingly well documented that Israeli drones are shooting and killing children / civilians regularly:
I watched your video, the only thing on it is a drone warning people away from a dangerous area.
It’s psychological genocide. Just like everything is a bubble everything is a genocide now.
Genetic fallacy. Like all propaganda it's suspect, but not all propaganda is fake.
It's usually "Israeli Occupation Forces" as opposed to "Israeli Occupation Army". Both variants are objectively true.
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holy shit thats fucked
That's really horrible
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Jeez, that's on brand for Israel, but holy fuck
The thing that worries me isn't the drone/anti-drone escalation. It is the fact that these weapons aren't actually limited to anti-drone use. Recently we have seen clear examples of countries, including Israel, that will use automatic id technology to mass tag a population. If you then have tools that can automatically track and mass kill, which this type of weapon represents, then we have reached a type of warfare that is new in the world and deeply scary. It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where person x is killed since they are marked as a 'bag guy' and as part of being marked every person they were next to for the last few days was also marked as likely enough to be bad guys to kill as well. All that has to be done is push a button. It is a scary, and unfortunately all to possible, future if not now.
It seems incredibly hard to imagine what else you would do with a ground based laser other than shoot at incoming projectiles. What exactly are you expecting the Israelis to do? Change the laws of physics?
I think we’re already there. Sounds like Obama administration hit jobs.
Paid for by American taxpayers who don’t have universal healthcare.
Someone should give people in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon the same tech.
Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.
Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.
This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.
That's not how it looks like though with the way Israel acts like the judge, jury and executioner of the region. You get the feeling that only Israeli lives count in the Middle East.
you could alternatively pount towards israeli expansionism, which is a bit more likely than religious extremism. demolish peoples homes and kidnap their families, and theyre gonna respond in whatever way they can.
i expect the iron beam is going to make a lot more deaths, just of people israelis dont consider human. wooo
> whatever way they can.
Except agreeing to a peace deal and state recognition... with Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert. And Except letting their citizens vote for their own gov in Gaza for over 17 years...
I guess responding to Israeli expansionism has some great strategy I still don't grasp.
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>This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more (israeli) lives.
There fixed it for you. last I checked, Israelis are using drones to summarily execute Palestinian kids with impunity. the idea of these people having even more weapons at their disposal paid for by MY tax dollars leaves me a bit disgusted.
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The moral argument for a modern, rights-based society is cleanly on Israel’s side. I’m glad they’ve developed this technology, so they can continue defending themselves at a lower cost to their citizens. The engineers involved have done a very good thing.
Your snide tone can’t obscure that the moral issue is straightforward, if you’re aiming at a world where people can be free to live, grow, and flourish. If you want a society that enables builders and engineers to express themselves by creating new things, i.e., on in which people are permitted to think, then you are aligned with Israel’s basic cause.
The central difference is that Israel’s government is essentially secular and free, whereas its enemies — especially Hamas — are essentially theocratic and totalitarian. In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
Last, to clarify the kernel of truth that your point relies on through distortion: while it is true that Israel contains a set of backwards theocratic tribesmen, their importance is marginal. Tel Aviv’s builders and entrepreneurs are the dominant cultural force in Israel, and they are proponents and practitioners of secular modernity.
Do not falsely conflate a marginal group with Hamas’ explicit cause, which is to destroy Israel’s free society and replace it with religious tyranny.
Unless, perhaps, that is what you really regard as moral?
The "backward tribesmen" are currently providing the Minister of Finance/special Minister for the West Bank (Smotrich), Minister of Police (Ben Gvir), Minister of Diaspora Affairs that happens to also manage access to aid orgs in gaza (Amichai Chikli), Minister for Cultural Heritage (Amihai Eliyahu), Minister of Settlements and National Missions (Orit "Time of Miracles" Stook) and probably others. So much for "marginal influence".
> In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
The Arab Israelis have those same rights on paper but face discrimination in practice. But that's beside the point and you know it. What about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are under Israeli rule but have no rights and no representation in Israel at all? But I guess all seven million of them are "Hamas" and therefore don't count as humans?
Also note that while the secular liberals from Tel Aviv and the deeply religious settlers from the West Bank disagree on lots of things, they have no fundamental disagreement on the occupation.
All lies?
Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets before, during and after October 7 massacre is documented[1] by Wikipedia (that does have documented anti-israel bias[2])
Sorry but doesn't fly. Also Islam has nothing to do with Palestinian resistance. This theme of "Palestinians and Muslims are all Jihadists and all seek to kill Jews" is also getting really really old.
2026 will bring more enlightenment to the masses. Also, Israel loves messing with wikipedia as it has done for years.
Indeed, Abu Zaydeh is well aware that for the past two years the
Hamas leadership had been talking about implementing "the
last promise" (alwaed al'akhir) – a divine promise regarding
the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam.
Sinwar and his circle ascribed an extreme and literal meaning
to the notion of "the promise, " a belief that pervaded all their
messages: in speeches, sermons, lectures in schools and
universities. The cardinal theme was the implementation of the
last promise, which included the forced conversion of all
heretics to Islam, or their killing.
There isnt much information here. What is the total power per m^2 and what is the frequency (range). As we know the sun alone is 1kW/m^2 over quite a range.
Just in time for Iran 2.0
In the war in June, Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles. These were the only lethal munition they used, killing a couple dozen civilians.
The Iron Beam is not relevant against ballistic missiles.
Shaheds are heavy and big and I doubt that the new laser system can damage them. An interceptor drone is much cheaper and effective against them. This is more like defense against smaller FPV drones targeting bigger anti-missile systems.
Flying disco balls when?
They certainly have those for radars! Although the reason for using them is different.
"""
What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return. Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded.
"""
Let's not pretend that the Jews just appeared there. 800k Jews were kicked out of middle eastern countries. If we rewind the clock shouldn't those Jews also get their Middle East land back? Or did they not terrorize enough people and hijack enough airplanes to qualify?
Source: I was born in Baghdad. Father and other relatives were tortured and murdered there.
At this point, aren't we all descendants of Abraham with high probability? Maybe we should just give the land we identify as Israel to the world.
“How did the occupied Palestinian territories become occupied? In 1967 Israel launched what it said was a pre-emptive defensive war against Jordan, Egypt and Syria, as they appeared to be preparing to invaded.”
The problem with these summaries is everyone can always somewhat legitimately claim a prior offence. The 1967 offense resulted from the shitshow that was the 1948 war [1], which itself resulted from a history of French, British and Ottoman control.
They both suck and they both have legitimate grievances.
They’re also both proxies on like four major axes (Iran vs Saudi Arabia, America vs Russia, America vs China and whatever Turkey is up to) and more minor axes than I’ve seen anyone even bother keeping track of.
It’s a deep and deeply fucked conflict that doesn’t lend well to armchair border drawing from an ocean away from first principles.
Hamas isn't Palestine.
According to Wikipedia, "Gaza" is the largest city in Palestine, and "Hamas" is the government of Palestine.
Putin isn't Russia either. By that logic Russia didn't attack Ukraine?
If one wants to avoid nationalism, then yes.
As the russians were not asked about it.
The russian government decided to do so and to supress any oposition.
(But their army is largely made up of volunteers)
> If one wants to avoid nationalism, then yes
How do you do that when dealing with nationalist governments waging nationalist wars? The most generous framing of either side’s ask in the Gaza war is for nationhood.
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You are thinking of Ashkenazi. Vast majority of Israeli jews are Mizrahi. This is in addition to 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and are doing just fine. Your hatred comes from ignorance.
Are they afforded the same rights as jewish israelis? What about Gazans and West Bank palestenians whose families came from elsewhere in the earlier Palestine and were driven out to these areas, now living in terrible conditions. For simplicity lets pretend it is Sep 2023 for this argument, as the conditions were terrible then, due to Israels policies.
> What about Gazans and West Bank palestenians whose families came from elsewhere
I’m sympathetic to the argument that there should be reparations—from Israel but also France, Britain and Turkey—for victims of the Nakbah.
But let’s be clear on a right of return: this logic applies to almost every human in Europe or Asia when it comes to the Middle East if we go back far enough. We’re talking about the closest coast to the cradle of civilisation.
You don't have to go 'back' to find Palestinians alive, today, who can point at their settler-occupied homes on a map, and tell you the day they were kicked out. I think that's a reasonable cutoff point for right of return.
> I think that's a reasonable cutoff point for right of return
I do too. The contours of how that works with their descendants, and when we draw the line for the living, has been debated in good faith (and bad, increasingly recently) for decades [1].
Thanks for the link. There are counterpoints in the linked article, including:
> Yousef Munayyer, an Israeli citizen and the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, wrote that Palestinians only have varying degrees of limited rights in Israel. He states that although Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel's population, less than 7% of the budget is allocated to Palestinian citizens. He describes the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel as second-class citizens while four million more are not citizens at all. He states that a Jew from any country can move to Israel but a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. Munayyer also described the difficulties he and his wife faced when visiting the country.[301]
Hope over time this changes for the better. If they can start letting people expelled years ago to return too. Maybe not to their old address but work something out.
If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states, Middle East would be a much quieter place
> If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states
Easier said than done. The chaos the PLO caused in Jordan and Lebanon [1] raises legitimate security concerns for any country asked to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees.
Why not US take a few million refugees, and build homes for them. Just borrow $100B from the Federal Reserve and do it.
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I look like an average white male.
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Can you give me some pointers on how to develop? I am currently farming years of professional experience, while simultaneously looking out for better job opportunities, and getting high school credits that are needed to attend a university. I'm not 100% sure if I actually need to go to university, but it's at least something if I can't find anything else.
No
No? ChatGPT says yes.
Thats why you should read and not rely on AI for your opinion.
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> To summarize, any technique or technology designed to subjugate colonial interests will ultimately be used the citizenry in the imperial core
To emphasize, however, per your own source, this is a critical analytical tool and not a testable hypothesis nor even prediction about the world.
Zyklon-B wasn’t much of a secret - it was used all over the place as a pesticide. Most soldiers would have been about as familiar with it as we would with Raid spray or bug traps.
Israeli police had to teach American one how to do violence? Come on
Just recently, US has worked with Saudis and Ukrainians and others to supply heavy and novel weaponry to be deployed in eg Yemen, coordinating airstrikes, giving intel etc. to devastating effect and has done even more direct involvement in brutal wars, whether proxy wars of whatever. The PATRIOT act and subsequent militarization of police at home supports the GP’s statement about a boomerang. I don’t think GP meant to say it was only due to Israel or single out Israel as a source US of military cooperation and MIC job creation.
But yes, some people will only care if they can find Jewish connections, eg Zelensky being partly Jewish or MBS or Al Sisi allegedly being partly Jewish due to their stances in opposition to Islamic extremism.
There are people who blame influential Jews for everything, and they’ll go so far as to say that Ataturk was Jewish, in order to care about the Armenian genocide. But they won’t care about, say, the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks that took place 20 years earlier because they can’t find any evidence that Sultan Hamid was Jewish.
They blame Israel for Iraqi expulsion of Jews, until they find out the Farhud was 10 years before Israel was formed as a state.
They even finally started to care about what’s happening in Sudan when they realized they can sort of draw a tenuous line between that and Israel through UAE.
As long as influential Jews are involved they will deeply care about a conflict, eg 9/11 dancing Israelis or clean break memo of PNAC. They will ignore that presidents like W Bush called the Iraq invasion a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers”. They also do not like to go back further to, say, bombing of Laos and all throughout southeast Asia because, again, it is hard to blame any Jews for that.
It’s almost as if they have an algorithm: 1) find Jews involved with thing they consider bad, 2) care about that issue but ONLY to the extent they can point out Jewish connections 3) cherrypick and compile lists of Jewish involvement to make it seem that all bad things done by states, corporations, or humanity, is due to Jews. Candace Owens for example recetly said that Stalin was Jewish and that the US slave trade was “not the white man but mostly Jewish”, and that Black lives now really matter to her after years of “White lives Matter” with Ye, now that she found out Jews were behind it.
> There are people who blame influential Jews for everything
To what extent are they in the same bucket as those who reflexively blame the CIA or Russia or immigrants or white people for everything?
There is a similar mentality among humans that many fall into, the “victimhood mentality”. And many Jews themselves also have the same thing. In a conflict, often both sides use the same tactics without realizing it.
The way BLM blamed “systemic racism”, various Jews might see “antisemitism“ behind every critique of Israel. It is not just individual but group psychology. The worst scorn is reserved for heaping on defectors, who Black BLM activists would call “uncle Toms” and Jewish Zionist activists would call “self-hating Jews”.
So what’s interesting is the common tactics. I don’t mean to imply it is one sided. Both sides of an ideological conflict (eg abortion, socialism, etc) want to take over a powerful state apparatus to use for their agenda. Both sides want to cynically and hyporcitically exploit millions of people to further their agenda.
For example, antizionists (and more generally revolutionaries / “axis of resistance” supporters who may be either leftist, Islamist or whatever) want to perpetuate statelessness of millions of people in Lebanon, Syria and all over the Middle East, so they can be labeled “Palestinian” because one of their grandfathers was in Palestine circa 1947, so that they can “keep their identity” by essentially forcing on them, and maintain large numbers for “the cause” of removing Jewish majority in any area of the Levant. They oppose giving them citizenship on a jus soli basis even if they and their parents were born in another country. This happens even with Palestinians who themselves got citizenship long ago in Chile, USA, UK, Sweden, Canada etc. It is a similar mentality to “fight to the last Ukrainian” by Ukrainians abroad who left Ukraine an settled in other countries.
Meanwhile, Zionists have a form of that, where many of them constantly play up and almost seem to welcome how badly Jews would be treated among other countries, and downplay the role of their right wing government waging wars in a far more reckless fashion than they could have. Instead of placing the blame on that government for making Jews less safe, they say “you see? This is why you should move to Israel. You’ll be safe here among Jews.”
In short both movements cynically use their own people, almost welcoming hardship for them until they are “forced” to embrace their identity and move back to where they same place both groups are competing to demographically dominate ..
This isn’t unique to Israel. Armenians vs Azerbaijanis for example seek foreign alliances for protection. Serbs vs Albanians. Tamils vs Sri Lanka. Rohingya vs Burma. Uyghurs vs China. And so on. There are horrific proxy wars happening in Sudan now, and Congo throughout. But people don’t tend to focus on any of that because Ashkenazi Jews are famous and successful in the West. And because Abrahamic religions are based on Judaism, so Israel is quite foundational to all their religions. Not so much Sri Lanka…
You can see in Eastern cultures which are not Abrahamic, not Muslim or Christian, the attitude is the same as to any other sectarian conflict. That is proportional. But it is extremely disproportionate in the West! For the reasons I listed above.
did you see rapid rise in violence against russians after russia started war in ukraine ? did you see rapid rise in violence against azeris after ethnic cleansing that they executed recently ? against chinese for their treatment of Uyghurs. etc.. etc.. etc.. ? I guess no.
but when there is a violence against random jews across the west, somehow israeli government is the guilty one and not antisemitism.
Yep, I did. My mom taught at a school where during the war Ukrainians would gang up on Russians, both being immigrants. A lot of Russian things were “canceled” to the point that Babylon Bee ran this story:
I have seen attacks on Asians ramp up during the start of COVID.
I say the same to both Jews and Black people (being Jewish myself): we live in the least racist, least antisemitic time in hundreds of years, maybe in history. Your grandfather had it much worse. These complaints are first-world problems. Yelling “racist” or “antisemite” on a hair trigger only serves to cheapen the actual words, same as yelling “genocide” while ignoring every other more horrific war, even 200 km to Israel’s north in Syria.
The “magarshak ratio” is the amount of outrage about something vs how many people are actually suffering. To be sure, the disproportionate navel gazing at Israel is due to Jews and Judaism. But similarly, the disproportionate navel gazing at attacks on Jews in USA or other countries, where they have been mostly protected and highly respected by eg the entire Evangelical community, is seen by some as “first world problems” while bombs are raining down in Gaza for example.
Som of the biggest hyporites criticizing Jews for “dual citizenship” and “ethnic cleansing and building an ethnostate” are Armenians like Dan Bilzerian who flew to Armenia with his family to accept citizenship and serve in the Armenian armed forces. People probably just don’t see the symmetries. Or maybe they’re just hypocrite grifters.
AND THERE IS THE INTITUTIONAL LEVEL.
On that level, of governments and corporations, Israel does enjoy an immense amount of support and immunity. Name me another country where every presidential candidate has to go affirm their support at an AIPAC for, say, Italy. As a Jewish person myself, I am uneasy at Jewish participation in PNAC or the military industrial complex and neocon war machine in general. I don’t want Jews to be blamed later for the wars. Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are of course quite supportive of Israel, but I am not thrilled at the endorsements. And so on.
I am a libertarian, I try to criticize Russia, USA, Iran other countries, and yes Israel, proportionally to what they actually have done. The wars are fought by plebs who die, the politicians stay in their ivory towers and bunkers and give speeches even as they get international arrest warrants for them.
But even just from the point of view of an Israeli citizen, or Ukrainian citizen, or Iraqi citizen etc. these politicians are horrible. Netanyahu was actively against the 2 state solution, Rabin’s wife blames him for inciting the PM’s assassination, and he literally released 1000 terrorists for 1 guy, Gilad Shalit who fell asleep and allowed himself to be captured. It included the masterminds of October 7th. Who does that? He personally allowed Qatari money to go to Hamas, ignored Egyptians’ warnings, ignored warnings from Shin Bet, oversaw a drawdown of security, and his army for hours ignored even the female spotters whose only job it was to report the threats, and who were killed while reporting it for hours! Such extreme negligence goes completely unpunished, nevermind the corruption and investigations that have been put off because of the war. You don’t have to be a leftist or a libertarian to appreciate the level of corruption and immunity from consequences and misaligned incentives of these politicians.
And the excuses the government intitutions give for the negligence or the wars are so laughable that it is hard to think they aren’t deliberately trolling us and rubbin their unaccountability in our face:
The current war vs Venzuela is a great example. They aren’t even trying to explain it anymore. (“hasbara” means explanation in Hebrew, but the same is done by other governments to their people - Russian govt when asked what if Russians wont support the invasion said “we will explain it to them”). The US administration now claims Venezuela is the biggest source of drugs (false) and even weren’t afraid to label drugs WMDs, not even concerned that WMDs were famously not actually found in Iraq during our invasion. They don’t even care about your consent - they know they’ll have your support later! Trump openly said we want to take their oil and land. He says the quiet parts out loud.
You’re seeing it happen in real-time. Again. But when it’s us, whether Iraq or Venezuela, most people heavily tone down their criticism that you would have had for the 73% of Russian public supporting THEIR invasion. But it’s all very similar. The symmetries are striking. 73% of US Americans also supported the invasion of Iraq.
so you have a couple example of anecdotal evidence from past . no example similar violence as it been ongoing against jews . attacks on places of worships, schools, kindergartens, holidays celebrations or just any assembly. attacks that end up with dead people. antisemitism went up on oct 7th even before cult of genocide witnesses was established
what you are doing in many paragraphs (laden with historical errors or misinformation) is whitewashing antisemitism and shifting blame back to jews.
Imagine you’re Black and we’re having this same conversation about systemic racism as if everyone is inherently a racist in society. Anyone who disagrees is called an uncle tom, is that reasonable?
Are there people who don’t like Jews? Of course. The most despicable were the people who came out to protest Israel in the days after October 7th, after the largest attack on Jews in Israel probably ever. And among them were rabid antisemites chanting vile things. Yes.
But look around. Are there a lot of mass shootings in USA? Yes. Many of them are not against Jews. You have to look at statistics. And this is miniscule compared to the violence in the world, eg in Mexico with the drug cartels. We have law and order. We also have a lot of homeless druggies and crazies.
But try to see others facing an entire systematic apparatus. The USA has spent decades trying to get people to hate Russians, for example, at an institutional level. First, it was that they’re commies. Then it was that they love Putin. Also Muslims by and large got similar treatment as Communists during McCarthyism and Cointelpro, after the CIA themselves funded the mujahideen and empowered jihadists (mujahideen is Arabic for jihadists, literally).
Once again, they brazenly admit they were responsible, but they are proud of it anyway. Both Democrats and Republicans:
It always goes through the same stages with these governments. First they gaslight you. Then they engage in “special military operations”. Then they draft you. Then they invade. Then they occupy, lose a lot of money and get people killed. Then the next generation of politicians says it was “a big mistake”. Russians can’t explain to their kids why they fought in Afghanistan in the 80s, and Americans can’t explain why they fought in Iraq.
So yeah I blame the politicians. And even if you were an Israeli, even if you were a radical right wing Kahanist, you could admit that Netanyahu and his government were negligent and call for an investigation of his handling of Hamas and the threats it posed, leading up of Octobed 7th. Agree?
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Yes, that’s exactly the kind of language the Nazis used. You merely further prove my point.
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Downvoted for not saying Apartheid in your buzzword bingo.
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Response to “How much U.S. taxpayer money was spent on this?” - now flagged:
“The Israeli system is a slightly different approach technologically. So actually, it’s a nice complement because we’re kind of going down one path, they’ve gone down a slightly different one. So I think yes, there’s potential if theirs works well, it could be something we could think about leveraging for our needs in that space. So that’s really a benefit of that funding is … we can explore multiple paths here and see what works,” Bush said.
None. The US money Israel receives is purely used for buying from US defense contractors. This is developed by purely Israeli defense contractors. The US leverages significant discounts on these Israeli developed systems compared to other countries.
Also, the amount Israel gets is in the same ballpark as Egypt and Lebanon, but interesting that that is never mentioned?
So it goes from Us Citizens to the wealthy who sell the weapon systems. That’s what none is. Cool.
This article is about an Israeli developed system, so no US tax payer money was used. It is an off topic discussion to discuss your hatred for Israel. Maybe submit a different article about that, but it is off topic for this one.
Tired of this kind of talk. Everybody is looking for a scapegoat. For some it's China, for others the billionaires, yet others suspect it's all the Jews' fault, or the European Union, or wokeness, or Donald Trump or or or.. sigh, it's not new, it's just boring, and it rarely leads to any good things.
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I don't see how that's relevant, considering we could already provide healthcare to all Americans simply by disbanding the corrupt Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies and recouping the administration fees. And then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI. Hell, we'd probably save money in both cases.
> we could already provide healthcare to all Americans simply by disbanding the corrupt Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies and recouping the administration fees
Source for this estimate?
> then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI
This is nonsense. Federal welfare spending is about $20k per capita [1]. You could get that to $30k by co-opting all state spending [2]. (And only in Alaska, Oregon and Hawaii.)
'the jews are stealing our healthcare' seems to be a huge bot posting theme on Reddit the last week or so. Might be working and bleeding over into the zeitgeist.
It is so sad the Humanity needs to develop weapons...
On the last day of the year, I am taking a few minutes to linger on this. At face value, most would agree with this, myself included. But I think we can dive one layer deeper. There are different schools of thoughts whether mankind is inherently good or evil. Over the years, I have become pretty firm believer that every person has the innate capacity for both good and evil, and the outcome is determined by both character and circumstances. Solzhenitsyn famously wrote (quote by Gemini):
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."
If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.
I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.
(edit: grammar, slight rewording)
We are also lucky a miscalculation didn’t occur during the Cold War resulting in millions of nuked folks. But, not sure what the alternative is. Best idea I’ve heard is for everyone to stop reproducing.
More to the point, "technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral, it just exists". Ultimately all tools can be used for good or bad purposes and what matters is the people who wield them.
This is separate from the argument over whether MAD is philosophically good. MAD is not an argument about technology. "Peace through strength" does indeed require the occasional display of strength, to maintain deterrence. Good and bad (morals) are not the right frame to understand deterrence, rather emotions: fear, confidence, and security.
Solzhenitsyn can be read as either a humanist or an ethicist: either the bridgehead of good is sufficient to redeem everyone from war and morality demands pacifism, or all military doctrines must be submitted to independent review to check that we do not give the "unuprooted small corner of evil" oxygen. Crucially, these are both judgements about ourselves and not about the foes who seek to destroy us, who indeed consider themselves to have "the best of all hearts". In this sense, Solzhenitsyn contributes to the cycle of violence: if both sides are ethicists, and their ethical councils have different conclusions, the result is not just fundamentalism but a fundamentalism justified by ethical review.
Fear, anger, disgust are the ultimate drivers of conflict. Can we conquer them? Of course not, they are the base emotions, part of being human. But can there be a better way of handling them in geopolitics? Yes - if leaders are focused on helping not just themselves feel safe, but their enemies as well. This is the higher level beyond MAD - not mutual fear, but mutual security. This is why USAID was great foreign policy and cheap for its benefits. This is why weapons are sold to allies despite the fact that their interests may not be fully aligned with ours. Weapons are fundamental to security, which at the end of the day is a feeling and not a guarantee against attack or repercussions from an attack, and these feelings of security are what reduces the incidence and frequence of war.
I totally understand the need for weapons. It is just makes me sad.
And I think Solzhenitsyn is wrong. There are psychopathic people that have no good in their hearts. Sure, with the right upbringing that could be kind and good but at a given moment they are what they are... psychopaths.
100 kW. That's a lot. I wonder how many kW will be needed to save them from God's wrath
Someone will find a reflexive material to put on the drone. Then you have a multi kw laser that hits randomly anywhere when intercepting drones.
Also I wonder why it is not common to run interception drones that automatically fly towards incoming drones and captures them mid air. Like a wasp is capturing other insects.
So pretty much like the iron dome but not with single use rockets but reusable drones instead.
Probably a dumb question, but could a ploy drone fitted with a directional mirror redirect the beam back to the source to damage or destroy it?
Mirrors are not effective enough. Shielding drones from energy weapons seems like a similar problem to entering Earth’s atmosphere, you want to shield it in a way that will blast away safely and ideally diffuse the laser, so the energy is spread over a larger space.
I suspect larger lasers will likely aways win, since there is only so much shielding can do. At which point we could end up with transformers like drones that are built to be broken apart mid flight and yet still deliver damage.
I feel like defending drones could become possible with energy weapons but only under ideal weather conditions.
Likely cheaper to just coat the real drones in an aerogel or similar light weight, high thermal resistance material. It's an arms race still, but one with a reasonable amount of asymmetry in favour of an attacker.
I'm not certain, but I think the returned beam would likely be significantly out-of-focus.
No, but an AI drone like the one Turkey has can probably detect the source of the beam by hiding behind some sacrificial/decoy drones and watching them blow up then shooting a missile at the laser source. It's not like the laser is coming out of thin air.
Shooting down missiles is what this is for.
actually it's for shooting anything that is close enough and can be intercepted.
during the war with hezbollah (drones were issue due to topography) lower power version of iron beam was deployed on trial bases and scored around 40 intercepts
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The presupposition here being that Israel has a right to defense and that the poor people being occupied, living under apartheid, being slaughtered and displaced should possess no such right to resist, has been a hallmark of zionist propaganda for ages now.
It's not aging particularly well.
This is an astonishing revisionist take on the reality on the ground.
Israel unilaterally disengaged from GAZA in 2005 and pulling out generations of Jewish settlement in the process. By 2006 GAZA has zero Jews, and 2007 Gazans elected HAMAS who fired rockets at Israel because they want to free Palestine from the river to the sea, AKA eliminate Israel. October 7 attack is a culmination of that, and between then and now, HAMAS didn't forget to build their military base in the mix of civilians and using civilian targets as shield. So that they can blame Israel for every single Palestinians death, including the death cause by their own firing.
The situation in west Bank is qualitatively the same.
No, protecting your people from terrorist is not apartheid, and Israel has no interest to build iron beam and/or build wall--which the west misinterprete as apartheid-- if the neighbors had no intention to eliminate them.
The issue with that type of reasoning is that if you swapped the parties the sentences would be the same. "Palestine removed generations of settlements from Israel, but was forced to attack because Israel wanted to wipe them out." You need to think in terms of principles that can apply equally to everybody.
There are 2 million muslims living in Israel.
There are zero Jews in Gaza -- not even just living ones, they had to remove the long-buried dead ones too.
Though your comment is phrased ambiguously ( not sure you are referring to the Arabs in Israel, or Arabs in Gaza/west bank), I try to respond to both.
For Arabs in Israel, it is important to note that inside Israel parliament knesset, there are Arab representatives, some who even call for the soft dissolution of the state itself ( rights of return). They are the descendants of the Arabs who didn't leave Israel during the 1947 Israel independent war. So no, Arabs there are by and large not removed at all by anyone. By contrast, there are zero Jews in Gaza or West Bank. Jews enter those places at their own peril, they could be lynched.
The Arabs in GAZA/West Bank are not under Israeli jurisdiction, and by their actions and words they are still declaring war on Israel, despite that they launched the war first every single time, and lost every single time, and play victim every single time. If Israel wanted to wipe them out then there is no need for Israel to accept the 1947 partition, the David peace accords (2000) or the Oslo accords (2008), which Palestinians all rejected wholesale. If Israel really wanted to wipe them out, the GAZA war following October 7 terrorist attack would be over by the next day as Israel dominated absolutely militarily.
Really, the conflict is really that simple. One side, Israel, wants peace, and the other, the Palestinians, who don't ( as captured by their slogan, "from the river to the sea Palestinians will be free", do look up on where is the river and where is the sea if you have doubt).
It is made complicated only because a lot of people try to obscure the reality. But that's the topic for another day.
Its pretty well established in international law and the UN charter that all countries have a right to self-defense. Given this is a purely defensive weapon, i can't imagine what reasonable objection anyone could have to it.
Israel is an occupier. This isn't symmetrical warfare.
Israel won't let food into Gaza in reasonable quantities. It has restricted basic things like tent poles and just about any commodity which humans anywhere else in the world would have the luxury of being able to take for granted.
All in violation of international law - that which has lost all meaning in the last three or so years.
> Israel is an occupier.
Not really relavent. Occupying powers still have the right to self-defense. Certainly they have the right to take defensive measures to prevent attacks on the civilian population of their primary territory, which is what is being discussed here.
> Israel won't let food into Gaza in reasonable quantities
As far as i understand the food situation in Gaza has now stabilized. However even if Israel was illegally restricting food into gaza, that wouldn't have any bearing on the legality of them setting up air defense systems on their own territory.
> All in violation of international law
Being an occupying power is not in and of itself a violation of international law. (The food thing might be. Israel is allowed to put certain restrictions on aid, but groups like the ICC have argued that the restrictions were beyond what was permissible under international law. Personally, even though it is incredibly unlikeky to happen, i hope the issue goes to trial at the ICC so we get a firm answer. However even if true, it does not mean Israel loses every right it has under international law)
I think Israel has a right to defense qua state and Palestinians have a right to resist qua subjects of unjust rule. These aren’t really contradictory positions, and both are pretty standard from a “this is what the UN says” ground truth[1][2].
(This is distinct from a state’s “right to exist,” which is nonsense. But once a state does exist, it has the right to defend itself by definition.)
If they both have a right to kill each other, does the other really have a right to defense? Making it complicated introduces legalistic flaws and distracts everyone from actually fixing it by doing something simple, like tying sanctions to murders of civillians.
> can the right to kill coexist with the victim's right to defense?
Yes it can, and it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Russia believes it has the natural right to reclaim what it considers to be Russian territory. Ukraine believes it has the right to be free. So everyone should just put down their weapons and come to an agreement based on these rights?
The fallacy at the heart of your argument is that there is somehow some greater single truth, and that each side agrees that it is the greater single truth, and that everyone will just peaceably agree to follow the single greater truth because it is the single greater truth. Nothing could be less human. What are we, the Borg? We're supposed to follow some hive mind?
> something simple, like tying sanctions to murders of civilians
Not even remotely simple. Define sanctions, murders, civilians. The US bombing "drug" boats in the Caribbean, are those civilians? International law recognizes that collateral damage can legitimately happen during legitimate military operations. Is the collateral damage "murder"? How far should sanctions go? Sanction enemy banks (layer 1)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with the enemy country (layer 2)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with other citizens who do business with the enemy country (layer 3)?
They don’t both have a right to kill each other! Both “defense” and “resistance” (w/r/t the goal of self determination) have precise bounds; not all forms of warfare or violence are considered justifiable under either. Much of what Israel has done in the current conflict goes well beyond a charitable read of its right to defense, but this doesn’t imply that all defense adaptations are illegitimate.
I think everyone (myself included) has a right to actual self-defense, just not the false version we've been seeing.
Here's my peace plan:
Blow up or starve kids on the other side +1 sanctions.
Intercept a drone or rocket +0 sanctions.
Say you're sorry and reduce arms by 10% -1 sanctions.
If the US alone did this they'd stop with all the murders in days to weeks.
Of course the state of affairs where random online commenters can think of better answers than the individuals in charge is only due to a lack of a desire for peace at high levels! There is nothing complicated about it at all.
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Zionism is not a race. The conflation police have once again been informed.
Nice dog whistle you got there
Laser weapons appear to be advancing rapidly. Once we get to the single digit MW power range, MAD will deteriorate as the ICBM becomes a non-viable nuclear delivery mechanism.
What effect would that have? Will nukes start getting used in wars? Will we see deployment of multi ton NEFP[1] warheads that can strike targets with nuclear-propelled kinetics?
We are nowhere near that point yet. Small rockets are totally different weapons then ICBM.
there was interview with guy from rafael who was head of iron beam project. it looks like they have some plans for dealing with icbm. airborne if I understood correctly
I guess airborne would be easier to intercept in their earlier phase before they go super fast, but then you have to have air assets in the right place at the right time.
At their terminal phase icbms go at mach 25, which is pretty hard to shine a laser on for an extended period of time.
Personally I think that defensive technology like this is fantastic. It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones. Israeli civilians have faced bombardment by tens of thousands of rockets from Gaza for the last 20 years [1].
Outside the Middle East there's many areas threatened by combatants with similar cheap missiles. Perhaps Ukraine is an obvious one. We're seeing rises in conflicts across parts of Africa, Cambodia/Thailand, Pakistan/India. Many governments are looking into buying these to protect their countries.
This technology hopefully can protect populations from destabilizing forces funded on the cheap by foreign powers. Machine guns changed warfare [2] and drones have been a similar massive change in warfare making it cheaper and easier to attack and destabalize regions. Though of course there's downsides as well [3].
1: https://www.mideastjournal.org/post/how-many-rockets-fired-a... 2: https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/how... 3: https://claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com/p/iron-dome-part...
Data says it’s the Palestinians that need defenses, not the ones doing 95% of the killing.
https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
> It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones
One could also hope that e.g. Iran starts focusing its economy on the wellbeing of its people versus playing regional cop to America’s world police.
They have economic related riots starting as we speak so the progressive end result (a few riots down the line) might either be this or regime change
Riots are going to end predictably badly when those participating do not have guns. Just like a couple years ago other there. Probably a lesson here.
It's usually progressive until the people with guns are too afraid to shoot, as in the fall of USSR
Although I will believe there are a few more iterations before this regime falls
They haven't done so in decades. You think they'll start now?
> You think they'll start now?
No. But I can hope.
Three thoughts:
1. Just to repeat myself from another comment on this thread, there is no such thing as a defensive weapon. Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.
Let me pose this question to you: if these were purely defensive technologies, why don't we give them to everyone, including the Palestinians? and
2. Israel has already ruled out giving Ukraine the anti-missile (and assumedly anti-drone) defenses [1]; and
3. Many people, yourself included it seems, need to examine these conflicts around the world through the lens of historical materialism.
Take the genocide and conflict in Sudan. The SAF are arguably the ones with the "cheap rockets" here. Should we be giving the RSF anti-drone technology? The RSF are backed by the UAE using US weapons. Why? To loot Sudanese gold.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Territory, access to the Black Sea, resources and to create a land bridge to Crimea that had otherwise become extremely expensive to maintain as a colonial outpost. Like, just look at a map of controlled territory.
But why is it in a stalemate? In part because Russia is a nuclear power but also because the West is unwilling to let Ukraine do the one thing it could do to defend itself properly and that is to attack Russian energy infrastructure. Despite the sanctions, Russia is still allowed to sell oil and gas to places like Hungary, Slovakia, France, Belgium, India and China.
Back to the Middle East, we have Yemen, who was devastated by war and genocide at the hands of another US ally, Saudi Arabia.
The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.
[1]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-rules-out-giving-ukr...
> Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.
I'm not sure that's true, before Iron Dome, Israel would respond to many rockets from Gaza by firing mortars back at where the rocket was launched from, often the roof of an apartment building or similar, causing civilian casualties.
After Iron Dome, a lot of rockets were simply intercepted and ignored, because there was no longer political pressure from Israelis seeing rockets land in their villages and wanting to hit back.
> The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.
Collectivism will not save us. The day after we abolish markets, prices, and capitalism, there will be as many disagreements about resource allocation as there were the day before. Some of those disagreements will spiral into conflict.
'people shouldn't have locks on their doors, they discourage them from improving society'
'moving from wooden shingles allows society to be negligent when it comes to fire/forestry management and makes the world worse'
Don't Get Distracted
https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
This is a good article. I disagree with its implications. I would agree that the average us citizen is much too far removed from the defense industrial complex and that creates these situations where a Google engineer (not necessarily this guy) is perfectly willing to help destroy American society with his advertising tech but balks at automating image tagging for the dod's big data lake because would rather have another 9/11 than be responsible for a false positive in the ME.
How is cell phone tracking going to prevent another 9/11? And looking at the historical track record, the DoD has done a lot of killing and very little 9/11 prevention in the past 24 years.
Do they have a public log of preventions we can look at? Seems fascinating to look at the numbers
The heuristic is that it would be in their interest to trumpet their successes.
Not if revealing success also reveals methodology and “trade” secrets.
hey man what country were the 9/11 hijackers from? What counties did we invade and which did we give f-35’s to?
This is designed to save people.
Sure, until someone says "hey can we stick this on a truck and use it against cars?" "Hey can we stick this on the belly of a plane and use it on a building?" "Hey what happens if we do a flash of this at protestors?"
Which will happen because it always happens
Then when that happens that might be morally objectionable. But probably like any other weapon that already exists, a rocket, missile or gun.
While not everyday a new defense systems is invented that is targeted at statistical weapon that terrorizes civilians.
In Batman Begins, the villian just makes the drinking water toxic. With todays AI and Biotech, one can create a new bacteria or virus and cripple water supply of cities. I am sure a suitable trained AI can get more creative with such low cost attack vectors.
Nah. You can't just engineer some sort of pathogen which will survive water purification treatments, or grow and reproduce in pure water without any nutrients. Real life isn't like the movies.
This just means, the addition of the pathogen has to happen after purification treatments. Viruses can stay dormant and activate only within human body, no need for food.
AI Labs Do "Gain-Of-Function" Research
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yVSihOtF4ZA
It’s not going to do anything useful against cars, let alone buildings. It would blind people, and that would be bad, but it’s a very expensive way to hurt people. I think this one is for what it says it’s for.
"It's a very expensive way to hurt people" has historically never been a real deterrent to motivated nation states to bring costs down
Countries dont generally invest in shitty weapons when they already have good weapons. Bombs & missiles already exist and are much better than lasers if your goal is to destroy a stationary target.
The point is, why would they bother when there’s cheaper and easier ways to do it? A high tech laser system is great for shooting stuff down because it replaces missile systems that cost even more. If you want to cripple people, why would you use it instead of a cheap gun or baton?
“It could be used to hurt people” doesn’t mean much. You at least need “it could be used to hurt people, and it’s better at it in at least one way than what’s already available.”
Does anyone really think the country that spent millions of dollars building explosive-laden pagers that blinded and maimed children, then spent tens of millions of dollars gloating about it in public, gives a solitary thought to the cost-benefit ratio?
They have rules that say it's okay to kill 100 civilians as long as a single "operative" is also killed.
This is a country whose leadership cares only about executing terror. Just like the USA.
Yet the pager attack did help wipe out most of the Hezbollah leadership and shortened the war overall.
Without it, Lebanon might be looking a lot more like Gaza right now.
Could definitely be used in an offensive capacity. I don't think it'll be a red alert 2 style prism cannon, but I do think it can be used to gain air superiority. With a long enough runtime, this thing could definitely take out a plane.
That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.
There is no such thing as a defensive weapon.
You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
> There is no such thing as a defensive weapon
I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.
That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.
> the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield
This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces. Through out history, disease and malnourished caused more death by a large margin than actually violence in combat, and many war campaign stopped suddenly because one or both sides became unable to continue.
> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
I would still say "what about a missile shield?".
If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.
If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.
> As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
Lol no, Iran was utterly humiliated in this conflict, and outed as a paper tiger.
That’s gross. You’re basically saying that hundreds of millions of people need to be held as hostages to ensure good behavior, and that trying to rescue those hostages is morally wrong.
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Settlements in West Bank are Israel’s great crime.
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it's almost as if it is unrelated to the article discussed
From Rafael’s site: https://www.rafael.co.il/system/iron-beam/
100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy.
The re-edited title frames this as an anti-drone system but this was foremost developed as an anti-rocket system.
Hamas and Hezbollah MO since the 1990s was based on bombing Israeli towns with statistical rockets and this system is supposed to reverse the cost equation (cheaper than those cheap rockets)
Today this is also used for drones though
Statistical rockets?
The rockets are very imprecise, but a large number of them, hitting the territory of a town, will deal damage, bodily harm, and death at random, due to statistics. It's Monte Carlo bombing of sorts :(
It's quiet the power requirement. I wonder how long it has to focus on a drone to eliminate it. Like how long is this thing consuming 100kW?
Good question, probably depends a lot on how much energy actually makes it to the target some distance away. And then how much is actually absorbed. Probably depends more on the power density then, rather than total power?
Can't imagine they get a very small spot at multiple km unless they use gigantic lenses or multiple independent laser focused on the same spot
I also wonder the extent to which the effectiveness is reduced by painting the projectile white or wrapping it in aluminum foil. Maybe 100kw is so large that it simply does not matter at that power level.
Maybe it involves multiple converging beams to reduce transmission losses?
yes it does
Even small divergence angles add up if they’re trying to intercept at visual ranges outside of traditional munitions.
That being said, probably ~10kW/m^2 is enough to overheat or disable a UAV
It'll get a lot of time to react at that energy as it's not going to "instantly" fry anything*. That's probably less energy/m2 than consumer heat guns, especially if consider that these drones are likely going to get sprayed in reflective paint. Easy defense for the drone would be just: get into a spin to get roasted evenly -> shut off -> fall for a few hundred meters, cooling using air that rushes by to counteract the laser further -> catch itself once it lost the laser.
That would force these laser systems to point each drone until it either visibly goes up in flames or impacts the ground (which means you also need to be able to track them all the way down), otherwise you can't be sure it won't just snap back to life once you started engaging the next drone.
I don't feel like 10kw/m2 would be anywhere near useful. It's gotta be more than that.
* Stadium floodlights aren't going to instantly grill any bird that flies in front of them either, and they reach that ballpark.
Depends on how tightly they can focus the beam.
http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DamageFromLaser.php
Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?
A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications.
> Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?
Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier.
The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame
> The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago.
Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades.
Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast.
I took 'power delivery' to mean the systems that facilitate driving the energy into the weapon, not the beam itself -- although now under consideration of the technology I think we should probably avoid the use of the phrase 'power delivery', without a projectile being involved that's essentially the entire concept.
Wouldn’t they be able to just use radars?
I guess they are using it in pulsed mode, continuous mode would be a little bit much power
Hm, you think longer than the laser is firing? Could there be windup?
I imagine there's some sort of storage system, like a huge bank of ultra-capacitors, that are constantly kept charged.
The wind up would be if that bank is depleted and they need to recharge. Delivering 100kW for a short period of time is definitely a feat.
If these things are even 50% efficient, then power delivery is really not a problem these days. Most EVs have no problem delivering 200kW for quite a few seconds at a time, limited mostly by components getting warm. Higher-end EVs are generally rated for 300-500kW.
It would by amusing to see one of these lasers mounted on an EV, possibly with a small range extender to recharge it on the go.
Ah, good point, that seems likely.
few seconds. it (lower power version) was deployed during war with hezbollah and intercepted 40 drones (big one, not fpv).
there is footage of intercepts out there. was released about half an year ago
from what I understand, problem with drones is first of all detection
Well there's drones, then there's prop driven cheap cruise missiles.
I think we're talking the second.
let me up the ante, drones intermixed with kamikaze pigeons.
They say it's first operational system in it's class, but it seems very similar to the Australian Apollo system, with Apollo being able to go up to 150kW
https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/apollo/
It's also similar to the British DragonFire and US HELIOS
I think the major difference here is that the Iron Beam is operational, as in finished trials, delivered to an armed force and actually was in active use in the previous war for more than a year
apollo range according to site is 3km. iron beam 10km
A lot of comments decrying new weapons tech, but I think drone defense tech is particularly critical right now and going to save a lot of lives. Put another way, I don't think we would be against new clothing that made bullets less effective, even if it remains terrible that such clothing is needed.
Especially as AI becomes better and cheaper and suicide drones become more nimble and autonomous. If you have seen any of the horrifying footage out of Ukraine you will understand how badly we need more effective and cheaper drone defense as soon as possible.
Maybe Hi Tech weapon is impressive but that could lure us into false sense of security. Israel learnt the lesson the hard way in the October 7 attack.
Yeah, I see this as ultimately a wash.
In Russia/Ukraine, drones have proven to be a very real threat to deal with (arguably also in Iraq).
What this means is wealthy nations will snatch up or recreate this and deploy it. That will stop smaller resistance forces from either defending or attacking. Depending on the nation in question this could both good or bad. Just like drones, guns, or tanks.
Effectively, this puts the status quo back to where it was before mass drone deployments.
Which, IMO, is better than having swarms of cheap bombs flying around.
Taken to the extreme, I also prefer the current status quo vs. everyone having a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and would welcome a countermeasure if cheap ICBMs became a thing.
That laser station will not last in Ukraine an hour and will be destroyed either by missiles or drone swarm.
What Ukraine have found a net launcher is effective and cheap solution against drones and may allow more use of tanks and heavy armor vehicles again in 2026. Then shotguns with a special ammunition is effective. Then against fiber drones a fence with moving wire works surprisingly good to cut the fiber.
you should tell it to ukrainians. because they are busy developing their own laser system https://thedefensepost.com/2025/04/15/ukraine-unveils-laser-...
Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.
Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.
Each Iron Dome interception cost many times more than the cost of the rockets. This will make it cheaper for other poorer nations to afford and operate.
Are you factoring in the cost in human lives?
Lets send some over to Ukraine.
And Putin gives a nuke to Iranians then it's game over since Iranians don't care about MAD doctrine. Anyways the risk of the tech falling into Russia's hands is too high. Ukrainians have the smarts to develop it themselves now that it is proven as a viable tech.
Why would Russia give nukes to Iran? The Russians themselves would be harmed by an open nuclear exchange.
No, Putin's threats to Biden and Trump were more along the lines of, 'See the Houthis shooting shipping, imagine that capability spread to rebels and terrorists worldwide'
iran has a religious rule against making nukes, to the same extent that it has religious decrees calling for an end to israel.
iranians arent gonna nuke anyone without first toppling their religious government
Similarly the insane far-right government of Israel seem hell-bent on making "Greater Israel" a reality. Iran aren't going to nuke anyone. They have no nukes nor a religious call to bring the end of times.
Christian Zionism, on the other hand, does seem to want this to happen.
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> seeing kids shot at intentionally from drones
Anytime somebody makes a claim about a drone operating a firearm, you should be extremely skeptical. There's a reason everyone uses explosive drones, not "drone with a machine gun". Small flying machines trying to fire off rounds doesn't work out.
> submarine launched drones throwing incendiary munitions at a flotilla
Per the Greek coastguard, someone left a lit joint by a fuel canister. Maybe the Greeks are in on the deep conspiracy.. or potheads are just forgetful.
whenever you see someone making the claim that a gun won't work on an aircraft, I urge you to look at our entire aviation history of vehicles with guns strapped on. Planes, helicopters, jet-packs, 'manned platforms', whatever your fancy.
we're not talking about glocks ductaped to DJIs here, and all of these mysterious engineer efforts that 'just doesn't work out' are hurdles that man has faced and conquered before.
What I would suggest is that if anyone trying to give you a technical reason that ends in "It just doesn't work" they are probably unprepared to accurately brief you on the topic.
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So will we get drones coated in mirrors and temperature sensors that automatically move them away from these weapons quickly? Or is the laser just too powerful?
Its really hard to make near perfect mirrors that stay perfect in rough conditions. Mirrors arent a reasonable defense to laser weapons outside of scifi.
what about mirrors with tiny little windshield wipers?
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FYI that source is associated with Hamas presence in Europe, acts as a Hamas propaganda piece and previously invented news such as Palestinian organ theft by Israel.
here is the organization founders Ramy Abdu and Mazen Kahel posing with Ismaeil Haniye the leader of Hamas https://www.facebook.com/DrArafatShoukri/photos/t.1000537951...
This isn't real. Any article that starts "the Israeli occupation army" is easy to recognize as fake.
"Israeli Occupation Army" is accurate. And the drone story is real, that which I posted in the first place.
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/...
I can post many more credible sources to this and anyone reading this should YouTube it and DYOR if in doubt.
The article you link to only quotes the first article you linked to as a source.
> As part of its ongoing genocide, which started on 7 October 2023
Well that was quickly debunked as a viable source. Israeli's didn't retaliate for Oct 7th until a few days later.
> When some of the residents went out to investigate and tried to help, they were shot at by Israeli quadcopter drones.
And another easy debunk - Israel uses explosive drones. Mounting a firearm to "shoot at" things from a drone is basically a fools errand.
Provide video. That should be trivial.
"Witnesses say Israel is using sniper drones in Gaza and they're shooting civilians"
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/nx-s1-5195171/witnesses-say-i...
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> The genocide started decades ago. The retaliation for Oct 7th began soon after.
In that case, the article you linked to is even more off.
(I’m not well-informed enough to comment on the rest, so I won’t.)
> Countless surgeons from The West have testified that Israeli drones have shot the hell out of people of all ages
How do the surgeons know it was a drone?
There was a genocide committed against Bangladeshi Hindus by Pakistan and another being done right now by Bangladeshi govt in power now. A genocide is being committed in Nigeria by boko haram. Another in Sudanese war committed and funded by uae and other Arab nations.
But let me guess, the only genocide worth committing your verbiage is the one where a certain people belonging to the favorite religion is facing issues after voting in a terrorist organization by the name of Hamas which went in and attacked a community which was persecuted and butchered for close to 2500 years. All provoked by a religious ideology and Arab theocratic pan nationalism.
Also in Myanmar! Or any of several states and the Rohingya.
I love the whataboutery Hasbara angle. It never gets old.
My genocide is better than your genocide. What a time to be alive.
It is exceedingly well documented that Israeli drones are shooting and killing children / civilians regularly:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/02/middleeast/children-killed-is...
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/10/1166024
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/6/israeli-drone-chase...
I say drone, but you and I know it is the Israeli solders operators behind the drones that are doing these war crimes.
There are recordings of Israeli drones engaging in psychological warfare against the civilian population by playing those horrible sounds
https://x.com/AJIunit/status/1863553707897680291
I watched your video, the only thing on it is a drone warning people away from a dangerous area.
It’s psychological genocide. Just like everything is a bubble everything is a genocide now.
Genetic fallacy. Like all propaganda it's suspect, but not all propaganda is fake.
It's usually "Israeli Occupation Forces" as opposed to "Israeli Occupation Army". Both variants are objectively true.
holy shit thats fucked
That's really horrible
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Jeez, that's on brand for Israel, but holy fuck
The thing that worries me isn't the drone/anti-drone escalation. It is the fact that these weapons aren't actually limited to anti-drone use. Recently we have seen clear examples of countries, including Israel, that will use automatic id technology to mass tag a population. If you then have tools that can automatically track and mass kill, which this type of weapon represents, then we have reached a type of warfare that is new in the world and deeply scary. It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where person x is killed since they are marked as a 'bag guy' and as part of being marked every person they were next to for the last few days was also marked as likely enough to be bad guys to kill as well. All that has to be done is push a button. It is a scary, and unfortunately all to possible, future if not now.
It seems incredibly hard to imagine what else you would do with a ground based laser other than shoot at incoming projectiles. What exactly are you expecting the Israelis to do? Change the laws of physics?
I think we’re already there. Sounds like Obama administration hit jobs.
Paid for by American taxpayers who don’t have universal healthcare.
https://quincyinst.org/research/u-s-military-aid-and-arms-tr...
Someone should give people in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon the same tech.
Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.
Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.
This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.
That's not how it looks like though with the way Israel acts like the judge, jury and executioner of the region. You get the feeling that only Israeli lives count in the Middle East.
you could alternatively pount towards israeli expansionism, which is a bit more likely than religious extremism. demolish peoples homes and kidnap their families, and theyre gonna respond in whatever way they can.
i expect the iron beam is going to make a lot more deaths, just of people israelis dont consider human. wooo
> whatever way they can.
Except agreeing to a peace deal and state recognition... with Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert. And Except letting their citizens vote for their own gov in Gaza for over 17 years...
I guess responding to Israeli expansionism has some great strategy I still don't grasp.
>This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more (israeli) lives.
There fixed it for you. last I checked, Israelis are using drones to summarily execute Palestinian kids with impunity. the idea of these people having even more weapons at their disposal paid for by MY tax dollars leaves me a bit disgusted.
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The moral argument for a modern, rights-based society is cleanly on Israel’s side. I’m glad they’ve developed this technology, so they can continue defending themselves at a lower cost to their citizens. The engineers involved have done a very good thing.
Your snide tone can’t obscure that the moral issue is straightforward, if you’re aiming at a world where people can be free to live, grow, and flourish. If you want a society that enables builders and engineers to express themselves by creating new things, i.e., on in which people are permitted to think, then you are aligned with Israel’s basic cause.
The central difference is that Israel’s government is essentially secular and free, whereas its enemies — especially Hamas — are essentially theocratic and totalitarian. In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
Last, to clarify the kernel of truth that your point relies on through distortion: while it is true that Israel contains a set of backwards theocratic tribesmen, their importance is marginal. Tel Aviv’s builders and entrepreneurs are the dominant cultural force in Israel, and they are proponents and practitioners of secular modernity.
Do not falsely conflate a marginal group with Hamas’ explicit cause, which is to destroy Israel’s free society and replace it with religious tyranny.
Unless, perhaps, that is what you really regard as moral?
The "backward tribesmen" are currently providing the Minister of Finance/special Minister for the West Bank (Smotrich), Minister of Police (Ben Gvir), Minister of Diaspora Affairs that happens to also manage access to aid orgs in gaza (Amichai Chikli), Minister for Cultural Heritage (Amihai Eliyahu), Minister of Settlements and National Missions (Orit "Time of Miracles" Stook) and probably others. So much for "marginal influence".
> In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
The Arab Israelis have those same rights on paper but face discrimination in practice. But that's beside the point and you know it. What about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are under Israeli rule but have no rights and no representation in Israel at all? But I guess all seven million of them are "Hamas" and therefore don't count as humans?
Also note that while the secular liberals from Tel Aviv and the deeply religious settlers from the West Bank disagree on lots of things, they have no fundamental disagreement on the occupation.
All lies?
Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets before, during and after October 7 massacre is documented[1] by Wikipedia (that does have documented anti-israel bias[2])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
Sorry but doesn't fly. Also Islam has nothing to do with Palestinian resistance. This theme of "Palestinians and Muslims are all Jihadists and all seek to kill Jews" is also getting really really old.
2026 will bring more enlightenment to the masses. Also, Israel loves messing with wikipedia as it has done for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-edit...
> > Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets
> Islam has nothing to do with Palestinian resistance
"Islamic Jihad" is referring to the group "Palestinian Islamic Jihad" which is very real and has claimed responsibility for multiple suicide bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Islamic_Jihad#List...
from haaretz article about Hamas plans:
Indeed, Abu Zaydeh is well aware that for the past two years the Hamas leadership had been talking about implementing "the last promise" (alwaed al'akhir) – a divine promise regarding the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam. Sinwar and his circle ascribed an extreme and literal meaning to the notion of "the promise, " a belief that pervaded all their messages: in speeches, sermons, lectures in schools and universities. The cardinal theme was the implementation of the last promise, which included the forced conversion of all heretics to Islam, or their killing.
https://judaic.arizona.edu/sites/judaic.arizona.edu/files/20...
Iron Dome, Iron Beam… what next, Iron Curtain?
Iron Sheik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain_(countermeasure)
There isnt much information here. What is the total power per m^2 and what is the frequency (range). As we know the sun alone is 1kW/m^2 over quite a range.
Just in time for Iran 2.0
In the war in June, Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles. These were the only lethal munition they used, killing a couple dozen civilians.
The Iron Beam is not relevant against ballistic missiles.
> Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles
Iran also fired “over 1,000 suicide drones” [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war
Shaheds are heavy and big and I doubt that the new laser system can damage them. An interceptor drone is much cheaper and effective against them. This is more like defense against smaller FPV drones targeting bigger anti-missile systems.
Flying disco balls when?
They certainly have those for radars! Although the reason for using them is different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
I guess they could use railguns too.
I wish they would make a demonstration
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Good God...
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Please read about the history of the region. This seems to be a good unbiased source, which is hard tobfind these days: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/09/why-israel-pal...
In particular, put attention to this:
""" What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return. Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded. """
Let's not pretend that the Jews just appeared there. 800k Jews were kicked out of middle eastern countries. If we rewind the clock shouldn't those Jews also get their Middle East land back? Or did they not terrorize enough people and hijack enough airplanes to qualify?
Source: I was born in Baghdad. Father and other relatives were tortured and murdered there.
At this point, aren't we all descendants of Abraham with high probability? Maybe we should just give the land we identify as Israel to the world.
“How did the occupied Palestinian territories become occupied? In 1967 Israel launched what it said was a pre-emptive defensive war against Jordan, Egypt and Syria, as they appeared to be preparing to invaded.”
The problem with these summaries is everyone can always somewhat legitimately claim a prior offence. The 1967 offense resulted from the shitshow that was the 1948 war [1], which itself resulted from a history of French, British and Ottoman control.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestine_war
It sounds like they both suck.
> It sounds like they both suck
They both suck and they both have legitimate grievances.
They’re also both proxies on like four major axes (Iran vs Saudi Arabia, America vs Russia, America vs China and whatever Turkey is up to) and more minor axes than I’ve seen anyone even bother keeping track of.
It’s a deep and deeply fucked conflict that doesn’t lend well to armchair border drawing from an ocean away from first principles.
Hamas isn't Palestine.
According to Wikipedia, "Gaza" is the largest city in Palestine, and "Hamas" is the government of Palestine.
Putin isn't Russia either. By that logic Russia didn't attack Ukraine?
If one wants to avoid nationalism, then yes.
As the russians were not asked about it.
The russian government decided to do so and to supress any oposition.
(But their army is largely made up of volunteers)
> If one wants to avoid nationalism, then yes
How do you do that when dealing with nationalist governments waging nationalist wars? The most generous framing of either side’s ask in the Gaza war is for nationhood.
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You are thinking of Ashkenazi. Vast majority of Israeli jews are Mizrahi. This is in addition to 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and are doing just fine. Your hatred comes from ignorance.
Are they afforded the same rights as jewish israelis? What about Gazans and West Bank palestenians whose families came from elsewhere in the earlier Palestine and were driven out to these areas, now living in terrible conditions. For simplicity lets pretend it is Sep 2023 for this argument, as the conditions were terrible then, due to Israels policies.
> What about Gazans and West Bank palestenians whose families came from elsewhere
I’m sympathetic to the argument that there should be reparations—from Israel but also France, Britain and Turkey—for victims of the Nakbah.
But let’s be clear on a right of return: this logic applies to almost every human in Europe or Asia when it comes to the Middle East if we go back far enough. We’re talking about the closest coast to the cradle of civilisation.
You don't have to go 'back' to find Palestinians alive, today, who can point at their settler-occupied homes on a map, and tell you the day they were kicked out. I think that's a reasonable cutoff point for right of return.
> I think that's a reasonable cutoff point for right of return
I do too. The contours of how that works with their descendants, and when we draw the line for the living, has been debated in good faith (and bad, increasingly recently) for decades [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
>Are they afforded the same rights as jewish israelis?
Yes [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
Thanks for the link. There are counterpoints in the linked article, including:
> Yousef Munayyer, an Israeli citizen and the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, wrote that Palestinians only have varying degrees of limited rights in Israel. He states that although Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel's population, less than 7% of the budget is allocated to Palestinian citizens. He describes the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel as second-class citizens while four million more are not citizens at all. He states that a Jew from any country can move to Israel but a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. Munayyer also described the difficulties he and his wife faced when visiting the country.[301]
Hope over time this changes for the better. If they can start letting people expelled years ago to return too. Maybe not to their old address but work something out.
If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states, Middle East would be a much quieter place
> If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states
Easier said than done. The chaos the PLO caused in Jordan and Lebanon [1] raises legitimate security concerns for any country asked to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...
Why not US take a few million refugees, and build homes for them. Just borrow $100B from the Federal Reserve and do it.
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I look like an average white male.
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Can you give me some pointers on how to develop? I am currently farming years of professional experience, while simultaneously looking out for better job opportunities, and getting high school credits that are needed to attend a university. I'm not 100% sure if I actually need to go to university, but it's at least something if I can't find anything else.
No
No? ChatGPT says yes.
Thats why you should read and not rely on AI for your opinion.
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> To summarize, any technique or technology designed to subjugate colonial interests will ultimately be used the citizenry in the imperial core
To emphasize, however, per your own source, this is a critical analytical tool and not a testable hypothesis nor even prediction about the world.
Zyklon-B wasn’t much of a secret - it was used all over the place as a pesticide. Most soldiers would have been about as familiar with it as we would with Raid spray or bug traps.
Israeli police had to teach American one how to do violence? Come on
Just recently, US has worked with Saudis and Ukrainians and others to supply heavy and novel weaponry to be deployed in eg Yemen, coordinating airstrikes, giving intel etc. to devastating effect and has done even more direct involvement in brutal wars, whether proxy wars of whatever. The PATRIOT act and subsequent militarization of police at home supports the GP’s statement about a boomerang. I don’t think GP meant to say it was only due to Israel or single out Israel as a source US of military cooperation and MIC job creation.
But yes, some people will only care if they can find Jewish connections, eg Zelensky being partly Jewish or MBS or Al Sisi allegedly being partly Jewish due to their stances in opposition to Islamic extremism.
There are people who blame influential Jews for everything, and they’ll go so far as to say that Ataturk was Jewish, in order to care about the Armenian genocide. But they won’t care about, say, the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks that took place 20 years earlier because they can’t find any evidence that Sultan Hamid was Jewish.
They blame Israel for Iraqi expulsion of Jews, until they find out the Farhud was 10 years before Israel was formed as a state.
They even finally started to care about what’s happening in Sudan when they realized they can sort of draw a tenuous line between that and Israel through UAE.
As long as influential Jews are involved they will deeply care about a conflict, eg 9/11 dancing Israelis or clean break memo of PNAC. They will ignore that presidents like W Bush called the Iraq invasion a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers”. They also do not like to go back further to, say, bombing of Laos and all throughout southeast Asia because, again, it is hard to blame any Jews for that.
It’s almost as if they have an algorithm: 1) find Jews involved with thing they consider bad, 2) care about that issue but ONLY to the extent they can point out Jewish connections 3) cherrypick and compile lists of Jewish involvement to make it seem that all bad things done by states, corporations, or humanity, is due to Jews. Candace Owens for example recetly said that Stalin was Jewish and that the US slave trade was “not the white man but mostly Jewish”, and that Black lives now really matter to her after years of “White lives Matter” with Ye, now that she found out Jews were behind it.
> There are people who blame influential Jews for everything
To what extent are they in the same bucket as those who reflexively blame the CIA or Russia or immigrants or white people for everything?
There is a similar mentality among humans that many fall into, the “victimhood mentality”. And many Jews themselves also have the same thing. In a conflict, often both sides use the same tactics without realizing it.
The way BLM blamed “systemic racism”, various Jews might see “antisemitism“ behind every critique of Israel. It is not just individual but group psychology. The worst scorn is reserved for heaping on defectors, who Black BLM activists would call “uncle Toms” and Jewish Zionist activists would call “self-hating Jews”.
So what’s interesting is the common tactics. I don’t mean to imply it is one sided. Both sides of an ideological conflict (eg abortion, socialism, etc) want to take over a powerful state apparatus to use for their agenda. Both sides want to cynically and hyporcitically exploit millions of people to further their agenda.
For example, antizionists (and more generally revolutionaries / “axis of resistance” supporters who may be either leftist, Islamist or whatever) want to perpetuate statelessness of millions of people in Lebanon, Syria and all over the Middle East, so they can be labeled “Palestinian” because one of their grandfathers was in Palestine circa 1947, so that they can “keep their identity” by essentially forcing on them, and maintain large numbers for “the cause” of removing Jewish majority in any area of the Levant. They oppose giving them citizenship on a jus soli basis even if they and their parents were born in another country. This happens even with Palestinians who themselves got citizenship long ago in Chile, USA, UK, Sweden, Canada etc. It is a similar mentality to “fight to the last Ukrainian” by Ukrainians abroad who left Ukraine an settled in other countries.
Meanwhile, Zionists have a form of that, where many of them constantly play up and almost seem to welcome how badly Jews would be treated among other countries, and downplay the role of their right wing government waging wars in a far more reckless fashion than they could have. Instead of placing the blame on that government for making Jews less safe, they say “you see? This is why you should move to Israel. You’ll be safe here among Jews.”
In short both movements cynically use their own people, almost welcoming hardship for them until they are “forced” to embrace their identity and move back to where they same place both groups are competing to demographically dominate ..
This isn’t unique to Israel. Armenians vs Azerbaijanis for example seek foreign alliances for protection. Serbs vs Albanians. Tamils vs Sri Lanka. Rohingya vs Burma. Uyghurs vs China. And so on. There are horrific proxy wars happening in Sudan now, and Congo throughout. But people don’t tend to focus on any of that because Ashkenazi Jews are famous and successful in the West. And because Abrahamic religions are based on Judaism, so Israel is quite foundational to all their religions. Not so much Sri Lanka…
You can see in Eastern cultures which are not Abrahamic, not Muslim or Christian, the attitude is the same as to any other sectarian conflict. That is proportional. But it is extremely disproportionate in the West! For the reasons I listed above.
did you see rapid rise in violence against russians after russia started war in ukraine ? did you see rapid rise in violence against azeris after ethnic cleansing that they executed recently ? against chinese for their treatment of Uyghurs. etc.. etc.. etc.. ? I guess no.
but when there is a violence against random jews across the west, somehow israeli government is the guilty one and not antisemitism.
Yep, I did. My mom taught at a school where during the war Ukrainians would gang up on Russians, both being immigrants. A lot of Russian things were “canceled” to the point that Babylon Bee ran this story:
https://babylonbee.com/news/nyc-restaurants-now-require-proo...
I have seen attacks on Asians ramp up during the start of COVID.
I say the same to both Jews and Black people (being Jewish myself): we live in the least racist, least antisemitic time in hundreds of years, maybe in history. Your grandfather had it much worse. These complaints are first-world problems. Yelling “racist” or “antisemite” on a hair trigger only serves to cheapen the actual words, same as yelling “genocide” while ignoring every other more horrific war, even 200 km to Israel’s north in Syria.
The “magarshak ratio” is the amount of outrage about something vs how many people are actually suffering. To be sure, the disproportionate navel gazing at Israel is due to Jews and Judaism. But similarly, the disproportionate navel gazing at attacks on Jews in USA or other countries, where they have been mostly protected and highly respected by eg the entire Evangelical community, is seen by some as “first world problems” while bombs are raining down in Gaza for example.
Both Azeris and Armenians hae engaged in ethnic cleansing back and forth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Azerbaijanis_fr...
Som of the biggest hyporites criticizing Jews for “dual citizenship” and “ethnic cleansing and building an ethnostate” are Armenians like Dan Bilzerian who flew to Armenia with his family to accept citizenship and serve in the Armenian armed forces. People probably just don’t see the symmetries. Or maybe they’re just hypocrite grifters.
AND THERE IS THE INTITUTIONAL LEVEL.
On that level, of governments and corporations, Israel does enjoy an immense amount of support and immunity. Name me another country where every presidential candidate has to go affirm their support at an AIPAC for, say, Italy. As a Jewish person myself, I am uneasy at Jewish participation in PNAC or the military industrial complex and neocon war machine in general. I don’t want Jews to be blamed later for the wars. Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are of course quite supportive of Israel, but I am not thrilled at the endorsements. And so on.
I am a libertarian, I try to criticize Russia, USA, Iran other countries, and yes Israel, proportionally to what they actually have done. The wars are fought by plebs who die, the politicians stay in their ivory towers and bunkers and give speeches even as they get international arrest warrants for them.
But even just from the point of view of an Israeli citizen, or Ukrainian citizen, or Iraqi citizen etc. these politicians are horrible. Netanyahu was actively against the 2 state solution, Rabin’s wife blames him for inciting the PM’s assassination, and he literally released 1000 terrorists for 1 guy, Gilad Shalit who fell asleep and allowed himself to be captured. It included the masterminds of October 7th. Who does that? He personally allowed Qatari money to go to Hamas, ignored Egyptians’ warnings, ignored warnings from Shin Bet, oversaw a drawdown of security, and his army for hours ignored even the female spotters whose only job it was to report the threats, and who were killed while reporting it for hours! Such extreme negligence goes completely unpunished, nevermind the corruption and investigations that have been put off because of the war. You don’t have to be a leftist or a libertarian to appreciate the level of corruption and immunity from consequences and misaligned incentives of these politicians.
And the excuses the government intitutions give for the negligence or the wars are so laughable that it is hard to think they aren’t deliberately trolling us and rubbin their unaccountability in our face:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/surveillance-soldiers-say-oct-...
The current war vs Venzuela is a great example. They aren’t even trying to explain it anymore. (“hasbara” means explanation in Hebrew, but the same is done by other governments to their people - Russian govt when asked what if Russians wont support the invasion said “we will explain it to them”). The US administration now claims Venezuela is the biggest source of drugs (false) and even weren’t afraid to label drugs WMDs, not even concerned that WMDs were famously not actually found in Iraq during our invasion. They don’t even care about your consent - they know they’ll have your support later! Trump openly said we want to take their oil and land. He says the quiet parts out loud.
You’re seeing it happen in real-time. Again. But when it’s us, whether Iraq or Venezuela, most people heavily tone down their criticism that you would have had for the 73% of Russian public supporting THEIR invasion. But it’s all very similar. The symmetries are striking. 73% of US Americans also supported the invasion of Iraq.
so you have a couple example of anecdotal evidence from past . no example similar violence as it been ongoing against jews . attacks on places of worships, schools, kindergartens, holidays celebrations or just any assembly. attacks that end up with dead people. antisemitism went up on oct 7th even before cult of genocide witnesses was established
what you are doing in many paragraphs (laden with historical errors or misinformation) is whitewashing antisemitism and shifting blame back to jews.
Imagine you’re Black and we’re having this same conversation about systemic racism as if everyone is inherently a racist in society. Anyone who disagrees is called an uncle tom, is that reasonable?
Are there people who don’t like Jews? Of course. The most despicable were the people who came out to protest Israel in the days after October 7th, after the largest attack on Jews in Israel probably ever. And among them were rabid antisemites chanting vile things. Yes.
But look around. Are there a lot of mass shootings in USA? Yes. Many of them are not against Jews. You have to look at statistics. And this is miniscule compared to the violence in the world, eg in Mexico with the drug cartels. We have law and order. We also have a lot of homeless druggies and crazies.
But try to see others facing an entire systematic apparatus. The USA has spent decades trying to get people to hate Russians, for example, at an institutional level. First, it was that they’re commies. Then it was that they love Putin. Also Muslims by and large got similar treatment as Communists during McCarthyism and Cointelpro, after the CIA themselves funded the mujahideen and empowered jihadists (mujahideen is Arabic for jihadists, literally).
Once again, they brazenly admit they were responsible, but they are proud of it anyway. Both Democrats and Republicans:
https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ
https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2022/03/01/ukra...
It always goes through the same stages with these governments. First they gaslight you. Then they engage in “special military operations”. Then they draft you. Then they invade. Then they occupy, lose a lot of money and get people killed. Then the next generation of politicians says it was “a big mistake”. Russians can’t explain to their kids why they fought in Afghanistan in the 80s, and Americans can’t explain why they fought in Iraq.
Listen to what this lady from a military family has to say for instance — it is just the latest war du jour: https://x.com/silentlysirs/status/2006133094177218711
So yeah I blame the politicians. And even if you were an Israeli, even if you were a radical right wing Kahanist, you could admit that Netanyahu and his government were negligent and call for an investigation of his handling of Hamas and the threats it posed, leading up of Octobed 7th. Agree?
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Yes, that’s exactly the kind of language the Nazis used. You merely further prove my point.
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Downvoted for not saying Apartheid in your buzzword bingo.
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Response to “How much U.S. taxpayer money was spent on this?” - now flagged:
$1.2B
Source: https://defensescoop.com/2024/04/25/iron-beam-procurement-us...
“The Israeli system is a slightly different approach technologically. So actually, it’s a nice complement because we’re kind of going down one path, they’ve gone down a slightly different one. So I think yes, there’s potential if theirs works well, it could be something we could think about leveraging for our needs in that space. So that’s really a benefit of that funding is … we can explore multiple paths here and see what works,” Bush said.
None. The US money Israel receives is purely used for buying from US defense contractors. This is developed by purely Israeli defense contractors. The US leverages significant discounts on these Israeli developed systems compared to other countries.
Also, the amount Israel gets is in the same ballpark as Egypt and Lebanon, but interesting that that is never mentioned?
>none
>more than 1 billion
Pick one
https://defensescoop.com/2024/04/25/iron-beam-procurement-us...
So it goes from Us Citizens to the wealthy who sell the weapon systems. That’s what none is. Cool.
This article is about an Israeli developed system, so no US tax payer money was used. It is an off topic discussion to discuss your hatred for Israel. Maybe submit a different article about that, but it is off topic for this one.
Response to “How much U.S. taxpayer money was spent on this?” - now flagged: $1.2B Source: https://defensescoop.com/2024/04/25/iron-beam-procurement-us...
Tired of this kind of talk. Everybody is looking for a scapegoat. For some it's China, for others the billionaires, yet others suspect it's all the Jews' fault, or the European Union, or wokeness, or Donald Trump or or or.. sigh, it's not new, it's just boring, and it rarely leads to any good things.
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I don't see how that's relevant, considering we could already provide healthcare to all Americans simply by disbanding the corrupt Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies and recouping the administration fees. And then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI. Hell, we'd probably save money in both cases.
> we could already provide healthcare to all Americans simply by disbanding the corrupt Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies and recouping the administration fees
Source for this estimate?
> then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI
This is nonsense. Federal welfare spending is about $20k per capita [1]. You could get that to $30k by co-opting all state spending [2]. (And only in Alaska, Oregon and Hawaii.)
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-money-does-the-govern...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
'the jews are stealing our healthcare' seems to be a huge bot posting theme on Reddit the last week or so. Might be working and bleeding over into the zeitgeist.
It is so sad the Humanity needs to develop weapons...
On the last day of the year, I am taking a few minutes to linger on this. At face value, most would agree with this, myself included. But I think we can dive one layer deeper. There are different schools of thoughts whether mankind is inherently good or evil. Over the years, I have become pretty firm believer that every person has the innate capacity for both good and evil, and the outcome is determined by both character and circumstances. Solzhenitsyn famously wrote (quote by Gemini):
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."
If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.
I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.
(edit: grammar, slight rewording)
We are also lucky a miscalculation didn’t occur during the Cold War resulting in millions of nuked folks. But, not sure what the alternative is. Best idea I’ve heard is for everyone to stop reproducing.
More to the point, "technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral, it just exists". Ultimately all tools can be used for good or bad purposes and what matters is the people who wield them.
This is separate from the argument over whether MAD is philosophically good. MAD is not an argument about technology. "Peace through strength" does indeed require the occasional display of strength, to maintain deterrence. Good and bad (morals) are not the right frame to understand deterrence, rather emotions: fear, confidence, and security.
Solzhenitsyn can be read as either a humanist or an ethicist: either the bridgehead of good is sufficient to redeem everyone from war and morality demands pacifism, or all military doctrines must be submitted to independent review to check that we do not give the "unuprooted small corner of evil" oxygen. Crucially, these are both judgements about ourselves and not about the foes who seek to destroy us, who indeed consider themselves to have "the best of all hearts". In this sense, Solzhenitsyn contributes to the cycle of violence: if both sides are ethicists, and their ethical councils have different conclusions, the result is not just fundamentalism but a fundamentalism justified by ethical review.
Fear, anger, disgust are the ultimate drivers of conflict. Can we conquer them? Of course not, they are the base emotions, part of being human. But can there be a better way of handling them in geopolitics? Yes - if leaders are focused on helping not just themselves feel safe, but their enemies as well. This is the higher level beyond MAD - not mutual fear, but mutual security. This is why USAID was great foreign policy and cheap for its benefits. This is why weapons are sold to allies despite the fact that their interests may not be fully aligned with ours. Weapons are fundamental to security, which at the end of the day is a feeling and not a guarantee against attack or repercussions from an attack, and these feelings of security are what reduces the incidence and frequence of war.
I totally understand the need for weapons. It is just makes me sad.
And I think Solzhenitsyn is wrong. There are psychopathic people that have no good in their hearts. Sure, with the right upbringing that could be kind and good but at a given moment they are what they are... psychopaths.
100 kW. That's a lot. I wonder how many kW will be needed to save them from God's wrath
Someone will find a reflexive material to put on the drone. Then you have a multi kw laser that hits randomly anywhere when intercepting drones.
Also I wonder why it is not common to run interception drones that automatically fly towards incoming drones and captures them mid air. Like a wasp is capturing other insects.
So pretty much like the iron dome but not with single use rockets but reusable drones instead.
Probably a dumb question, but could a ploy drone fitted with a directional mirror redirect the beam back to the source to damage or destroy it?
Mirrors are not effective enough. Shielding drones from energy weapons seems like a similar problem to entering Earth’s atmosphere, you want to shield it in a way that will blast away safely and ideally diffuse the laser, so the energy is spread over a larger space. I suspect larger lasers will likely aways win, since there is only so much shielding can do. At which point we could end up with transformers like drones that are built to be broken apart mid flight and yet still deliver damage. I feel like defending drones could become possible with energy weapons but only under ideal weather conditions.
Likely cheaper to just coat the real drones in an aerogel or similar light weight, high thermal resistance material. It's an arms race still, but one with a reasonable amount of asymmetry in favour of an attacker.
I'm not certain, but I think the returned beam would likely be significantly out-of-focus.
No, but an AI drone like the one Turkey has can probably detect the source of the beam by hiding behind some sacrificial/decoy drones and watching them blow up then shooting a missile at the laser source. It's not like the laser is coming out of thin air.
Shooting down missiles is what this is for.
actually it's for shooting anything that is close enough and can be intercepted. during the war with hezbollah (drones were issue due to topography) lower power version of iron beam was deployed on trial bases and scored around 40 intercepts
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The presupposition here being that Israel has a right to defense and that the poor people being occupied, living under apartheid, being slaughtered and displaced should possess no such right to resist, has been a hallmark of zionist propaganda for ages now.
It's not aging particularly well.
This is an astonishing revisionist take on the reality on the ground.
Israel unilaterally disengaged from GAZA in 2005 and pulling out generations of Jewish settlement in the process. By 2006 GAZA has zero Jews, and 2007 Gazans elected HAMAS who fired rockets at Israel because they want to free Palestine from the river to the sea, AKA eliminate Israel. October 7 attack is a culmination of that, and between then and now, HAMAS didn't forget to build their military base in the mix of civilians and using civilian targets as shield. So that they can blame Israel for every single Palestinians death, including the death cause by their own firing.
The situation in west Bank is qualitatively the same.
No, protecting your people from terrorist is not apartheid, and Israel has no interest to build iron beam and/or build wall--which the west misinterprete as apartheid-- if the neighbors had no intention to eliminate them.
The issue with that type of reasoning is that if you swapped the parties the sentences would be the same. "Palestine removed generations of settlements from Israel, but was forced to attack because Israel wanted to wipe them out." You need to think in terms of principles that can apply equally to everybody.
There are 2 million muslims living in Israel.
There are zero Jews in Gaza -- not even just living ones, they had to remove the long-buried dead ones too.
Though your comment is phrased ambiguously ( not sure you are referring to the Arabs in Israel, or Arabs in Gaza/west bank), I try to respond to both.
For Arabs in Israel, it is important to note that inside Israel parliament knesset, there are Arab representatives, some who even call for the soft dissolution of the state itself ( rights of return). They are the descendants of the Arabs who didn't leave Israel during the 1947 Israel independent war. So no, Arabs there are by and large not removed at all by anyone. By contrast, there are zero Jews in Gaza or West Bank. Jews enter those places at their own peril, they could be lynched.
The Arabs in GAZA/West Bank are not under Israeli jurisdiction, and by their actions and words they are still declaring war on Israel, despite that they launched the war first every single time, and lost every single time, and play victim every single time. If Israel wanted to wipe them out then there is no need for Israel to accept the 1947 partition, the David peace accords (2000) or the Oslo accords (2008), which Palestinians all rejected wholesale. If Israel really wanted to wipe them out, the GAZA war following October 7 terrorist attack would be over by the next day as Israel dominated absolutely militarily.
Really, the conflict is really that simple. One side, Israel, wants peace, and the other, the Palestinians, who don't ( as captured by their slogan, "from the river to the sea Palestinians will be free", do look up on where is the river and where is the sea if you have doubt).
It is made complicated only because a lot of people try to obscure the reality. But that's the topic for another day.
Its pretty well established in international law and the UN charter that all countries have a right to self-defense. Given this is a purely defensive weapon, i can't imagine what reasonable objection anyone could have to it.
Israel is an occupier. This isn't symmetrical warfare.
Israel won't let food into Gaza in reasonable quantities. It has restricted basic things like tent poles and just about any commodity which humans anywhere else in the world would have the luxury of being able to take for granted.
All in violation of international law - that which has lost all meaning in the last three or so years.
> Israel is an occupier.
Not really relavent. Occupying powers still have the right to self-defense. Certainly they have the right to take defensive measures to prevent attacks on the civilian population of their primary territory, which is what is being discussed here.
> Israel won't let food into Gaza in reasonable quantities
As far as i understand the food situation in Gaza has now stabilized. However even if Israel was illegally restricting food into gaza, that wouldn't have any bearing on the legality of them setting up air defense systems on their own territory.
> All in violation of international law
Being an occupying power is not in and of itself a violation of international law. (The food thing might be. Israel is allowed to put certain restrictions on aid, but groups like the ICC have argued that the restrictions were beyond what was permissible under international law. Personally, even though it is incredibly unlikeky to happen, i hope the issue goes to trial at the ICC so we get a firm answer. However even if true, it does not mean Israel loses every right it has under international law)
I think Israel has a right to defense qua state and Palestinians have a right to resist qua subjects of unjust rule. These aren’t really contradictory positions, and both are pretty standard from a “this is what the UN says” ground truth[1][2].
(This is distinct from a state’s “right to exist,” which is nonsense. But once a state does exist, it has the right to defend itself by definition.)
[1]: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-7
[2]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assemb...
If they both have a right to kill each other, does the other really have a right to defense? Making it complicated introduces legalistic flaws and distracts everyone from actually fixing it by doing something simple, like tying sanctions to murders of civillians.
> can the right to kill coexist with the victim's right to defense?
Yes it can, and it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Russia believes it has the natural right to reclaim what it considers to be Russian territory. Ukraine believes it has the right to be free. So everyone should just put down their weapons and come to an agreement based on these rights?
The fallacy at the heart of your argument is that there is somehow some greater single truth, and that each side agrees that it is the greater single truth, and that everyone will just peaceably agree to follow the single greater truth because it is the single greater truth. Nothing could be less human. What are we, the Borg? We're supposed to follow some hive mind?
> something simple, like tying sanctions to murders of civilians
Not even remotely simple. Define sanctions, murders, civilians. The US bombing "drug" boats in the Caribbean, are those civilians? International law recognizes that collateral damage can legitimately happen during legitimate military operations. Is the collateral damage "murder"? How far should sanctions go? Sanction enemy banks (layer 1)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with the enemy country (layer 2)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with other citizens who do business with the enemy country (layer 3)?
They don’t both have a right to kill each other! Both “defense” and “resistance” (w/r/t the goal of self determination) have precise bounds; not all forms of warfare or violence are considered justifiable under either. Much of what Israel has done in the current conflict goes well beyond a charitable read of its right to defense, but this doesn’t imply that all defense adaptations are illegitimate.
I think everyone (myself included) has a right to actual self-defense, just not the false version we've been seeing.
Here's my peace plan: Blow up or starve kids on the other side +1 sanctions. Intercept a drone or rocket +0 sanctions. Say you're sorry and reduce arms by 10% -1 sanctions.
If the US alone did this they'd stop with all the murders in days to weeks.
Of course the state of affairs where random online commenters can think of better answers than the individuals in charge is only due to a lack of a desire for peace at high levels! There is nothing complicated about it at all.
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Zionism is not a race. The conflation police have once again been informed.
Nice dog whistle you got there
Laser weapons appear to be advancing rapidly. Once we get to the single digit MW power range, MAD will deteriorate as the ICBM becomes a non-viable nuclear delivery mechanism.
What effect would that have? Will nukes start getting used in wars? Will we see deployment of multi ton NEFP[1] warheads that can strike targets with nuclear-propelled kinetics?
[1] <https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.ht...>
> Once we get to the single digit MW power range, MAD will deteriorate as the ICBM becomes a non-viable nuclear delivery mechanism.
Requires a mountain of evidence and argument.
The best public arguments I have read:
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-pa...
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-pa...
We are nowhere near that point yet. Small rockets are totally different weapons then ICBM.
there was interview with guy from rafael who was head of iron beam project. it looks like they have some plans for dealing with icbm. airborne if I understood correctly
I guess airborne would be easier to intercept in their earlier phase before they go super fast, but then you have to have air assets in the right place at the right time.
At their terminal phase icbms go at mach 25, which is pretty hard to shine a laser on for an extended period of time.
to deploy it in space can also be an option