Israel Moves Toward a National Biometric Database 476
An anonymous reader writes "Israeli's government has approved the creation of a biometric database which would contain fingerprints and facial photos of all Israeli citizens. If the bill becomes law — and it is at an early stage — the biometric information of each citizen would be embedded in their passport and national ID card. Israeli citizens would be required by law to submit to biometric testing upon request by government employees, soldiers, and policemen, so that their biometric info can be compared to the info embedded in their ID card / passport. The declared purpose of the bill is to combat forgery of passports and ID cards, and also to aid identification 'in cases of a mass disaster.' The bill was approved over objections from civil rights groups and the Israeli Bar. The article notes that no other democratic country has a comprehensive biometric database of all citizens."
You would think that they would learn from history (Score:0, Insightful)
The creatures outside looked from nazi to jew,
and from jew to nazi, and from nazi to jew again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which.
And if you listen closely... (Score:1, Insightful)
Excuse (Score:1, Insightful)
Now other countries can use the excuse that Isreal did it, so "we're not alone"
Re:Good for them (Score:1, Insightful)
This was obviously modded troll because the moderator didn't like the opinion, not because it wasn't a valid point of debate. It is a valid point of debate. While it may be a minority opinion here at Slashdot, there is no denying that it isn't a majority opinion in many countries around the world (for example, the security obsessed UK).
Moderators: don't moderate down posts just because you disagree with them. That is not the point of moderation.
(Posted as AC to prevent the karma hit from mods who will disagree with this post.)
Re:And if you listen closely... (Score:5, Insightful)
...you can just hear the maniacal cackling of the engineers of the Third Reich.
Israel is reacting to the threats of regular terrorist bombings.
The Nazis were trying to breed the ubermensch and wipe out the undermensch.
If you want to draw a tie between Nazis and the Israeli State, you're going to have to work harder.
As for the engineers* of the Third Reich, they were ahead of their time. One of the reasons the USA grew so strongly after the war is that we took all the highlights of German industry by way of war reparations.
*engineers as in guys with slide rulers, not the politicians
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
And before all of you Ben Franklin quoters start yammering, the key word Ben Franklin used was "essential."
Actually, the way that reads, it doesn't sound like he's implying that liberty is essential, not that there are a select number of essential liberties, and all the rest are forfeit. Here's the quote:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
And if there's really any doubt in your mind of what Franklin's intent was, here's a quote from Poor Richard's Almanac:
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
Look, if you really have no problem giving up your liberty, go for it. I'm not stopping you. If you have no problem with the Israelis giving up their liberty, I'd love to hear your argument.
But picking apart the semantics of a historical quote, and then using that to imply that the man agrees with you -- that just makes you look stupid. Honestly, do you think any of the Founding Fathers would've consented to biometrics, when they literally got up in arms over a tea tax?
Re:Freedom! (Score:1, Insightful)
"they are respected and renowned as the people with the most experience of dealing with terrorism."
Am I alone in feeling that 60 years of warfare is not a successful strategy that one should try to emulate?
A light unto the nations (Score:1, Insightful)
The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze wrote the following [blogsome.com] prophetic words 30 years ago:
It's just one worrying trend (Score:5, Insightful)
Many Reform jews are pro-Zionist (think the State of Israel is a good thing) but strongly disapprove of the way it treats Palestinians, the Lebanese and their other neighbours, and object to the hypocrisy of Israel having 200 nuclear warheads and then complaining about regional destabilisation (e.g. the letter from Gerald Kaufman MP in the Guardian this weekend). The result is often quite vicious attacks by Orthodox Jews.
Now look at this in the context of this biometric database. It is a wonderful opportunity for the Orthodox in Israel to identify Jews who they may regard as troublemakers. (They already routinely do things like refuse to recognise marriages of non-Orthodox Jews, or refuse to recognise conversions ratified by Reform rabbis). This database will give the police and the army more power to identify and harass, not only the Palestinians, but people who disagree with the settlers and the ultra-Zionists.
Many of the founders of Israel were secular; a lot of them were socialists. I think they would be horrified by this proposal and would even quote the Torah against it.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:5, Insightful)
And the Israeli tags are shaped like a little star because the government decided that it was a shape that conveyed their aspirations for a better, more peaceful society. And they're bright yellow to make them harder to misplace.
Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.
Re:Only 5,499,000 Jews in Israel, 14 mil in the wo (Score:4, Insightful)
but with the U.S. funding and supporting Israel those 7.2 million get carte blanche to do things for which the 305 million in the U.S.A. get blamed
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have to be an antisemite to disagree with the politics of Israel?
I mean really.. Do you really believe that saying that Israel behaves badly toward its neighbours and even its own citizens means you are prejudiced or hostile toward Jews?
Give it up.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:5, Insightful)
The Israeli government and many of its citizens are always implying so. The Israeli governments continual pretense (or perhaps its a genuine delusion) that they represent the Jewish people is one of the most insidious pieces of political trickery in the modern era. Being Jewish does not imply a particular political viewpoint of national affiliation. But some people don't half push the idea that it does...
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:1, Insightful)
Or, you know, maybe Israel isn't actually a "colony." Not that I really even care since the Palestinians get no sympathy from me anyway. They don't deserve it.
Due to the constant threat of terrorism presented by the Palestinians, I don't find it suprising that Israel has come up with this idea. What else can they even do? Peace is not possible since Hamas will settle for nothing less than the eradication of Israel. There's no place for a Jewish nation in the Ummah.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:4, Insightful)
Both sides behave badly. Neither excuses the other, and there is no room for forgiveness for or from each other.
The situation is hopeless until at least one side stops the retaliation.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you really believe that saying that Israel behaves badly toward its neighbours and even its own citizens means you are prejudiced or hostile toward Jews?
I think it's the Israelis = NAZIs that's assumed to be anti-Semitic.
Hell, I'm more on your page (don't like lots of Israeli policies, hate this new measure, think it's wrong in a lot of ways, setting a dangerous precedent, etc.) but I think the NAZI comparison is pushing it.
I'm a weird brand of orthodox liberal Jew, so my pet peeve is Israel=Jewish state=representative of all Jews, but while that's the status quo (which it probably will be 'til the country implodes), yeah Isreali=NAZI=Jew and comparing people to the people who killed 'em is kind of tasteless.
Re:I am an Israeli (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very delicate subject, and as one Israeli to another, as we both know, if it wasn't in an anonymous internet forum I wouldn't dare raise such a question, how can you explain giving a twelfth of your life away to an organisation obsessed with harassing, repressing, dividing, locking in, shutting out, abusing and killing people for the sole reason that they lived in your country before your parents/grand-parents arrived and drove them off their land?
And don't give me this "the IDF is the most moral army in the world" line, we both know how wrong that is. I could give enough examples to make both of us blush, but I won't (it's my country too damn it!). Looking at the way the IDF operates, I see the sole purpose of its actions in the conquered territories as to make the inhabitants' lives as painful and difficult as possible. How can you collaborate to that?
Full disclosure: yes I did my full three years back when I didn't know what was actually going on. I couldn't keep doing it once I found out. How do you find it possible? Is the boogie-man of terrorism that intimidating?
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:5, Insightful)
comparing people to the people who killed 'em is kind of tasteless.
But what does taste have to do with it? Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?
After all, Nietzsche, that nazi-enabler, said: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. For if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Which is a generic admonition of essentially the same thing and few if any people fault him for it.
When I first learned of what was going on in palestine I really could not reconcile it with what I had been taught in history class (still can't actually) it seemed to me that the two countries most likely to have empathy for palestinians were the ones with the least - the USA (because of all the propaganda about freedom, self-determination, etc) and Israel because of their recent experience at the hands of an overwhelmingly powerful force. Not that I expected Israel to be happy about all the countries nearby ganging up on it, but I do expect them to handle the 'occupation' that followed in a much better way.
To further mix metaphors its like palestine is the weimar republic after WWI - they lost the war and israel is determined to exact unrealistic penalties from them, thus making them an ideal breeding ground for continuation of the conflict. When they ought to be taking a cue from the way the Allied powers handled the situation with the Axis countries after WWII.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?
Sure, theoretically, but in the real world it just doesn't work. It's far too emotionally charged for people to keep a cool enough head to objectively evaluate the aptness of the comparison, and often is only used for the shock value.
For the record, I don't think the comparison is apt. The Israeli's actions are more akin to other colonial powers, not the NAZI's systematic killing and torture on the basis of race/ethnicity. Israeli's treat Palestinian's badly because of the political situation (religion and race are secondary/fueling the whole situation) where as the NAZIs chose the races and then created the political situation, and that's the least of it. Segregation in Israel is nowhere near as bad as it was in NAZI Germany, nor are rights quite that suppressed, (and that's ignoring cattle cars, concentration camps and gas chambers, those other staples of the NAZI regime).
Not that I expected Israel to be happy about all the countries nearby ganging up on it, but I do expect them to handle the 'occupation' that followed in a much better way.
I think to a certain extent they're screwed regardless of what the try, and I think they've tried almost everything at this point. It's 60 odd years of mistakes, many of which can't be corrected. Israel was created pretty much as a dp camp for holocaust survivors, at which point yeah nobody was really thinking about who lived there (collective guilt and all.) It only became as major problem once everyone was too heavily invested in the land for their to be a solution that would satisfy everyone, and every attempt has failed. (Though lately it looks like they're going towards a three state solution that people can somewhat live with.)
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:4, Insightful)
"But what does taste have to do with it? Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?"
Yes, exactly.
I'm sick and tired of political discourse being filled with bizarre weasel words like 'tasteless' and 'tired' and 'offensive' and 'disloyal' to describe claims the speaker doesn't like which are, objectively, either *true* or *false*.
I'm sick of politics being about 'opinions'.
Politics *isn't* about opinions. It's about reality. People have strong opinions *about* it, yes, just as they do about science, but those opinions do not *determine* the truth or falsity of political claims: results do. It's not a matter of fashion. Truth doesn't get 'tired' or 'stale' from multiple repetition and lies do not get proven consensus acceptance no matter how many years have passed.
That's why history is an active research subject - we're too polite to admit it, but it's because HISTORY MAKERS LIE, and history is largely the science of sorting through the lies after the fact and determining from documentary evidence just how we were deceived and then guessing at why. If we could take public figures' words at face value at the time they say them, we wouldn't *need* either history or political science.
Political claims, like every other claim, need to be verified against objective, trustworthy evidence, one political system is NOT identical to another, and torture and oppression remain torture and oppression regardless of whether it's the 'good guys' or the 'bad guys' doing it.
And while Israel's policies toward Palestine are not identical to Nazi Germany's toward the Jews, there sure are depressing similarities.
And it just goes to show that suffering atrocity and swearing 'never again shall this happen TO US' is not quite the same as swearing 'never again shall we allow this happen, full stop'.
The other interesting thing is that America's 'torture lite' techniques are, from what I've read, not only nearly identical to the Cold War KGB's (sleep deprivation, sound, heat/cold, stress positions) -- but they actually migrated to the US military lexicon FROM the Soviets via the Cold War.
What you hate, you really DO stand a strong chance of becoming. Literally and not figuratively. Rivals copy each other and adopt the methodologies which seem to work.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:2, Insightful)
And while Israel's policies toward Palestine are not identical to Nazi Germany's toward the Jews, there sure are depressing similarities.
No. Not really.
You could find much better analogies in the USSR (or even modern-day Russia), Belarus, various Arab and Central Asian (Uzbekistan, Turkeminstan) countries, China, South Korea and so on.
And yet, Israel is compared to the Nazis more than any of those.
You want objectivity? The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a tiny and relatively bloodless regional conflict. More people died in the current Iraq war than in the whole Israeli/Palestinian conflict since 1948. Hell, I think more people died in the first two months of the Iraq war than in the whole 2nd Intifada. And that's just one example. I'm sure that I could find dozens of others (Russia/Chechnya springs to mind...)
Saying that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is anything like Nazi Germany is the furthest thing from "facts" or "objectivity". It's a crazy hyperbole, a cheap (and indeed, offensive) rhetoric trick.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, it's not the Israeli Jews who will suffer here. It's the indigenous population. The Palestinians.
They are the ones who will suffer.
Says who?
From what I've heard, the biometric ID will supplement Israel's already-existing national ID. Its stated purpose is to combat forgery and identity theft (...), as well as convenience (you don't have to carry your ID/driver's license around all of the time). So, at the very least, The Jews are are going to suffer from this.
As for the Palestinians... well they don't have Israeli IDs since they are not Israeli citizens (the PA issues its own IDs). However, most of them have to go to Israel to work, or to visit family members, so they need a special Israeli permit. Now, you'd say that biometric measures would be added to those permits as well, and I think you'd be right. But the question here is, how is that going to make them suffer?
You see, one of the crappier parts of being a Palestinian is that a tiny piece of paper is basically your life. It can be stolen, it can get lost, it can be taken away by asshole soldiers. With biometry, you don't need that piece of paper.
Of course, it might hurt the Palestinians' privacy a bit. But remember that we're talking about people who can have their houses searched, and themselves arrested for arbitrary periods of time, without any real warrant or justification. I don't see how biometric ID can make it worse.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:5, Insightful)
"every other nation in the region has a free pass to do anything they want without anyone even looking in their direction"
Free pass? Israel is quietly the most prolific violator of UN resolutions, violating more than all other Middle Eastern nations combined. There are many other UN resolutions which the US vetoed on Israel's behalf.
Free pass indeed.
Oh, and Iraq didn't get to do what it pleased. It tried trading oil in Euros and that got it a set of trumped up WMD accusations and an invasion. Iran doesn't seem to be free of criticism either.
Cut it out with the Jewish victim complex, the rest of the world is tired of it. Criticism of Israel != antisemitism. I am a Muslim. I am a vehement critic of Israel's politics. I am also friends with many Jewish people, who I find to be very warm, friendly and pleasant people. In fact, many of my Jewish friends' biggest problem with Israel is that they carry out their politics in the name of Judaism.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time "anti-semite" was a label for someone who hated Jews.
It has become a label for someone a Jewish person hates.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:3, Insightful)
Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.
Unfortunately the Israeli philosophy seems to be that it's not a problem as long as the right people are doing it. Which is true, it just ignores the fact that the right people never stick around forever.
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:1, Insightful)
The Jews are indigenous. You don't think they chose Israel at random, do you?
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:4, Insightful)
Murdering a bunch of civilians is your solution?
Ever looked up the definition of terrorism?
Re:You would think that they would learn from hist (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the reason is because the people there went directly from being oppressed to doing the opressing. They should know better.
I seriously doubt that. If only because many people who compare Israel to the Nazis are also holocaust deniers (I'm talking about Arab countries/Iran, where "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is still a bestseller).
To be honest, I think the actual reason is actually pretty complex. For example, I wrote a paper about anti-Israeli cartoons in the Soviet Union, and I discovered that the Soviets probably invented that whole Israelis=Nazis idea, back in the 1960s. In fact, while constantly describing Israelis as Nazis, they stopped using Nazi symbolism (swastikas etc.) to describe actual, historical Nazis, describing them as simply stereotypical Germans (lederhosen, iron crosses). The Soviets' reasons were pretty complex, ranging from the attempt to cast US/Israel as the new "national enemy" (you have to remember that the Nazis are remembered as bitter enemies in Russia), to the obnoxious use of traditional antisemitic feelings and symbolism, and of course, there was also the implicit holocaust denial (official Russian sources never mentioned that the Jews had any special connection to the holocaust. the offical claim was that "Russian, Polish, and others" died in the camps).
As for the adoption of this demagoguery by some supposedly free-thinking people, I can't say. Maybe it makes them feel better about their own, often deeply antisemtic past, maybe it makes a good story, and maybe it's just a "big lie" phenomenon. I don't know.
What I can say is that holding people to a much higher standard just because they were oppressed/massacred just 60 years ago makes no sense, and if that's the case, it's applied only to the Jews (look no further than the elaborate excuses we make for the victims of European colonization).
Re:I am an Israeli (Score:4, Insightful)
The prime reason is that in the late 1940s the Arabs refused the UN partition plan which would have created two states, one arab and one israeli, with international status for jerusalem (hey, that sounds familiar, I heard it recently), and declared war. That war has not yet ended.
The palestinians have accepted a two-state solution (Oslo Accords) and so have the arab nations (Arab Peace Initiative). What happened in the 40's is not that relevant, because we cannot change the past. We can choose to take steps towards peace today and in the future. Unfortunately, too many people are coming up with excuses why they cannot make peace, instead of taking the painful steps towards a solution.
The IDF operates to protect the citizens of Israel...
According to international law, the IDF is also responsible for protecting palestinian civilians and guaranteeing their human rights. Unfortunately, they do not and allow settlers to freely attack palestinians. They also harass palestinians and disallow travel. The harassment and lack of jobs are excellent breeding grounds for the resistance. The policy of settlement expansions/ethnic cleansing executed in part by the IDF has resulted in large settlements that have greatly jeopardized the viability of a two-country solution.
I recall recently when Hamas sent 6000 rockets randomly into Israel
According to Israel, it's acceptable to murder citizens that are in the vicinity of Hezbollah or Hamas members, when the rockets the IDF uses have limited accuracy. We know that Hamas' rockets are very crude and can only be aimed for a certain town. I think that pretty much every town in Israel will have (reserve) soldiers living there, so the attacks are on military targets (who 'hide' among civilians, to use the israeli jargon). I'm perfectly willing to condemn the rocket attacks, but don't pretend that Israel is not doing the same thing.
The proportionate response would have been to send 6000 rockets randomly into Gaza.
Look up the number of palestinian civilians that are killed every year vs the number of israeli civilians and then get back to me on 'proportionality.'
Violent attacks by Arabs is not the bogeyman, they are all too real.
One of the reasons why there is no peace agreement yet is that Israel has always 'rewarded' the attackers by stopping the peace process after an attack. The result is that a minority can hold 4 million people hostage. That weakens those who want peace, because they cannot show results. The election of Hamas is a good example of what happens next.