That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:

> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.

"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.

> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are

IDF trains them.

https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...

> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are'

American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/

Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.

Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.

The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.

At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.

In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.

This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.

> at the slightest "provocation"

Is that it though? When one has historical reasons to expect being attacked, one must be vigilant and one must be trigger-ready.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...

> (For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)

Or much more most recently than WWII: not knowing that 1200 civilians were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists, whom palestinians did vote in power.

Or even more recently: not knowing that the islamic republic of Iran slaughtered 30 000 unarmed civilians and went as far as sending its guards into hospitals to finish the wounded.

Not that anything excuse shooting kids at point blank: but we all know the BBC --and oh so many other media-- prefer to cover a family of muslim kids being shot by the IDF than to cover the slaughter of 30 000 civilians. When it's muslims killing muslims: that's not newsworthy to them. A missile landing on a school and killing kids? That's ground for lots of coverage. But 30 000 civilians getting slaughtered? Let's not talk about that.

That's the main issue with politics on HN: it's slanted towards making one side look evil while making excuses or being lip-sealed about the causes of all this mess.

It's the crazy double standards.

Technology IS politics.

Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.

There must be guardrails

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> automatic assault rifles

Trying hard to embellish your language I see. Might I suggest "military style automatic tactical assault rifle"?

My impression is that topics that involve politics are tolerated, even encouraged. It's politically charged discourse such as yours that's not welcome. It's near impossible to have an intellectual exchange with a political pundit.

I wonder if any VC out there would fund my pitch for an AI enhanced military style automatic tactical assault rifle with a copilot 360 targeting integration to ensure our troops can noscope420 at all times as well as a blockchain layer for auditing discharge events.

> is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things?

I agree. Hamas and IDF do terrible things - the ICC issued warrants for the leaders of both. This is why an external party has to impose a solution and it should involve in my opinion separation (two-states.) Both parties are radicalized at least for now and need to be separated and allowed to manage their own affairs while allowing the other to exist.

Yeah it is getting worse. This was written 3 days ago before this event by Human Rights Watch:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/13/in-the-shadow-of-war-set...

> this is war 101

The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.

I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.

Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.

> this is war 101, every day.

Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).

I don’t think anyone is going to forget about this

completely deranged way of thinking that calls for a hard self-reflection.

> this is war 101

genocide 101