Bethan McKernan in Jerusalem and Harry Davies, The Guardian ; ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets
"Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines."
Gal Koplewitz, The New York Times; Israel’s National Library Reopens After Delay Caused by Hamas Attacks
"“The library has been able to play a tremendously therapeutic role,” said Raquel Ukeles, head of collections at the library. She said that many visitors have been evacuees from the country’s borders with Gaza and Lebanon, where communities are regularly targeted with rockets and shells, or reservists on leave from the Israeli military.
The library has helped stock mobile libraries that travel the country. Its staff members have also assisted in setting up a “pop-up” school in the previous National Library building for roughly 100 children displaced from their homes by fighting along the Lebanese border.
In the library’s reading room stand scores of chairs, each one holding a book chosen to represent one of the hostages taken on Oct. 7...
The library also has found new ways to serve its core mission as a custodian of collective national memory — painful as this new chapter is.
Library workers are salvaging and digitizing local archives from the ravaged communities overrun on Oct. 7. And staffers like Ms. Cooper are gathering and archiving WhatsApp conversations, in recognition of their documentary value. In Kibbutz Be’eri, the site of some of the worst atrocities on Oct. 7, one the more reliable logs of the day’s events are the messages sent on the community’s group chat."
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY, Los Angeles Times; Opinion: Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now
"Students have the right to say very offensive and even hateful things, but school administrators — deans, presidents and chancellors — have free speech rights too. They must exercise them and take a stand even if it will offend some and subject them to criticism.
It is a very difficult time on campuses across the country. Many of our students and faculty members have family and friends in Israel or in Gaza. Many care deeply about the suffering we are seeing, and yet there is no bridge between those who seek the elimination of Israel and those who believe it is essential to have a Jewish state. I hope there will be a time when campus officials can find ways to bring their communities together. But it is not realistic now. This makes it all the more important that they show moral leadership and speak out against the antisemitism that is rampant now, as they would condemn all other forms of racism and hate on campus.
Erwin Chemerinsky is a contributing writer to Opinion and the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. His latest book is “Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.”
Katie Robertson, The New York Times; After Hospital Blast, Headlines Shift With Changing Claims
"Covering wars is always fraught, both because journalists on the ground are often in harm’s way and because the sides at war aggressively push information in their favor."
, The New York Times; Ethical Resistance Is the Answer to Grief and Rage
"Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope."
Elizabeth Dwoskin, The New York Times; Inside the Israel-Hamas information war, from insider attacks to fleeing leaders
"While social media has been a critical tool for disseminating wartime information in recent days, a barrage of images, memes and testimonials is making it difficult to assess what is real...
“Right now,” said Hultquist, “it’s very difficult for a lay person to get to ground truth.”"
Anemona Hartocollis, Stephanie Saul and , The New York Times; At Harvard, a Battle Over What Should Be Said About the Hamas Attacks
"The debate over Israel and the fate of Palestinians has been one of the most divisive on campus for decades, and has scorched university officials who have tried to moderate or mollify different groups.
But Dr. Summers’s pointed criticism raised questions about the obligation of universities to weigh in on difficult political matters.
A famous 1967 declaration by the University of Chicago called for institutions to remain neutral on political and social matters, saying a university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” But students over the years have frequently and successfully pressed their administrations to take positions on matters like police brutality, global warming and war."
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian; Israelis’ defiance of Netanyahu holds a lesson for anyone who cares about democracy
"That prompts a troubling question for all those engaged in the fight against nationalist populism, wherever they are. If all the strength and numbers Israel’s pro-democracy movement has mustered are not enough, what exactly will it take? Can it really be that a nation is powerless to stop a leader bent on destroying his country to save himself? That thought is almost too bleak to contemplate. Which is why everyone who cares about democracy, including those who are distant from Israel, should desperately want those protesters to succeed. We need them to win."
"In its annual report released this spring, Freedom House, an American democracy advocacy organization, downgraded Israel’s freedom of the press ranking from “free” to “partly free.” To anyone following Israeli news media over the past year and a half, this was hardly surprising. Freedom House focused primarily on the “unchecked expansion” of paid content in editorial pages, as well as on the outsize influence of Israel Hayom (“Israel Today”), a free daily newspaper owned by the American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and widely believed to promote the views of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... The only heartening thing in all this is that news outlets are pushing back to maintain their independence. Investigative “60 Minutes”-type programs like “Uvda” (“Fact”) and “Hamakor” (“The Source”) continue to delve into government corruption and to air in prime-time slots. “Despite the assault on the press, the Israeli media remains very critical, very aggressive, and has a lot of chutzpah. It’s a kind of basic instinct that’s part of our DNA,” Ms. Dayan, who hosts Uvda, told me."
