All of Yovel Rom's Comments + Replies

We are in agreement, then

Oh, I see. I find it very unlikely. Such actions would border on casus beli, and it just doesn't seem important enough to risk an actual war with Israel. The US sent ~$80B over the years, which is a bit less than $2B a year, which is 2% of Egypt's government budget. 

The peace with Israel is mainly based on mutual deterrence since the 1973 war, military aid from Israel and more. The US is not a major actor within it.

I would expect very public, very ulikely to escalate actions in order to increase US aid. Not something like this.

I agree it will also affect Gaza. Disagree about the effect on Israeli casualties.

I agree. However I know that it's widely accepted Hamas is enjoying popular support. I don't have good public sources to support that statement, it follows from many little anecdotes over the years. A good example is that unlike widely unliked authoritarian regimes such as Belarus, they enjoyed very little protests over the years, and have managed to repeatedly rally people to their needs. 

While it's a defensible position from a "briefely googled this" point of view, I really don't think people who have been following closely hold this position. 

I really doubt that. The Hamas generally enjoys popular support, AFAIK (no good public source).

I really doubt that. The Hamas generally enjoys popular support, AFAIK (no good public source).

The government was democratically elected in 2006, so it's not a bad indication.

The Russian are now close Iranian allies, so it might have been some form of payment. 

Could you point me to the exact deal? I'm not sure what you're talking about. Also, Egypt had three different regimes since 2010, which all had different interests. We have reasonably good relations with the current one.

Sure. Qatar is one other obvious candidate, and there are probably other possibilities. 

I was actually born in Netzarim in the Gaza strip, but my parents left when I was one month old for job reasons. I've not been there until 2005, when The Separation happened, all jews were transferred from the strip and jewish entrance was prohibited, after which I couldn't visit anymore.

There are 150,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who work in in Israel, and around 15,000 from the Gaza strip who used to do the same until last saturday. Israelis and Israeli Arabs mix all the time (for instance, I have some Israeli Arab friends), Palestinians less so. A... (read more)

Part 1: I agree, it seems they don't use the Roofknock Protocol for now, and that will be the main source of civilian casualties. It's a tragedy, but not actually a problem by law of war (see Jay Donde's post).

Part 2: I generally agree. I don't think actual food shortage will be a problem (5%), electricity might (10-33%, very uncertain) but I don't think will cause many casualties by itself. We live in a warm country, and hospitals (and Hamas operatives) have emergency reserves.

Part 3: I agree, and think it depends a lot on Egyptian refugee policy.

Addition... (read more)

I'm not so sure about that. Hamas don't actually talk that much about the deal, and as long as Israel doesn't do anything too terrible in the coming war I don't think it'll be affected that much. I also don't think a deal with the Saudis will do nearly as much damage to the Hamas as will the current attack, which represents a clear existential threat to its regime. 

This could be an Iranian plan for the same reasons, since they have less to lose and more to gain from sabotaging the deal, but then I would expect a similar attack from Hezbollah at the sa... (read more)

Thanks for your question! It's complicated, and I'll try to adress it tomorrow. 

I slightly disagree with David here: Hamas representatives did thank some unnamed countries in addition to Iran in the last couple of days, which might hint to some Russian involvement and supply. However they don't want to be publicly associated with all this, so I imagine it's not too substantial.

I don't know about the war on terror more than what David said, sorry. It's a bit far from home, and I was young at the time and didn't follow it closely.

I don't expect it, since historically Israel let humanitarian supplies in during wars. I also sincerely hope it will continue do that during this war.

IIRC (can't find sources right now) common practice has been to stop electricity for some time, then when international pressure increases supply it interminently. 

Yeah, I don't understand the water situation myself. I hear Hamas complaining about electricity, and not about water, so it seems to be fine for now.

About casualties: That's extremely difficult to answer in the best conditions, depends on the ... (read more)

I imagine the US might have something like that. but if it does it doesn't share it.

I agree, which is why I tried to answer to the points concretely. Did I miss anything? I did write "your points" where I should have written "their points", but I don't think it's important enough to edit. I'm not surprised at all, I've seen worse. The far left is quite antisemitic.

They did indeed stop going to reserve. However, basically 99% of them who were of relevant age enlisted now. It's not actually in our cultural DNA not to show up in emergency. Brothers In Arms also called for everyone to enlist immediately (Hebrew, sorry).

Historically wars did not negatively affect long term growth in Israel.
 

1. Not much, unless maybe Hezbolla joins in and starts seriously shelling us. It has accurate long range rockets which can do orders of manitude damage more than Hamas. However maybe in the long term we'll frogleap back? IDK.
2. Not much
3. I imagine opposition, since it's seen as a strategic failure by Nethanyahu policy, who was in charge in the last 15 years. However that's hard to predict, since it might give rise to far right forces who'll want to retaliate.

Wildly off the mark. I'll try and address your points one by one. 

1. Content warning: discussing slaugter of innocent jews, babies and elderly. Also the Holocaust. 
   How many babies and elderly Germans were killed during the Uprising of Warsaw Ghetto? Literally zero. It's a baseless comparison, making analogy between a last stand of people getting slaughtered against Nazi soldiers, and people who slaughtered hundreds of music festival attendees, beheading babies, taking babies as hostages, killing and burning babies (terrible censored image, proceed a

Nope. 

I don't think you will be able to get an actual solution in the next 10-20 years (barring SAGI- scale changes), since there's a sizable fraction of the palestinian population that wants literal jewish genocide and the destruction of Israel [1].

I do think Israeli government is planning to take over the Gaza Strip, so I imagine we'll get some kind of a different equilibrium after. But I can promise you nobody knows how what will happen in the day after. Some people are trying to promote solutions, such as the Palestinian Authority taking over the ... (read more)

We have been keeping peace and nation building in the West Bank in the last fourty years or so. It's far from perfect, but the places didn't go up in flames in the last 20 years or so. We have less options than the US in Afghanistan so we learn through trial and error. Also the EU tends to send experts to try and help (whether they do is a diffferent question, for which I don't actually know the answer). 

The problem tends to be not that we don't know how to nation- build,  but that we don't want to. When we tried to build an actual Palestinian co... (read more)

Haha not that different from data science in other large organizations, but from time to time you do gruard shifts because it's the army. 

People try to make you do research on problems with next to no data, and there are literal human lives on the line, but you have to convince everyone it's not possible and you should focus on other, more approachable problems.

Let's take, for instance, a non classified problem: Automatically detecting people trying to sneak towards you. Seemingly easy: computer vision is a solved problem! However, sneaking tends to h... (read more)

Sorry it took me some time. 
I agree with your asessment. I did say Israel tried to do that, but it's a hard problem. I didn't want to elaborate on this point in the original comment since it felt off topic, so here goes:

TL;DR: Blockade is the baseline from which we try to improve, since Hamas are genocidal terrorists and use any aid to military needs. Under that constraint Israel has supplied water, food, electricity, and tried to build more generators and let palestinians work within its borders.

Some links will be in hebrew, sorry in advance. I'll on... (read more)

1. Thanks for your concern! Thankfully I've been impacted very little personally. I live in the center of Israel which "only" gets bombed once a day or so. My room is a bomb shelter (as is required by Isreali law to be available in every apartment), so I don't even have to get out of bed if there's an alarm during the night! 
   However two of my cousins are in combat, have enlisted as resrves and will go into the Gaza strip if it's invaded, so I'm worried for their safety.
2. In two word: Yes, exactly. 
   Israel's strategy since the Hamas took the strip over

I would look deeper into Israel's policy around cash transfers per child to see how big is the effect. We used to have extremely generous transfers for families with four or more children (veryuch non optimal, it was the result of pressure by the Ultra- Orthodox parties), so generous that families literally lived off of them. They stopped after 2001 for being unsustainable, and you can clearly see fertility rates taking a hit. If I remember correctly Kohelet Forum published a research about it a few years back.

For what it's worth, I got to Kameel independently, from an Israeli East Europe expert.

I did similar trades to yours- call on VXX, and put on JETS (nothing on USO, as I don't think it can get much lower than it already is). As the market doesn't react to the rising case numbers in the US (and maybe more importantly, in Ireland, where they have a horrible outbreak), do you think the market might just factor the coming outbreak as a net positive, since everyone will be either vaccinated or immune after it? Also, vaccine distribution in the US seems to be accelerating, the British strain seems to be a bit less contagious than thought in Decembe... (read more)