Google Was Set to Host An Israeli Military Conference. When We Asked About It, The Event Disappeared.

Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 369 points – Google Was Set to Host An Israeli Military Conference. When We Asked About It, The Event Disappeared.
theintercept.com

The Israeli Defense Tech Conference, aimed at tech companies working with the Israeli military, was scheduled for November at the Google for Startups campus in Tel Aviv.

The event, according to a listing posted on the event RSVP app Luma, was pitched at “founders, investors and innovators” looking to network and learn more about the defense tech space. It was co-sponsored by Google, Fusion Venture Capital, Genesis, a startup accelerator, and the Israeli military’s research and development arm, known as the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D, or Ma’fat).

When The Intercept contacted Google, the event page disappeared.

Google was not only listed as the physical host of the event and one of its sponsors, but the event listing also included a notice that attendees “approve of sharing [their] details with the organizers (Fusion & Google)” as part of signing up.

When The Intercept contacted Google, as well as the other companies and venture capital firms on the event page, the event page disappeared.

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Let me guess... they're still having the meeting, it's just that the pages are removed...

i wish journalists were real and could go check

Naaah, that would take effort.

Are you not familiar with the staff at TI? They have some of the most tenacious investigative reporters in the US

So tenacious that they'll leak their sources and put them in prison.

I don't understand why companies have such a hard on for Israel. This is nuts. They're literally committing genocide, and people are just shrugging at it.

Genuinely it's money. Israel, and most importantly Zionist supporters of Israel, have access to ridiculous amounts of investment funding. Most western billionaires and venture capitalists are Zionist in their personal lives for whatever reason. It's why the BDS movement isn't really going to affect Israel.

I was reading an article about it after I asked this question. Apparently, the U.S. thinks they are strategically important to maintain access to oil in the region. Always comes back to oil... 😒

Alexander Haig:

Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.

No they need a location the USA can safely use. Any country they go to hates them except for Israel in the Middle East. Nobody but Israel even wants them there in the first place.

As Genocide Joe has been saying for decades, they need a location the USA can safely use to protect its interests in the region, and its primary interest is oil.

As Sec. of State Alexander Haig said, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security” (actually it houses a number of American soldiers and one or more military bases). A major goal of “national security,” of “full spectrum dominance”, of the bipartisan neoconservative New American Century, is to control of the world’s energy supply.

“National security” has fuck-all to do with our security, and there are two gaping holes in downtown Manhattan to prove it. Sept. 11th was blowback from decades of US adventurism in West & Central Asia.

Yeah, I'm not surprised countries are trying to meddle in U.S. elections. We've done such crappy things, and everything is always in pursuit of making money and being a world super power.

Countries are actually doing very little to meddle in US elections, and so what little they’ve done has been ineffective so far.

All the noise around this is propaganda; its projection of what the US does to countries around the world all the time. But many Democrats still believe this BlueAnonsense.

Well, that's just not true. There's a fuck ton of propaganda all the time.

Since around 2016 there’s been increasing domestic propaganda about an increasing amount of foreign propaganda. But it’s bullshit.

Firstly, this country isn’t a democracy and our votes hardly matter, so there’s little benefit to a foreign power in trying to shape domestic public opinion. And secondly, foreign governments already have a much more efficient & effective way of influencing the US: by bribing (a.k.a. funding the political campaigns of and lobbying) politicians and bribing high-level government appointees.

So then why are we increasingly being fed this propaganda? It started as a partisan project relating to the 2016 election. But now it’s also bipartisan/deep state project for the purposes of censorship and suppression for various purposes, one of which being the new cold war. For the purposes of manufacturing consent.

Same reason Siemens, Volkswagen, Bayer, and many more, including a ton of American ones were onboard with the Holocaust.

Genocide is good for business.

I don't understand how genocide is good for business, but I'll take your word for it.

The stolen land alone is worth hella cash. That's why they're trying to sell gaza before it's even been "cleansed".

You don't understand what a mass surveillance company selling personal details, including location, relationships, search history, and more, on everyone on earth, would sell to people doing a genocide?

Probably tacos.

It's grim, but think about it like this. If you were in the gardening industry, wouldn't it be good for business if your neighbor started a garden in their yard? Even if you weren't directly in the gardening industry they may want to buy things like decorations to go out there. More time outside? Sun screen and bottled water are things you'll need. Plastic bad for the environment? Get this new reusable water bottle that everyone is using!

It's similar with war. It's not so much that it's the killing specifically, but regardless, it's a massive endeavor that needs lots of supplies. Think about all of the logistics involved in shipping someone overseas and maintaining them there. Even if companies do it for cheaper, they're not going to do it at a loss. The same way we see companies getting excited to cash in on the AI craze, we'll see companies excited to try and extract whatever possible value they can out of war.

And honestly, same thing with genocide.

Wartime means taxes from citizens. Private companies offer to help the government for said taxes to help fuel the war machine

Money.

Israel doesn't have money of their own, but the US sends container-loads of cash to Israel, which they spend on products and services from US companies

US companies profited off of Nazis too

https://www.meetup.com/fusion-la-israel/events/303578537/?eventOrigin=group_events_list

The meetup page is still up but Google Startups has been stripped from the image.

https://lu.ma/Israeli-Defense-Tech-Conf-Fusion-Google-Mafat

Also, the original page still shows up in Google searches, but was not archived on archive.org and I have been unable to find Google's cached version of the page. Although they obviously have a cached version since the text is visible as a preview of what's on the page.

Stay classy, Google.

Google removed their search cached pages, unfortunately

I was under the impression you could still do a cache:url style search, but it seems impossible.

They're caching them, they're just not sharing that with the public anymore. I know it has a cache because the Google result shows a bunch of text from the page that no longer exists. That "preview" text is pulled from a cache if the "new" page is resulting in a 404. I was hoping there some way for users to still access it, even if esoterically, but even those options seem unavailable.

God, I hate that. I find search results all the time (that don't involve google) that are now completely different :/

Like... I was looking for that specific search.

For those who are paywalled https://web.archive.org/web/20240927171841/https://theintercept.com/2024/09/27/google-israel-defense-tech-conference/

TI doesn't paywall. Its authwalled.

But you can bypass the authwall by just disabling JS or switching to distraction free reader in FF

On Vivaldi and yeah it was paywalled so I went straight to my collection of workarounds and no built in solutions. Overall faster that way.

Authwall disappears in Tor Browser. Its like the only site where it gets easier to read on a more secure browser lol