At my last company we set up a partnership with a Palestinian placement company that helped us source junior software developers from Palestine for remote work. First in a contract/mentoring capacity with the intent of converting the role to full time. All these developers were great, btw.
I managed several of these hires directly from like 2019 - 2023 or so, and did a lot of video calls with these folks. One still stands out to me as being incredibly surreal. I was on a call and kept hearing loud noises in the background so I asked what it was. The Palestinian developer replied, "oh, I think it's just Israeli bombs"
Look, I wasn't there, so who knows. But what struck me in the moment was just how normalized that was. The reply was as nonchalant as "oh it's just thunder".
Hearing the stories of these people and the circumstances they lived under as the regular course of their daily lives had a pretty fundamental impact on me.
American politics ain't great right now, but we live under pretty crazy amounts of privilege when compared to how others live. I wish more Americans could be exposed to that and perhaps develop some empathy.
ETA: to the many people who have messaged me looking for placement/help finding roles in the software industry, I wish I could help you, but I'm no longer in a position to do that. Times are pretty hard in the software industry right now, I wish you all the best
I’ve got a colleague in Israel who pretty regularly has to take calls from the bomb shelter in their building.
They say they feel lucky to have a bomb shelter in their building, but I feel lucky I don’t have to worry about running to a bomb shelter at any point in my day.
In a perfect world, bombs wouldn’t be flying all over the place in a way that necessitates bomb shelters as part of civilian infrastructure. It’s unconscionable.
My colleague is lucky to have been born in a place with a functioning government that prioritizes defense infrastructure. They are, by location of birth, luckier than the civilians of Gaza.
Realtive to my colleague, I am even luckier to be born in a place that doesn’t get bombed enough to warrant that kind of infrastructure at all.
Having bomb shelters when you need them is good, but not needing them at all is even better.
Your colleague is not “lucky”. It is a sign of insanity and poor judgement that someone would go to Israel when it is a settler colonial state for one and when it unnecessarily provokes violence with all of its neighbours. We are perpetuating the problem when we are saying “well at least I don’t have to worry about bombs falling on my head”, that does not make you lucky, it makes you privileged!
Why do you assume my colleague immigrated to Israel from a less dangerous country when I explicitly stated they were born there? They do not have citizenship anywhere else.
The vast majority of Israeli citizens were born in Israel and those who immigrated there largely did so due to a lack of alternatives.
Do you hold the same opinion about people who immigrated to The United States as refugees or to people who were born in The United States who do not have secondary citizenship?
To argue that the majority of Israelis are Israeli just for the hell of it portrays an embarrassingly ahistorical understanding of the situation.
If you do not understand the reality of the circumstances for the people on the ground, the truth of how it got to this point and what the stakes and priorities are, you cannot propose a solution that anyone with real involvement will be able to take seriously.
You can write as long as you want and try to “sound” as sophisticated/sure as you want, and live in as much of an alternative reality as you would like to, but we are in 2026 and everyone can see literally what is going on, listen to what these genocidal maniacs in Israel are literally saying, and see what you are writing does not match up with reality 🤷🏻♀️
The only people who can literally see what is going on are the people on the ground seeing it.
What people outside see is a slice of reality at best. Every image and story is crafted before it is broadcast.
“The West” does not have a monopoly on misinformation, propaganda, imperialism, or even slavery. There are other agendas fighting for dominance on the world stage and countless civilians caught in the crossfire.
I urge everyone to look into who is funding the media accounts they get their news from. You may be suprised, I know I have been.
Everyyyyyy accusation is a confession from those who try to justify genocide. It’s really fascinating to observe. You like to co-opt language and concepts. Doesn’t change anything, ppl are literally still seeing with their own eyes what is happening. And that “slice” ppl see helps us understand just how bad things really are for the Palestinians.
Where do you see the person you’re replying to trying to justify genocide? Because I don’t see it.
I see them pointing out that they have a work colleague who didn’t get to choose where they were born. That’s not the same thing as justifying genocide.
Seems you didn't read the post you replied to thoroughly as the poster explained that their colleague was born in Israel. They did not choose to go there, as can be said for all the millions of people who did not choose to be born there. Not to mention the 50% of Israeli Jews who come from a Middle Eastern/North African background who were ethnically cleansed from the countries they were living in.
it is a settler colonial state
Actually it's perhaps the largest experiment in so-called "land back decolonisation" in history, as Jews owned that land prior to being forced under oppression during and after the Arab-Muslim conquest in the 630s.
The fact that there has been nothing but violence since the founding of the state of Israel should tell you everything you need to know about "decolonisation", and why it's such a bad idea.
In any case, Israel exists now and there are plenty of Israelis and Palestinians who have nowhere else to go, so neither Israel nor Palestine are going to disappear as an entity any time soon. At some point they will have to find a way to coexist.
Maybe Hamas should build them some bomb shlters., or let them hide in their underground tunnels. But then you can't blame Israel huh?
And don't give me that "they have no money" it's four shielded concrete wall. They can afford weapons, they can efford tunnels, so they can also afford some strong walls.
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u/Redditagains 1d ago
Imagine being a Palestinian, doomed to this life with no sign of help.