Israel made a commitment in the past few years: people calling for the destruction of Israel will be taken at their word and dealt with as such.

It reminds me of the frequently quoted admonishment from the Talmud:

If someone rises to kill you, rise to kill him first

Neither Israel, Jews living outside Israel, or anyone contending with radical, violent groups have the luxury of assuming that threats are just words and the people making the threats don’t intend carrying them out.

Initiatives like this are important to the health of the open Web because they preserve more of the Web for our future benefit. I like this quote from Alexander Rose at Automattic:

It’s very important that websites have a memory and that the web overall as has a memory. We are increasingly using [the web] as our only source of truth. When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead. This has become even more important in the world of AI.

One way to combat this is to install the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin on your WordPress site and let it quietly run in the background, essentially backing up your site to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, preserving it for future readers and researchers.

Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com and where I work) and the Internet Archive have collaborated on a new release of this plugin:

Link rot. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as clicking on a link that leads to nowhere.

WordPress, which powers more than 40% of websites online, recently partnered with the Internet Archive to address this problem. Engineers from the Internet Archive and Automattic worked together to create a plugin that can be added to a WordPress website to improve the user experience and check the Wayback Machine for an archived version of any webpage that has been moved, changed or taken down.

The free Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, publicly launched last fall, combats link rot by seamlessly redirecting the user to a reliable backup page when it encounters a missing page. When the plugin is added to a website, it will do a scan, see what pages exist, and then automatically save those pages to a queue to be archived. If it doesn’t exist, then it will be sent for capture.

The plugin is free and you can find it here: Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer – WordPress plugin.

We don’t usually receive homework assignments from work¹. Earlier this week, our CEO, Matt Mullenweg invited us to take a couple hours to go to a museum and then share our impressions. It was totally voluntary and I thought I’d accept the assignment and go visit a small museum in my city, The Hasmonean Heritage Museum.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from the visit. I enjoyed the interactivity in the exhibits and appreciated the more hands-on approach to the ancient artifacts that have been excavated over the decades. It was a good experience overall and I’m glad I went.

What stood out to me at the museum

I arrived at the museum shortly after it opened and I was the only person there, aside from one of the curators (at least, I think she is a curator). I basically had the whole place to myself. The curator explained some of the interactive exhibits to me and left me to explore with the help of an online audio guide.

The museum takes its name from the Hasmonean Dynasty (also referred to as the Maccabees who you may know from Hanukah stories) but it is really a fairly high level history of the ancient city of Modiin, the precursor to the modern city of Modiin Maccabim Reut where I now live.

The museum presents the story of Modiin from the time of the Hasmonean Family till the establishment of the modern city, all by way of instinctive and hands on programming. Visitors of the museum enjoy displays, entrance to a project room consisting of four fun activities, and a special effects movie ride that takes participants through time, from the Hasmoneans to the development of the modern city.

The museum is in the central heart of Modiin so as to connect the earlier city to the present city, and its commercial areas with its rich cultural venues.

Historical sources and sights of the area were the inspiration for the founding of the museum.

Most of the exhibits are very interactive and include replicas of pottery found in and around the city that you can reassemble and then have scanned to learn more about them, as well as a range of artifacts found in excavations around the city over the years.

I particularly like the main hall’s exhibit that displays a timeline of the area going back to around 11,500 BCE. This timeline has a set of screens and a sort of iron tray on rails that you can slide along the timeline. When you pause it at each time period, the screens on either side of a map of the modern city change to share historical information about the period and information about the artifacts in the display case. Points on the map of the modern city also light up to show you where the artifacts were found.

An adjoining hall contains a larger collection of artifacts that were excavated in and around the city, along with the pottery replicas I mentioned and a covered excavation site (or replica of one) that you can point lasers to to get them to light up and display information about them on screens around the excavation pit.

This hall also contains a fun sort of multiplayer game where you use arcade-style joysticks to move a digital magnifying glass over the a map of the modern city to locate stars that indicate what objects were found in those locations. You earn a token for each item you find and there are a couple joysticks around the table so you can play against other people.

The walls of this hall have display cases of various types of artifacts including some truly ancient glass, coins, and stone ossuaries.

The museum also hosts a really interesting exhibition by Nechama Levendel titled “Between the Visible and the Unseen” that uses used books to create a range of objects –

Nechama Levendel operates within this space. She works with used books — objects steeped in meaning and memory — and breaks them down into material layers that formulate a new visual language. In her hands, the covers, faded pages, fabrics, and glue residues are transformed into history-carrying raw materials. In a precise, patient, and intuitive process, she removes, pastes, conceals, and reveals. Action after action, layer by layer, the book loses its function as an agent of knowledge and is reimagined as a physical and mental object. “Time is my palette,” says Levendel, and indeed, time is present in her work not only as a theme but also as a material element, manifested in the creases, glue stains, faded colors, and the traces of touch.

The objects are placed around the museum and there are a few pieces in the “artifact hall” where they both blend in and stand apart as something very different and modern.

I ended my visit with a slightly cheesy 4D movie/ride (the seats move with the action) about a fictional search for oil to help bring the modern city of Modiin into being that touches on parts of the city’s and Jerusalem’s history. It was a fun movie and left me feeling a little more uplifted when I stepped back out on to the city centre boulevard.

1. I am a Happiness Engineer on the WordPress.com escalated support team at Automattic ︎

Mastodon

I feel like Mastodon’s big advantage is that it is already very much a distributed network. This is the only truly federated option in the mix. This makes Mastodon/ActivityPub-based networks pretty resilient with no single point of failure.

If a major Mastodon server goes down, the rest of them just keep going and they just lose contact with the server that failed. No need for a flock of hybrid bird-butterflies to keep the mythical whale swimming.

A big, potential boost for the ActivityPub ecosystem is the very gradual (and voluntary) move by Threads with its 275+ million users to federate using ActivityPub. This is theoretically going to be a huge boost for the ActivityPub network because it would enable true interoperability between Mastodon, Threads and other ActivityPub-based networks.

The challenge here is that Threads actually needs to roll out more complete ActivityPub support and, ideally, encourage users to federate. Currently, even though is is possible to enable federation for your Threads profile, it is not that intuitive to find, not obvious why this is something a Threads user would want to do, and I noticed that the reminders that you are already federating have the hint of a warning.

So, essentially, until federation becomes commonplace on Threads, the audience for Mastodon and other ActivityPub-based networks will probably remain relatively small. This is fine if you are comfortable navigating the slightly more technical sign-up process and you can find your community there. For “mainstream” social network users, it still seems to be too intimidating or not interesting because you don’t have all the sorts of people you’d want to follow on Mastodon.

Certainly this is something I’ve noticed. While there are loads of interesting people who I am happy following on Mastodon, the prospect of adding all the “mainstream” people I’d like to follow from Threads is a big draw for me. That isn’t happening quite as quickly as I had hoped.

Bluesky

Bluesky is very much like Twitter from a couple years ago. It is much easier to sign-up and get started with Bluesky. Leaving aside how interesting the customizable approach to moderation there is (and this will probably only become more interesting over time), features like starter packs make it really easy to follow a bunch of people who interest you.

Add to that a range of curated lists based on topics of interest and it’s pretty easy to just fall into Bluesky and find people who interest you. Moderation tools like blocking and muting accounts are also really effective, too, so trolling has a pretty short shelf life in Bluesky.

It’s not surprising that Bluesky has been growing so quickly lately. The last few days it has basically grown by about 1 million users a day. It’s really impressive. If this continues then network effects kick in and we’ll see even more “mainstream” people joining.

The big challenge with Bluesky at the moment is that while it is designed to federate, there only really is one server for now. This makes this one server pretty vulnerable to failure for some or other reason. It also doesn’t seem to be quite as “easy” to set up your own server (to the extent setting up a Mastodon server is easy).

You can use both

I switch between Mastodon and Bluesky. I follow a lot of really interesting people on both services so I don’t mind. I also find that there are differences between the people I follow on both networks that appeal to me for different reasons, and I like that too.

Having seen how Mastodon federates and how I can follow Threads profiles that are federated, I really like the idea of having one profile in the Fediverse that I can use to follow anyone, wherever they are. To an extent this is possible with Bridgy Fed that enables me to follow Bluesky people from Mastodon and vice versa. So we may even see more coherent and simpler bridges between Mastodon and Bluesky in the future, at which point the dream of a federated social experience becomes much more of a reality.

Even now, seeing how Mastodon and Bluesky have grown is really encouraging. Bluesky is growing rapidly at the moment, sure. At the same time, I wouldn’t write Mastodon and ActivityPub-based networks off as losers. In the long run, this is where we should, and will hopefully, go with our social networks.

You can find me here:

• Bluesky
• Mastodon

When I read the horrific scenes at this base, and what must have happened to these soldiers that the IDF left insufficiently protected, I realised that one of the main reasons that this week was so jarring is because for so many Israelis, we are still being traumatised by not only the attacks on 7 October, but by everything that has followed since then.

Intellectually I know that it is now 75 days after that dark day. Emotionally, viscerally, I feel like it was last week, or perhaps two weeks ago. All these narratives about Israel committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, erasing Palestinian culture, and more are just continuations of those attacks. This doesn’t mean that we are losing our way and giving into the criticism. If anything, this draws us closer together as Israelis and as Jews (often despite our personal or political differences).

I mentioned the following on Mastodon and Threads the other day –

It is very difficult to have a meaningful conversation about Palestinians, whether those caught up in the war in Gaza, or elsewhere if your (you know who you are) starting point is that Israel, and the people who live in Israel (the majority of whom are Jews) don’t have a right to exist and a right to self-determination on our ancestral land.

It’s not that we are not aware of the casualties in Gaza. We are. Right now, though, we are still under attack. Not just in Gaza and in northern Israel. We are under attack globally as Jews and Israelis. So for now, we are defending ourselves because this is a fight for our survival as a nation and as a people.

There is no context in which calling for genocide is vaguely acceptable. None. It shouldn’t even be a debate. If you think that calls to eradicate Jews (or anyone else, for that matter) is a valid intellectual exercise, take a good look at what your words mean:

This year, Chanukah has even more meaning as the war continues, and as we continue to hope and wait for the return of our people.

חג חנוכה שמח

@paul @evan understandable. Remember that the Palestinians don’t want to be under constant threat either, and many don’t support hamas, especially those in the West Bank (where attacks from settlers and Israeli security forces have been concentrated). The Palestinians I know in Ramallah really just want to live their lives in peace, like you do, like almost anyone would.

I don’t think peace is possible until both Israelis and Gazans recognize that their respective governments are unacceptably bad, and until both hamas and Netanyahu are out of power. You probably know that Netanyahu has favored hamas over Fatah because a two-state solution would be bad for him politically.

Link

To begin with, the Gazan Palestinians are under threat from two sources:

1. Hamas itself. Hamas is a tyrannical ruling power in Gaza and doesn’t tolerate any opposition to its rule.
2. Israeli strikes in response to Hamas attacking Israel.

If Hamas doesn’t attack Israel, the Palestinians have nothing to fear from the IDF.

The second issue is that while we have extremists in our government (thanks to Netanyahu who no-one else would work with), Hamas is an extremist, terrorist organisation that rules Gaza.

Hamas terrorises its own citizens, as well as Israelis. Hamas doesn’t hold elections and its primary focus is not the wellbeing of its people.

In Israel, we do have a far right government. Some members of that government are talking about taking over Gaza.

They are in the minority and they lack the support of the majority of Israelis. Unlike in Gaza, we have elections (sometimes too many) and I am sure we will see a return of a more centrist government after this war.

Our far right ministers are only good at sowing division and we don’t need that.

We have a few English news sources that, while not perfect, seem to offer somewhat more balanced news somewhere in the vicinity of center/center left on the political spectrum:

For online print media, I recommend the following:

• The Times of Israel | News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World
• ynetnews – Homepage

When it comes to podcasts and YouTube news, I recommend these options:

• i24NEWS English – YouTube
• The Daily Briefing | The Times of Israel (this is a daily podcast)
• For Heaven’s Sake | The Times of Israel is also a podcast and it has a series focused on the war against Hamas that leans fairly left and at the same time offers pretty good perspectives on aspects of this war.

How this began

I’ve been uploading my photos and videos to Flickr for almost 20 years. I don’t really use the service except as an automated backup solution for my media, and since I also backup to Dropbox and Google Photos/Google Drive, it isn’t really worth the cost of maintaining my Flickr subscription at roughly $80 per year.

My son mentioned to me that some of his friends were looking up old photos of mine from years ago on Flickr. I really didn’t expect this. It turned out they had found my old photos of the area in my city that was to become our “Ma’ar”, or city center, on Flickr.

While I didn’t want to continue paying for Flickr when I’m not using it ($80 doesn’t seem like much but when I already pay for a few other storage services, it’s not a cheap indulgence), I also didn’t want to take away those photos and videos that other people may find helpful or valuable from a historical perspective (ok, very recent history).

I thought about a few ways to preserve the photos for people like my son’s friends, and decided to build a site that I’d use to keep those images available. I also want to configure the site to automatically backup to the Internet Archive like I do with this site.

Where you can find the site

You can find the site here:

Israel Memories

You can also follow the site on the Fediverse:

• Israel Memories

I’ve just started adding some media, and I’ve been backdating the content to maintain some sort of chronological consistency.

Take a look, if you’re interested. I’m open to feedback if you have (constructive) thoughts about how you’d like to see the content shared on the site.

Stage 1 – Excitement

I had an idea, this will be awesome.

Stage 2 – Wonder

Just think of the possibilities, all the things I can do.

Stage 3 – Why Do I Do This To Myself?

I’ve hit a snag. Oh, and the the project seems to be a lot more involved than I expected the more I work on it. It wasn’t meant to be this complex!

Stage 4 – Determination

Dammit, I have started this. I am most of the way through. I can finish this. I will finish this.

Stage 5 – Elation

It’s allliiiiiiivvvve!!!

Stage 6 – Meh

It works as expected, and fades into the background … until it’s time to refactor it.

At which point, return to Start.

Images generated by Dall-E 3

1. Apologies to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross ︎

When I first saw the video, I saw a figure being shot at by off-duty soldiers responding to the attacks. I saw the figure fall to the ground, seem to raise his hands, and was then shot again.

We’re accustomed to terrorists being “neutralised” (usually a euphemism for being shot dead by security services and when this happens, it’s often a relief because those terrorists won’t live to kill or injure more Israelis elsewhere.

In this case, I watched the figure being shot again after seeming to surrender (my initial perception). Seeing that felt wrong, before I thought that at least this terrorist won’t be around to try kill others. Then I found out that this individual was an Israeli citizen, Yuval Castleman, who intervened to help stop the actual terrorists, and who was instead seemingly mistaken as an attacker by the off duty soldiers on the scene.

“The findings of the investigation so far indicate that during the attack, one of the IDF soldiers identified and mistakenly suspected the late Yuval — who acted bravely and courageously to neutralize the terrorists — as a third terrorist,” police said. “The same soldier also fired at him which led to his serious injury and tragic death.”

Four killed, 5 injured in Hamas-claimed terror shooting at Jerusalem bus stop | The Times of Israel

When I learned that this person was not a terrorist, but rather a heroic civilian who crossed lanes of traffic to stop a devastating attack, I found myself quite rightly questioning my acceptance of what I saw in that video as a “just” action by our soldiers.

This introspection is more about my perceptions and what I consider to be acceptable, and not a commentary on whether what the soldiers did was correct. That said, I understand that our soldiers’ rules of engagement require a degree of verification before firing in circumstances like this and I am sure the military investigation will shed more light on Yuval’s tragic death.

“Yuval noticed a terrorist attack from the other side of the road while driving to his job at the government complex, and stopped his car to stop the terrorists,” Channel 13 quoted his family as saying on Friday. “He had previously served in the security forces and was always a hero and the first to jump in and save lives, which he did this time as well.”

Family says Yuval Castleman, killed after taking out terrorists, was ‘executed’ | The Times of Israel

On the one hand, terrorism can’t be tolerated, and even though I don’t support the death penalty¹ I do feel that there are instances where heavily armed terrorists may need to be “neutralised”.

If they aren’t stopped, they will head down the road to the next town and take more lives, possibly mine, my family’s, friends, neighbours.

We’ve seen this happen time and time again.

In this case, why was I so quick to accept Yuval’s shooting as an unpleasant, yet necessary neutralisation of another armed “terrorist”? I felt uncomfortable when I saw the video, so why did I still justify it to myself when I watched it?

The seemingly constant threat of terrorist attacks in our cities and the current war in response to the barbaric attacks of the 7th of October have traumatised me, I suspect. The challenge is not losing my humanity in the process, though.

1. This position that goes back to my law school days when the Constitutional Court ruled in the case of “S v Makwanyane and Another”, on June 6, 1995, that the death penalty unconstitutional. The court found that capital punishment violated the right to life and the right to dignity, as guaranteed in the South African Constitution. This decision marked a significant moment in South African legal history, firmly establishing the abolition of the death penalty in the country’s legal system. ︎

Their story is nothing less than inspiring.

When a group of young Israeli women were woken up at 6:30 a.m. on October 7, they had no idea they would be making history as the first female armored crews in Israel, and perhaps the world, to participate in active battle.
In an interview with Channel 12 this week, the combat soldiers spoke of thundering along main roads to get to some of the 20 southern Israeli communities that came under massive assault that morning, running down terrorists, and securing breaches on the border with the Gaza Strip.

Female IDF tank crews ran down dozens of Hamas terrorists on October 7 | The Times of Israel

You can read the story on the Times of Israel too. This could well be the first battle that a women tank crew engaged in. It is certainly a story that will become a part of our history, and a powerful reminder that women as as capable as men, particularly in the military.

Update (2023-12-18): It seems that there will be a movie about these incredibly brave women in the near future too. Here is an i24News report:

Here are the stories of some of the babies, children, men, women and elderly who were taken from their homes, their families, and their communities. Take the time to read these stories:

Here are the names and details of just over 200 of the kidnapped:

You can download these posters yourself, and share them in your community, too, thanks to Kidnapped:

On October 7th, 2023 more than 240 innocent civilians were abducted from Israel into the Gaza Strip by Hamas. Ranging in age from 10 months to 85 years old, these people were kidnapped in the midst of a vicious attack against Israel during which thousands of children, elderly, women, and men were slaughtered, raped, and wounded.

With the clear goal of returning these hostages back home safely and immediately, thousands of people have been hanging photos of the hostages in thousands of cities around the world.

HOME | Kidnapped

Don’t look away.

Our Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu reportedly said we should use nuclear weapons in Gaza.

Asked in an interview with Radio Kol Berama whether an atomic bomb should be dropped on the enclave, Eliyahu said, “This is one of the possibilities.”

Eliyahu, a member of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, does not have any connection to the three-member war cabinet directing the war against the Hamas terror group, nor is he part of the broader security cabinet.

When it was pointed out to the minister that there are some 240 hostages currently held in the Gaza Strip, Eliyahu doubled down.

“I pray and hope for their return, but there is a price to be paid in war,” he said. “Why are the lives of the abductees, whose release I really want, more important than the lives of the soldiers and the people who will be murdered later?”

Far-right minister says nuking Gaza an option, PM suspends him from cabinet meetings | The Times of Israel

Fortunately Prime Minister Netanyahu disavowed his comments, and suspended Eliyahu from cabinet meetings. Eliyahu should have been fired although doing that would only agitate Itamar Ben-Gvir which could, in turn, threaten Netanyahu’s position.

To make matters worse, our Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel will “control Gaza after the war”. He said he will refuse to invest in defending our southern border and, instead –

“The most important thing is that there will be no more Hamas, that the Strip will be under the operational control of the IDF for years, and that we will not return to the same misconceptions,” he told Channel 12. “We will be there, we will rule there and we will maintain security.”

The last thing we should do is actually go occupy Gaza once our military goals are achieved in Gaza.

In another article, our National Security Minister dismissed the growing violence in Judea and Samaria as “graffiti” where this violence could easily become yet another front for our soldiers. Bear in mind that one of the reasons the IDF was not able to respond quickly to the attacks on 7 October is reportedly because we had troops deployed in Judea and Samaria to address violence between radical Jews in the settlements and their Palestinian neighbours.

Ben Gvir, the leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, reportedly asked why so much attention needed to be given to the “graffiti” Israeli youth are daubing on Palestinian property.

Upon hearing this, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly shot down Ben Gvir and told him the settler violence is much more serious than that, Channel 12 reported.

Amid Shin Bet warnings, Ben Gvir said to dismiss deadly settler violence as ‘graffiti’ | The Times of Israel

Israel is embroiled in a justifiable war against a monstrous force while another seems to be trying to take advantage of this situation to score political points while undermining our efforts to create a more secure Israel going forward.

I don’t care that you’ve rallied for Palestine as part of your march for LGBTQ rights, trans rights, workers rights, socialism, climate change, intersectionality, Black Lives Matter, fighting Islamaphobia and ‘all forms of racism.’

Your gullibility would be laughable if it wasn’t so hypocritical. None of those things exist under Hamas.

I don’t care that you ‘love Jewish people – just hate Israel’, that you have some friends that are Jewish, that maybe you’re ethnically Jewish yourself – and therefore you’re entitled to levy every libel in the playbook against us.

Words matter. They lead to actions. When a lie is repeated often enough it’s accepted as truth. You are laying the groundwork for more attacks against us.

I don’t care that you wave the flag of ‘human rights’, that you’ve become overnight experts in international law, that you shout fancy slogans you don’t understand such as proportionality, occupation and apartheid.

Your humanity is selective. In your mind, human rights don’t apply to us because we are undeserving. You didn’t speak up when our women and children were horribly assaulted.

I don’t care if you think we are colonialists, imperialists and settlers and that we should just go back to where we came from.

We are back to where we came from.

Dear world: I don’t care | Avi Lewis | The Blogs

This war is emotionally draining because we saw our fellow Israelis butchered and kidnapped. To add to this, we have watched Jews being attacked and harassed because they are Jews while thousands protest against Israel’s supposed “genocide”, “occupation” or whatever other descriptions these groups come up with despite our numerous attempts to share the truth of what is actually going on in Gaza.

I am willing to discuss what is going on, and to share my perspective. This war doesn’t just affect Israelis. It affects Palestinian civilians too, no doubt.

At the same time, this is a war for our survival as a nation (that deserves to exist), and as a people (without Israel, Jews will continue to be persecuted and exterminated in the future).

If you support Hamas, refuse to acknowledge our right to exist and to defend ourselves, spout such hateful and false accusations against us, and incite violence against us, then I don’t have time for you. Whatever you are pushing, I’m not interested.

If any country could claim the “Rainbow Nation” banner that South Africa once claimed (perhaps still does), Israel could be such a country. Israeli Jews returned from eastern Europe, north Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere.