Avihai apatoff

@Smash_Dog24 @siaxares As an Israeli I must correct you. You needn’t get Islam out of Iran, but you needn’t to get Islamist jihadism out of it. There are plenty of good people among us, good Muslim people.

@siaxares I'm American, I can only imagine it must be beyond frustrating. I hear you, please know America will continue to support all of you in getting islam out of Iran. Please stay safe my country's military will continue to help.

Day 35 of war with Iran and only 1% of the population have internet. That 1% isn’t normal citizens. The vast majority are regime agents on white SIM cards — the ones the government still keeps online so they can flood every platform with their narrative. People like me with Starlink or expensive configs? We’re 1% of that 1%. A tiny, fragile window to the outside world. And sometimes it feels crushing. Every single day I’m trying to push back against the tsunami of propaganda the regime and its supporters (both inside Iran and abroad) are pumping out. Every lie, every edited video, every twisted narrative. I screenshot, I translate, I document, I reply, I post, I repost… and I still catch myself thinking: Am I doing enough? Because when almost nobody else can even get online, it starts to feel like the truth is resting on the shoulders of a handful of us who have to fight tooth and nail to still have signal. If you’re reading this and you still have internet, you’re not just scrolling. You’re one of the last witnesses. Don’t look away. Be our voice. #DigitalBlackOutIran‌ #KingRezaPahlavi‌ForIran

@MarioNawfal He just proves the point that every american president was absolutely free to say no, and Trump CHOSE to go for it. This guy is just anti Israel, he prefers trashing Israel before giving agency to a U.S. president

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou: "All my years in the CIA, no matter who led Israel, they came to the United States and asked, ‘Help us strike Iran.’ Every president refused, until this one. Now we are in a war that was not ours."

@UNRWA I’m sure Hamas took that into consideration when launching the war, after years of embedding their military infrastructure into schools and day cares. It just didn’t make it as a priority this time, so sorry

In #Gaza, hundreds of thousands of children have been out of formal school since October 2023.  With UNRWA support, learning activities continue: nearly 60,000 children in shelters and over 280,000 through digital platforms took part in learning activities, between 9 and 15 March.  #UNRWAworks to keep children learning, but we must be allowed to do much more.

@sabah999 @UNGeneva You know that there are other crossings right?

#Lebanon: Frequent violations of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for a full cessation of hostilities, are consistently reported to the UN Security Council. What exactly is UNSCR 1701 all about? Here’s what you need to know👉 buff.ly/qBEF9ap

@DrTedros What’s really courageous is to actually do something in this world rather to hide behind big words like peace

You cannot bomb your way to trust, nor can you shoot your way to lasting safety. The history of the Middle East has reminded us of this truth time and again. Every new act of violence deepens wounds, fuels resentment, and sows the seeds of conflict for years to come. If we seek a future free of fear and mourning, we must first stop feeding the flames of hate and violence. The path forward, our only path forward, is the hard, courageous choice to build peace. #ChoosePeace

@DrTedros Sorry, but empty words. Nothing specific about it, no geopolitical context, no mention of the Iranian people, of their tyrannical regime, and therefore all assumptions about feelings of ME people are just unicorn wish talk worthy of a beauty pageant

@DavidG106743970 @GuntherEagleman Well it doesn’t work like that, tremendous organizational knowledge and experience goes away, possibly even access to plans and secrets

@GuntherEagleman 50 more will replace them. Are we gonna do this forever?? I thought we took out all of their nuclear capabilities 6 months ago?? WTF are we doing?

🚨 US strike just KILLED 50 SENIOR IRANIAN LEADERS Fox News reporting. This comes right after President Trump dropped the raw video of the strike.

@ChopinSanj @ethanagarwal Hmm

@ethanagarwal Israel is a welfare queen. Any Congress member that pushes for funds to Israel while we have 39 trillion in debt, and Americans dying from food & Healthcare insecurity deserve to be tried for treason. This nonsense about Israel is something out of the Matrix. Pure insanity.

Israel already does pay for a substantial portion of the Iron Dome. But that's not the point. Israel is a strategic ally. Strengthening the relationship helps Americans. Some of the U.S. funding is required to be spent in the United States, helping us directly. But importantly, the U.S. uses Iron Dome cooperation to gain access to missile-defense technology, testing, and battlefield data which inform American systems. Also remember, the Dome is purely defensive. Helping an ally defend themselves is a good thing for America, strategically and morally.

@MSF You chose not to register. Telling white lies and half truths just boomerang to your face

We haven't been able to bring any new equipment into Gaza since the beginning of this year, as Israeli authorities block aid from entering. We're using equipment we have used for a long time, meaning it can malfunction and severely impact our patients' recovery. msf.org/gaza-israeli-e…

@BillAckman @X Praying for your daughter’s full recovery ❤️‍🩹

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@BillAckman @X It’s an important example for stepping up against extortion and mob rule, part of the ANTI shaming cancelation and appeasement zeitgeist that must be strived for and empowered. You’re doing a huge favor for western society

@JohnWight1 Hehe

@JohnWight1 You’re full of contradictions and ignorance. Genealogy by itself does not determine peoplehood or cultural link. It’s the narratives and culture that spans centuries that keeps the link between Jews and the land of Israel. If you follow genetics, it’s just a new race theory

Palestine predates Judea, Samaria and Galilee by centuries. The Palestinians of today are the Hebrews of yesterday, and the Hebrews of yesterday are the Canaanites of the day before that. Israelis today are the non-semitic product of a white European settler colonial project. Ideology not history or genealogy informed the modern state of Israel's establishment in 1948.

One picture - a thousand words: The IDF reservist father protected his baby son with his body under fire on the way to the Seder ❤️‍🩹

@aa22396584 @aakashgupta It’s not unique to religious families. Secular do it too. But it could still be the influence of religious families that normalize having many kids.

Culture and community cohesion probably explain more than income alone. Israel's strong religious identity and tight-knit communities create social incentives for large families that purely economic models just can't capture. The "affluence → fewer kids" rule needs a cultural variable.

Israel breaks this chart in half. GDP per capita comparable to Germany. Housing costs higher than anywhere in Europe. One of the most educated populations on earth. TFR of 2.9, nearly double the OECD average. The correlation between income and fertility is real, but calling it a "self-defeating mechanism" confuses the map for the territory. Income is a proxy for a bundle of things that happen simultaneously when countries modernize: urbanization, female education, career optionality, contraceptive access, and a cultural shift from family-as-economic-unit to individual-as-meaning-unit. Israel has all of those inputs. And secular Jewish women there still have near-replacement fertility of ~2.0. College-educated Israeli women out-reproduce non-educated European women. The gap between Israeli and European fertility is actually wider among the educated than the uneducated. What Israel has that Germany, Japan, and South Korea don't: a shared sense that building the next generation is the point. Social solidarity so thick that grandparents live within driving distance of nearly every child. A culture where having three kids at 35 with a graduate degree is normal, not sacrificial. Sweden, Germany, and South Korea have all spent enormous sums on pro-natal benefits. Their TFRs: 1.42, 1.36, and 0.73. You cannot subsidize your way out of a culture that has deprioritized reproduction. The mechanism here isn't economic. It's existential. Countries that believe they're building something have kids. Countries optimizing for individual optionality don't. The "final boss" framing makes this feel like physics. It isn't. It's a story about what cultures decide matters.

¿Se dan cuenta las personas de que si Israel cometiera un genocidio, simplemente podría cortar todos los servicios básicos? Pero no lo hacen. ¿Por qué? Israel suministra anualmente a la Franja de Gaza 18.000 millones de litros de agua a través de tres oleoductos. No por obligación, sino por voluntad propia. Además, Israel comenzó a transportar diariamente a Gaza, a su propio costo, casi 60.000 litros de gasóleo para mantener en funcionamiento los generadores. Para julio de 2024, desde el inicio de la guerra, Israel había entregado 40.035 toneladas de agua directamente a Gaza. Ese mismo mes, Israel conectó una planta desalinizadora gestionada por UNICEF en Khan Younis a su propia red eléctrica, produciendo 20 000 metros cúbicos de agua potable al día para casi dos millones de personas. En noviembre de 2024, la planta de Deir el-Balah también se reconectó completamente a la red eléctrica israelí; funcionó las 24 horas del día, produciendo entre 16 000 y 20 000 metros cúbicos de agua al día para más de 600 000 palestinos. Durante toda la guerra, Israel nunca ha reducido el suministro eléctrico a Cisjordania: más de 1.300 megavatios fluyen diariamente sin interrupción a la misma población que supuestamente está siendo sometida a un genocidio. Así sería un genocidio en la práctica: simplemente te detienes. Un clic y se acabó. No conectas las plantas desalinizadoras de tu enemigo a tu red eléctrica. No suministras diésel a tu costa. Y no produces agua potable para los dos millones de personas que supuestamente quieres exterminar. La palabra genocidio tiene una definición legal: la intención de destruir a un grupo, ya sea total o parcialmente. Israel cuenta con un historial documentado de haber mantenido con vida a personas durante una guerra, una guerra iniciada por quienes pretenden destruir a Israel. No es lo mismo. Ni de cerca. De Kile B. Jones en Facebook

FACTS Warning - The post may trigger sensitivity among Western students, please share. A brief history lesson for Western students calling to "restore Palestine": 1. -Before Israel's establishment, the region was under the British Mandate, not a Palestinian state. 2. -Before that, it was part of the Ottoman Empire, not a Palestinian state. 3. -Before the Ottomans, the area was ruled by the Mamluk Sultanate, not a Palestinian state. 4-. Earlier, it was under the Ayyubid Dynasty, not a Palestinian state. 5. -Before the Ayyubids, the region was controlled by the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, not a Palestinian state. 6. -Before the Crusaders, it was part of the Fatimid Caliphate, not a Palestinian state. 7. -Before the Fatimids, the area was under the Abbasid Caliphate, not a Palestinian state. 8. -Earlier, it was part of the Umayyad Caliphate, not a Palestinian state. 9. -Before the Umayyads, the region was within the Byzantine Empire, not a Palestinian state. 10. -Before Byzantine rule, it was under the Roman Empire, not a Palestinian state. 11-. Before the Romans, the area was the Hasmonean Kingdom, a Jewish state. 12. -Earlier, it was part of the Seleucid Empire, not a Palestinian state. 13. -Before the Seleucids, it was conquered by Alexander the Great, not a Palestinian state. 14. -Before Alexander, it was under the Persian Achaemenid Empire, not a Palestinian state. 15. -Before the Persians, the region was controlled by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, not a Palestinian state. 16. -Earlier, it was the Kingdom of Judah, a Jewish state. 17. -Before Judah, there was the Kingdom of Israel, a Jewish state. 18. -Before the United Monarchy, the land was inhabited by the Twelve Tribes of Israel, not a Palestinian state. 19. -Before the Israelite tribes, the region comprised various Canaanite city-states, not a Palestinian state. Throughout history, numerous empires and states have governed this region, but a sovereign Palestinian state has never existed-

A new study from Indiana University just analyzed 2,335 YouTube Shorts and 94,000+ video frames from major international news outlets covering the Israel-Hamas war. The data on media bias is staggering, yet unsurprising 🧵

BREAKING: The Politico reporter who glorified Francesca Albanese just DELETED his X account—after we began to expose his posts on “the Jewish lobby” controlling U.S. policy. “Banks? Stock market?” x.com/UNWatch/status… But Karl, the Internet is forever: archive.ph/H7o8c

Israel is depopulating South Lebanon to create a no-man's-land military buffer zone and keep Hezbollah away from targeting Israeli northerners. The only problem is that, because Israel punishes only Hezbollah and its enablers, 15 South Lebanese Christian villages were not harmed and their residents continue to live there in peace. How can a depopulated buffer zone be created with some 75,000 Lebanese Christians still living in it, especially since Israel’s control will likely be conditioned on Lebanon enforcing UN Res 1701 and disarming Hezbollah? If Lebanon does that, the land goes back. For these Christians, if they’re seen as cooperating with Israel and living under its rule, returning to Lebanese sovereignty would make them treasonous. This is why these Christians are shouting as hard as they can to make sure the state abandoned them and left them with no choice. That way, when the time comes and the land is given back to Lebanon, they won't be held accountable. My advice to these Christians: Assume that the next back you’re under Lebanese sovereignty, Beirut would have normalized ties with Jerusalem, which makes living under Israeli rule not treasonous for you. The picture is a letter signed by the mayors of the 15 villages explaining their position.