Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now? Making this jump to liken it to Epstein or Palantir is kinda wild imo
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now?
Yes, absolutely. Profiting from servers under genocidal control is literally being materially tied to genocide.
Like I hear what you're saying. I'm on the fuck Israel train as much as everyone but how does them hosting servers in that region support genocide? Are they giving money to the Israeli government? Defending the IDF?
Like there is McDonald's in Israel does that mean McDonald's is complicit in genocide? (I actually don't know if they give money to support Israel but my point is more broad than that and might be a bad example)
Edit: Also for the McD's example I guess they make money off of Israelis but I still posit that is different to a large degree with being complicit in genocide.
hosting servers in that region support genocide?
yes, it's occupied land, it's not like those servers are in tunnels in Gaza, paying fees to Palestinians
It's the same in many places, and more often than not israel is held up as a special example
Fuck McDonald's too tbh
It's not about supporting genocide that I'm concerned about over here per se (though it's obviously not a good look), it's the fact that the region is known for surveillance through any comms that enter it.
Unrelated, but yes, people against genocide literally boycott any businesses that operate in Israel, including McDonalds. BDS movement, for example.
Remember me of a guy who said that being paid by the CIA doesnt mean youre actually working for the CIA.
Doing any business with or in Israel is being materially tied to Israel.
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Having exit nodes for their VPN is not the same as collaborating with the government. There is no evidence that the Israeli government has access to any of their information, their servers are hosted in Switzerland.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't running a VPN to a region require you to have a server in that region?
I wouldn't assume they aren't able to grab it all. Both the US and all 5 eye countries, and Israel, should be avoided if possible, to have nothing passing through their servers. Not that other countries won't also grab it as they can, but Israel by extension of the US has things compromised on a base level.
I have my issues with proton because of its CEO and some weird decisions for their product lone and don't use them at all. I.e. I won't defend this company.
Such a claim without source and explanation or interpretation of assumed implications are pure fear mongering.
Because of this: my advice is to decouple your privacy concerns and thoughts from politics in the first degree (rhetoric and hearsay). Base it ok policies, observable behavior, audits, laws and so on..your example: exit nodes for VPNs don't have an impact on security at all in neither direction. Hosting infrastructure there would (i.e. it would increase potential access and put the infrastructure under additional legal requirements).
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Do you have information on proton's Israel links? I know they used radware several years ago but no longer do.
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Source?
I'm a big fan of mullvad
Mulvad is the first group that really gets me. Good because they care about the idea, cheap because they aren't trying to choke me for money, and they take cash.
but doesnt mullvad have an exit node in Isreal too? Wouldnt that just be the same boat this person (OP) put proton in for?
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You have the ability to whip up this BS about proton, but a web search for “private email provider” was too much?
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Bad news, the sun shines in Israel and provides illegal settlers with vitamin D therefore it must have ties to genocide. BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!!
BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!
we already are, that's why there's no mass adoption of solar panels and electric vehicles in most of the world despite both being dirt cheap from china and we've doubled down on drilling/extracting fossil fuels to the highest levels ever in history while simultaneously quadrupling our energy usage via datacenters for AI.
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Your ties to Israel claim is more than just a little specious.
Mullvad, widely considered the gold standard for privacy, allows the user to select a server in Israel.
Aside from that nugget, consider not worrying too much about perfect email secrecy. Email isnt private, was never intended to be and has many, many vectors of attack which are so well documented and in such common use that ISPs have attacked email simply to promote end users running their service instead of the competition.
One VPN being openly corrupted doesn't make another openly corrupted VPN safe.
I can only read this as the first vpn you refer to being mullvad and the second being proton.
It’s hard to understand how you can come to the conclusion that a vpn offering exit nodes (wrong terminology but bear with me) in a bad country makes the vpn service bad.
One of the types of traffic shaping and monitoring that vpns are used to avoid is geofencing, where your ip address is a determinant of how your traffic is treated.
Users who are outside the bad country but want to be treated by its internet as if they are inside would use a vpn server inside the bad country.
Users who are inside the bad country and want to make a connection to the internet outside the bad country without being observed would use a vpn server inside the bad country.
Users whose internet backbone goes through the bad country would be well served by the vpn servers in the bad country.
There are many other situations where a vpn with servers inside a bad country might be useful, but those are just a few.
To put an extremely fine point on what I’m saying: mullvad users in gaza are well served by the single Tel Aviv mullvad server for self evident reasons. They must lean harder than others on mullvads unloggable design, the same one that caused Interpol to have their servers blacklisted until they disallowed port forwarding, but based on the history of that design and law enforcements inability to make hay out of it I think those users are safe.
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Mullvad or ivpn for vpn, tutanota or posteo for mail.
Also stop looking at advertisements for privacy tools and services.
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There are plenty of problems with Proton, but since they have a VPN service it means they probably have an exit node in Israhell. I'm pretty sure any VPN that masks traffic as coming from Israhell will do the same. I'm not saying that it's not worth looking for one that doesn't do business in Israhell, it just might be hard to find. If you ever need to exit through that node, just make sure your encryption is maxed, with quantum encryption preferably, and avoid doing anything sensitive over that node.
Not sure why people would downvote this completely reasonable question.
Unfortunately I don't know of any VPN services that actively oppose genocide. I would like to know as well.
It's part of the misery of living in the imperial core. The whole of capitalism is based on genocide, etc.
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Ties to Israel are never a good thing.
I think we're on the same page but you might be exaggerating a bit here. Everything is connected in this world.
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