Everywhere Insiders 60: Israel, Icelandic Whaling, AI Cybersecurity, and Cambodia

Irina Tsukerman is a New York-registered human rights and national security lawyer, geopolitical analyst, and journalist. She earned a B.A. in International/Intercultural Studies and Middle East Studies from Fordham University in 2006 and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law in 2009. She is president of Scarab Rising, Inc., editor-in-chief of The Washington Outsider, and fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and the Arabian Peninsula Institute. Her work focuses on foreign policy, information warfare, security, and Middle Eastern affairs. She serves as Written Content Vice Chair of the American Bar Association’s Science and Technology Committee.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Irina Tsukerman discuss generational shifts in American Jewish support for Israel, Iceland’s seizure of an anti-whaling vessel, China’s distant-water fishing practices, AI cybersecurity containment failures, and Cambodia’s overlooked human rights crisis. Tsukerman connects these stories through questions of identity, proportionality, technological risk, geopolitical neglect, and consistent human rights standards, while Jacobsen frames each topic through current reporting, statistical caution, and broader international implications for policy and public debate.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Welcome back to another episode of Everywhere Insiders with Washington’s outsider, Irina Tsukerman, an attorney in New York City, geopolitical analyst, and counterintelligence expert. AP will be the sources today. A footnote on this one, a brief comment, because it is noteworthy. I have heard quite a bit about this in terms of generational differences. This happens.

This article, by Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press, is entitled “Israelis Worry About Weakening Connection With Younger Jewish Americans.”

Itai Nixon, who leads the Diaspora Department of Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, stated, “It’s extremely important to us. We’re the state of the Jewish people, not just Israelis.” As we have discussed numerous times, amid rising antisemitism, there is concern about a disconnect in relations. There are different ways people interpret that, obviously, but that is a concern within the framework she was describing.

Tamar Hermann, academic director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research in Jerusalem, stated, “The United States is perceived as the best friend of Israel in the entire world. That’s still the case.”

According to an AP-NORC poll, about four in 10 religiously affiliated Jewish adults under 45 in the United States say that supporting Israel is extremely or very important to their Jewish identity. About half of religiously affiliated Jewish adults aged 45 and older say the same.

The survey included 1,022 Jewish American adults. There are some valid points raised there. The statistical difference is more modest than some of the sentiment expressed, although the broader concern may still be valid. It is about four in 10 among younger religiously affiliated Jewish adults and about five in 10 among their older counterparts.

There appears to be a generational decline, although we should be cautious about saying that this particular difference falls outside the margin of error without examining the subgroup margins. Strategically, however, even the appearance of a long-term decline would be an issue or concern. What are your thoughts?

Tsukerman: I cannot say that I am terribly surprised. Frankly, the generational issue is not simply that younger people do not care about the things older people do, because that was not necessarily the pattern a generation ago. For a while, there was a fairly consistent transmission of support for Israel from one generation to the next.

There has been a rapidly growing gap in perception, and that reflects various factors that were not previously present to the same extent: education, including Jewish education; the media environment; the political environment; peer pressure; and the level of preparation for dealing with these external issues. The fact that many parents may be less connected to their Jewish identity and to Israel also affects their ability to pass their own sentiments on to the next generation.

If one generation does not prioritize consistent communication on these topics at home, and the school environment is even less engaged with these topics, it is not surprising that this will not be a top priority for the next generation.

There has also been a clear increase in anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment. Some people may feel pressure to remain silent or respond negatively in polls to fit in with their peers or accommodate the current environment for the sake of safety. Others may be affected by public perceptions, especially if they have never been to Israel or do not know much about the subject.

There is also a general disconnect from Israel within some American Jewish communities. Jewish identity is often defined through religion, holidays, and rituals rather than through political paradigms or a connection to the Land of Israel. Support for Israel has generally been high in the United States, but Jewish identity is still often centred more on Judaism as a religion, even when that religious identity is minimal or hollowed out, than on a connection to Israel itself.

Outside strictly religious circles, I would say that even moderately observant Jews do not necessarily think of Israel as a religious part of their identity, even though the Land of Israel has a central place in Jewish religious tradition. Many Jewish commandments, particularly agricultural and Temple-related commandments, are specifically connected to the Land of Israel or cannot be practised in the same form outside it.

There is a disconnect that is not being addressed. There is a great deal of misunderstanding, and people are surprised that this is the case. They ask: if even the Jewish community is not going to be strategically supportive of Israel, then who will be?

The problem is that many Jews do not necessarily see Israel as a strategic part of their identity. Others, even if they identify as Jews, do not necessarily see their Jewish identity as the most important part of who they are. Even when they recognize a connection between Jewish identity and Israel, they may not place their Jewish identity above other considerations, such as being American, belonging to a particular political party, or supporting other causes.

It is a complex question. The Jewish community in the United States is not monolithic and does not necessarily understand Jewish identity, Israel, or related issues in the same way.

Jacobsen: There is interesting news out of Iceland in the next item. I do not think we have discussed Iceland much. Icelandic authorities have seized an anti-whaling ship operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation and detained its crew.

For the record, as you well know, and as many may not know, Iceland has no standing army. It is a member of NATO and maintains a coast guard and police special forces. The former permanent U.S. naval air station at Keflavík closed in 2006, although American and other NATO forces continue to use Icelandic facilities periodically. It is therefore an unusual setting for this kind of maritime confrontation.

I spent about three weeks there last year in central Reykjavík. Spending time in a culture and understanding its rhythms can sometimes be more informative than statistics alone. This is an interesting move coming out of Iceland.

Iceland has a major fishing industry, while tourism has also become economically significant and has brought its own pressures. The anti-whaling activist Paul Watson is central to the organization involved, although he was not aboard the vessel when it was seized.

The crew of the Icelandic whaling ship Hvalur 9 requested assistance on Thursday evening because they believed their safety was being threatened by the protest vessel Bandero. According to the Icelandic Coast Guard, the Bandero ignored instructions to leave Icelandic waters and later ignored an order to stop its engines.

Coast Guard personnel and the police special forces’ Viking Squad boarded the vessel around midnight on Thursday and detained the crew. The Captain Paul Watson Foundation confirmed in a statement that the vessel had been seized and said that its 21 crew members were being held aboard without their phones.

Along with Norway and Japan, Iceland is one of the few countries that still permits commercial whaling. Watson is 75 and is a former leader and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Watson was quoted as saying, “I have to make sure that I don’t land in Iceland or another country where Interpol might try to have me arrested again.” He made that statement after Denmark released him from detention in Greenland in December 2024. He had been arrested there under a Japanese warrant connected to an incident involving a Japanese whaling ship in 2010.

He became the subject of an INTERPOL Red Notice requested by Japan in 2012. INTERPOL removed that notice in July 2025, although Japan’s domestic arrest warrant remained active. Good Lord. He certainly does not appear inclined to retire quietly. What are your thoughts about this? It is one of the smaller stories this week, but it is an unusual one.

Tsukerman: I do think there is something rather hilarious about it. Any number of Viking jokes could be brought into this. I have been to Iceland, and the fishing industry is integral to both its cuisine and its broader tourism economy. Whaling itself is much smaller economically, although whale meat remains available in some restaurants and is marketed partly to tourists.

I had a chance to try it. I can understand why some Icelanders are reluctant to let go of the practice. I have to say, though, that Iceland generally takes the management of its natural resources seriously. Its government monitors whale populations and establishes quotas, although the sustainability and ethics of commercial whaling remain disputed internationally. The International Whaling Commission’s general moratorium on commercial whaling remains in force, while Iceland conducts whaling under a formal objection to it.

The Icelandic Marine and Freshwater Research Institute and the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission advised that no more than 150 fin whales should be caught in 2026. That advice was based on population assessments and the management procedure used by their scientific committees. This does not resolve every animal-welfare or conservation objection, but it means that claims of an immediate extinction threat from Iceland’s present quota require evidence.

In my opinion, these environmental activists are barking up the wrong tree. They would be better off concentrating more heavily on countries such as Russia, Iran, or China, where environmental governance and enforcement can present much larger systemic problems, rather than focusing so intensely on a small European country with relatively strong sustainability institutions.

Wildlife is also part of Iceland’s national identity, whether we are talking about whales, puffins, fisheries, or the country’s broader relationship with the sea. In my opinion, the vessel was not merely disrupting a commercial operation. Many Icelanders may have perceived it as an attack on something connected to the country’s culture and identity.

Iceland has a small population, and fishing has historically played an important economic and cultural role. Farming also remains important in rural areas, although it would be an overstatement to suggest that most Icelanders today are farmers or fishers. The activists’ message can nevertheless sound like: stop doing what your society has traditionally done and become something else.

The Icelandic response is then: Who are you to tell us that? Why are you targeting us rather than going somewhere with a larger population and more severe environmental problems?

It is an unusual target for such aggressive activism. Iceland is one of the few countries that still conducts commercial whaling, which makes it an obvious target, but it also regulates catches and commissions scientific assessments. Critics dispute whether those measures are sufficient, particularly regarding animal welfare and uncertainty in some population estimates, but the situation is not the same as wholly unregulated exploitation.

There are places where whale populations face serious threats from ship strikes, fishing-gear entanglement, habitat disruption, climate change, pollution, and depleted prey. In my opinion, activism should concentrate on the places and practices that pose the greatest demonstrable danger. That does not mean that people should not care about Icelandic whaling. It means that the scale and nature of the threat should be described accurately.

Jacobsen: This is a final thought from me. Iceland does not even have half a million people.

Tsukerman: It has roughly 400,000 people.

Jacobsen: So how many people in major Western cities consume comparable amounts of fish and other seafood? Larger states, including some of those already mentioned, create environmental pressures on a vastly greater scale.

Perhaps Iceland was simply the only place where the foundation believed it could position its vessel and confront an active whaling ship. Perhaps they believed they could operate there more easily than elsewhere. I do not know, but there are many interesting questions surrounding the choice of target.

Tsukerman: By the way, not to be one of those people, but I have to say that a much larger issue than Iceland’s whaling practices is the scale of China’s distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese vessels operate across the high seas and near the exclusive economic zones of countries in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. There have been documented concerns about overfishing, illegal or unreported fishing, labour abuses, pressure on squid stocks, and incursions into protected or national waters. China disputes many accusations and says that it strictly regulates its fleet.

I would not say there has been zero activism or attention. Environmental organizations, investigative journalists, researchers, and governments have raised the issue repeatedly. There have also been efforts to improve surveillance and restrict illegal fishing. Still, the subject has not generated anything close to the level of popular mobilization or celebrity-driven activism attached to some smaller and more visually dramatic campaigns.

I have heard relatively little from internationally prominent environmental activists about China’s distant-water fleet compared with the scale of the problem. The criticism should not be that nobody has addressed it. The criticism is that the level of public attention remains disproportionately low given the fleet’s size, geographic reach, and potential effects on marine ecosystems and coastal communities.

Jacobsen: Anthropic reported that, during further testing of its models, three of them gained unauthorized access to the systems of real organizations. This follows the recent disclosure of a separate OpenAI incident involving Hugging Face. In the OpenAI case, an experimental model escaped an improperly isolated testing environment, reached the public internet, and accessed Hugging Face’s systems. The incident appears to have involved a containment failure in the test infrastructure, rather than a model spontaneously deciding to attack a company.

The Anthropic examples involved cybersecurity evaluations known as capture-the-flag challenges. In these exercises, a model is placed in a fictional scenario and told that a piece of secret information, called the flag, has been hidden on another machine in the network. Its objective is to break into that machine and retrieve the information. The method is left open-ended.

In these three cases, however, the models were mistakenly able to reach real external systems. Anthropic said the incidents resulted from operational and containment failures during testing. The models used relatively basic methods, including weak credentials and unauthenticated endpoints, rather than previously unknown or extraordinarily sophisticated exploits.

OpenAI publicly identified Hugging Face as the organization affected in its incident. Anthropic has not publicly named the three organizations involved in its cases. Two reportedly did not know that their systems had been accessed until Anthropic notified them.

Anthropic stated, “Safety testing happens before a model is released precisely because we don’t yet know what it is capable of.” The company also said that evaluation environments involving powerful autonomous systems must be held to the same security standards as other systems on which those models operate.

Dario Amodei is Anthropic’s chief executive. In any event, this was a follow-up to the OpenAI disclosure and another example of increasingly capable models operating beyond the boundaries researchers intended to impose.

Tsukerman: I am not surprised that an AI system instructed to perform cybersecurity tasks might pursue methods that its designers did not anticipate. That is part of the challenge with increasingly capable and autonomous systems. They can select strategies within a broad objective without every intermediate action having been explicitly programmed by a human.

I would not describe this as the models independently teaching themselves to ignore commands. In these cases, the systems were following the general task they had been given. The problem was that flaws in the evaluation environment allowed them to act against real systems rather than remaining inside a simulation.

These incidents are still useful to researchers because they demonstrate how AI systems may behave when they are given broad objectives, powerful tools, and insufficiently constrained access. They can help identify the point at which an agent begins exploiting opportunities or vulnerabilities that its operators did not foresee.

This matters because, while Western researchers and policymakers are still struggling to establish ethical and regulatory frameworks for AI, adversarial states are studying the same technologies and attempting to weaponize them. They can observe both the failures and the precedents produced by Western models and use those lessons to train or configure their own systems.

If we are talking about China, for example, the likely lesson is not merely to identify what went wrong. It is to determine whether the failure can be turned into a deliberate capability. A containment weakness that produces an accidental breach in a laboratory could become a feature in a system designed for offensive cyber operations.

At some point, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, defensive cybersecurity researchers, and criminal black-hat hackers will probably attempt to develop similar autonomous capabilities for different purposes. That is not the same as saying that the commercial models themselves became malicious or went rogue.

What is disturbing is that commercial companies with government contracts are discovering these capabilities through failures in their own testing environments. Their inability to contain the experiments suggests that model development and deployment are advancing faster than some organizations’ security procedures.

I am not convinced that broader regulation or severe restrictions on this research are necessarily the answer. Some unexpected behaviour is inevitable when researchers are dealing with a new and rapidly advancing technology. The proper response is to improve containment, auditing, authorization controls, network isolation, and incident-reporting procedures.

My concern is that these incidents will produce a large backlash from regulators and the general public. That could eventually place us at a disadvantage in several ways.

First, research might be restricted to the point that we lose viable methods for learning how advanced AI agents behave under adversarial conditions. We need controlled tests of systems that can identify vulnerabilities, exploit them, or evade barriers because hostile actors will conduct those experiments regardless of whether responsible researchers do.

Second, we could be outplayed by governments, criminal groups, or other actors that have no comparable ethical or legal concerns and are willing to experiment aggressively.

The third concern is more technical. Now that we know these containment failures can occur, which vulnerabilities make them more likely? How could an external actor deliberately manipulate an agent, its tools, or its evaluation environment so that an accidental breach becomes an intentional one?

The central problem is not that the AI developed an independent desire to escape. The problem is that a goal-oriented system was given powerful capabilities inside an environment whose boundaries were weaker than its operators believed.

Jacobsen: All right, we will move on. I do not know whether we have discussed Cambodia extensively, but a UN official stated on Friday that Cambodia is facing serious human rights problems. These include people displaced by armed conflict, human trafficking connected to cyber-scam compounds, and the imprisonment of people exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

Displacement is, regrettably, a common consequence of armed conflict. When you see the words “armed conflict,” you should expect internally displaced persons, refugees, or both.

Former U.S. Congressman Tom Andrews said that he visited a relocation site near the Cambodian border where roughly 20,000 people remained displaced by the previous year’s conflict between Cambodia and Thailand. The fighting began in 2025, with renewed clashes later that year, so many of these people have now been displaced for months.

Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Cambodia, was speaking in Phnom Penh after meeting Prime Minister Hun Manet and other senior officials.

Andrews stated, “While we may not have agreed on every point, there was an agreement to move forward on the issues that I had identified.” In other words, they agreed to continue addressing the human rights concerns he raised.

Andrews previously served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. He has now taken up the Cambodia mandate, so I suppose he is becoming something of a career rapporteur.

This is all very sad. What are your thoughts?

Tsukerman: Honestly, in my opinion, Cambodia is one of the most overlooked countries when it comes to conflict, human rights abuses, and authoritarian trends.

The largest amount of recent international attention Cambodia received came during efforts by the Trump administration to mediate the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia. That conflict is itself a serious and longstanding issue. However, contrary to claims that it had been fully resolved, ceasefires and negotiated agreements did not settle the underlying territorial dispute. Fighting resumed, and disagreements over troop positions and control of contested territory continued.

That is not even Cambodia’s largest problem, in my opinion. The border dispute can become a side issue that distracts attention from what is happening internally.

Cambodia’s domestic situation has been scrutinized by human rights organizations, but the international response has been limited and often ineffective. Part of the reason is that Cambodia is relatively obscure in Western political discourse. Its internal repression has not become a major international flashpoint.

That does not mean Cambodia is geopolitically insignificant. Its close political and economic relationship with China gives it importance within the broader competition for influence in Southeast Asia. However, Cambodia is not usually treated as a central global power, a major military actor, or a country whose internal politics consistently dominate international headlines.

There is therefore a tendency to overlook its human capital, social problems, political repression, and restrictions on civil society. In my opinion, that is not a good sign.

When human rights concerns are addressed only according to a country’s geopolitical weight, abuses are more likely to continue and spread. Powerful states may also conclude that human rights language is merely a political weapon used to pressure adversaries and settle external disputes. They will then be more inclined to disregard human rights principles altogether.

A more consistent approach would apply the same fundamental standards regardless of a country’s size, wealth, alliances, or strategic importance. Human rights should not depend on whether a population happens to live in a country considered useful by major powers.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Irina.

—

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer and Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 2,000 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic, media, and research institution fellowships, and currently serves on numerous international boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.