How AI Took Control of Israel's Killing Machine in Gaza - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Religious fundamentalism has been identified as the main cause of the October 7 attack. The name Hamas gave it, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the barbaric cruelty, the fanatical messianic ideology behind it, all show that extreme religious belief led to the greatest catastrophe in the history of the State of Israel.
Israel's response to the attack has nothing to do with religion. Israelis see it as a war of no choice, a rational response to acts of madness, an existential war that must end with a total victory over Hamas and the organization's collapse. War entails costs. It can't be helped – we live in a time of cost-benefit considerations.
- Israel's right-wing incitement leads to violence, and it will end in blood
- Israel is lost and Netanyahu has no idea where he's taking us
- The Palestinian death toll in Gaza is Israel's biggest taboo
According to data from the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Health Ministry, which the Israeli military also relies on, over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began six months ago. According to figures released Sunday by the Israel Defense Forces, during that period around 12,000 militants were killed in the Strip. It follows from this that all of the other deaths were of noncombatants, including more than 13,000 children and about 9,000 women.
The prevailing view in Israel explains the dimensions of the death and destruction as the result of Hamas' use of civilians as human shields, but this is only a partial explanation. An investigative report by Yuval Avraham, published on April 3 on +972 Magazine and its sister site, the Hebrew-language Sicha Mekomit ("Local Call") presents the artificial intelligence mechanism the IDF relies on to attack its targets and points out a number of important issues.
Israeli soldiers rest on top of their tank on the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Monday.Credit: Tsafrir Abayov,AP
These include, but are not limited to, overly permissive marking of targets (including junior militants and people who were later identified as civilians); deliberately attacking targets while they were at home; cursory human verification – less than a minute – of targets prior to approval; the wide use of unguided munitions, or "dumb bombs," that can destroy an entire apartment building, killing all its occupants; and the use of automated software that inaccurately calculates the number of noncombatants present in a target's home.
The investigation raises the question of whether extensive reliance on AI as well as raising the number of civilians who may be killed for every militant killed explain, at least partially, the enormous number of noncombatants killed in Gaza.
The use of advanced technology for mass killing demonstrates what the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir calls the "secularization of catastrophe." According to Ophir, in the Bible, divine violence establishes and defines the relationship between the sovereign (God) and the people; in the process of secularization, modern governments expropriate the catastrophic violence. Ophir analyzes the actions of the biblical God. He writes about the flood, the first megadisaster, which the Bible presents as a "proportionate" punishment; about the Tower of Babel and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – "the Hiroshima and Nagasaki of their age." All of them are catastrophic divine punishments for human sins. In all of them, the connection between the sin and the punishment is not entirely clear, and certainly not the proportions.
In the current secular version, it is not an angry god that causes catastrophe, but an algorithm. There are two seemingly contradictory images: an ancient deity and messianic cults that kill in its name, and Western rationalism that uses ultramodern technology.
But there is a similarity: In both, human judgment is negated, and with it, humanity itself. In both cases, a dimension of arbitrariness is introduced and compassion is erased. Even the "slight bump to the wing" is missing from AI-guided airstrikes. The role of humans in these imprecisely targeted hits contracts until it almost disappears. The result: violence that is as destructive as the worst divine violence.