With Gaza war and Trump’s return, Silicon Valley embraces a military renaissance
At Israel’s first DefenseTech Summit, corporate leaders and army officials openly touted their partnership in AI-driven warfare and surveillance.
On Dec. 10, Israeli military officials, weapons manufacturers, and American venture capitalists gathered at Tel Aviv University for the first ever DefenseTech Summit. The two day affair featured panels on “The Future of Global Conflict,” “Challenges of Iron Swords” (the IDF’s name for the war in Gaza) and “Exploring Innovation in Drone Technology.” Representatives from Palantir, Sequoia Capital, and Elbit shared the stage with the Director General of the IDF and the head of LOTEM, the army unit devoted to big data and AI.
I arrived early on Tuesday morning and stood in line to pick up my entry badge with representatives from Google Cloud and uniformed soldiers from MAFAT, the Israeli army’s research and development wing. The event was packed full of tech workers, military representatives, and American investors eager to network.
Officially, the DefenseTech Summit was meant to showcase “Israel’s cutting edge technologies and strategies for addressing global security.” But the event felt more like a celebration of a new and unrestrained era of techno-militarization inaugurated by Donald Trump’s reelection.
Partnerships between Israel’s military and American venture capitalists and corporate heads are expected to ramp up under the Trump administration. Trump’s planned “government efficiency drive,” overseen by Elon Musk, champions joint projectsbetween big defense contractors and smaller tech firms, especially in areas like AI and drone warfare. As Palantir’s Noam Perski put it in his speech on Tuesday morning, “All these people who used to be tech bros are now defense tech bros.”
Many American proponents of the overhaul are hardcore defenders of Israeli military strategy in Gaza over the last year. They cite Israel’s rapidly spinning door between the military and start-up sector as a model to be emulated — and a handful traveled to Ramat Aviv for the occasion.
Attendees at DefenseTech Summit at Tel Aviv University, December 10, 2024 (DefenseTech Summit)
The American investors, with their leather shoes, designer button-ups, and botox, stood apart from the Israeli tech bros sporting Nike t-shirts, skinny jeans, and sun-damage. But the buffet in the lobby was a veritable melting pot. High ranking generals and intelligence soldiers straight off the base chatted with billionaires over cappuccinos. Everyone was eager to talk about AI, sky-rocketing investments in military industries, and Elon Musk.
The optimism buoying these war industries is not tempered by the ongoing devastation in Gaza, one of the most fatal conflicts for civilians in recent history. Charges of war crimes at the ICC and of genocide at the ICJ have done little to deter Israel’s far-right government, and at the conference — as in Israeli public discourse writ large — the official line continued to bend, obstinately, toward righteous victory. “This is a war between good and bad,” Director General of the Israeli Army Eyal Zamir offered in his opening remarks. “It is a war between light and darkness, and soon we will light the Hanukkah candles.”
Nati Amsterdam, Country Director at Nvidia Israel, speaks at DefenseTech Summit, Tel Aviv, December 10, 2024 (DefenseTech Summit)
It is a narrative that would sound cheesy if it did not cohere with the Manichean worldview embraced by Silicon Valley’s hawks, now ascending the ranks of American political power. Among the most influential firms is Palantir, the software company known for providing AI-assisted surveillance and targeting software to both the U.S. and Israel.
“(After October 7,) demand for our products skyrocketed dramatically. Suddenly all doors opened,” General Manager of Palantir Israel, Ayelet Gilan, told Forbes Israel in November. “A rare opportunity for collaborations was created here, and we managed to create relationships that led to joint projects.”
Palantir’s company vision was distilled by CEO Alex Karp at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum, held in Simi Valley California just a few days before the Tel Aviv summit. “People want to live in peace, they want to go home — they do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology,” he exclaimed. “They want to know they are safe and safe means that the other person is scared: that’s how you make someone safe.”
‘Defense tech is cool again’
It is no secret that Silicon Valley began as an experiment of the U.S. Department of Defense, churning out the mainframe computers and microprocessors guiding U.S. military operations during the Cold War. Israel quickly became the industry’s satellite campus: IBM and Intel first opened offices in the 1970s, and other giants followed in the decades to come.
Israel’s technology industry, indebted to an influx of American cash at the end of the 20th century, has never covered up its role in regional war and occupation. On the contrary, the closely revolving door between the military and technology sector is a hallmark of Israel’s start-up nation brand.
Promotional item handed out to attendees at DefenseTech Summit at Tel Aviv University, December 10, 2024 (DefenseTech Summit)
Since the 1990s, however, American tech firms have tended to deny their military origins. Instead, they advertised themselves as liberal bastions — Google’s motto was literally “don’t be evil.” Although military contracts were common, CEOs ensured they were signed secretly to avoid the ire of employees who would vocally protest military applications of their products.
At prior industry events I covered, starting in 2019, founders and generals went out of their way to assure the audience that algorithmic surveillance and drone targeting offered more precise — and therefore more humane — tools of war. It was part of a larger narrative, pushed by more centrist elements in Israel’s government and a historically liberal security establishment, that digital and automated technologies would help minimize the impact of war and occupation on civilian lives.
Over the last few years, however, the tide has slowly shifted — both in the United States and Israel. Today, American tech founders view themselves as a new warrior class, proudly remaking their country in the image of Israel’s “warrior nation.” Israel’s far-right government and Silicon Valley’s royalty adhere to a “peace through strength” security doctrine, touting lethal displays of force as the only way to shore up national security — or what Palantir’s Alex Karp describes as “scaring your enemy shitless.”
Palestinians inspect a car destroyed by an Israeli drone strike that killed two people and injured several others, in Al-Mawasi, southern Gaza Strip, December 23, 2024 (Abed Rahim Khatib)
At this year’s DefenseTech Summit, it seemed as if there was no need to appeal to international human rights law or diplomatic norms. Hamutal Merido, former General Manager of Palantir Israel, explained this to the audience: “When I was at Palantir, we used to have demonstrations outside our offices,” she recalled. “Now, everyone seems to think [defense tech] is cool again.”
Shaun Maguire, a partner at U.S. venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and an outspoken defender of Israeli military strategy in Gaza, offered the audience a similarly rosy picture for today’s military industrial complex: “If I talked to people three years ago, you were said to be a bad person if you worked for the military. But now things are very optimistic — the psychology of the whole thing is changing.”
A new era of partnership
In 2024, Trump ran on an isolationist “America First” platform, opposing involvement in faraway wars. But for Palantir and other jingoistic tech firms who coalesced around his campaign, Israel’s war in Gaza underscored the importance of investing in military technologies.
“People are looking at what’s happening in Ukraine or Israel… and they’re saying, ‘Man, I would love to spend time working on things that are going to move the needle for humanity,’” said Trae Stephens, co-founder of U.S. defense tech firm Anduril, in a September interview with Wired. Earlier this month, Anduril and Open AI announced a partnership to supply the U.S. Department of Defense with AI-assisted defense systems, and Stephens recently consulted with Trump’s transition team on plans to revamp the U.S. military.
Since October 7, Israeli troops have relied on a host of weapons and surveillance systems — many manufactured or maintained by U.S. technology giants like Palantir, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — in the country’s relentless aerial and ground bombardment of Gaza that killed at least 45,000 people and damaged or destroyed60 percent of its buildings. And as reporting by +972 revealed, AI targeting systems such as Lavender and The Gospel were used to ramp up death tolls across the Strip, often in blatant violation of international law.
Israeli soldiers in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, November 28, 2024. (Oren Cohen/Flash90)
But while these tactics have failed to achieve Israel’s objectives in Gaza, the prolonged war — which former army chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon recently describedas amounting to “ethnic cleansing” — has bolstered the portfolios of American tech CEOs and venture capitalists. Many of them continue to strike new deals with the Israeli army and pump cash into the local military tech market.
Earlier this month, an American investment firm bought Israeli spyware firm Paragon for over half a billion dollars, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to curb the sale of such systems. Tensions between the U.S. and Israel rose after similar surveillance technologies sold by NSO Group, an Israeli spyware company, were linked to human rights violations worldwide. Industry insiders believe Trump’s reelection marks a new era of partnership, even for Israel’s more controversial firms.
“The next four years, we’re going to be entering a much better era of partnership between Israel and the U.S. and a kind of more aligned vision of how to have security in the region,” Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire declared in his speech at the conference. Kamala Harris as President, he added, “would have been terrible news for Israel.”
Lorne Abony, managing partner of VC fund Texas Ventures, and one of the most prolific funders of Israeli military technology firms since the war began, put it in more simple terms: “The next few years will be a renaissance for Israel. We have all the pieces in place in the [U.S.] department of defense.” The crowd clapped loudly.