Antony Loewenstein – Israel’s use of AI in Gaza is a terrifying model coming to a country near you
An under-reported aspect of the Gaza genocide is the role of big tech in sharpening the Israeli murder machine.
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, best–selling author, filmmaker and co–founder of Declassified Australia. He’s written for the Guardian, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and many others. His latest book is The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. His other books include Pills, Powder and Smoke, Disaster Capitalism and My Israel Question. His documentary films include Disaster Capitalism and the Al Jazeera English films West Africa’s Opioid Crisis and Under the Cover of Covid. He was based in East Jerusalem from 2016 to 2020.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Israel could not fight its wars of conquest without a host of foreign players supporting, arming and funding it.
From Washington and Berlin sending billions of dollars of weapons to Israel since 7 October 2023, to diplomatic backing at the United Nations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has enjoyed an unparalleled level of tangible endorsement during his nation’s mission of annihilation in Gaza and beyond.
What’s far less understood and scrutinised is the extent of corporate interests behind the Israeli war machine.
While it’s widely known that countless Israeli defence and surveillance companies are integral to the country’s military, from Elbit Systems to Israel Aerospace Industries, fewer people know that some of the world’s biggest tech companies – including Google, Microsoft and Amazon – are deeply enmeshed with the Israeli army.
In a recent investigation, The Washington Post revealed that Google “rushed to sell” artificial intelligence (AI) tools to Israel soon after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 because it feared losing business to its rival, Amazon.
Although the Post didn’t confirm how Israel was using these tools, it’s clear that Israel has utilised enhanced AI in its mass killing campaign in Gaza over the past 15 months.
Another story published this month by +972 Magazine details the extensive collaboration between Microsoft and the Israeli military, both before and after 7 October 2023. It outlines how the corporation’s cloud services were used by units in the naval, ground and air forces, along with the intelligence gathering branch, Unit 8200 – all as Israel was committing genocide and war crimes on an unprecedented scale.
Massive database
Amazon and Google established Project Nimbus with Israel to assist various branches of its government, including the military, in a 2021 deal that was publicly and privately opposed by many employees – but the project continues to this day, with no transparency or accountability.
These corporate behemoths are storing massive amounts of information about every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and elsewhere.
How this data will be used, in a time of war and mass surveillance, is obvious. Israel is building a huge database, Chinese-state style, on every Palestinian under occupation: what they do, where they go, who they see, what they like, what they want, what they fear and what they post online.
It’s not a perfect system, and there are ways to challenge it – but countless Palestinians tell me that this panopticon has the desired effect, curtailing freedom of speech, _expression_ and movement.
None of this means that Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation won’t continue. If anything, it will likely increase as repression deepens in the Trump years, with religious fanatics appointed as the US president’s key allies.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon have not answered reasonable questions in recent years because they know the truth about their complicity in Israel’s secretive and deadly plans, likely fearing legal or political backlash. Palestinian civilians are just data points for a state that views them as deserving of dehumanisation or death.
Big tech is happy to assist, both out of a desire to make money and ideological affinities with Israel’s cause.
The second reason is perhaps the most disturbing, with far-reaching ramifications. During the research for my book, podcast and new film with Al Jazeera English, The Palestine Laboratory, I uncovered that Israel’s military-industrial complex views its occupation as a vital testing ground for the latest forms of killing and surveillance.
Palestinians are guinea pigs – but this ideology and work doesn’t stay in Palestine. Silicon Valley has taken note, and the new Trump era is heralding an ever-tighter alliance among big tech, Israel and the defence sector. There’s money to be made, as AI currently operates in a regulation-free zone globally.
Targeting dissidents
“Israeli Jews are people,” Noam Chomsky said in 2011. “Palestinians are unpeople.” Nothing has changed in the years since. AI is just the latest technology, albeit a very powerful one, that will continue this unpeopling, with more brutal efficiency.
It won’t stop with Palestinians. It never has.
The numbers of refugees, displaced peoples, migrants and climate-change victims are at record highs, estimated to exceed 120 million people worldwide. That’s a vast pool of people to be surveilled, targeted and killed, if their presence or political desires are viewed as undesirable by those in power.
If that sounds harsh or like something out of a sci-fi film, think again. Israel has provided a model in Gaza on how to obliterate a society without serious consequences (yet), deploying the most sophisticated weapons on the planet to do so.
My sources tell me that many nations are looking to Israel and its use of AI in Gaza with admiration and jealousy. Expect to see a form of Google, Microsoft and Amazon-backed AI in other war zones soon.
Think about how many other states, both democratic and dictatorial, would love to have such extensive information about every citizen, making it far easier to target critics, dissidents and opponents. With the far-right on the march globally – from Austria to Sweden, France to Germany, and the US to Britain – Israel’s ethno-nationalist model is seen as attractive and worth mimicking.
Israel’s surveillance tech in the hands of such people should terrify us all.