Israel, Gaza and the Genocide-Industrial Complex

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If you’re an Israeli arms maker, genocide pays. Big time.  This graph lists Israel’s top weapons manufacturers and their stock market returns on the Tel Aviv exchange. Some of the biggest winners?

• Next Vision: (+251%) camera systems for UAVs, ground vehicles, and maritime platforms. Supporting surveillance, reconnaissance, target acquisition, and loitering munitions operations.
• Aerotech Industries (+128%) Drone manufacturing
• Third Eye Systems drone systems incorporating situational awareness, target acquisition, Augmented video, and mission management (104%).
• Beit Shemesh Engines: (+127%) jet-engine part manufacturing, Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul, R&D for turbojet engines. .
• IMCO (+138%) missile development-production, ground vehicles, UAVs

These results reflect the key role the Israeli weapons regime plays in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the massive profits it’s generated. I call it the “genocide-industrial complex.”  They are committing genocide on industrial scale.  It is unlike other modern genocides because it’s not neighbor killing neighbor like in Rwanda or Bosnia; it’s not even one ethnic group killing another like in Myanmar. This is a comprehensive genocide utilizing conventional warfare and cyber-war capabilities, including AI-powered weaponry and a massive surveillance system.

As an added “bonus” for the Israeli weapons makers: this is a genocide that can and will be exported like a product to other authoritarian nations with restive populations demanding subjugation.

These companies are providing the weapons and technology that enables the carnage, while generating massive profits on the backs of Palestinian suffering.  US companies are sharing in the bounty by providing some of their most lethal and sophisticated missiles used for some of the most controversial missions, which have included assassinations of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian officials throughout the region.

Palantir is among the most contentious for its use of vast datasets to target both US immigrants for detention and deportation; and Palestinians in Gaza.   It has formed a “strategic partnership” with the IDF, providing some of its major surveillance systems including:

Gotham (Palantir Gotham): used for military and intelligence applications, designed to integrate and analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and provide insights, including integrating with drones.

Foundry: Used for high-level logistics and planning, such as managing supply chains.

Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP): An AI and large language model that helps with intelligence and decision-making, including analyzing targets and proposing battle plans.

Purpose: The technology is intended to help the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) process data and accelerate targeting and decision-making in the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

Palantir has turned the Gaza battlefield into an “AI War Lab,” allowing it to perfect the lethality of its battlefield systems. These AI-powered capabilities tend to ignore distinctions between civilian and military targets, and have contributed to the immense toll of misery and death for Palestinians.

Given founder, Peter Thiel’s far-right, white-supremacist views, it’s no surprise Palantir has insinuated itself onto the Israeli battlefield.  He and his CEO, Alex Karp, are among the most enthusiastic backers of both Trump and Israel’s racist, xenophobic policies.

Now the company has embedded itself in yet another joint Israeli-US intelligence operation. The Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) is tasked with monitoring all of Gaza.  Though the acknowledged mission is to monitor security there, the unstated goals are even more ambitious.  They will maintain intelligence data on virtually every resident there, using the data to surveil real time movement and activity. They will also identify potential targets viewed as posing a threat, using AI that scrapes social media content and telecommunications.

The world “civil” in the title is a misnomer. There will be no coordination between civil and military authorities.  There will be no effort to protect Palestinian civilians from military conflict.  It is not a humanitarian relief project.  It is not going to help any Palestinian. CMCC will facilitate intelligence-sharing between the IDF and US military.

Any thought that Israel is going to withdraw from Gaza is a delusion.  As long as there are Palestinians, it will control everything there, and these systems will facilitate that:

…Despite vague mention of Palestinian self-determination in Trump’s plan, Israel’s control over Gaza will remain deeply entrenched — with AI-powered surveillance and weapons systems at the center of post-war security architecture.

When US officials describe the CMCC as a resource to monitor IDF compliance–as well as Hamas’–with the ceasefire…that too is an illusion.  The Center is not halting the murder of Palestinians: 340 have been killed in the past month.  News reports indicate that its forces, who established their own yellow line demarcating their zone of control, are unilaterally encroaching on territory outside it, and shelling mercilessly neighborhoods which were beyond the Israeli line.  No one on the US side is telling Israel to pull back or stop the carnage.

Palantir is bringing a new tool to the table in Gaza. It is deploying one of its most advanced products: an “AI-powered battlefield platform” with the distressingly ironic name, MAVEN (a Hebrew-Yiddish term for “knowledge”). It is designed, as the company boasts:

[It] collects and analyses surveillance data…from war zones to speed-up U.S. military operations, including lethal airstrikes. The platform sucks information from satellites, spy planes, drones, intercepted telecommunications, and the internet, and “packages it into a common, searchable app for commanders…

The collaboration is a two-way street.  The company and US military personnel staffing the intelligence coordination unit will share data and intelligence gathering methods with their IDF counterparts and vice versa.  It’s also a bonanza for Israeli firms developing military-intelligence applications. They will develop their own new surveillance and weapons systems with the capabilities offered to them by Palantir:

…Given the United States’ history of sharing and bolstering Israeli surveillance efforts across the Palestinian territories, it is unlikely the data compiled by Palantir and Dataminr will remain under Washington’s exclusive purview.

It’s a win for everyone…except the Palestinian victims.

Embedding Unit 8200 veterans in US cyber-war companies

Israel has other means of acquiring the cyber-warfare products and expertise of US companies like Palantir.  It has embedded its own IDF intelligence officers within these companies.  Many of them even founded their own companies here and export the technology they created while serving in Unit 8200.  Veterans of the IDF SIGINT branch even maintain there own social networking organization, holding regular meetings at which they share social niceties as well as professional expertise.

An Israel source with experience in this field told me:

There is constant osmosis back and forth, between the private market and state security organizations…Many times it is informal. People do reserve duty and bring [from their US jobs] knowledge with them. Often it’s not a specific commercial secret, but rather gray stuff like practices, methodologies, general ideas.

But I am sure that if the intelligence organizations have their eyes on a specific technology they might use veterans working in the market to get their hands on it.

In the old days, Israeli spies had to physically steal US military-intelligence secrets.  It was a messy business of spycraft, break-ins, and embarrassing exposure of agents and assets.  But in the digital age, the IDF infiltrates its assets into the US labs and office suites, where they devise cyber-warfare technology.  Undoubtedly, they share it with their former colleagues in Unit 8200.  It is fertile ground for both parties. Palantir gets Israeli brainpower and expertise. Israel harvests the fruits of those labors and demonstrates it on the killing field.  It’s a relationship reaping mutual rewards.

But it goes beyond material benefits.  Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp is–besides being a rabid white supremacist spouting race science–an avid Zionist (also Jewish).  Though he claims his relationship with Israel is largely based on business interests, his support goes far beyond that.

For Palantir, it is also a literal and figurative gold mine. Though neither party has revealed the value of the various contracts–given that it recently signed a $10-billion deal with the US Army, the Israeli “partnership” would be at least as lucrative, if not more.

Gaza as bantustan

This US technology will be a key element of another Kushner-Witkoff plan, to divide Gazans into what I call concentration “camplets”: what the Administration is euphemistically calling Alternate Safe Communities.  Why do such horrible projects have such innocuous-sounding names? These will be enclaves surrounded by barbed wire, from which the inmates would be prohibited from leaving.  The Shin Bet would vet those permitted to live there.  Only those with Hamas-free backgrounds could enter:

 Each enclave would be surrounded by patrol roads, fences, surveillance cameras, and military outposts managed by the ISF, which would coordinate with Israeli forces to determine who enters each compound — and once admitted, Israeli officials have proposed, Palestinians should not be able to leave.

Israel and its US  enablers are developing a 21st century version of the Holocaust–without the extermination camps. They’re not needed. Because  exterminating 2-million Palestinians would be messy and raise a few (though undoubtedly manageable) objections from global bodies and states. Instead of eliminating victims, it traps them in a permanent vise of physical, psychological and technological control, from which there is no escape. There is, of course, the necessity of killing a few tens of thousands of them in maintaining such subjugation, since the victims will have strong objections.

Israel’s surveillance systems don’t only target Palestinians.  The IDF has implemented an AI-powered application called Morpheus, which will monitor social media content and communications of its own soldiers. Ostensibly, the object is to detect and prevent leaking of information that might compromise military operations or otherwise endanger personnel.  However, it could also detect suspicious or illegal behavior on the part of troops.

Who is so naive as to think that a surveillance state constantly targeting its enemies, would not eventually turn the technology on its own soldiers? Who is so naive as to think that the spymasters won’t turn it upon average citizens who dissent from government policies? That is coming, if not happening already.