In the Name of Security and Progress: “A House by the Beach Is Not a Dream!”, The Israeli Army Will Make It Happen.

This newsletter was reformulated from an original article whose publication was rendered unfeasible due to accusations of “bias” and excessive “politicization” of the analysis, given the use of the term “genocide”, supposedly inappropriate for an academic-scientific approach. The intersection between the debate on technoscience, genocidal practices, and modernity dates back at least to the first half of the 20th century, elucidating not only the fallacy of the argument in favor of the neutrality of science and technology but also the fact that this very positivist neutrality of technique produced the conditions for the extermination of entire populations, as we see in Palestine today.

It is further emphasized that the term “genocide” is recognized by the United Nations Convention as a crime committed with the intent to eliminate, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group¹. The 20th century is frequently witness to episodes thus described, as seen in Namibia in 1908, Armenia in 1915, Nazi Germany in 1939, and Rwanda in 1994. It is no coincidence that the concept of “genocide”, formulated in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin (2009), is based on these events from the first half of the 20th century. Beyond the physical death of individuals from a particular group, genocide must be considered as a “coordinated plan” of various actions aimed at undermining and rendering the existence of this very group unviable. Murder and the destruction of means of survival are some of the practices that fall within the genocidal process.

A report by the research agency Forensic Architecture (FA) demonstrates how, since October 2023, Israeli forces have systematically targeted orchards and vital agricultural infrastructure in Palestinian territories, deliberately increasing hunger and depriving them of essential resources for survival². “In total, Forensic Architecture identified more than 2,000 agricultural sites, including farms and greenhouses, that have been destroyed since October 2023, often to be replaced by Israeli military earthworks. This destruction was most intense in the northern part of Gaza, where 90% of the greenhouses were destroyed in the early stages of the ground invasion”³. Another FA report shows a pattern of Israeli military forces attacking hospitals, constituting “intimidation and violence” as components of the ongoing invasion⁴. The justification given by Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – in response to arguments presented by South Africa requesting the application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – alleging that there is a “humanitarian effort” to protect civilian lives, such as attack warnings or the indication of “safe routes”, is disingenuous and does not correspond to what occurred. FA found “eight cases in which the Israeli legal team misrepresented the visual evidence it cited, through a combination of incorrect annotations and labels, and misleading verbal descriptions”⁵.

In parallel with these offensives, the mortality rate in the current incursion into Gaza surpasses that of all recorded conflicts in the 21st century, according to a report by Oxfam, not considering the Palestinians killed in the West Bank since October 2023.

Any attempt to relativize the aforementioned scenario also demonstrates “politicization” and “bias”, as in the previously mentioned refusal of the article. Therefore, we decided to publish this version of the article as the (Anti)Security Newsletter, first because we do not claim scientific neutrality or any kind of “best practices” when it comes to the political technologies of mass lethality; and second, because, despite the historical and contemporary issues that explain and justify the massacre in Gaza, its occurrence and the reactions to it are extreme evidence of how far security concerns can take us. Ultimately, regardless of the classification (academic and/or legal, according to International Law) of what is happening in Gaza as genocide, it is in the name of security and peace that people are indiscriminately killed and exterminated in that strip of land. In other words, this is a policy that finds its most complete expression in the state form. Finally, and no less importantly, for us, it is intolerable that such a massacre, with such an asymmetry of forces, continues, regardless of the argument.

Almost 20 years ago, the Gaza Strip Withdrawal Plan signaled a paradigmatic shift in the pattern of intervention and management of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) in the form of what has been identified as a policy of strategic balance between minimal responsibility and maximum control over the indigenous population. Under this framework, aerial reconnaissance drones, remote-controlled machine guns, CCTV circuits, sonic imaging, radiation detectors, remote-controlled excavators and boats, electrified fences, among other devices, characterize the contemporary occupation of Gaza as being deeply shaped by the intensive use of computational and informational technologies.

In the same context, Israel gradually established itself as a supplier of high-tech security equipment for governments, police forces, security agencies, and private actors in strategic sectors in at least one hundred countries around the world, quickly positioning Tel Aviv as one of the most significant high-tech capitals globally. Strongly driven by local demand in the first decade of the 2000s, the military-industrial complex served as a collaborative space for hundreds of programmers from the technology industry – weakened by the dot-com bubble burst – facilitating the development of products and services enhanced by the recurring experience of combat testing. This experience, over the past few decades, has given Israeli production a global perception of “field verification” legitimacy.

Consolidated as a cornerstone of the national economy, the cybersecurity industry remains a key revolving door between the Intelligence Corps (Unit 8200) of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the local and global labor market, serving not only the interests of local political and economic elites but also an ascending global logic of managing, monitoring, and surveilling vulnerable (and inconvenient) populations.

Considering this scenario, the current military incursion into Gaza seems to represent the most contemporary phase of this process, adopting the intensive use of artificial intelligence tools as a trademark both in the systematic production of targets and in mass disinformation campaigns. At least two new systems have been employed against Palestinian civilian populations since October 2023, according to surveys conducted so far by news agencies and civil society organizations.

Designed to identify suspects linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Lavender system, by analyzing massive data on approximately 2.3 million residents of the territory, reportedly identified around 37,000 suspects in the early weeks of the war alone, for whom army officials authorized bombings with little to no human verification of the targets. In addition to the Lavender system, supplementary software is used to identify the location of the selected individuals. The Where’s Daddy system, also in intensive use since October, issues automatic alerts to the responsible officials when the designated targets enter their family homes – reason why about half of the deaths in the first month of the operation occurred while people were at home. “Smart shooting” devices and automatic triggers are not, however, isolated tools from other typical initiatives of digital occupation of the OPTs, which include, above all, broad and permanent monitoring tools of the Palestinian population, even in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Pegasus system from the NSO Group, associated with controversies in recent years in the Brazilian government⁶, represents one of the paradigmatic cases of these initiatives, covered by both private and state sectors within Israel.

It is important to foreground the connection between the use of this immense high-tech arsenal, such as “smart shooting” devices and guided explosive drones, and the expansion of real estate speculation over occupied territory. The cover of this newsletter is a montage published on the social media of the Israeli construction company Harry Zahav, which projects various housing projects on the ruins of a bombed city, depicting a residential complex to be occupied. The image is accompanied by the following phrase: “We at Hari Zahav are working to prepare the ground for a return to Gush Katit⁷. They started working on the reclamation of the area, the removal of waste and the expulsion of invaders. We hope that in the near future, all the abductees will be returned safely to their homes, our soldiers will return home and we will be able to start construction in the Gaza Strip, in all Gush Katif regions”. This activity by the construction company, whose history is marked by attempts to annex Palestinian territory through the construction and commercialization of residential condominiums⁸, underscores the relationship between the overt use of mass destruction devices and the “preparation of the ground” for enabling new forms of accumulation. Allied with the Israeli Army, showing this support even by disseminating images of soldiers holding a flag with the company’s logo in front of operational tanks, the construction company operates in a crucial sphere of the commodity domination movement over land, its agents, and the way life is organized together with the territory beyond its capitalistic functionality.

Combining devastation and reconstruction; annihilation of ways of life and land; incorporation of territory through the narrowing of spatial reproduction possibilities; the most advanced technological apparatus with the most barbaric and “archaic” forms of capital frontier expansion: the activities of this construction company clearly symbolize how the “so-called primitive accumulation”, rather than being a past and static moment in the history of capitalism, is active every day from southern Bahia⁹ (Brazil) to the southern Gaza Strip. It is based on the construction of uninhabitable/security zones to stifle previously established forms of life and integrates the public and private sectors to ensure dynamism in the violently expansive movement of value form.

Also notably are cases of generative AI tools that contribute to the (re)production of an Orientalist and fallacious imaginary about the conflict, associating images of Palestinian children with weapons and racialized stereotypes of “Arab terrorists”. At the same time, AI-enhanced algorithms have been accused of discrimination, suppression, and cancellation of content creators critical of Israeli state actions and supportive of Palestinian claims for self-determination, as well as content that simply documents the violence of the operations.

It is pertinent to note that the Israeli-Palestinian context does not inaugurate, in any way, the proliferation of debates and concerns around the intersection of organized violence and the impetus for total spectrum dominance, associated with remote monitoring sociotechnical apparatuses. On the contrary, this is a typical concern of the period immediately following the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War and exacerbated by the 09/11 attacks. The most current materialization of this dystopian imaginary of late modernity now visible in Gaza, however, points to an even greater acceleration of a process integrating the battlefield into social life and eroding the “classic” distinction between “peace” and “war” or “civil life” and “military life”, a process ongoing at least since the turn of the century, as extensively mapped out in various debates within critical security studies.

The call from the international civil society for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the defense of human rights in the occupied territories has significantly intensified in recent months – particularly since the recent events in Rafah – motivated by the evident disproportionality of the force employed by the IDF and recalling the memory of the Nakba of 1948 and the Six-Day War of 1967. In this sense, it is possible that from the ruins of the current techno-genocide in Gaza, the perception will solidify that any silence from the international community will open the gaps for the widespread recurrence of the practices and policies of Digital Occupation of Palestine over vulnerable populations around the world.

As the incursion into Gaza escalated, in October, Israel began opening bids for transnational gas and oil companies on the Mediterranean coast as part of Netanyahu’s administration agenda to position the country as an energy hub alternative to Russia in the region. A few months later, advertisements circulated for the construction of luxury condominiums in bombed neighborhoods of Gaza (as mentioned above) and for the construction of the so-called Ben Gurion Canal, through the Negev Desert, as an alternative to the Suez Canal, controlled by Egypt. The Palestinian presence in Gaza is a known obstacle for the Israeli administration in advancing these and other projects around the Occupied Territories.

It is a fact that genocide was not the preferred alternative for the administrators of the colonization of Palestine, who, in the early decades in the territory, opted for the exploitation of the indigenous workforce in a series of projects aimed at modernizing the territory’s infrastructure. Since the early 1990s, under the guise of a peace process that converted the grammar of liberation into the neoliberalization of what remained of Palestinian administration of the territories, Israel has not only hardened policies of restrictions and border closures of the Occupation but has also encouraged hundreds of immigrant workers from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, replacing the “traditional” Palestinian labor adopted by the first generations of Zionist colonialism. This has consolidated the population of the OPTs – and especially Gaza – as a population that is simply surplus, an ideal object for investment in the growing sector of accumulation through repression, and highly computerized repression.

The genocidal regime of Netanyahu, therefore, benefits from the adoption of artificial intelligence systems – famous for their appeal to scientific neutrality – that move beyond capturing gestures, movements, interactions, and data, to attempting to produce on a large-scale new paradigms of truth and reality. The algorithmic governmentality, which for Antoinette Rouvroy already eliminates the singular existence of the subject – with a memory, experience, and body – by transforming it into anticipated behaviors, also introduces devices for reconfiguring the erasure of Palestine, suffocated by the design of an artificial future from which its past and present are progressively erased and exterminated.

The Israeli incursions into Gaza and their high-tech extermination are an extreme and macabre condensation of what has governed the planet since the end of World War II: planetary police security, databases, and extreme state violence. This raises the issue of security as a more urgent problem than the sterile debates in the field of political representation and its concerns about the forms of democracy. This is because this highly technological massacre apparatus is mobilized regardless of the ideological coloration of the ruling government, operating without the need for what could be classified by Political Science as an authoritarian or dictatorial government. The experiment of creating a state in the post-WWII era reveals what the Modern State is made of; moreover, that the State, democracy, and capitalism, as well as the much-desired progress, only come with a massive production of violence. Just look at Israel. Even subtracting the variable of the Gaza occupation, what is observed is a quite refined form of a securitized democracy.

¹ This definition is in accordance with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. See more here.

² ‘No Traces Of Life’: Israel’s Ecocide In Gaza 2023-2024 - Forensic Architecture.

³ Ibidem.

⁴ Destruction of medical infrastructure in Gaza - Forensic Architecture

⁵ An Assessment Of Visual Material Presented By The Israeli Legal Team At The Icj - Forensic Architecture. See also: Humanitarian Violence In Gaza - Forensic Architecture.

⁶ In the year marking the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in Guerrero, Mexico, it is worth recalling the use of the Pegasus system by the armed forces and other entities such as the Attorney General's Office and Mexican intelligence agencies. The espionage targeted the phone of a member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), the investigative group for the case, two lawyers representing some of the students' families, as well as other targets such as activists and journalists. Acquired in 2011 during the first Peña Nieto administration, it continued to be used under AMLO as one of the repressive technologies employed by the State, especially by its Armed Forces. See more in the following news articles: Fifty people linked to Mexico’s president among potential targets of NSO clients - The Guardian; and Estado mexicano tropeça no caso Pegasus, do ‘software’ para espionagem política - El País. Accessed on July 24, 2024.

⁷ Gush Katif is the name of a former bloc that contained 17 Israeli Jewish settlements located in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, between the Rafah border with Egypt. In 2005, according to Israel's Unilateral Disengagement Plan, the Israeli Army evacuated about 8,000 Jewish settlers from their homes and the territory was “transferred” to the Palestinians.   

⁸ Israeli Gov’t Uses Judicial Tricks to Legitimize Settlement Outposts – “Aley Zahav” Example - NBPRS

⁹ PM abriu caminho para fazendeiros matarem Nega Pataxó, dizem sobreviventes de ataque ruralista na Bahia - Brasil de Fato

References

LEMKIN, Raphael. El dominio del Eje en la Europa ocupada: leyes de ocupación: análisis de la administración gubernamental: propuestas de reparaciones. - 1a ed. - Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros; Caseros: Univ. Nacional de Tres de Febrero, 2009.