January 8, 2025
Artificial Intelligence: Israel’s Preferred Tool of Genocide
Over the past 14 months, Israel has created a mechanized system of extermination in Gaza, relying on a lethal 21st century tool to automate and accelerate its campaign of mass murder: artificial intelligence (AI).
Israel had developed and deployed mass surveillance systems for years before October 2023, collecting enormous amounts of data on Palestinians and turning the besieged Gaza Strip into one of the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. Since the beginning of the genocide, Israel has operationalized this data by feeding them into machine learning systems to develop “target banks,” or kill lists of Palestinians. These machine learning programs, which are able to generate targets at a rate far greater than any human, have played a direct role in enabling the most destructive aerial bombardment campaign in the 21st century.
Western media outlets—including, most recently, the New York Times—have attempted to frame Israel’s use of AI as an effort to identify militants. In painting such a picture, these media are taking at face value the idea that Israel’s use of AI has a legitimate military purpose. In this way, AI is used rhetorically to distance Israeli soldiers, generals, and politicians from their direct role in perpetrating the crime of genocide.
As with the “gang databases” developed by U.S. law enforcement, which have been found to include names of small children and people with no gang affiliation, Israel’s target banks dramatically over-capture potential targets based on broad and ill-defined search criteria, resulting in “kill lists” that include infants, journalists, and civilians.
Certain Israeli machine learning programs, such as “Where’s Daddy?,” are used to target Palestinians while they are home with their families--effectively ensuring the massacre of entire bloodlines as a matter of policy. In addition to targeting Palestinians, Israel’s AI programs are also used to identify and destroy critical infrastructure, as part of a wholesale assault on every institution of social, economic, and political life in Gaza.
The humans who program autonomous weapons systems bear responsibility for their deadly outcomes. Moreover, each massacre on hospitals, tents, children, ambulances, and journalists was conceived and executed by an IOF soldier, intelligence officer, or commanding general--all of whom are guilty of encoding their genocidal intent into every machine learning program.
The complicity extends much further than IOF soldiers themselves, to some of the wealthiest corporations on earth headquartered in the US, Canada and Europe. While Israel has become the tip of the spear for developing military applications using artificial intelligence, companies like Google and Amazon also provide cloud infrastructure and advanced AI and machine-learning capabilities to the IOF, illustrating the private sector’s eagerness to reap profit from slaughter.
Israel is pioneering the normalization of new autonomous weapons systems in warfare and pushing for their legal integration into international law, paving the way for other imperialist powers to follow suit. It is no coincidence that the US military has officially made its first purchase of OpenAI for use in direct combat following Israel’s example. Gaza is the proving ground, but the destructive consequences of these new weapons will be felt through the normalization of mechanized mass slaughter across the globe.
In the face of these technological horrors, the Palestinian people remain defiant. Against multi-billion dollar technologies and the entire weight of the U.S. empire, Palestinians in Gaza have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate that while the challenges of artificial intelligence are formidable, no algorithm can defeat the indomitable Palestinian spirit that is limited only by flesh and blood.