We hope readers will be happy to see this timely article by Border Chronicle favorite Petra Molnar. It is timely for what is happening in Israel/Palestine, timely for the holidays, and, as you will see, has deep relevance for the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist. She is a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab, York University. Her first book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is being published by the New Press in 2024.
A red-and-black dress hangs heavy in the mudroom of a house in Ramallah. Thick embroidery of geometric patterns and flowers adorns both front and back, a story in each stitch. This thobe is part of the Handmade Palestine shop of Morgan Cooper, an American who is raising her two young boys in the Occupied West Bank with her Palestinian husband. While less well known than the black-and-white kaffiyeh scarf, the thobe is a revered traditional garment for Palestinian women, colorful and intricate. One of the common patterns is an ancient eight-pointed star, known as the “Holy Star of Bethlehem,” which is also a common pattern on Christmas sweaters in North America. Biblical references are thick in the air here, but there is also a new gospel coming from the Holy Land. Since Israel’s brutal crackdown on Hamas violence in Gaza, the Israeli government has been deploying “the Gospel,” an AI system that helps generate new targets at an unprecedented rate, using artificial intelligence to optimize its operations. Over 17,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023.
Palestine is just one of the places I have had the privilege to visit over the last six years in my quest to witness and document the rise of border technologies. Earlier in 2023, I saw firsthand the omnipresent surveillance of cities like Hebron and Bethlehem, drones and cameras all over the West Bank, and even AI-powered guns at checkpoints. And as journalist Antony Loewenstein cogently explores in his award-winning book The Palestine Laboratory, Israel is also a leading player in exporting “battle-tested” technologies to the West, projects that are then rolled out for various purposes, including border enforcement.
For example, along the Arizona border, which I last visited in the spring of 2022, the Israeli project XTEND was tested out. This project was first deployed in the Gaza Strip; its proponents claim that its virtual reality training technology is so effective, soldiers “within 10 minutes . . . start downing balloons in the Gaza Strip.” Powered by the Skylord operating system, the technology boasts a “revolutionary micro-tactical Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance platform, with built-in resilient indoor-outdoor navigation and AI capabilities,” all aimed at Palestinians. Yet this is not the only Israeli project on U.S. soil. In an investment made over 10 years, totaling at least $500 million, the United States has installed at least 55 fixed AI-system surveillance towers made by none other than the Israeli company Elbit Systems. The company has been contracted by the U.S. Border Patrol to put the Arizona border under constant surveillance, including through surveillance cameras and drones. This technology was first rolled out in the surveillance sensors for Israel’s separation barrier through the West Bank, a barrier that the International Court of Justice ruled to be illegal way back in 2004 but still stands today. The European Union’s appetite for Israeli surveillance has also exponentially grown as it tries to wall itself off from further “undesirable” migration. The Observer and Statewatch also uncovered various contracts to track migrant boats reaching the shores of Europe. The agreements, negotiated between Elbit Systems, the European Union’s Frontex, and the European Maritime Safety Agency, total $115 million.
Yet this AI and surveillance technology also flows in multiple directions. In one notable example, Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government signed a $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus, providing the Israeli government with advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, which could augment the country’s use of digital surveillance in occupied Palestinian territories. This, while Occupied Palestinian Territory is in the middle of some of the worst violence and apartheid repression in decades. The contract provoked anger among both Jewish and Palestinian Google employees, who have publicly spoken out about the project. Some, like computer scientist Ariel Koren, have been fired; some have resigned. Others have been silenced.
This silencing has reached a fever pitch since the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip in October 2023. Activists have been targeted, students have been doxed and have lost job offers, and academics and those in the public eye have been censored. For example, Palestinian lawyer, Doctor of Juridical Science student at Harvard Law School, and my friend Rabea Eghbariah was invited by the Harvard Law Review to write an article on the situation in Gaza. At the 11th hour, the journal refused to publish it—luckily, other (arguably more influential) outlets did. I too have been threatened with censorship of my remarks at conferences and meetings, just like countless others. Yet people continue to speak out, including the hundreds of thousands of protesters, sometimes led by Jewish voices, who keep showing up day after day, with keffiyehs and perhaps even a star-covered thobe or two. And the tech space is also a target. At the end of October, activists tried to shut down Elbit Systems in Boston, clashing with police. Nine were arrested, and one woman I spoke with for some summary legal advice was charged with vandalizing property and disorderly conduct, while others were further charged with assaulting a police officer. Another three people were later arrested in New Hampshire at a different Elbit office.
At first blush, companies like Elbit may seem removed from the atrocities on the ground in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, but they are very much at the center of the ongoing violence. The private sector is where new border technologies are developed, and states and governments benefit from these experiments, both for military purposes but also for the control of migrant populations. This technological experimentation also shows whose interests matter most, as states prioritize and legitimize the types of interventions peddled by the private sector and powerful actors who get to set the stage. It is no accident that what little governance exists is vastly insufficient—even the EU’s promising Act to Regulate Artificial Intelligence barely acknowledges the risks of border technologies, not setting any bans or moratoriums in place, in opposition to recent international recommendations by the UN Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.
What will happen in this Holy Land? Calls for a ceasefire seem to fall on deaf ears as more people die. But tools of apartheid and genocide are not just military weapons—they are facial recognition, drone surveillance, and persistent dehumanization through technology, the gospel of technosolutionism singing its clarion call. Israel’s brutal crackdown in Gaza is a bleak reminder of how authoritarianism and technology go hand in hand, as rockets and drones in the sky dim the stars of Bethlehem.
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