Israel’s Destruction of Gaza Is a Warning to Us All
Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images
It takes a lot to destroy a city. To wipe out Palestinian homes, infrastructure and human beings. Israel has launched one of the most intense aerial bombardments the world has ever known, dropping more bombs on Gaza this past year than ever fell upon Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg combined during World War II. It uses unguided “dumb” bombs, which are prone to going wayward and wiping out huge numbers of civilians, along with AI-guided bombs and “killer robots,” machines which select the people to be obliterated. It uses “fragmentation” weapons, purposely designed to spray large amounts of shrapnel to ensure that, if the children who are hit survive, they’ll at least live out the rest of their lives without some limbs.
It takes a lot, too, to maintain a system of apartheid. With an eye towards tracking and restricting their movements, Israel monitors Palestinians through an old-fashioned but extensive CCTV network, while it also scans their faces using experimental facial recognition systems. It monitors phone calls within the Occupied Territories using sophisticated spyware, and it boxes Palestinians in by raising high-tech border walls and turrets, armed with sensors and remote-controlled weapons.
It takes a lot to fight a war against forces in a neighboring state. To combat Hezbollah, Israel launches airstrikes into Lebanon and Syria, but it also allegedly has developed innovative new methods of attack, like causing hundreds of pagers in different locations to unexpectedly explode at the same time, even at funerals. It employs tactics of psychological warfare, terrorizing civilians in Beirut by flying warplanes overhead and breaking the sound barrier, creating loud booms from the sky and leaving the people below trembling for their lives.
It takes a lot, in short, to be a genocidal state at war.
Israel has relied on plenty of friends to help it become such a formidable military and occupying force. The United States, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, China, India and plenty of other countries, not to mention Big Tech corporations like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have all provided Israel with arms or surveillance technology. But, as important as those foreign contributions are, Israel itself boasts a profoundly advanced homegrown arms and surveillance industry, developing its own technologies of war and oppression and testing them out on Palestinians.
This experimentation is most acute in Gaza, which Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), once tellingly described as “a great laboratory,” but such testing is carried out across all of Israel and the Occupied Territories. The Palestinian people are viewed as little more than guinea pigs, whose bodies may be used to demonstrate the efficacy of dystopian weapons systems and spyware, before these methods are exported across the globe.