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.
The European Union, as I wrote about last Monday, is reinforcing an increasingly hard border along its periphery to keep out migrants setting off from Africa, which has led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Israeli-made technology has been deployed to this end, such as drones that monitor boats carrying migrants and allegedly help to coordinate illegal deportations to unsafe countries. Frontex, the EU’s border agency, has also built surveillance towers reminiscent of those standing in the West Bank.
It is a similar story along the U.S.-Mexico border, where a range of technologies supplied by Israeli firms are used to monitor and deter people hoping to make it to America. The U.S. has also experimented with “robodogs” — terrifying, dog-shaped robots, fitted with sensors and filming equipment, that walk around on all fours — which have, in turn, been used in Gaza. Mexico, too, was the first — and is believed to remain the biggest — user of the spyware Pegasus, developed by the Israeli company NSO Group.
Pegasus, which eavesdrops on cell phones without the target ever knowing, has been exported around the world, where it has been used to spy on journalists, activists, political dissidents and even heads of state. Reports claim at least 14 European Union member states have purchased the software, including Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Azerbaijan is believed to have used it against several Armenians within the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which, in the end, saw an estimated 120,000 Armenians ethnically cleansed from their homes. Pegasus was also reportedly used to spy on those close to the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and dismembered by Saudi intelligence in 2018.
Israel’s arms and surveillance industries are lucrative. The country’s weapons sales were worth about $13 billion in 2023, a record-breaking sum, while its cybersecurity exports are vital to its economy. Israel is a major exporter of drones worldwide, and its facial recognition technology, reportedly tested in the West Bank, is now being used in public spaces all over the world.
Apartheid, war and genocide — nasty words they may be — are nonetheless good for business.
While there is clearly a lot of money to be made in Israeli arms and spyware sales, the state benefits in another way, too. Exporting weapons abroad can be a great way for Israel to forge better relations with previously hostile regimes, both in its immediate region or elsewhere. When Israel was trying to normalize relations with Arab states, for instance — countries like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia — sales of weapons and spyware like Pegasus acted as a sweetener to negotiations.
Mexico and Panama, according to a New York Times investigation, also purchased Pegasus, in deals which preceded those countries later altering their votes in the U.N. to support Israel. Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to ever visit Israel in 2017, around the same time that two arms deals worth $2.6 billion were signed between the previously hostile countries. Weapons have continued to flow between India and Israel, even as the Gaza genocide unfolds, while India, despite its historic antipathy towards Israel, continues to become increasingly supportive of it diplomatically.
In the hands of foreign actors — be they those in the “democracies” of the United States and the European Union, or those in the autocracies of the world — Israel’s weapons are being used against vulnerable people that the ruling classes no longer see any use for.
In the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967, which led to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel exploited Palestinian workers from the Occupied Territories by having them work low-paying but necessary jobs throughout Israel. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly turned towards migrant workers from places like India, Malawi, and Sri Lanka instead. With the state’s reliance on Palestinian workers diminished, its priority has increasingly turned towards managing Palestine’s population through imprisonment and slaughter.
As jobs around the world are lost to new technologies, and as war and ecological breakdown ensure more and more people are displaced globally, the numbers of what the sociologist William I. Robinson calls “surplus humanity” — that is, those who have been rendered economically useless — will continue to swell. The ruling classes, in turn, will seek to contain these desperate masses through ever more brutal tactics.
It is a nightmarish scenario, but it is one that is already being realized. It is today a reality lived by those who risk their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean, or by those trying to make it past the defenses along the U.S.-Mexico border. It is lived, most of all, by Palestinians, but, as the whole world becomes increasingly consumed by crisis, more and more of us may eventually come to live it too.
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