Israel and the AI-Driven, Military-Industrial Complex

The Emergent Nonfiction Lab (part of the Counter Evidentiary Futures project) welcomes Jeff Halper, Lucy Suchman, and Helga Tawil-Souri for this discussion on how artificial intelligence and other network-centric technologies of surveillance and warfare fit into the longer history of Israel’s military-industrial complex.

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Two months prior to the International Court of Justice’s ruling that there is a plausible risk of genocide by Israel, journalists from the Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call published an article headlined “‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza.” In it, they revealed that a new AI targeting system called “Habsora” (“the Gospel”), has played a key role in creating one of the most lethal military offensives against Palestinians since the events of the Nakba in 1948. The Gospel aims to expedite target identification from surveillance data, essentially functioning as a “mass assassination factory” within Gaza, as described by a former intelligence officer. Earlier this month, these same journalists published a second piece focusing on another AI system, “Lavender.” Where the Gospel focuses on marking buildings and infrastructures supposedly housing militants, “Lavender marks people—and puts them on a kill list.” As Lucy Suchman has argued, “the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has shifted the argument for AI-enabled targeting from claims to greater precision and accuracy, to the objective of accelerating the rate of destruction.”

Taking these systems as a starting point, this roundtable discussion aims to examine how artificial intelligence and other network-centric technologies of surveillance and warfare fit into the longer history of Israel’s military-industrial complex and its regimes of surveillance and control in the occupied Palestinian territories. As Israel aims to establish itself as a “leading purveyor of high-tech military technoscience, not least in so-called AI-enabled warfighting,” how do we understand such contemporary developments within the context of Israel’s longer history of occupation? Are systems like the Gospel and Lavender representative of a broader entrenchment of the paired militaristic-capitalistic project of AI, which extends back beyond such contemporary agglomerations? Or are systems such as these simply networked, techno-scientific intensifications of Israel’s military strategy? Do forms of automated militarism increasingly sidestep mechanisms of legal accountability, or are there new modalities and methods of investigation that can help expose their logics?

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Participants:

Jeff Halper, anthropologist, activist, and head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He is the author of War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (Pluto, 2015), which examines the role of Israel’s military-industrial complex in the generation of a “global pacification industry.”

Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the fields of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary militarism.

Helga Tawil-Souri, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and Middle East and Islamic Studies at NYU Steinhardt. Her work focuses on spatiality, technology, and politics in the Middle East and especially Israel/Palestine, and methodologically incorporates political economy, visual and cultural studies, and cultural geography.