How AI can be used to legitimize Israeli apartheid
An AI-controlled Israeli machine gun in a Hebron neighbourhood
Shir Hever writes in Mondoweiss:
Do scholars and activists who support Palestinian rights sometimes unintentionally promote the Israeli arms industry? The Israeli military hype machine famously uses the occupation as a “laboratory” or as a “showcase” for its newly developed weapons, but this creates a dilemma for activists who oppose Israeli arms exports. Scholars and activists are morally obligated to highlight the crimes committed by the Israeli forces. But by pointing to the destruction, suffering, and death caused by these weapons, activists may inadvertently reproduce exactly the propaganda that allows Israel to sell its technologies of death, destruction, and repression.
To avoid falling into the trap of Israeli hype, we must take a step back and look at the Israeli methods of oppression and state violence over time. Recently Israeli forces in the West Bank have returned to the methods of 20 years ago, of the second Intifada, with an Apache helicopter spraying a whole crowd with bullets. The technology is going backward.
Spyware is a good example of this hype. Israeli spyware companies received government authorization to sell spyware to the highest bidder, or to authoritarian regimes with which the Israeli government wanted to improve relations. This doesn’t make spyware an Israeli technology — intelligence organizations in the U.S, Russia, and other countries with access to spyware simply do not offer it for sale on the market.
In his book, The Palestine Laboratory, Antony Loewenstein discusses how this hype is manufactured to boost the sales of Israeli arms companies, and Rhys Machhold has also warned about critical texts against Israeli crimes being subverted into promotional materials by the very companies which activists are trying to stop.