The United Nations (UN) Security Council voted 14-0 last month to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza for the remainder of Ramadan and for the unconditional release of all hostages. The U.S. abstained from voting—even after pushing to replace the word “permanent” with “lasting” regarding the length of the ceasefire agreement.
The mainstream media treated this decision as a watershed moment, in part because it led the office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel a trip to Washington, D.C. However, just days before the March 25 ceasefire vote, the U.S. government passed a bill that further defunds the UN agency that aids Palestinians, while also approving the $3.8 billion the U.S. sends to Israel each year. Also in March, President Joe Biden quietly sent new arms packages to Israel, undermining the growing reports of rising tension between Biden and Netanyahu.
None of this increased and covert aid to Israel should come as a surprise. One of Israel’s most influential and ardent backers, of course, is the U.S. In 1986, then-state Sen. Joe Biden called Israel “the best $3 billion investment we make.” Under the Biden administration, the U.S. has provided Israel with billions in taxpayer funding and more than 100 weapons transfers since Oct. 7.
Israel-U.S. relations have always been transactional—the U.S. provides financial and political support for Israel to carry out its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and the theft and occupation of their land. In turn, Israel serves as a major supplier of weaponry, surveillance technologies, and military training to state and federal agencies in the U.S. to be deployed against the country’s most marginalized communities.
Since 2014, the Israeli-based military and surveillance technology company Elbit Systems has contracted with the federal immigration agency Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to develop a network of integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona. CBP has also acquired and deployed blimps outfitted with high-powered radar, underground sensors, and facial recognition software against migrants. This technology is used in similar landscapes in Palestine.
Congress annually allocates billions to the Department of Homeland Security, in part for high-tech surveillance systems that make the U.S.-Mexico border one of the most surveilled places in the country. This also means that Israel has had the most to gain financially from the widespread militarization of the Southern border—and it is border communities like the Sonoran Desert’s Tohono O’odham Nation that suffer from the expansion and deployment of Israel’s wide-area surveillance technologies.
Elbit Systems of America has built 55 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona along Tohono O’odham land, where residents describe the monitoring of the reservation as a “grim aspect of everyday life.” Tohono O’odham people can’t move freely without the U.S. and Israel’s surveillance. Investigative journalist Will Parrish reported for The Intercept in 2019 that “the U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for new systems of enforcement and control” that are “fueled by the growing demonization of migrants as well as ongoing fears of foreign terrorism.” The militarization of the borderlands also creates new opportunities for genocide profiteering. U.S. defense and technology companies like Lockheed Martin and upstart Anduril Industries benefit significantly from border security contracts.
“[But] Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are ‘field-proven’ on Palestinians,” Parish reported.
Away from the border, American law enforcement officials also routinely collaborate with the Israeli military. Thousands of U.S. state and federal law enforcement officials have participated in security conferences and workshops with Israeli police and security agents. During a 2014 trip to Israel, high-ranking officials with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) studied drone technology used by the Israeli military in Gaza and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. The LAPD now uses similar tech on predominantly Black and brown residents. More recently, hundreds of police officers trained in Israel through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program, a university-police exchange program between Georgia State University, the Atlanta Police Department, and the Atlanta Police Foundation. As Prism reported, Israel’s connections to Atlanta’s Cop City illustrate a broader convergence of international policing tactics, which the Palestinian Youth Movement describes as emblematic of the intertwined forces of oppression in Palestine and Turtle Island.
U.S. support for Zionist militarism and the lack of accountability for the 1948 Nakba bolstered an already viable local defense sector in Israel. Beginning in the 1950s, Israel sold arms to foreign countries, resulting in the advent of government-owned defense companies and privately owned corporations such as Elbit Systems that formed in 1966. After 9/11, Israel’s military-industrial complex saw a significant increase in revenue from the sale of missiles, drones, and surveillance equipment by internationalizing the message that Israel was at the forefront of the War on Terror since its violent inception.
Dubbed the “Startup Nation,” Israel is the world leader in the number of startups per capita. Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s leading entrepreneurial hot spots and, as writer Kaleem Hawa noted, “Palestinian scenes of dispossession become sites of Zionist leisure.”
Furthermore, Israel ranks fourth in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. In 2022, Israel spent $23.4 billion on its military and, over time, the U.S. has supplied about 80% of Israel’s weapons imports. When you also factor in the research and development grants provided by the Israeli government, Israel has become one of the top arms dealers in the world.
A major driving force of the Israeli political economy has been its “world-class weapons industry.” According to Antony Loewenstein, author of “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World,” Israel has marketed and commercialized its apartheid technologies to reflect “the lived experience of brutalizing Palestinians.” Ultimately, Israel has attracted the likes of repressive and fascist regimes eager to mimic the occupation of Palestine in their respective countries using uniquely brutal terror technologies.
Often working in concert with the U.S., the Israeli government has entered secret arms deals and military training exchanges with repressive governments throughout Global South nations—efforts primarily intended to hinder mass mobilization, resistance movements, and decolonization efforts. Historically, Israel has acted as a proxy for the U.S. in the Global South. In “The Palestine Laboratory,” Loewenstein reveals that Israel has supported police forces in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador—countries where the U.S. covertly interfered in civil wars. In Colombia, beginning in the 1980s, Israeli agents trained and armed death squads that helped protect U.S. interests in Latin America. The Israeli military establishment has largely been shielded from global condemnation and accountability because its tools of surveillance and death are “ubiquitous across the globe,” Loewenstein noted. Moreover, Israel’s duplicitous involvement in arms diplomacy has allowed it to orient its economy around the laboratory it constructed “where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subjugated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination,” Loewenstein wrote.
By receiving ample cover from its alliances with the U.S. and other Western nation-states, Israel is enabled and even encouraged to test brutal tools of domination and pacification on Palestinians and then export these technologies around the world. Gaza is the blueprint for Israeli expertise in domination and control and the Gaza Strip—an open-air prison subject to intensive surveillance and control—is thus regarded by supporters of the Zionist entity as the “ultimate ethnonationalist dream,” according to Loewenstein.
Interminable technological advancement is foundational to preserving the apartheid state, advancing its genocidal policies, and maintaining a false veneer of legitimacy. Because of this, Israel’s apartheid tech is booming.
Advocacy groups protested and warned against the use of automated apartheid systems and artificial intelligence warfare such as “Habsora,” which allows the Israeli army to carry out mass ad-hoc strikes on Palestinian civilians. Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is made possible by the continuous stream of U.S. weaponry estimated to arrive in Israel every 36 hours.
As apartheid technologies become increasingly automated, let us remember these words from Colombian President Gustavo Petro: “Gaza is just the first experiment in considering us all disposable.”
