Putting my two daughters to bed is a daily ritual for me. I lie in their bed and have one of them next to me. We read a story, they play, tease each other, tease me. Finally, I firmly ask them to go to bed, and they fall asleep in a second.
Recently we had some particularly bad weather here in Oslo, with violent thunderstorms disrupting our routine. The girls were afraid of the deafening noise that sometimes seemed so close that even I was afraid of it, but I managed to keep it under control for them.
As they approached me, I reassured them with the same words my own parents used when I was a child to calm my siblings and me: that we were safe and that God is most merciful, so not to worry.
The girls asked a million questions, as children often do: Who sends thunder? Why does God do this to us? Doesn’t God see and hear everything?
As I sought to answer these questions in the midst of the storm, I thought of Gaza. At that moment, somewhere in the ruins of a house or in a tent, a Palestinian father was also holding his two daughters in his arms and trying to answer similar questions.
My thoughts raced. What was he telling his children? That it was not God, the most merciful, who was making those frightening, thunderous sounds, but a child in a military uniform behind a screen, playing God and deciding who lives and who dies at the push of a button? How do you explain high-tech genocide to a child? How do you tell him he’s living in a future extermination campaign?
As I lay there with my two frightened daughters, I thought about what Gaza is and what it tells us about our own future and that of our children.
I am a bit of a science fiction nerd. Over the past three decades, I have watched hundreds of science fiction movies, series, and comics. As I read the news and watch videos about the reality the Palestinian people face today, I can’t help but constantly have a sense of déjà vu when faced with scenes, concepts, and scenarios that I have seen time and time again in the dystopian genre.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza may be the most technological in human history. Every aspect of the extermination is fueled by technology: the bombs, the shootings, the decisions about who lives and who dies.
The trendy artificial intelligence (AI) is of course everywhere. An AI program called Lavender knows the names of almost everyone in Gaza and suggests people to attack based on “input data,” such as social media usage. Another system called “The Gospel” generates an infinite number of “military targets,” including residential buildings. A third AI invention grotesquely called “Where’s Dad?” checks to see if a “suspect” is home so it can bomb him—which usually kills his family and neighbors as well.
What is happening in Gaza really does sound like a Hollywood movie about artificial intelligence running amok. But it is much more than that. It is also what war will look like in the near future: humans will hide behind screens and let technology do the killing.
The Israelis are already using this practice on a large scale. They have already used drones and quadcopters to shoot civilians, even in their homes. Fearing Hamas tunnels, they have also deployed robot dogs to explore underground. These images reminded me of Metalhead, an episode of the British science fiction series Black Mirror, in which robot dogs with artificial intelligence hunt people.
Another aspect of using artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies is that they put an end to Israel’s campaign of dehumanization of Palestinians. Nothing says more clearly, “We do not consider Palestinians to be human beings” than allowing technology to kill them indiscriminately.
The Israelis have indeed perfected dehumanization. They do not need to implant neurochips in their soldiers – as in the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire – to make them feel no remorse. The intensive brainwashing in Israeli schools and society has made the majority of Israeli soldiers willing to accept genocide – some even seem to enjoy it.
Israel’s genocidal AI technology has been empowered and fueled by another major high-tech sector: surveillance. Israel’s considerable advances in surveillance technology have been driven by the need to control the population it occupies.
In what Amnesty International calls “automated apartheid,” Israeli authorities have deployed surveillance mechanisms so sophisticated – and in such large numbers – that Palestine today resembles a much worse version of George Orwell’s novel 1984.
In Orwell’s novel, an omnipresent regime monitors the every move of its subjects, its surveillance and repression penetrating and destroying the most intimate and precious aspects of human life. The Israeli apartheid regime operates in a similar way.
There is not a Palestinian cry, not a Palestinian sigh that the Israeli colonial regime does not know. It knows everything about everyone. Using powerful technological tools – from drones to various hacking software, high-tech cameras and special facial recognition instruments – it has gained access to all Palestinian public and private spaces.
“The drone is constantly with me in my room – worry and fear do not leave our homes,” a Palestinian teenager told AFP in 2022, a year before the war began.
She said she had trouble sleeping and concentrating because of the constant buzzing of Israeli military drones flying over the crowded Palestinian enclave. “Sometimes I have to put the pillow over my head so I don’t hear the buzzing,” she added.
At the time, Israel was flying drones over Gaza for 4,000 hours a month, the equivalent of having five such planes in the sky at all times.
In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the situation is no better. Israel has deployed vast networks of security cameras, many of which are trained directly on the windows of Palestinian homes, closely monitoring the lives of families.
The military also makes extensive use of facial recognition technology. Media reports have reported on the Blue Wolf program, in which soldiers are encouraged to take photos of Palestinians, including children and the elderly, to populate a database, and prizes are awarded to units that collect the most.
The feeling of being constantly watched can have immense psychological consequences, reminiscent of the oppressive atmosphere of Orwell’s dystopian world.
But the impact of surveillance goes beyond anxiety and fear. Just as in 1984, Israel’s surveillance machine uses information about Palestinians’ private affairs against them. It is one of its most destructive methods of recruiting informants and collaborators, undermining internal cohesion and solidarity among Palestinians and destroying families and friendships.
There is another aspect of Orwell’s novel that I find in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians: the propensity for doublespeak. Genocide is “self-defense”; Palestinian civilians are “terrorists” or “not innocent”; resistance fighters are “terrorists”; colonialism and land theft “make the desert bloom.”
The idea of “making the desert bloom” is also part of Israel’s rationale for its genocidal campaign in Gaza. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released details of his Gaza 2035 plan, which presents the Strip as a prosperous, high-tech city of the future, with a port, a railway, and luxurious apartment buildings. This is what Gaza will look like ten years after the genocide: its survivors enjoying the sweet life of economic progress that their Israeli genocidaires have given them.
It almost sounds like a plot from the Matrix trilogy, where the oppressors force the oppressed to live in a virtual reality of easy living to blind them to their reality: a life of slavery and exploitation.
But promises of material prosperity have so far failed to deter Palestinians from giving up their homeland. Nor will this ruse work in the future.
There is an iconic scene in The Matrix that illustrates a very human choice between obedience and resistance. Neo must choose between a blue pill, which maintains the illusion, and a red pill, which shatters it. The Palestinian people made this choice a long time ago; for them, the blue pill was never an option.
The question now is what choice we will make when faced with the very real possibility that what we see today in Gaza will become the new normal in the very near future. Will we ignore it and swallow the blue pill? Or will we wake up to the red pill?
For many people around the world, the Gaza genocide may seem like a distant tragedy that could never happen to them. But the surveillance and killing technologies that Israel is testing on Palestinians are for sale. And many governments and non-state actors have their eye on them.
“Just as Israel’s technological revolution has provided the world with breathtaking innovation, I am confident that the AI developed by Israel will benefit all of humanity,” Netanyahu ominously declared at the UN General Assembly in September 2023, less than three weeks before his military launched a genocidal war.
As I lie next to my two sleeping daughters, I fear for their future. I fear that not enough of us are willing to see reality as it is and take a stand now before it is too late, before the whole world goes down the path of Gaza.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.