Amazon investment into Palestinian Apartheid
The dark side of automated technology/ artificial intelligence and how it is being used to power oppression of those living under occupation
“Where is Ahmad?” Israeli military forces demanded after boarding a bus headed toward Jerusalem from Ramallah.
They were looking for me.
You see, as a Palestinian dual national with a Palestinian ID, I cannot visit areas of occupied Palestine without a special permit called a tasree7, which takes several months to obtain. After locating me on the bus, Israeli forces violently removed me; an armed soldier then scanned my face, passport, and other personal information and told me the information will be “permanently recorded” in their system and used against me if I attempt to make my religious pilgrimage to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque again.
My treatment was hardly an anomaly. Israel’s apartheid state and occupation are being sponsored by tech giants, with AI and other surveillance technologies used to deepen the longstanding repression against Palestinians. In 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, which saw Israel bombard the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, leaving 1,000 Palestinians displaced and 260 dead in Gaza, “AI was a force multiplier,” according to an Israeli official. In the years since, companies like Amazon have powered what a recent Amnesty International report dubbed Automated Apartheid. Amazon announced just recently that it would invest another $7.2 billion in Israel through 2037 and extend its Web Services to the country.
The company claims the benefactors of Amazon Web Services will be “Israeli entrepreneurs and businesses.” In reality, the primary winner will be the military. AWS will expand “Project Nimbus,” which provides the cloud service ecosystem for Israel, primarily the country’s military. (Google also invests in Project Nimbus.)
The project will allow Israeli forces to obtain and retain data on Palestinians and surveil them with facial recognition, clamping down on the right to protest by making Palestinians warier of, say, appearing at a demonstration. Even if they aren’t detained at the protest itself, Palestinians know the numerous watchtowers and checkpoints will capture their faces and they could be arrested later or banned from visiting certain sites. Amnesty’s report found that protests outside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate plummeted after the various watchtowers and cameras were erected.
The ties between Israel and Amazon run deep. As of 2019, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) had supplied Amazon with 80 percent of its aircrafts. Buoyed by Amazon’s investment, IAI is implementing autonomous “robo-snipers” and drones across Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The implications for Palestinians at any of the 100+ checkpoints across the West Bank is frightening. Israeli soldiers haven’t distinguished themselves as paragons of morality in their role as occupiers. But human error or miscalculation in murdering Palestinians beats highly intelligent technology that does not give second thought to inputted commands.
In cities like Hebron, for instance, AI-controlled machine guns use stored surveillance technology to shoot Palestinians without direct human input. The gun scans Palestinians as they make their way through one of the eighteen permanent checkpoints in Hebron. Once scanned it checks background information and searches for orders placed on that person. If indicated to shoot, it does not miss, and another Palestinian life has been stolen.
This is the kind of oppression Amazon is fueling.
The company began pouring money into Israel in 2014, the same year Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and killed 2,000 Palestinians (a quarter of whom were children). Since then, Amazon has continually aided the occupation, with many illegal settlers employed by the AWS network requiring security clearance. This year alone, AI has facilitated the murder of 170+ Palestinians , the destruction of 290 Palestinian-owned buildings, and the displacement of thousands. Amnesty International found that automated weapons, spyware, and unauthorized biometric systems are constantly being used to strip Palestinians of their basic human right to privacy and freedom of movement.
Since 1967, over 600,000 Israeli settlers have moved into the West Bank — settlers on the stolen land of millions of displaced Palestinians — and Amazon Web Service will only propel the expansion of illegal settlement projects. AWS will support data for the Israel Land Authority, the agency that dictates which Palestinian village or town will be ethnically cleansed to make way for Jewish-only settlements.
Amazon Web Services will also work in tandem with Israel’s Pegasus spyware, its primary method of obtaining private information. Pegasus infiltrates mobile phones and harvests personal and location data without the user’s knowledge. Under its “Wolf Pack” program — fortified by Amazon Web Services — Israel aims to house the profiles of every Palestinian in the West Bank, storing their biometrics, family histories, and security ratings. These ratings are used on the ground as soldiers scan and search Palestinians, deciding whether to imprison or kill those deemed “security threats” (an inaccurate term, since Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance under the Geneva and Hague Conventions of the United Nations).
Imagine living your life under constant threat of armed surveillance. Every movement tracked, every angle of your face scanned, every word listened too. What little freedom you have as an occupied human being, stolen.
Israel should be boycotted, not enabled, by these tech giants fueling the Apartheid state.
These companies do not rely on, nor need, the profit that comes from the segregation, occupation, and brutalization of the Palestinian people. No amount of justification or rationalization will explain how these companies are profiting off the disposition of Palestinian life through autonomous technology. While AI might seem like a solution to many of the world’s problems, to Palestinians it further contributes to the dystopian nightmare that even Orwell could not have predicted in 1948.