By Jada Gannon-Day
Abstract
The Israeli occupation of Palestine and its subsequent dispossession, starvation, and genocide of the Palestinian people is a pertinent issue across numerous fields. The IDF’s use of Palestinians as a captive population in the testing and marketing of surveillance and weapons technologies is of particular significance in critical security studies. Despite the significance of Palestine both in terms of life lost and the international anti-imperialist struggle, predominant schools of thought remain limited to a purely or predominantly ideological perspective on surveillance, neglecting to examine the converging interests of private corporations and imperialist states as forces that fuel the occupation of Palestine. This paper seeks to disrupt this tendency to focus solely on the western public’s acceptance of genocide and instead breaks down the material forces at play in the Israeli punitive-surveillance apparatus in relation to weapons manufacturing and data commodification. Breaking down Israel’s biometric checkpoints, development of autonomous weapons, and marketization of surveillance technologies, with the support of not just western states but multinational data extractive platforms and cloud services, I argue that a cohesive materialist analysis of interconnected colonial and capitalist-imperialist structures is essential to comprehending and fighting these structures.