Just what we need: autonomous killer drone swarms powered by algorithms and AI.
Part 3 of the excellent Al Jazeera documentary The Business of War focuses on Israel’s use of killer drones in Gaza. The trend is toward “fully autonomous weapons”—drone swarms that rely on algorithms to identify targets to hit and humans to kill. Officially, a human is still supposed to make the final decision to strike, but in some cases the operator has only 20 seconds to give a “go” or “no go.” And, let’s be honest, the system drives operators toward “go.”
The documentary is especially powerful in showing the devastation in Gaza (images of Stalingrad in World War II come to mind), the deliberate killing of journalists (a war crime), and how drones are used not just for killing but as tools of intimidation and control.
Images of AI-enabled drone swarms chasing and killing people recall scenes from the Terminator films. But as the documentary notes, the danger right now isn’t some future Skynet—it’s how these drones have already emerged as “new forms of domination and oppression.”
Almost as troubling is the military-corporate fusion as these drone swarms are supported by “cloud” resources supplied by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. A new conceit boasts of Israel as an “AI superpower,” even as corporations make a killing in profits.
All this technology, all this high-tech prowess, is fueling a holocaust in Gaza. Eisenhower warned us in 1953 that humanity might crucify itself on a cross of iron. Looking at today’s autonomous weapons, perhaps we’ve chosen a different cross—one made of silicon.
In an ever-changing world, the one constant in Universe USA is rising Pentagon budgets. For President Trump, a trillion-dollar war budget is something to crow about. Of course, it’s sold as “peace through strength.” For what is more peaceful than more weaponry, especially nuclear-tipped ICBMs and SLBMs?
America is always arming, uparming, rearming for war allegedly to prevent war. The problem is arming for war usually leads to yet more war. You don’t “invest” in weaponry to keep it on a shelf, rusting away in armories.
Excuse my language, but Vietnam vets and war protesters put it well: Fighting (or bombing) for peace is like fucking for virginity.
Vintage 1969. Makes sense, right?
More telling, however, is the constant state of war preparations that infect and influence our minds. Our “leaders” talk about “all options being on the table” when the only option they consider is military force. We are what we “invest” in. And weapons ‘r’ us.
In U.S. politics, strong and wrong is seen as far better than “weak” and right. And just about every politician inside the DC Beltway appeases the military-industrial complex, Israel, or both. That’s how you end up with disastrous wars of choice in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, together with full-throated support for genocide in Gaza.
Who cares about right and wrong when might always makes right?
An anecdote: I have a friend who works in the belly of the beast (the DoD). He told me his job makes him think of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984.” The Pentagon under Pete Hegseth has become an exercise in eliminating DEI bad speak and replacing it with doubleplusgood warrior-ethos speak. Lots of time is wasted sending “bad” terms and names down the memory hole.
Even as the DoD’s language is purged of bad speak about DEI, the Pentagon’s embrace of a permanent war economy is tightened. The very idea of a “peace dividend,” floated by Republican President George H.W. Bush in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, is seemingly ancient history, an idea never to be considered again, not in Trump and Hegseth’s warrior-USA.
Preparing constantly for war is a powerful way to ensure more war. Overspending on esoteric and genocidal weaponry is a powerful way to hollow out one’s country while establishing the conditions for global mass death.
Perhaps our “leaders” need to recall that Orwell’s “1984” was meant to be a warning of what to avoid, not a how-to guide for authoritarian rule and perpetual war.
I sent this somewhat despairing note to a friend this morning:
It remains unclear to me whether the U.S. government kowtows to Israel (for all the reasons we know, like AIPAC), or whether Israel is a sort of cat’s paw for U.S. imperial and corporate interests. Maybe it’s not about nations and borders, as the famous speech from “Network” put it, but rather resources and profit, whether oil, water, weapons, and the like. The people of Gaza are simply in the way and entirely expendable to these larger interests. Naturally, propaganda is skillfully used to portray just about every Palestinian as a Hamas terrorist. Then, as you noted, there’s a media blackout on Gaza in most U.S. mainstream media sources.
Short of revolution, I don’t see any changes coming. The Democrats, of course, are just as happy to serve Israel and corporate interests.
This is the famous scene from “Network” featuring a brilliant performance by Ned Beatty:
If the world is a “college of corporations” (heck, even Harvard is a corporation) and if business and money is the universal lubricant, the Palestinians in Gaza are both good and bad for business. They are “good” in the sense that money can be made from killing them, concentrating them, monitoring them, expelling them, and so on. Speaking and documenting this horrendous truth got Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, sanctioned by the U.S. government, as Lisa Savage noted here.
They are “bad” for business with respect to the gas fields off Gaza. Those marine gas reserves are likely worth $5 billion or more, money that would have done much to alleviate poverty in Gaza. Of course, Israel wasn’t about to allow Palestinians in Gaza to share in this bounty. Getting rid of Palestinians is a means to the end of completely dominating future trade in gas and other commodities in the Levant Basin.
I’ve been wondering why Great Britain is at great pains to help the Netanyahu government—then I noted that British Petroleum is one of the giant corporations that Israel granted a license to for future gas exploration. Coincidence?
Now, unlike Ned Beatty above, I’m not saying everything is explained by money and currency flows as “the primal forces of nature.” But it’s always a good idea to follow the money. It’s a ghastly business indeed when genocide makes money, but there you have it. A large part of the Holocaust in World War II was Germans and their fellow travelers taking everything from the Jews before they killed them. Profit from death factories—a grim truth I care not to contemplate, but it happened. Mass death can be a huge money-maker, and those pulling the strings couldn’t care less about body counts. Quarterly profits—now those they care about.
This suggests a strategy for activism—except efforts at BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) are heavily resisted by the powers that be. Surprise! You can find out more about the BDS movement here.
When protests are bad for business, that’s when the powerful pay attention. Powerful people already know the truth—they do everything in their power to determine what is “true”—so they’re not interested in right or wrong. What’s “right” is what makes money and what’s wrong, very wrong, loses money. You can’t appeal to their collective conscience (Good luck with that!), but you can possibly appeal to or cut into their collective profits.
I didn’t know I was a “Jew-hater” until I suggested in a comment that giving Bibi Netanyahu everything he wants (and then some) might not be the same as serving the national interests and security needs of the United States. Well, there, I said it. Maybe Bibi shouldn’t get all the bombs and weapons and support he wants, whenever he wants and whatever Israel does with them.
And for that, I became a “Jew-hater.” I guess because I wasn’t 100% subservient to Bibi.
These are strange days in America. Congress can’t jump to its collective feet quickly enough to applaud Bibi. Members of Congress proudly display Israeli flags outside their offices. Heck, a few members of Congress (notably Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania) aren’t happy unless they literally wrap the Israeli flag around their bodies.
Senator Fetterman (on the right) shows the proper deference to Israel
What gives? What accounts for this madness?
Oh, I know some of the reasons. AIPAC. Christian evangelicals looking to the Second Coming. All the money ($100 million and more) Miriam Adelson gave to Donald Trump. All the profits to be made from weaponry and war. The corporate media, bought and paid for by billionaires. And so on. Yet something deeper, more insidious, seems to be at work here.
We used to have the “America, love it or leave it” crowd. Now we have the “Israel, love it—or else” crowd. In America!
Of course, ad hominem attacks like “Jew-hater” are meant to distract from real issues. People call you names when they can’t think of intelligent and persuasive ways of challenging your arguments. Yet this is America, after all, where much of our discourse (such as it is) consists of name-calling and other forms of insults and slander.
Honestly, I loved the response of another commenter to the “Jew-hater” epithet. The person simply typed: YAWN.
If you’re willing to think or write critically about Israel and the actions of its government and leaders, which indeed every American (and Israeli) should be, be prepared to be attacked as a Jew-hater, an anti-Semite, or worse. It comes with the territory. Even my Jewish friends who write critically are not immune. They, of course, are dismissed as “self-hating Jews.”
Fortunately, it appears most Americans today are onto the game that’s being played here. Progress, of a sort, even as Bibi continues to get everything he wants. Now Bibi says he’ll nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
At her Substack, Lisa Savage asks whether the “Gaza Hunger Games” we’re witnessing—the concentration of Palestinians there accompanied by slaughter and mass starvation—was the plan all along for Israel and the United States. It got me to thinking, so I wrote a rather longwinded response to Lisa, which I’d like to share with all of you.
Whether it was the plan all along or whether it’s the result of ad hoc decisions over time, one thing is certain: the holocaust in Gaza must be stopped.
*****
Lisa, I’ve taught the Holocaust, and your question reminds me of a debate among historians: Did Hitler and the Nazis always plan to kill all the Jews, or was it the result of ad hoc decisions over time? Scholars still debate this.*
Perhaps the debate is somewhat artificial in the sense that Hitler and the Nazis vilified the Jews, demeaning them, attacking them, dehumanizing them, establishing the conditions for genocide, which were linked to the need to win a war (Jews as an existential enemy that had to be destroyed, even Jewish children, i.e. they were all “guilty”).
The “logic” of genocide sees even children as enemies who must be eliminated (Image of the “Warsaw Ghetto Boy” during World War II)
Something similar is happening with Palestinians in Gaza. I don’t think Israel and the U.S. had a plan all along to concentrate them in Gaza and kill them. But all that’s gone before this has created the preconditions for a final solution to the Gaza question.
When you vilify Palestinians, demean them, attack them, incarcerate them, dehumanize them, you establish the conditions for a genocide. Then you use the excuse of a “war” to drive the most radical solution–elimination–just as the Nazis used the excuse of World War II to eliminate the Jews (who, of course, posed no existential threat to Germany).
Within the Nazi government (and now within the Israeli government), extremists always come to the forefront. Many officials in Nazi Germany wanted to relocate the Jews, not kill them all, or they wanted to exploit them as slave labor before killing them. But the extremists–the ones who just wanted to kill them all–tended to win the argument. They were the most committed, most sure of themselves, the most radical.
So, what’s happening in Gaza has been the result of long-term dehumanization and propaganda coupled with ad hoc decisions that have run to extremes, because those who are most radical tend to win these “arguments.”
What is truly unconscionable is the eagerness of the U.S. government to provide Israel with all the weapons and diplomatic cover it needs to implement its final solution in Gaza. Whether the president is Biden or Trump, whether Congress is controlled by the Democratic or Republican parties, the policy and result is the same: a blank check to Israel to kill as many Palestinians as they want, justified falsely in “defending” Israel from Hamas.
The Nazis thought or said the Jews were out to destroy them (obviously the Jews were totally incapable of threatening the German war machine) so they tried to destroy the Jews.
The Israeli government says Hamas is out to destroy them (obviously Hamas is totally incapable of threatening the IDF war machine) so they’re trying to destroy the Palestinians.
Genocide is sold as “defensive” and “necessary.”
The parallels are there, yet few people want to see them.
*****
*Addendum: Among Holocaust historians it’s known as the “intentionalist” versus “functionalist” debate, i.e. was it always the Nazis’ intent to kill the Jews, or did it emerge slowly as a function of specific events and decisions?
Some might say, who cares? Dead is dead. Stop the killing!
So much of what we’ve been told about Israel and Zionism has been a lie, as this video reveals.
My mother-in-law had a saying: “Have a heart if you’ve got a heart.” So many “leaders” in the U.S. and Israel, including Joe Biden and Donald Trump and of course Bibi Netanyahu, haven’t got hearts, at least when it comes to Palestinians and Gaza.
Israel bombed the home of two married doctors in Gaza on Friday, killing nine of their children and critically injuring their sole surviving son. The father of the children was also severely injured in the attack, while their mother, while still working at the nearby hospital, received the charred bodies of her children. They were too badly burned to be recognized.
This one incident, just by itself, is vastly more newsworthy and deserving of attention than two Israeli embassy staff members being killed in Washington. But news coverage hasn’t reflected this, because Palestinians aren’t regarded as human beings in the mainstream western press.
And another worthy snippet from Caitlin Johnstone:
This is a particularly glaring example of the way the western press have been discussing the Gaza holocaust as some kind of unfortunate tragedy that is just passively happening to the Palestinian people, as though it’s a natural disaster or something. It’s like bombs and siege warfare are just the weather over there. Like “Oh it’s a bit bomby and faminy in Gaza today, and it makes me feel sad!”
This genocide is exposing the mass media like nothing else in my lifetime.
Finally, consider this article by Lisa Savage as she ponders the misuse of Memorial Day as a celebration of militarism in the United States.
Here’s an excerpt:
The U.S. as a whole seems to be suffering from moral injury as we destroy country after country in our lust for imperial spoils. Watching the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza starving thousands to death while bombing them drives me to despair. There are now plans for U.S. soldiers to distribute food aid because Israel won’t allow UNRWA to do it as they have for decades. Food has been weaponized and politicized, and the largest shipments being allowed in at the moment don’t even contain calories or medical supplies. They contain shrouds.
I will hold my kids tonight, and shake with anger. Dr. Alaa Elnajjar left her home this morning in Gaza to save other kids lives. 9 of her 10 kids arrived to her charred in body bags, and her 1 surviving child barely alive. May Gods mercy be upon her and her family, and may His… pic.twitter.com/hqvvSnu4kD
It was quickly obvious to me, as it was to so many people, that Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli government was engaged in a genocide in slow motion, using the October 7th Hamas attack to justify the most ruthless reprisals against more than two million Palestinians in Gaza.
Caitlin Johnstone’s new piece, “Israeli Officials Explain Balancing Act Between Overt Genocide And Maintaining Western Support,” cites the words of Israel’s own government to prove this. Israeli officials are open about it. They make no apologies. They would like to starve and kill more quickly, but they need to go slow so as to maintain support in the U.S. Senate.
I wrote the article below in early December 2023. It was obvious then, as it is today, what Israel’s goal is. Gaza (and the West Bank) is to be ethnically cleansed. Full stop. The main challenge for Israel is to do it in a way that’s palatable to politicians and supporters in the United States.
A palatable genocide. Just think of that idea for a moment.
Anyhow, here’s my article from December 2023, unchanged.
Biden to Israel: Don’t Ethnically Cleanse Too Fast
Have you ever heard parents tell their unruly children: Don’t run in the store too fast. Don’t slug your friend too hard. Don’t eat all the candy. Instead of telling them to stop running in the store, to stop slugging their friend, to stop hogging all the candy.
I feel like that’s the Biden and Blinken approach to Israel: Don’t ethnically cleanse Gaza too fast. Just slow down a bit. Don’t make it too obvious. Don’t be too ruthless.
Biden and Blinken are those permissive parents who are dominated by an unruly child. Let’s call the child “Bibi.” They don’t dare tell Bibi to stop. They don’t dare punish him. They don’t dare make a scene, because Bibi will throw a tantrum and make their lives hell. So they allow Bibi to do whatever the hell he wants to do, except just a bit quieter, or slower, or less violent. They enable the child, in short, and indeed Biden and Blinken give Bibi more “clubs” (as in 2000-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles) so he can keep slugging other kids with even more relish.
Don’t kill too many children, Bibi. Good boy!
Speaking of enabling, I got my daily report today from the New York Times on what’s happening in the “Israel-Hamas War.” Note the framing here: the idea this is a war between equals, when Israel is an overwhelmingly powerful nation-state and Hamas consists of maybe 20,000 lightly-armed fighters. Anyhow, here’s the summary:
Israel-Hamas War
Israel said it had launched 200 strikes into Gaza since fighting resumed yesterday. Air-raid sirens in Israel warned of possible incoming rockets.
Gazan officials accused Israel of striking southern Gaza, where many displaced Palestinians are sheltering.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, blamed Hamas for the cease-fire’s end and said he had seen signs that Israel had begun to take new steps to protect Palestinian civilians.
The resumption of fighting left dozens of hostages still in Gazaand reduced the amount of aid entering the enclave, which had increased during the truce.
Let’s take a look at those bulleted points.
The powerful Israeli military has launched 200 strikes against Gaza, killing hundreds of innocent Palestinians, which goes unmentioned, even as small rockets from Hamas may (or may not) have been launched against Israel.
Gazan officials “accused” Israel of striking southern Gaza: Is there any doubt here? Where “many” displaced Palestinians are sheltering: How many? What type of shelter is available to them? Hasn’t Israeli military action “displaced” more than a million Palestinians, most of whom have no real shelter to speak of?
Blinken blames Hamas: What a surprise! And how is Israel protecting civilians in Gaza when they’re launching 200 “strikes” against them?
Apparently, the only hostages that matter are the ones held in Gaza. Israel’s mass incarceration of Palestinians, including children, goes unmentioned.
Again, Israel is held blameless; Hamas is responsible for everything bad that has happened, is happening, and will happen in Gaza. Because our child Bibi can do no wrong.
Don’t bomb too much, Bibi. Don’t kill too many other children. Don’t ethnically cleanse too fast. There: that’s my good boy. That’s my little angel.
Though the sentiment has been wrongly attributed to George Orwell, it makes sense to say that in an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Two graduating college students recently decided to tell the truth about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The first student, Logan Rozos, said he’d searched his heart, a search which led him to condemn mass murder in Palestine.
New York University responded by denouncing his statement and withholding his diploma.
At George Washington University, another student-speaker, Cecilia Culver, used her speech to denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza and U.S. complicity in the same. I haven’t heard as yet how she will be punished.
It’s truly hard to be a “prestigious university” when you have no moral spine.
It’s nice to think that speaking truth to power works, except that the powerful already know the truth, indeed they work hard to define what is “truth” and what isn’t, and they will indeed punish those who pose a threat to manufactured notions of truth.
I commend these students for speaking boldly and honestly, as democracy withers when it’s defined and dominated by lies. They truly earned their diplomas, even if the powerful conspire to take them away.
These students have learned a valuable lesson that really can’t be taught in classrooms: that doing the right thing, when it’s contrary to the dictates and interests of powerful entities, is risky and will often lead to severe repercussions. Just ask truth-tellers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Daniel Hale.
The new pope, Leo XIV, is off to an encouraging start as he calls for peace (from CNN):
Pontiff calls for ‘authentic, just and lasting peace’ Pope Leo XIV delivered his first Sunday blessing from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday and used the address to pray for peace. “In today’s dramatic scenario of a third world war being fought piecemeal, as Pope Francis said, I too turn to the world’s leaders with an ever timely appeal: never again war!”
Pope Leo XIV at the central Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica (Photo: Isabella Bonotto/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Sadly for the pope, U.S. leaders believe that peace is achieved through military strength and total dominance, unleashing “warriors” across the world. It doesn’t matter who the president is or which political party is putatively in charge. The Imperial State insists on colossal spending on wars and preparations for the same.
With respect to Gaza and the ongoing death and destruction there, Leo XIV had this to say:
“I am deeply pained by what is happening. Let the fighting cease immediately, let humanitarian aid be provided to the exhausted civilian population, and may all hostages be released.”
Sensible words. But it will take far more than words to stop Israel from its destruction of Gaza and its evisceration and evacuation of the Palestinians there.
Leo XIV also called for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine while highlighting the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
The word “peace” has almost disappeared from American discourse. Leo is helping to reinvigorate it. U.S. leaders are doing their best to sabotage it with war budgets that approach and exceed a trillion dollars yearly (this coming from a Christian nation, at least according to its leaders).
Leo is pointing the way. It’s time all those self-confessed Christians in America start following the Prince of Peace rather than the god of war.
As a teenager in the late 1970s, I read about Israel’s “Six-Day War” in 1967. The account I read was sympathetic toward Israel, respecting the audacity of its sneak attack on the Egyptian and Syrian air forces and its Blitzkrieg in the Sinai. But it also mentioned the Israeli attack on a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, a signals intelligence ship that was monitoring the war in international waters. The Israeli air and sea attack killed 34 crew members aboard the Liberty and wounded another 173. The ship, heavily damaged, never sailed again and was later sold as scrap.
The USS Liberty, post-attack
The Israeli government claimed the attack was unintentional and a mistake. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest the story is far more complicated. Yet I was thinking this morning about how the Trump administrations’s strenuous attempt to criminalize critical speech vis-à-vis Israel is yet another assault on liberty. Once again, the ship of liberty is endangered in the U.S., yet the U.S. government is content to look the other way, or even to collaborate with the attackers.
Let me be clear: Those Americans who criticize Israel for its actions in Gaza are exercising their liberty. We are free to speak, and indeed we should speak freely on crimes against humanity, for that is what ethnic cleansing in Gaza is: a crime against humanity.
Yet the U.S. government, which essentially agreed to look the other way in response to Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, is now looking the other way as free speech in America is suppressed, or even twisting denunciations of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza as anti-Semitic hate speech.
Liberty is something precious, and we as Americans are supposed to admire and applaud Patrick Henry and his sentiment from 250 years ago: “Give me liberty or give me death!”
If we as Americans have the right to criticize our own government, which we do, we certainly have the right to criticize foreign governments, including, of course, Israel. Yet, judging by U.S. mainstream media coverage and the words of government spokespeople, American citizens actually have less scope to criticize Israel than any other country, including their own.
Liberty attacked and abridged is liberty denied. How long before liberty itself in America, rocketed and strafed and torpedoed, is decommissioned and sold for scrap, just as the USS Liberty was?
Addendum: There are many books and videos about Israel’s attack on the USS Libertyand what was *really* behind it. I’m not an expert on the subject, but the official story of a regrettable “mistake” is decidedly fishy. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarizing a complex subject. Here’s an excerpt to ponder:
Some intelligence and military officials dispute Israel’s explanation.[79]Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the incident, wrote:
I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.[80]
Bracing Views 