Putting my two daughters to bed is a daily ritual for me. I lie down on their bed and place one on each side. We read a story and they play, they tease each other, they tease me. Finally, I ask them to go to bed firmly and fall asleep in a second.
We recently had particularly intense weather here in Oslo, with strong thunderstorms disrupting our routine. The girls were frightened by the deafening sound that at times seemed so close that it scared me, but I stood firm for them.
When they approached me, I reassured them with the same words my parents used when I was a child to calm my siblings and me: that we were safe and that God is the most merciful, so don’t worry.
Even so, the girls asked a million questions, as children often do: who sends the thunder? Why does God do this to us? Doesn’t God see and hear everything?
As I struggled to respond amid the storm, I thought about Gaza. At that moment, somewhere in the ruins of a house or in a tent, a Palestinian father also hugged his two daughters and struggled to answer similar questions.
My thoughts raced. What was he telling his children? That it is not God, the most merciful, who makes the frightening, rumbling sounds, but a boy in a military uniform behind a screen, playing god and making decisions about who lives and who dies at the touch of a button? How do you explain high-tech genocide to a child? How do you tell them that they are living in an extermination campaign from the future?
As I lay there with my two scared girls, I thought about what Gaza is and what it tells us about our own future and the future of our children.
I’m a science fiction fan. Over the past three decades, I have consumed hundreds of science fiction films, series and comics. When reading the news and watching videos of the reality that the people of Palestine face today, I can’t help but have a constant déjà vu of scenes, concepts and scenarios that I have seen repeatedly in the dystopia genre.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is perhaps the most technologically enabled in human history. Every aspect of extermination is powered by technology: the bombs, the shootings, the decisions about who lives and who dies.
Modern “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), of course, is everywhere. An AI program called Lavender has the names of almost everyone in Gaza and produces suggestions for people to attack based on “data inputs” 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 Daddy?” checks if a “suspect” is at home so he can be bombed – which usually also kills his family and neighbors.
What’s happening in Gaza really does sound like the plot of a Hollywood movie about AI going rogue. But it’s more than that. This is also what war will be like in our near future: humans will hide behind screens and let technology do the killing.
The Israelis are already doing this quite extensively. The use of drones and quadcopters to shoot at civilians, even in their homes, is well documented. Fearing Hamas’ tunnels, they also deployed dog-shaped robots to explore underground. Seeing images of them reminded me of Metalhead, an episode of the British sci-fi series Black Mirror in which AI-powered robot dogs hunt people.
Another aspect of using AI and other cutting-edge technologies is that it brings the Israeli campaign to dehumanize Palestinians to a grand finale. There is nothing that says “We do not consider Palestinians human” more clearly than allowing technology to kill them indiscriminately.
In fact, the Israelites perfected dehumanization. They don’t need to implant neurochips in their soldiers – like in the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire – to not feel remorse. Extensive brainwashing in Israeli schools and society has made most Israeli soldiers willing to go along with genocide – some even seeming to enjoy it.
Israel’s genocidal AI technology was enabled and fueled by another important high-tech sector: surveillance. Israel’s tremendous progress in surveillance technology has been driven by the need to control the population it occupies.
In what Amnesty International calls “automated apartheid”, Israeli authorities have implemented such sophisticated surveillance mechanisms – and so many of them – that Palestine today looks like a much worse version of George Orwell’s 1984.
In Orwell’s novel, an omnipresent regime watches its subjects’ every move, its surveillance and repression penetrating and destroying the most intimate and precious aspects of human life. The Israeli apartheid regime works in a similar way.
There is not a Palestinian cry, not a Palestinian sigh that the Israeli colonial regime does not know. He knows everything about everyone. By using powerful technological tools – from drones to various hacking software, high-tech cameras and special facial recognition instruments – he gained access to all Palestinian public and private spaces.
“[T]The drone is constantly with me in my room – worry and fear never leave our homes,” a Palestinian teenager told AFP in 2022, a year before the start of the war.
She said she had difficulty sleeping and concentrating because of the constant drone of Israeli military drones flying over the crowded Palestinian enclave. “Sometimes I have to put the pillow over my head to keep from hearing the buzzing,” she added.
At that time, Israel was flying drones over Gaza for 4,000 flight hours every month – the equivalent of having five such aircraft permanently in the sky.
In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the situation has not been better. There, Israel has deployed vast networks of security cameras, many of them pointed directly at the windows of Palestinian homes, keeping a close eye on family life.
It is also using facial recognition technology extensively. There have been reports in the media about the so-called Blue Wolf program, in which soldiers are encouraged to take photographs of Palestinians, including children and the elderly, to feed a database, with prizes awarded to the units that collect the most.
The psychological cost of feeling constantly watched can be immense. In fact, it is similar to the oppressive atmosphere of Orwell’s dystopian world.
But the impact of surveillance goes beyond instilling anxiety and fear. Just as in 1984, Israel’s monstrous surveillance machine uses information about Palestinians’ private affairs against them. It is one of their most destructive methods of recruiting informants and collaborators, which undermines internal cohesion and solidarity among Palestinians and destroys families and friendships.
There is one more aspect of Orwell’s novel that I see 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 are “making the desert bloom”.
Talking about “making the desert bloom” – this is one of the strategies that Israel is using in its genocidal campaign in Gaza. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released information about his Gaza 2035 plan, which makes the strip look like a prosperous, high-tech city of the future, with a port, a railway and flashy residential buildings. This is what Gaza will be like 10 years after the genocide – its survivors enjoying the sweet life of economic progress, granted to them by their genocidal Israelites.
It almost seems like a plot taken from the Matrix trilogy, where the oppressors force the oppressed into a virtual reality of an easy life to blind them to their reality – a life of slavery and exploitation.
But promises of material prosperity have not dissuaded Palestinians from giving up their homeland sooner. This ploy will not work in the future either.
There is an iconic scene in The Matrix that illustrates a very human choice between obedience and resistance. Neo has to choose between a blue pill, which maintains the illusion, and a red one – which breaks 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 in the face of the very real possibility that what we see in Gaza today will become the new normal in the very near future. Do we ignore this and swallow the blue pill? Or do we wake up with red?
For many people around the world, the genocide in Gaza may seem like a distant tragedy – a tragedy that cannot happen to them. But these killing and surveillance technologies that Israel is testing on Palestinians are for sale. And many governments and non-state actors are keeping an eye on them.
“Just as Israel’s technological revolution has provided the world with breathtaking innovations, I am confident that the AI developed by Israel will benefit all of humanity,” Netanyahu he said ominously at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023, less than three weeks before his army launches a genocidal war.
Lying next to my two sleeping girls, I fear for their future. I fear that few of us are willing to see reality as it is and take a stand now, before it is too late, before the entire world heads down the path towards Gaza.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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