Algorithmic Dispossession: Automating Warfare in Israel and Palestine

Abstract

This dissertation offers an anthropological portrait of how algorithms are transforming what it means to wage and live with war across Israel and Palestine. My findings emerge from three years of ethnographic research with Israeli intelligence veterans, Palestinian advocates and influencers, and ordinary civilians living at the cross-hairs of regional conflict. I begin in the early 2000s, as Israel’s surveillance apparatus across Palestine proliferated amidst the violence of the Second Intifada and receding visions of regional peace. I conclude more than two decades later, as AI-powered surveillance and weapons systems intensify warfare across the region. I argue that the imperatives of a globalized information economy tangle with violent forms of dispossession across the occupied Palestinian territories to entrench warfare, a process I call algorithmic dispossession. Bringing critical algorithm studies to bear on an anthropological portrait of warfare in Israel and Palestine, I show how the buildup of algorithmic systems embedded the Israeli army into the most intimate domains of Palestinians’ lives. As new technologies drove up arrests, displacement, and death for Palestinians, the economic value placed on algorithmic development cleaved Israeli soldiers and military strategy writ large off from the imperatives of reducing bloodshed, ensuring warfare continued at a profound human cost to Israelis and Palestinians across the region. By placing ethnographic evidence gathered through years of fieldwork in Israel/Palestine alongside urgent debates surrounding the ethics and impact of new technologies, this dissertation ultimately foregrounds the iterative relationship between war and automation today.