Israel’s Lavender Kill List

For years, scholars, filmmakers, and journalists have documented Israel’s use of the Gaza Strip as a laboratory for developing, testing, and marketing strategies of rule and technologies of repression.¹ Israeli arms manufacturers like Elbit Systems, Israel Weapons Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and hundreds of smaller companies develop weapons and technology that the Israeli military uses in the occupied territories. Military and police forces around the world watch these spectacles of death and destruction with fascination and flock to Israel to purchase “battle-tested” weapons. In the words of Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, “Palestine is Israel’s workshop, where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subjugated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination.” ²

Understanding Gaza as a laboratory draws attention to the strategic location of Israel within the global political economy of repression. Over the last decade, Israeli arms sales have doubled—reaching a record $12.5 billion in 2022. Drones make up 25 percent of the exports, followed by missiles, rockets, and air defense systems. Israeli companies also export advanced surveillance and spyware technology, most notoriously the NSO Group’s Pegasus software. Pegasus transforms cellphones into surveillance devices by activating cameras and microphones, harvesting data, bypassing end-to-end encryption, and transmitting everything to whatever agency controls the software.

Israel billed its 2021 assault on Gaza as the “first AI war,” advertising its deployment of autonomous swarms of quadcopter drones to surveil neighborhoods and attack Palestinians.³ The lab has operated in high gear since Israel initiated its extended genocidal assault on Gaza in October 2023. Alongside the ubiquitous quadcopter drones that now terrorize Palestinians night and day, the Israeli military has experimented with GPS-guided mortar systems; hyperspectral sensors that collect information across the electromagnetic spectrum; terrestrial and aquatic drones; pellet-filled drone-fired missiles; remote-controlled bombs that loiter in the air while awaiting a target; thermobaric vacuum bombs; sponge grenades that release explosions of a chemical foam that rapidly expands and hardens; lasers that shoot down rockets and balloons; and more.

In the summer of 2023, a few months before Israel began its assault on Gaza, the chief engineer behind the laser-guided missile defense system explained, “We are after a significant and large demonstration experiment to prove the feasibility of removing threats and exploiting technological capabilities developed over the years. In one of the next military conflicts, we will take the system to the battlefield. We will test it in real scenarios, we will return home with the data, analyze the numbers and see how we are doing.”⁴

Some of this weaponry—like GPS-guided mortars—feed the image of Israel as the world’s most moral army using precision technology to minimize civilian deaths. But the genocide has largely removed that façade. And doctors in Gaza are reporting injuries that they’ve never encountered before. Yasser Khan, a Canadian eye surgeon who has worked in Gaza during the 2023–24 genocide, coined the term “Gaza shrapnel face” to describe the pervasiveness of eye and face injuries caused by “missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere.” The missiles also cause unusual amputations:

Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also, these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So, you gotta take it out.⁵

Doctors have also reported deep third and fourth degree burns where the skin tissue is “impregnated with black particles” and “all the layers underneath are burned down to the bone.”⁶ Investigators suspect that these are the result of thermobaric vacuum bombs, which contain an aerosol fuel compartment and two separate explosive charges. “When they impact their target, the first explosive charge disperses the fuel mixture widely as a cloud, capable of infiltrating any building openings or defenses that are not hermetically sealed. Subsequently, a second charge ignites the cloud, resulting in a massive fireball, a formidable blast wave, and the creation of a vacuum that absorbs all surrounding oxygen.”⁷ In addition to sucking the oxygen out of lungs, the Euro-Med Monitor explains, thermobaric blast waves generate “extremely high temperatures of up to 2,500˚C, which cause severe burning of skin and internal body parts, charring corpses to the point of complete melting or evaporation, particularly in areas where the explosion cloud is denser.”⁸

Focusing on production for deployment in Gaza, Israeli weapons manufacturers have suspended most exports for the time being. But the companies know that their sales will resume in the near future. As one producer recently explained, “Sales to the IDF and the Israeli security forces are a sign of quality for any product in the arms sector. Sometimes the first question a potential customer asks us is whether the IDF and the police have been equipped with weapons. If the answer is positive, the chances are that we will move forward towards a deal.”⁹ The Palestine laboratory provides excellent opportunities to market technologies of death.

Despite the important insights generated by the laboratory hypothesis, understanding Gaza as a laboratory for repressive technology risks obscuring two significant truths. First, it is Israel’s settler colonial project—not the profit motive—that drives the assault on Gaza. Second, the technology tested in Gaza is not a product of Israeli arms manufacturers alone but of an imperial network of military and carceral industries. I discuss the first point in the next section and develop the second point in the remainder of the article, through a focus on the imperial production of Israel’s AI-powered Lavender kill list.

The Ongoing Nakba

The Gaza Strip is a product of the Nakba of 1948 when the Zionist movement seized 78 percent of historic Palestine, forcibly displaced seven hundred thousand Palestinians, and established a Jewish state on the ruins of Palestinian society. Gaza successfully resisted colonization in 1948 and became a shelter for nearly two hundred thousand Palestinian refugees. Today, 80 percent of Gaza’s people are refugees whose families were displaced 75 years ago. Rather than a singular event, however, the Nakba is an ongoing structure of displacement and elimination. The Gaza genocide is part of what Palestinians call al-nakba al-mustamirra (the continuous Nakba), which is grounded in Zionist settler colonialism and reinforced by neoliberal racial capitalism. ¹⁰

The Zionist project emerged as one of several responses to European anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many European Jews fought for equal rights, joined socialist movements, and/or emigrated to the Americas, the Zionist movement argued that Jewish people needed a nation-state of their own and identified Palestine as the ideal location. The Zionist response to racism, therefore, birthed a settler colonial project.

Zionists embraced an Orientalist belief in European superiority, taking for granted that Europeans could colonize other lands with impunity and that their own lives were more valuable than those of the colonized. Promising that Israel would be an outpost of Europe in the Middle East, the Zionist movement gained support from the British and later the US Empires. Early Zionists envisioned a plantation economy that would exploit Palestinian workers, but the factions that came to dominate the Zionist movement embraced a settler colonial strategy of conquering Palestinian land, displacing Palestinian people, and eliminating dependence on Palestinian workers.¹¹

Since 1948, Israel has steadily expanded the area of Jewish-only settlement through the systematic colonization of Palestinian land and the forced displacement of Palestinian people. Israel has used warfare, military rule, mass incarceration, torture, land confiscation, settlement construction, home demolitions, bureaucratic obstructions, racial discrimination, curfews, closures, sieges, invasions, and more to construct and enforce a system of Jewish supremacy throughout historic Palestine. This is what drives the ongoing Nakba. The genocidal assault on Gaza is the latest in a longstanding process of settler colonial expansion and Palestinian elimination. As Toufic Haddad reminds us in an interview with Spectre, “Transfer, in whole or in part, together with a substantial genocide, remain Israel’s objectives in Gaza.”¹²

Like other military and carceral projects, Israeli settler colonialism generates opportunities to test and market strategies along with technologies for containing and eliminating unwanted populations. It is therefore crucial to understand how neoliberal racial capitalism has intensified efforts to render the Palestinian people disposable. Upon occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel forcibly incorporated the occupied Palestinian population into its capitalist economy as both low-wage workers and captive consumers. By the late 1980s, more than 120,000 Palestinians crossed from the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Israel every day to work in the construction, agriculture, and service sectors. Tens of thousands more worked in sweatshops subcontracting for Israeli companies in the occupied territories.

As part of the Oslo process, Israel used neoliberal restructuring during the 1990s to engineer the disposability of Palestinian workers.¹³ Free trade agreements with Egypt and Jordan, a shift to high-tech production for the global market, and the arrival of Russian Jews and migrant workers from Asia, Eastern Europe, and later east Africa largely eliminated the demand for Palestinian workers. This enabled Israel to concentrate the now-disposable Palestinian population into an archipelago of isolated enclosures and aggressively colonize the land that remains. Cut off from employment opportunities and from one another, Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized and abandoned to permanent unemployment, grinding poverty, slow death, and deadly assaults by the Israel military.

The Gaza Strip is the largest zone of concentrated, racialized abandonment in Palestine.¹⁴ The siege of Gaza began in 2007, after Israel and the United States refused to recognize a Hamas victory in legislative elections. But Gaza has been described as an “open air prison” since at least 1996, when Israel intensified its closure of the occupied territories as part of its emerging strategy of concentration and colonization. For nearly thirty years, Gaza has been a concentration camp containing a racialized surplus population whose lives and labor are no longer valued by the dominant powers. They have been effectively expelled from the productive economy, relegated to the periphery and subject to consistent violence.

Israel’s settler colonial project operates through a racial capitalist logic that devalues Palestinian lives and labor but profits from their spectacular deaths.

The same processes have made Palestinian deaths quite valuable. Through the longstanding siege supplemented with devastating military assaults every few years, Israel has showcased technologies to not only contain but also to kill the racialized poor. And the spectacle of Palestinian death has attracted investments from military, police, and national security agencies around the world. Israel has transformed Gaza into a laboratory by turning racialized disposability into a market opportunity. The engine behind the process remains Israel’s settler colonial project—the ongoing Nakba—which now operates through a racial capitalist logic that devalues Palestinian lives and labor but profits from their spectacular deaths.

The Lavender Kill List

In early April 2024, as the genocide in Gaza reached its seventh month and the Palestinian death-toll passed thirty-three thousand, investigative reporter Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine exposed the Israeli military’s use of an AI-powered kill list to eliminate Palestinians suspected of association with the armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.¹⁵ Based on interviews with Israeli intelligence officers who have been active in the genocide, Abraham revealed that the kill list is generated by an algorithm called “Lavender” that was developed by the IDF’s Unit 8200 intelligence division (similar to the US National Security Agency). Building on recently published research that I conducted with my comrades in the Policing in Chicago Research Group, I want to explore how this deadly new technology was developed and tested in other laboratories targeting the racialized poor. While the Israeli military bears responsibility for deploying the kill list, the technology itself is the product of an imperial network of military and carceral forces.

Lavender is an algorithm that is trained to identify features associated with known militants and then deployed to look for similar patterns in other individuals. Supercharged with artificial intelligence, Lavender reviews vast amounts of surveillance data from a wide range of sources, likely including “drone footage, intercepted communications, surveillance data, and information drawn from monitoring the movements and behavior patterns of individuals and large groups.”¹⁶

Evidence suggests that data from companies such as Google and Meta are included in the analysis.¹⁷ Analyzing people’s familial and social networks, cellphone usage, social media presence, housing, employment, and more, the algorithm assigns every person in Gaza an individualized risk score of 1 to 100, with higher numbers suggesting an increased probability of belonging to an armed faction of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad. The result is a ranked list that the Israeli military uses to prioritize targets for assassination.

As Israel launched its assault on Gaza in October 2023, military commanders constantly demanded more targets. In the words of one intelligence officer, “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.” The IDF turned to Lavender and another AI program called Gospel to automate the process of target selection, destroying thousands of buildings and killing tens of thousands of Palestinians. In the words of an Israeli intelligence officer, “That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy.”

During the first weeks of the war, Lavender marked thirty-seven thousand Palestinians with risk scores indicating probable association with an armed faction. According to Abraham’s sources, the IDF calculated that the list was only about 90 percent accurate. But “errors” were inconsequential. The IDF greenlit the killing of almost any Palestinian male whose name appeared on the Lavender list. Israel’s military then used additional AI-powered surveillance programs—including Gospel, Where’s Daddy, and Fire Factory—to track the suspected militants and mark the locations of their family homes. When the surveillance programs indicated that a person on the Lavender kill list was at home, the IDF bombed the building with little regardfor the number of additional Palestinians killed.

One source told Abraham that AI has turned the Israeli army into a “mass assassination factory.”¹⁸ Of course, the use of AI programs to identify targets ultimately rests on human decisions. “Nothing happens by accident,” explained another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit another target….These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

When the surveillance programs indicated that a person on the Lavender kill list was at home, the IDF bombed the building with little regard for additional Palestinians killed.

Indeed, Abraham’s exposé revealed that Israeli army commanders authorized the killing of fifteen to twenty civilians in strikes targeting people that Lavender identified as “junior operatives” of Hamas and the killing of more than one hundred civilians in strikes on senior Hamas commanders. Reserving its expensive “precision” warheads for Hamas commanders, the IDF dropped “dumb” (unguided) bombs on the homes of people identified as low-ranking operatives. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people,” explained one of the sources. Another added, “We usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole house on its occupants.”¹⁹ The Israeli government and military command structure bear responsibility for all of these decisions.

Israel’s embrace of AI-powered targeting software was foreshadowed in 2021 when Brigadier General Y. S.—later identified as Yossi Sariel, the commander of Unit 8200 until April 2024—published The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy between Human & Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World. The book envisions an AI-powered targeting machine with “the ability to create tens of thousands of targets before a battle begins, and to assemble thousands of new targets every day during a war.”²⁰ As the author explains, construction of the machine, which resembles a blueprint for Lavender and Gospel, would start by using classified data to identify “a few strong features” of militants and then incorporate machine-learning technology to build an algorithm capable of analyzing “hundreds or even thousands” of datapoints and producing individualized risk scores. According to the author, things like belonging to a WhatsApp network with a member of Hezbollah, frequent address changes, and repeated cellphone purchases could influence a person’s risk score.

The commentary on Lavender has overlooked a crucial detail that underlines the imperial foundations of Israel’s kill list: Brigadier General Sariel conceptualized and wrote The Human-Machine Team during a fellowship year at the US National Defense University (NDU) in Washington DC. Run by the US Department of Defense, the NDU provides advanced training in warfare and strategic studies for US and allied military and national security agencies. Programs such as the National War College, the Joint Advanced Warfighting School, and the Institute for National Strategic Studies create spaces for military and carceral agencies, private corporations, and academics to collaborate on joint projects. Sariel’s fellowship constitutes a direct link between Israel’s Unit 8200 and US developments in high-tech weaponry.

Sariel notes that, “We were 70 international students from 54 countries; there were also a few hundred American students,” and describes the NDU as “an amazing place that gives one the ability and the facilities to learn and build a global network.” He sees these networks as key building blocks for the AI revolution. In a chapter titled, “What Can We Learn from the United States about Leading A.I. Transformation,” Sariel argues that the United States is at the forefront of AI because the country builds bridges between national security agencies, academic institutions, private sector corporations, and global partners. He celebrates the innovative role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the creation of the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center as a “focal point” for interagency collaborations.

While cultivating networks, the NDU also produces cutting-edge knowledge and military strategy that likely informed Sariel’s vision of AI-powered warfare. From 2016 to 2018, for example, the NDU journal, Joint Force Quarterly, published a series of articles and commentaries about the so-called “third offset strategy” that discussed AI, swarm technology, and human-machine collaboration.²¹ The US military uses the term “offset strategy” to describe a broad effort to leverage emerging technology to maintain domination in inter-imperial competition.

The first US offset strategy emphasized nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century; the second prioritized precision-guided weapons and stealth technology in the late twentieth century. In 2014, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called for the development of “a game-changing Third Offset Strategy.”²² The following year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work outlined five building blocks for the new strategy: 1) autonomous deep-learning systems, 2) human-machine collaboration, 3) assisted human operations, 4) advanced human-machine combat teaming, and 5) network-enabled semi-autonomous weapons. In a 2016 Joint Force Quarterly article, US Navy Captain Brent Sadler noted that all five of Work’s building blocks rely on “learning machines that, when teamed with a person, provide a potential prompt jump in capability.” In other words, human-machine teams. ²³

In a 2017 Joint Force Quarterly article, US Air Force Captain Jules Hurst wrote about swarms of “miniature quadcopters armed with light machine guns” and fixed wing swarms that “orbit the battlefield like flocks of angry birds.” He continues:

Imagine the power of thousands of drones gathering combat data in real time and the rapidity with which weak points in the enemy line could be calculated and exploited with a robotic coup d’oeil. Then imagine how quickly these same drones could concentrate in an attack on these points. The potential for a trained swarm to observe, orient, decide, and act faster than human combatants in this scenario is frightening.²⁴

Sariel’s book embraced this vision, noting the near-term possibility of developing AI-powered drone swarms: “the potential to build a swarm that includes hundreds of drones with A.I. capabilities is a vision that can be realized in two to three years and can be a game changer for our missions.” These are the swarms that Israel showcased in 2021 and has deployed throughout Gaza since.

In short, many of the ideas that Sariel outlined in The Human-Machine Team built on conversations taking place among US military officials, academics, and high-tech corporations at the NDU and related spaces. In a very direct sense, therefore, the Lavender kill list—and the swarms of quadcopter drones—that Israel is using to terrorize and annihilate the people of Gaza must be understood as joint productions of US imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism.

Webs of Imperial Policing

Beyond these direct connections, the Lavender kill list has deep roots in data-based policing, which is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century. Throughout much of the world, policing has been reshaped by the rapid expansion of high-tech surveillance, massive databases, advanced data analytics, and data-sharing processes. In the US, the roots of data-based policing stretch back to the colonial advent of pin maps, the “professionalization” of police forces, and the surveillance of antiracist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and national liberation movements by police Red Squads, FBI COINTELPRO units, and the National Security Agency.

The Lavender kill list must be understood as joint productions of US imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism.

Today, law enforcement agencies use stops, arrests, and high-tech surveillance equipment—including video cameras, cell-site simulators, audio detection devices, social media monitoring software, and aerial drones—to compile massive databases. They supplement their own data with information sourced from public databases and private data-brokers. They analyze the data using facial recognition software, geographic mapping software, social network analysis, machine-learning algorithms, and other emerging technologies. They circulate their data through networks of carceral agencies using shared databases and other data-sharing agreements. And they use the data to determine targets for predictive deployments, heightened surveillance, and aggressive policing. This is how data becomes weaponized.²⁵

Reading Abraham’s report, I was struck by something eerily familiar about the techno-horror of Israel’s latest genocidal experiment. In 2012, the Chicago Police Department rolled out the latest innovation in predictive policing: the Strategic Subjects List (SSL). Designed to identify individuals likely to become involved in gun violence, the SSL used an algorithm to analyze the CPD’s extensive data system and produce individualized risk scores on a 500-point scale. Higher scores were meant to indicate an increased likelihood that the person would become a “party to violence,” either as a shooter or a victim. ²⁶

The SSL calculated risk scores using individuals’ arrest and victimization records as well as the police records of people that the CPD considered their “associates.” Employing the latest advances in social network analysis, the algorithm identified a person’s “associates” by mapping networks of people who were arrested together. The result was a ranked list of individuals—called a “heat list”—that the SSL algorithm determined were at heightened risk for violence. Police commanders used the SSL to identify people for targeted interventions, which included promises of support if they rejected violence, coupled with threats of enhanced surveillance, upgraded charges, and longer sentences if they did not.

Unlike the SSL, Israel’s Lavender program incorporates AI technology and is being used for the targeted annihilation of Palestinians. But the SSL experiment with algorithms, social network analysis, and risk scores clearly helped pave the way for Lavender. So how should we understand the movement from the CPD’s Strategic Subjects List to the IDF’s Lavender kill list?

My colleagues and I in the Policing in Chicago Research Group (Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ila Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta) just published a new book which analyzes the SSL and other innovations in data-based policing. Grounded in movement-led research that we conducted in support of abolitionist campaigns and transformative justice organizations, Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago focuses on the rapidly expanding use of data-based tools for police operations and for coordination within a global web of carceral agencies.²⁷ Although we completed the book before Yuval Abraham exposed Israel’s AI-powered kill list, our analysis can shed light on the imperial roots of Lavender.

As we show in the book, police forces never work alone. Instead, they operate through global webs of state and private sector agencies with similar but distinct missions and interconnected projects. Our study focuses on three of these overlapping projects—the War on Crime, the War on Terror, and the War on Immigrants—with attention to the multi-agency networks that pursue each war in Chicago and the weblike connections that link agencies operating at local, state, national, and global scales.

While each police war is driven by different political economic dynamics, they are all grounded in relations of racialized disposability, they are all interconnected, and they all create laboratories for experimenting with new high-tech tools for surveilling, containing, and eliminating poor and working-class communities of color. Data, technology, and strategies circulate through the webs of imperial policing, generating an expansive spiral of surveillance in which advancements in one warzone fuel developments in others.

In the remainder of this essay, I show that these webs shaped the creation of Israel’s Lavender kill list. Recognizing the potential for an imperial boomerang, we can also anticipate that the same webs will bring Lavender back to the United States.²⁸ To illustrate how imperial policing shaped the production of Lavender, I examine each war in turn, with a focus on a few key innovations.

The War on Terror is an imperial project to support US power in the Middle East, corporate access to oil, and Zionist rule in Palestine. It has driven innovations in data-based policing since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon established the interagency Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the US federal government used the USA PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act, and the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System to fortify existing structures for surveilling Arabs and Muslims at ports of entry and throughout the country.

Federal agencies quickly expanded the use of data-based surveillance tools, including terrorist watch lists and no-fly lists. These precursors to Lavender marked individuals as threats based largely on racial profiling, electronic surveillance, and the testimony of paid informants. But these were not the most important surveillance tools produced by the War on Terror.

In January 2002, John Poindexter was placed in charge of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office and drove a project called Total Information Awareness. New York Times reporter John Markoff, who exposed the project, explained that “The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe—including the United States.”²⁹ Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor and staff writer at the New Yorker, added that the Information Awareness Office’s main assignment is

to turn everything in cyberspace about everybody—tax records, driver’s-license applications, travel records, bank records, raw FBI files, telephone records, credit-card records, shopping-mall security camera videotapes, medical records, every e-mail anybody ever sent—into a single, humongous, multi-googolplexibyte database that electronic robots will mine for patterns of information suggestive of terrorist activity.³⁰

Although public protests led Congress to strike DARPA’s budget line for Total Information Awareness, the National Security Agency took over the key technological aspects of the program, such as predictive analytics, biometric technologies, social media monitoring, social network analysis, and “automated intelligence profiling.”³¹ Years later, Edward Snowden exposed these programs, which the NSA uses to collect “any data including emails, chat, videos, photos, stored data, voice-over-IP, file transfers, video conferencing, logins, and online social networking details from communication providers and social networks.”³² Total Information Awareness and its proliferating components helped lay the groundwork for Lavender.

In addition, the War on Terror led to a rapid expansion of interagency data sharing, also known as data fusion. The federal 9–11 Commission, which investigated the 2001 attacks, determined that US intelligence agencies failed to anticipate or prevent September 11 because they operated in silos without sharing information. Responding to this critique, the federal government created the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate intelligence agencies, multiplied the number of regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and established the National Network of Fusion Centers to promote interagency data sharing.

Fusion centers are high-tech surveillance centers designed to facilitate information-sharing between law enforcement agencies. Funded by federal agencies and operated by state or local police departments, fusion centers are staffed by officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies across the country. For instance, Chicago’s fusion center—the Crime Prevention and Information Center (CPIC)—is staffed by agents from the CPD, the FBI, the DHS, the US State Department, the US Secret Service, the US Attorney’s Office, the Illinois State Police, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, and suburban police departments.

The primary directive of all fusion centers is to review Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), documents created when people report something they consider suspicious through the Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something” program. When a SAR is created, analysts at a fusion center review federal, state, and local law enforcement databases as well as information from public databases and private sector data-brokers to determine if the reported activity has a “potential nexus to terrorism.” They share their findings with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, which conducts a follow-up investigation.³³

Importantly, most fusion centers have expanded their missions beyond counterterrorism to include “all crimes, all hazards.” For instance, CPIC quickly became the central intelligence hub for the entire CPD. The inclusion of crime within the fusion center’s mandate enabled CPIC to direct resources toward the surveillance of Black and Latinx communities. Analysts at CPIC conduct real-time surveillance, monitor high-tech equipment, analyze data, inform predictive deployments, and provide up-to-date reports on gang conflicts and gun violence.

By facilitating flows of data between local and federal agencies, fusion centers have enabled local police to use War on Terror funding to intensify surveillance related to the War on Crime. The centers constitute an important link between the two wars, much like the 1033 Program that provides surplus equipment from the US military to thousands of local, state, and federal agencies.

The War on Crime is primarily an effort to contain or eliminate poor Black people, rendered disposable by white supremacy and neoliberal restructuring.

The War on Crime is primarily an effort to contain or eliminate poor Black people, rendered disposable by white supremacy and neoliberal restructuring. Chicago police began experimenting with the use of data to determine deployments during the “professionalization” era in the 1960s, while the CPD Red Squad simultaneously built an index card database that included 285,000 individuals and 14,000 organizations. During the 1980s, the CPD collaborated with neighborhood watch groups to develop rudimentary computerized crime mapping programs. This became the foundation for the CPD’s community policing program, which was designed as a data-based strategy and drove the weaponization of data in twenty-first century Chicago.

In 2003, the CPD created the Deployment Operations Center, where data analysts oversaw deployments and facilitated COMPSTAT meetings. The following year, the department computerized its system for recording gang designations. Chicago police are not required to provide any evidence to support a gang designation; they simply click a button when submitting an arrest report. This led to a rapid expansion in gang designations. By 2019, the Gang Arrest Card database contained more than 134,000 names. 95 percent of people on the list are Black or Latinx.

Moreover, the CPD was at the forefront of data-sharing processes, winning national awards for its twenty-first century data system, designed from the start as a shared database. More than five hundred federal and local law enforcement agencies across the country have direct access to CPD databases. In a ten-year period, ICE searched CPD databases over thirty-two thousand times to identify noncitizens with criminal records or gang designations as priority targets for deportation.³⁴

The most rapid advances in data-based policing have occurred in the last decade. The advent of the Strategic Subjects List, described above, marked a giant leap in individualized predictive policing. Using CPD databases and recent advances in social network analysis, the CPD and a scientist from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) designed the SSL algorithm to identify individuals for targeted interventions.

Police claimed that the SSL provided “objective” guidance for target selection, but organizers pointed out that SSL scores were based entirely on an analysis of CPD data collected through years of racially discriminatory deployments, surveillance, and arrests. In practice, the algorithm merely justified targeting the same Black and Latinx communities that the CPD has aggressively policed for decades. After the RAND Corporation and Chicago’s Inspector General corroborated the organizers’ arguments, the CPD quietly decommissioned the SSL in 2019.

Yet the CPD, like other police departments, has accelerated the use of advanced technology. The CPIC fusion center oversees social media monitoring, facial recognition, gunshot detection, automatic license plate readers, advanced crime-mapping software, biometric surveillance, drones, and other advanced technology and data-processing software. All of this technology contributed to the technological foundations for Israel’s Lavender kill list.

Importantly, the IIT scientist who helped design the SSL, Miles Wernick, previously worked with the US Army to develop predictive algorithms that would enable target selection using night vision technology.³⁵ Similarly, a company at the forefront of data fusion and predictive policing—Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s Palantir Technologies—received early investments from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.

Around the time the CPD introduced the SSL, Palantir deployed similar predictive policing tools in New Orleans and Los Angeles. With broad access to police databases, other public databases, and advanced technology such as Automatic License Plate Readers, Palantir software integrates (or “fuses”) previously separate data sources, processes the data using advanced analytic tools, and generates predictions about when and where crimes will take place and which individuals are likely to be involved in gun violence.³⁶

Palantir has helped circulate these predictive technologies between police and military agencies. In addition to police departments, Palantir contracts with the CIA, FBI, ICE, DHS, and, of course, the US military. From producing early technology to predict the location of IEDs in Iraq, Palantir is now at the forefront of experiments with AI weapons systems. In a June 2023 New York Times editorial, CEO Alex Karp ridiculed efforts by tech workers to oppose military contracts and resist the development of AI weapons: “A reluctance to grapple with the often grim reality of an ongoing geopolitical struggle for power poses its own danger….The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”³⁷

Finally, another key site for developing the advanced surveillance technology that contributed to Lavender is the US War on Immigrants, a project to control the flow and regulate the subjectivity of people seeking opportunities in the imperial mainland after being displaced from the Global South. Since the creation of DHS in 2003, ICE has worked to amass and analyze enormous amounts of data in its effort to track, detain, discipline, and deport undocumented migrants.

Under the Bush administration, the Secure Communities program created data-sharing infrastructure for local police and sheriff’s departments to send fingerprint data to ICE and the FBI. In addition, ICE sends information requests to police departments and, in cities like Chicago, directly accesses police databases. Moreover, ICE purchases data from private-sector data-brokers, including cellphone location tracking information from Venntel and vehicle tracking data from Vigilant Solutions. And Palantir helped ICE build a platform for integrating data across systems and developing its own databases.

In 2022, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology documented ICE’s use of driver’s license records for facial recognition, utility company data for address tracking, as well as records from phone companies, child welfare agencies, credit-rating agencies, employment agencies, medical centers, and social media posts. To track people released from detention, ICE now uses the SmartLINK cellphone app that incorporates not only GPS data but also biometric authentication technology such as voice scans and facial recognition during video check-ins.³⁸

In June 2024, Just Futures Law and Mijente released a report documenting the AI turn in the War on Immigrants.³⁹ ICE and US Citizenship and Immigration Services now use AI programs to inform decisions on naturalization requests, predict fraudulent asylum claims, create risk assessments for release from detention, and establish conditions for electronic monitoring. In addition, Homeland Security uses AI to surveil immigrants using massive datasets and social networks analysis, to power the digital border wall, and to conduct biometric surveillance, including facial recognition.

As the Georgetown Center on Privacy & Technology explained, “By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time.”⁴⁰ In developing the tools to create such dossiers and advancing AI technology, ICE has not only been building on the vision of Total Information Awareness, but it has also been helping lay the foundations for Israel’s AI-powered Lavender kill list.

Each police war is driven by distinct objectives and contestations. Anti-Blackness and the control of the racialized poor shape the War on Crime; US imperialism and Zionism drive the War on Terror; and regulating the flow of migrant workers grounds the War on Immigrants. Each war zone is also a laboratory for developing and testing new technologies of surveillance, domination, and elimination. The companies at the forefront of surveillance capitalism—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and others—work closely with military and carceral agencies to weaponize data and develop, test, and market new technology for each war.

And the three wars are linked together to form the complex unity that the Policing in Chicago Research Group calls the webs of imperial policing. Like other partners of the US Empire, Israel is fully integrated into these webs. As technologies flow through the global circuits of military and carceral agencies and industries, racial capitalism and empire produce a dangerous spiral of surveillant power. The Lavender kill list is merely the latest deadly effect.

Beyond the Laboratory Hypothesis

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has produced a seemingly endless spectacle of death and destruction. But the spectacle is secondary; death, destruction, terror, and transfer are the Israeli government’s primary goals. Israel is responsible and must be held accountable for the genocide. But Israel does not act alone. The US Empire’s unwavering support for Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime has remained consistent throughout the latest episode in the ongoing Nakba. And while the Israeli government and military took the decision to deploy Lavender as a kill list, US imperial wars at home and abroad contributed to the development of the software.

Working hand-in-hand with multi-billion-dollar corporations, US-based military and carceral agencies develop and deploy advanced technology to achieve the goals associated with particular police wars. The technology that they’ve developed and tested in battlefields throughout the United States and around the world have become constituent parts of the Lavender kill list. Gang databases and no-fly lists identify individuals for targeted surveillance; drones, video cameras, audio sensors, automatic license plate readers, biometric technologies, and social media monitoring enable constant surveillance; social network analysis, predictive algorithms, and risk scores add an air of objectivity; cloud storage and data-sharing practices informed by a vision of Total Information Awareness enable interagency coordination and an expanding spiral of surveillance. In short, Lavender is a joint production of the Israeli settler colonial state and the US Empire state.

As the spiral continues to spin, will the SSL return to Chicago as a kill list? Or was it always already a potential kill list?

Now, as the spiral continues to spin, will the SSL return to Chicago as a kill list? Or was it always already a potential kill list?

When the Israeli government thinks of Gaza as a laboratory, it is not primarily about profit but rather as a space for testing strategies and technologies to use in other parts of Palestine. It was in Gaza that the Israeli military first used walls, checkpoints, closure, remote-controlled machine guns, and other technologies later deployed in the West Bank. And today, as Toufic Haddad points out, Israel is using the assault on Gaza to “establish a pattern of ethnic cleansing that can subsequently be used in theaters like the West Bank and Jerusalem.”⁴¹

Israel is not only testing new weapons in Gaza but also attempting to normalize genocide. The Israeli military is eroding the shock and horror of attacks on schools, hospitals, shelters, and journalists; of witnessing buildings collapse and entire neighborhoods leveled; of hearing screams of pain and cries for help. Israeli propaganda is attempting to obliterate distinctions between civilians and combatants as well as protections for women, children, and elders. For Israel, the ultimate purpose is to normalize the elimination of the unwanted Palestinian population.

Far right figures like Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi, Milei, Duterte, and Trump are watching closely to see how long Israel can get away with mass slaughter. For even though the brutality of Israel’s settler colonial project is exceptional for this century, there is nothing exceptional about the production of racialized, dehumanized populations rendered disposable. Indeed, this is a core feature of neoliberal racial capitalism. And the rise of fascist movements around the world is in large part a response to the question of what do to about unwanted populations.

This question grows ever more urgent as mounting climate catastrophes generate unprecedented waves of refugees. Lock them in cages. Fortify the borders to keep them out. Round them up and deport them. Abandon them to a slow death. Set them up to fail on the “free market” and blame them for their own failure. But mass extermination? That fantasy seemed off-limits until Israel began its assault on Gaza last October. Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, recently pointed out that right-wing governments are now studying Israel’s assault on Gaza: “They want to obtain not just the technology but the idea of how do you get away with such a massive civilian death toll.”⁴²

Future versions of Lavender will not always appear as kill lists; some will take the form of liberal projects to offer support for vulnerable individuals who make “responsible” choices. But new tools are being tested in the battlefields of all police wars, and the technology flows quickly through the webs of empire. Unless we find a way to end the Nakba and stop all imperial wars, we will see Lavender and other AI kill lists again, along with even more frightening advances in necro-technology.

By breaking down the walls on October 7, Hamas and other Palestinian factions shattered Israel’s fantasy of permanent containment in a high-tech concentration camp. In the wake of the violent attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians, Israel’s regime vowed to eradicate Hamas. The guerilla campaign in Gaza has now effectively undermined that fantasy as well. Globally, mass demonstrations, student encampments, tech workers, labor unions, and other campaigns have built on the principles of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) to cut ties with Israel and unravel the webs of empire.

And abolitionist movements across the United States are continuing mobilizations to cancel tech contracts, erase police databases, stop data-sharing, and end all police wars. These mobilizations are absolutely crucial, in their own right and as components of the struggle for Palestine liberation. Continuing to build revolutionary trans- national solidarity between movements that value all life provides the best hope for bringing an end to settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and empire. ×

Notes & References

Darryl Li, “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement,” Journal of Palestine Studies 35, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 38–55; Yotam Feldman (Director), The Lab, Gumboot Films, 2013; Jeff Halper, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians, and Global Pacification (London: Pluto, 2015). For constructive critiques of the laboratory hypothesis, see Leila Stockmarr, “Beyond the Laboratory Thesis: Gaza as Transmission Belt for War and Security Technology” in The Global Making of Policing: Postcolonial Perspectives, Jana Hönke and Markus-Michael Müller, eds. (London: Routledge, 2016), 59–76; and Rhys Machold, “Reconsidering the Laboratory Thesis: Palestine/Israel and the Geopolitics of Representation,” Political Geography 65 (2018): 88–97.
Athony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (London: Verso, 2023), 9.
Judah Ari Gross, “In Apparent World First, IDF Deployed Drone Swarms in Gaza Fighting,” Times of Israel, July 10, 2021.
Yuval Azulay, “Did Israel Test Its New Laser System Iron Beam to Intercept Hamas Missiles?” CTech, October 16, 2023.
Jeremy Scahill, “‘Man-Made Hell on Earth’: A Canadian Doctor on his Medical Mission to Gaza,” Intercept, March 23, 2024.
Allan Woods, “Gaza Doctors Say They’re Seeing Intense, Unusual Burns after Israeli Air Strikes,” Toronto Star, October 26, 2023.
Huma Saddiqui, “Unleashing the Unprecedented: The Controversial Use of Thermobaric Bombs in Recent Conflicts,” Financial Express, October 21, 2023.
“Investigation Must Be Opened into Israel’s Potential Use of Banned Thermal Weapons, Which Cause Victims’ Bodies to Melt or Evaporate,” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, April 30, 2024.
Yuval Azulay, “As War Wages On, The Local Arms Industry Is Booming,” CTech, November 13, 2023.
Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Framework,” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (May 2024), available at tinyurl.com/2tpzayes.
Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023).
Shireen Akram-Boshar, “An Unending Genocide: Interview with Toufic Haddad,” Spectre (online), July 16, 2024.
Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Refaat Alareer, ed., Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza (Washington, DC: Just World Books, 2014).
Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine, April 3, 2024. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this section are drawn from this report.
Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan, and Dan Sabbagh, “‘The Gospel’: How Israel Uses AI to Select Bombing Targets in Gaza,” The Guardian, December 1, 2023.
“Urgent Need to Investigate Role of Technology, Social Media Companies in Killing Gazan Civilians,” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, April 21, 2024.
Yuval Abraham, “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza,” +972 Magazine, November 30, 2023.
Abraham, “‘Lavender.’”
Brigadier General Y.S., The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human & Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World (eBookPro Publishing, 2021).
Another NDU journal, PRISM, regularly publishes articles on AI and warfare.
Gian Gentile, Michael Shurkin, Alexandra T. Evans, Michelle Grisé, Mark Hvizda, and Rebecca Jensen, A History of the Third Offset, 2014–2018 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2021).
Brent D. Sadler, “Fast Followers, Learning Machines, and the Third Offset Strategy,” Joint Force Quarterly 83 (2016): 13–18.
Jules Hurst, “Robotic Swarms in Offensive Maneuver,” Joint Force Quarterly 87 (2017): 105–11.
Brian Jordan Jefferson, Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Ana Muñiz, Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022).
Matt Stroud, “The Minority Report: Chicago’s New Police Computer Predicts Crimes, But Is It Racist?” The Verge, February 19, 2014; Yana Kunichoff and Patrick Sier, “The Contradictions of Chicago Police’s Secretive List,” Chicago Magazine, August 21, 2017.
Andy Clarno et al., Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Unless otherwise noted, the material in this section builds on analyses developed in our book.
Julian Go, Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
John Markoff, “Pentagon Plans a Computer System that Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans,” New York Times, November 9, 2002.
Hendrik Hertzberg, “Too Much Information,” New Yorker, December 9, 2002.
Nancy Murray, “Profiling in the Age of Total Information Awareness,” Race & Class 52, no.2 (2010): 3–24.
Newton Lee, Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (New York: Springer, 2024), 162.
Arab American Action Network and Policing in Chicago Research Group, Suspicious Activity Reports and the Surveillance State: The Suppression of Dissent and the Criminalization of Arabs and Muslims in Chicago (Chicago: Arab American Action Network, 2022).
Office of Inspector General, Review of the Chicago Police Department’s “Gang Database,” (Chicago: Office of Inspector General, 2019).
Miles N. Wernick and G. Michael Morris, “Image Classification at Low Light Levels,” Journal of the Optical Society of America A 3 (1991): 2179–87.
Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Alex Karp, “Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of A.I. Weapons,” New York Times, July 25, 2023.
Nina Wang et al., American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21^st Century, Georgetown Law, Center on Privacy and Technology (2022), americandragnet.org.
Julie Mao et al., Automating Deportation: The Artificial Intelligence Behind the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Enforcement Regime, Just Futures Law and Mijente (June 2024), mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Automating-Deportation.pdf.
Wang et al., American Dragnet.
Akram-Boshar, “An Unending Genocide.”
Justin Salhani, “Did Israel’s Overreliance on Tech Cause October 7 Intelligence Failure?” Al-Jazeera, December 9, 2023.

Israel’s Lavender Kill List

A Joint Imperial Production

Andy Clarno

The Ongoing Nakba

The Lavender Kill List

Webs of Imperial Policing

Beyond the Laboratory Hypothesis

Notes & References

SHARE

Israel, Israel/Palestine, Surveillance

Please Log In

Forgot Password?

Not a subscriber yet?

Create an Account

SHARE

Hope and Resistance in a Time of Disaster

Building the Palestine Solidarity Movement

The End of Zionism?

Spectre

Please Log In

Forgot Password?

Not a subscriber yet?

Create an Account

HELLO, COMRADE

NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DETAILS?

Support our Work

Gift Subscriptions, Renewals, and More

Israel’s Lavender Kill List

A Joint Imperial Production

Andy Clarno

The Ongoing Nakba

The Lavender Kill List

Webs of Imperial Policing

Beyond the Laboratory Hypothesis

chevron-down chevron-up Notes & References

SHARE

Israel, Israel/Palestine, Surveillance

Please Log In

Forgot Password?

Not a subscriber yet?

Create an Account

SHARE

Hope and Resistance in a Time of Disaster

Building the Palestine Solidarity Movement

The End of Zionism?

Spectre

Please Log In

Forgot Password?

Not a subscriber yet?

Create an Account

HELLO, COMRADE

NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DETAILS?

Support our Work

Gift Subscriptions, Renewals, and More

Notes & References