The vast networked infrastructures that Israel has created over the past two decades to surveil every single aspect of Palestinians’ lives in Gaza and the West Bank have not only enabled the ongoing genocide we have been witnessing in the aftermath of 7 October 2023. By imposing the possibility of lethal force at any time and in any place onto Palestinian life-worlds, the all-encompassing surveillance architecture has enabled a level of absolute control that only the most dystopian theories had been capable of anticipating. Extinguishing the very possibility of spontaneity as the conditio sine qua non of genuine political action, the systems that were ostensibly built to enable a ‘cleaner’ form of counter-insurgency in urban warfare have proven to foreclose any actualization of self-determination. In 2026, as predicted by many scholars, these tactics of control honed in the ‘Palestine Laboratory’ (Lowenstein) have reemerged in the imperial metropole: In Minneapolis, ICE agents hunted down ‘deportation targets’ with the help of novel tools provided by Palantir, built on top of model architectures constructed and refined in Palestine. Once again, the authorities’ intentions evidently transcended their publicly stated objectives: Anyone can become a target, so everyone is under control.
Henning Lahmann is assistant professor at eLaw – Center for Law and Digital Technologies, Leiden University, The Netherlands.