Without their faces catalogued in a military database.
Without their every move surveilled.
Without their routine actions falsely criminalized.
Without their homes made so unsafe that they have no choice but to leave.
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As the article details, the Israeli military uses facial recognition throughout the West Bank — not just at checkpoints, but also to surveil public areas and private homes.
“We no longer feel comfortable socializing because cameras are always filming us,” said a Hebron resident.
And the Blue Wolf app — which tells Israeli soldiers if a Palestinian is to be detained, arrested, or "left alone" — entailed soldiers competing to collect the most photographs of Palestinians against their will.
Reminder: the US sends this military $3.8 billion per year.
The Israeli military's 24/7 monitoring of Palestinians' daily lives has predictably (and likely intentionally) led to false criminalization of mundane actions.
To whom does a fallen teaspoon resemble a thrown stone, other than soldiers trained to dehumanize and vilify?
Israeli surveillance has also led many Palestinians to leave their homes.
This is all too convenient for the Israeli government and settlers, whose project of displacing Palestinians and Judaizing the West Bank is often met with the kind of resistance we see in Sheikh Jarrah.
The alignment of goals between the Israeli military and settlers is also one of tactics: White Wolf, another facial recognition app, allows settlers to scan Palestinians' IDs.
This elevates settlers to a quasi-official status and represents unabashed settler-state collusion.
This pervasive surveillance is a clear violation of privacy. It is recognized as such in Israel's '48 borders (as well as in 12 US cities and, hopefully soon, European Parliament.)
But Israel is an apartheid state with different rules for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
While we fight the use of facial recognition technology in the US, we also must fight it in Palestine.
These struggles are not just similar, but connected: the Israeli military exports its technologies of occupation around the world after field-testing them on Palestinians.
Our movement has had prior success campaigning against surveillance in Palestine. @lizzadwoskin's article states Microsoft divested from Israeli facial recognition company AnyVision this May; actually, it did so in early 2020 after pressure from @MPower_Change, @SumOfUs, and JVP.
Thank you to the brave and honorable testifiers at @BtSIsrael who shared their knowledge and experiences for this disturbing and revelatory article. Read more: washingtonpost.com/world/middle_e…
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The devastating loss of Palestinian life to Israeli AI technology is made more chilling by the fact that, this September, the Israeli government signed the first global "safety" AI treaty, the Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence.
The treaty claims to be a legal framework governing AI systems to mitigate risks to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law—but the Israeli military is using AI to do precisely the opposite.
This is nothing new. For over 76 years, the Israeli military has weaponized surveillance and targeting systems, claiming tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.
The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) was founded by Asian American billionaires during the rise of the Stop Asian Hate movement. Their mission is to foster a safer and more inclusive future for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Now, they’re facing backlash for their longstanding partnership with The Anti-Defamation League.
via @18millionrising and @jvplive
The ADL’s main priority isn’t the safety of Jews or anyone, it’s shielding the genocidal state of Israel from accountability at all costs. The ADL peacocks as an organization whose purpose is to keep Jews safe. Instead, they use their political power, along with Zionist rhetoric, as a forceful tool against any organization or person that does not support the state of Israel.
Many progressive Asian American groups are reevaluating their connections to @taaforg due to its deep ties to the ADL, an organization which mislabels anti-zionism as antisemitism and supports the Israeli government’s atrocities against Palestinians. Earlier this year, over 70 Asian American and allied organizations publicly called on TAAF to end their relationship with the ADL.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is one of the oldest and largest organizations behind the theft of Palestinian land and the support of segregated, Jewish-only settlements on this stolen land. 🧵
Now, the JNF seems to be fueling and providing cover for genocide of Palestinians — all by claiming to do so in the name of Jewish safety.
As Jews, we will continue to stand up to the JNF and other right-wing organizations which enable the displacement of Palestinian families and Jewish supremacy.
The US government refuses to hold the Israeli government accountable — again — and instead is choosing to enable the mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
Thirty-one days ago, the Biden administration issued the Israeli government an official ultimatum: end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza by November 12th, or face consequences. The Israeli government didn’t.
Fewer trucks carrying food entered into Gaza in the past month than in the past year. And yesterday, the US government announced there would be no change to the weapons the US is continually sending to the Israeli military.
Yesterday, the far-right Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced that he ordered preparations to annex the occupied West Bank, boasting that 2025 will be “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.” Judea and Samaria is how the Israeli state refers to the West Bank, in an attempt to claim religious ownership over the land by connecting it to the Jewish bible.
The Israeli government has been systemically eroding Palestinian governance over the occupied West Bank through military violence, the destruction of homes and settlement expansion in the three decades since the Oslo Accords, which ostensibly granted Palestinian control over the occupied West Bank but instead served to obscure the realities of Israeli apartheid and occupation and eradicate popular resistance. Now, the Israeli government is making explicit its end-goal of full colonization, which is the only logical conclusion of Zionism.
Zionism is a political ideology that envisions the establishment of an ethnostate where Jews have more rights than Palestinians. This colonial logic is predicated on total Israeli governmental control in order to maintain an apartheid system, built on the legacy of dispossession, displacement, and massacre of Palestinians.
The Israeli military is escalating its targeting of Palestinian families in Masafer Yatta. In September, the Israeli military declared one of Masafer Yatta’s villages, Umm al-Khair, a closed military zone. This means Palestinian residents will be subject to even more demolitions and violence from Israeli forces.
Now, Jewish supremacist settlers are using their illegal outpost — “Avigail” — to continue stealing Palestinian land.
@ISMPalestine: This past week, more structures rose up alongside the Avigail outpost, the metastatic spread of this settlement gnawing deeper into the hills of Masafer Yatta, Palestine.
Accompanied by army, the encroachment feels unending—an infrastructure of occupation expanding like cancerous cells, seizing land, one fortified structure at a time. Now, even the water lines and plumbing sprawl outward, well into Palestinian soil.