The Palestinian population is intimately familiar with how new technological innovations are first weaponized against them–ranging from electric fences and unmanned drones to trap people in Gaza—to the facial recognition software monitoring Palestinians in the West Bank. Groups like Amnesty International have called Israel an Automated Apartheid and repeatedly highlight stories, testimonies, and reports about cyber-intelligence firms, including the infamous NSO Group (the Israeli surveillance company behind the Pegasus software) conducting field tests and experiments on Palestinians.
When discussing Gaza or the West Bank, it’s critical to understand that Israel’s achievements in AI and overall technological edge is perpetuated by the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other warfare technologies that are first tested in Palestine and the occupied territories before being exported abroad. Reports have highlighted:
“testing and deployment of AI surveillance and predictive policing systems in Palestinian territories. In the occupied West Bank, Israel increasingly utilizes facial recognition technology to monitor and regulate the movement of Palestinians…Israeli military leaders described AI as a significant force multiplier, allowing the IDF to use autonomous robotic drone swarms to gather surveillance data, identify targets, and streamline wartime logistics.”
The Palestinian towns and villages near Israeli settlements have been described as laboratories for security solutions companies to experiment their technologies on Palestinians before marketing them to places like Colombia, India, and Mexico. Since at least 2012, NSO Group’s controversial surveillance products–which allow users to penetrate any cell phone without the target’s awareness–have been public knowledge. The debates around “privacy” and “owning your data” seem rather asinine considering all of the open-source information pertaining to the Intel Management Engine’s backdoor capabilities or its Memory Sinkhole vulnerabilities. It’s also worth noting that Intel, a California-based tech juggernaut, considers itself “an Israeli company as much as a US company.”
A recent article in The Intercept asserts that since NSO Group was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2021, their recent effort to aid the Israeli government in finding Israeli citizens in Gaza, seems like an attempt “to rehabilitate its image in this crisis.” While it’s positive that The Intercept is highlighting NSO Group’s attempt to rebuild its public image, the nature of the alleged “blunder” itself is worth questioning considering Hamas was able to charge into Tel Aviv by slashing through the barricades at a border that’s, supposedly, embedded with a myriad of sophisticated surveillance software and devices (including NSO’s Pegasus spyware). Israel is assumed to have one of, if not the most, advanced border surveillance system with cameras and ground motion sensors. Additionally, Pegasus is presumed to be one of the Israeli tech sector’s most highly sought-after products that’s been sold to intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world.
According to a Washington Post article:
“Hamas fighters neutralized long-range cameras, sophisticated sensors and remote-control weapons — a tactic known inside the group as the ‘blinding plan’ — to breach the high-tech fence…the Post reconstructed the attack by analyzing hundreds of videos and photos posted online, including visuals filmed on Oct. 7 and during preparations by Hamas fighters.”
It’s not clear exactly how the Post “reconstructed” the attack; perhaps they were given access to footage and geolocation data and were able to create a computer model of what could have taken place at the border. The Post also reported on the New York Times story that the Israeli government had information (for over a year) about a planned Hamas attack on Israeli territory. They appear to have ignored warnings from their own and neighboring intelligence services about Hamas’ “blinding plan” which has now led to the Israeli military and tech companies racing to “innovate” and develop new hi-tech weapons, advanced surveillance systems, and AI that will utterly destroy the Gaza strip so that these same forces may then rebuild (or “Build Back Better”) a demilitarized and “deradicalized” Gaza.
Just as the Israeli military and its contractors attempt to perfect their surveillance and AI systems, it seems like the Israeli government hopes to crystalize its “automated apartheid” through the tokenization and privatization of various industries and establishing a technocratic government in Gaza. Much of the groundwork for this was developed and planned out by the Trump Administration. Recently, crypto companies with close ties to Netanyahu and the digital currency advocates selling pipe dreams of “decentralization” to people in Palestine (and also the Global South) are picking up where the Trump administration left off.
Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” Woes & Jared Kushner’s Bahrain Blowout
The Trump administration’s Israel-Palestine “solution,” known formally as the Peace to Prosperity plan, was engineered by Israeli government insiders and needed to be implemented by Likud Party affiliates in Israel. As a result, it was dead on arrival given its one-sided nature. As part of the plan, Donald Trump tapped an Israeli crypto start-up, Orbs, to help his administration leverage smart contracts and blockchain technology for social impact projects in order to bring “verifiable trust, transparency, and external auditability.” In 2018, Orbs raised over $133 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) and, in 2021, partnered with Binance to launch a “DeFi accelerator” (to promote innovation in decentralized finance). Orbs was built as a public blockchain designed to help governments iron out any bureaucratic challenges from migrant identification to tracking aid funds.
Netta Korin, a partner at Orbs and founder of its associated Hexa Foundation, was one of the Israeli business executives who attended the Bahrain Conference hosted by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (more on that shortly). Hexa Foundation works on projects involving “identification for refugees, credentials wallets, using blockchain to track aid funds and fund traceability for employment in politically unstable areas of the world.” She was previously an advisor to General Yoav Mordechai, from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and her husband was an aide to Moshe Kahlon, from the Israeli Ministry of Finance. Korin got her start on Wall Street as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers where she worked under Ron Lubash, founder of Markstone Capital Group. Lubash’s co-founder, Elliott Broidy pled guilty in a pension scandal involving the New York Retirement Fund that Broidy arranged to invest $250 million in Markstone Capital Partners. In 2020, Broidy was convicted for failing to register as a foreign agent on behalf of China and Malaysia. He was later pardoned by Donald Trump.
Shortly after the Israel-Hamas war broke out, Jared Kushner, went on the All-In Podcast to discuss Trump, Israel, Hamas, and a gathering he organized in Bahrain back in 2019 (where he presented the so-called “Peace to Prosperity” plan). The event was the perfect pretext for Kushner to promote and sell the Abraham Accords to Arab leaders and it was praised by publications like Fortune magazine. The Abraham Accords were a series of cooperation and normalization agreements between Israel and leaders from, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan spearheaded by Kushner and other members of the Trump administration.
During the interview, Kushner talked about how Stephen Schwarzman (from Blackstone Group) and Randall Stephenson (CEO of AT&T) attended the gathering in Bahrain and implied that they seemed eager to invest in the Palestinian economy because of its proximity to Israel, robust population, and cheaper labor–“the prospects for prosperity spillover are massive!” (Kushner exclaimed). Fortunately for Kushner, he wasn’t being interviewed by people who would challenge his ill-considered, accelerationist ideas. He was, instead, surrounded by figures like David Sacks, of the PayPal Mafia, who hosts the All-In Podcast (along with three others). In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Sacks shared that, although he’s against “revolutionary politics” he’s in favor of revolutionary change in the narrow category of technology because it’s the basis of “American prosperity” and, like Peter Thiel, he doesn’t want innovators to be stifled by leftists who want to slow down technological innovation with regulations.
Ultimately, Kushner smugly attempted to argue that practically everyone loves doing business with Israel’s robust economy and that the business tycoons and transnational executives simply wanted to create wealth in the West Bank and Gaza. Create wealth for whom, exactly? It seems like the abundance of cheap labor, unregulated markets, and a population of economically poor and psychologically traumatized people (to steer and mold as one sees fit) were the real incentives, but I digress.
Other Trump officials, like former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, gleefully claimed that venture capitalists were excited to invest money in projects in the West Bank and Gaza like they were “hot new IPOs” (an investment in Palestine’s future). Likewise, Netta Korin (of Orbs) noted that there was a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy toward Palestine because it was transitioning from a “donations-based” relationship to an “investments-centered” partnership. And in order to get the most “value” from the investments, the solutions would have to be more innovative and game-changing (disruptive).
Mnuchin’s circle also expanded to the crypto sphere because in 2019, one of his top aides, Craig Phillips, stepped down from his position at the White House and joined Ripple’s board of directors to advise the company on strategic regulatory opportunities–as Ripple was in the midst of opening its DC office. This is similar to, in 2015, when Gene Sperling (from the Obama administration) joined Ripple’s board of directors (the DC “revolving door” at work). Ripple is a currency exchange founded by the creator of Mt. Gox, Jed McCaleb, with early funding from big-name investors like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. That being said, Mnuchin referring to Palestine as an IPO and Korin’s remarks about donations vs. investments actually make perfect sense when understood within the context of the 2018 BUILD Act that established the U.S. Development Finance Corporation (or DFC).
Trump’s BUILD Act & Biden’s “Build Back Better” with Impact Finance
Created following the passage of the 2018 BUILD Act, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is a prototypical “public-private partnership”–a government institution that collaborates with private sector entities foaming at the mouth to invest in “commercially sustainable” projects. Furthermore, the DFC plays a central role in advancing the global impact investing market. As noted earlier, Netta Korin’s Hexa Foundation is specifically focused on using blockchain to create social impact through investments (impact investing). I previously wrote about how the BUILD Act and the DFC bolster impact investing projects here and more details about social impact finance here.
For a long time, the prevailing narrative has been “Gaza wants to rebuild, but ensuring funds don’t go to Hamas is slowing the process.” Enter Korin’s Hexa Foundation: they can use blockchain to track aid funds in politically unstable areas (like Gaza). Problem, reaction, (prepackaged) solution–Gaza can rebuild or “Build Back Better” with blockchain. Aly Alexandra’s analysis of “Build Back Better” as a marketing slogan for Agenda 2030–“a fully-globalized economy and society built on predetermined metrics of success” is worth reading.
Another character from the Trump syndicate—also linked to Israel, UAE, and Abraham Accords—is Erik Prince, who, in 2017, spoke at the Oxford Union and argued that Trump needed to create an institution like the UK’s Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) to help bring private capital to the developing world. A year after Prince’s Oxford Union address–the DFC was created to replace the OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation), which was created in the early 1970’s. The current U.S. DFC is a merger of OPIC and USAID. As I’ve noted a while back, by their own declaration:
“USAID coordinates with U.S. Special Operations to address complex challenges in fragile states, particularly in conflict situations, to ensure that diplomatic, development and defense efforts are mutually reinforcing.”
The DFC was modeled after the UK’s CDC because OPIC needed to be reformed in order to compete in the global economy—according to Senate testimony given by Daniel F. Runde (one of the architects of the BUILD Act). The DFC also has a higher lending limit than the OPIC. This is rather ironic because, in this case, the DFC and this expansion of the US’ international aid budget was overseen by the allegedly “fiscally conservative” and “America first” faction of the manufactured political paradigm. My thoughts regarding Erik Prince, DFC, and Prince’s ambitions of “resurrecting the British East India Company” can be found here.
Prince seems to be one of these shadowy figures who can openly operate in the dark with zero consequences. He transitioned from providing private mercenaries for the United States (via Blackwater, later renamed Academi) to being a “logistics” specialist via Frontier Services Group (FSG) in China and the UAE. In 2011, Prince’s company, Reflex Response, obtained a multimillion-dollar contract from the UAE to protect “a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity” and Prince planned to earn “billions more…by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.” These Latin American mercenaries (mostly hailing from Colombia) were trained by Prince’s “mercenary school for the desperate and disgruntled” and then dropped in Yemen to help the UAE fight against the Houthis.
Prince’s ties to the CIA have been documented for some time (here and here). For instance, Cofer Black was the vice chairman of Blackwater when it was controlled by Prince and before Blackwater, Cofer Black was the CIA’s director of counterterrorism (during the 9/11 event). Then in 2017, Black joined the board of Burisma Group (a Ukrainian energy company with controversial ties to Hunter and Joe Biden). As much as political operatives like Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec love to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop and Hunter’s ties to Burisma, they never ask Prince–a regular fixture on their programs–about figures like Cofer Black when they interview him–interesting how that works.
In addition to the CIA, the UAE, and China, Prince also has connections to Israeli intelligence. For example, in 2022, Prince launched a new smartphone called Unplugged (to “liberate” patriots from Big Tech censorship) and as MIT Technology Review noted, the Unplugged tech operations are run by Eran Karpen, a veteran of Unit 8200 and a former employee of CommuniTake, the Israeli company that started NSO Group (a cyber-intelligence firm that conducts surveillance experiments on Palestinians). Other ties of Prince to Israeli intelligence were covered earlier this year by Unlimited Hangout.
Considering that the DFC is central to advancing global impact investing, it’s no surprise that Israel has companies like 8200 Impact (founded by Unit 8200 veterans) that supports “impact-tech” start-ups that aim “to solve social or environmental problems through advanced technology.”
In 2020, under Trump, the DFC, Israel, and the UAE established the Abraham Fund which mobilized “more than $3 billion in private sector-led investment and development initiatives to promote regional economic cooperation and prosperity in the Middle East and beyond.” Think of it as a “Build Back Better” plan for the Middle East (funded by the DFC). Biden’s “Build Back Better” is basically a continuation of Trump’s BUILD Act. In fact, earlier this year, this time under Biden, the CEO of the DFC, Scott Nathan, traveled to Israel and the West Bank to, just like under the Trump administration, further “private sector-led development in the Palestinian territories and in countries around the world in partnership with Israeli companies.” Since the Israel-Hamas conflict began, prominent neoconservative think tanks have made suggestions about recreating an Abraham Accords-style policy to help “rebuild” Gaza after the conflict subsides.
Naftali, Bibi & Elon: Emergence of Technocracy in Gaza
Last week, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared on the Ben Shapiro program to do some “public diplomacy” (or Hasbara) and claimed that Palestinian civilians, rather than Hamas or the IDF, were the ones who committed “the most heinous atrocities” on Oct 7. He also laid out a plan to “denazify” Gaza, the first stage of which would be to install a “technocratic government” (interesting word choice). Bennett repeated the same rhetoric on Jake Tapper’s program when he said he would create “an interim technocratic self-government that would…for about five years, govern Gaza, denazify Gaza, which means clean out all the incitement…and after five years, we would revisit and figure out how to create a sustainable government.”
When Naftali Bennett was in power, he worked to push the expansion of Israel’s hi-tech industry and the Bennett-Lapid government actively worked to bring “about a situation in which the bulk of the Israeli economy [was] based on the high-tech industry and thus [created] around that sector, a stable coalition (both political and social) that [blocked] any counter-processes.” In Israel, the emergence of technocracy is attributed to 1971 when:
“army officers who…entered the economy as administrators and specialists and who were eager to capitalize on the technical skills they learned in the intelligence units that were expanding across the Palestinian territories…[and] from the 1970s onward, these military-technicians-turned-business-administrators worked closely with politicians, to push the government to adopt policies they favored, including subsidies for high-tech companies, looser regulations for foreign investors, and lenient export controls.”
Earlier this year, Bennett joined the Quantum Source board of directors. Quantum Source develops technology in photonic quantum computing (with funding from Dell Technologies Capital).
Quantum computing will be integral to the transition to a decentralized (but unified) world of Web3. The image below illustrates the role played by blockchain, which is the next iteration of the “cloud” (as it relates to storing data). Web3 uses artificial intelligence as its logic base (which is where quantum computing fits in because logic requires computation).
The day after Naftali Bennet’s interview on the Ben Shapiro program aired, Elon Musk, grandson of a prominent figure in the Technocracy movement, announced that he would like to help Benjamin Netanyahu demilitarize and rebuild a “deradicalized” Gaza (after the destruction of Hamas). Interesting that the poster boy for the “good technocrats” wants to help Netanyahu rebuild a “deradicalized” Gaza just as Naftali Bennett tells Ben Shapiro and Jake Tapper that Israel is going to establish an “interim technocratic government” in Gaza. How symbolic.
Elon’s statements were made during his visit to Israel where he got a tour of the areas where the violence occurred on October 7th. Bibi and Elon compared “rebuilding a deradicalized Gaza” to the post WW2 era when Germany was rebuilt through denazification and Japan through cultural reformation (Netanyahu’s words). They equated the majority of the Palestinian population to Nazis in Germany (Naftali Bennett also made that same comparison).
Ultimately, Musk seemed like he was in Israel to perform the ritual apology that comes after making any spicy comments regarding the chosen community–especially since some have accused Twitter of not enforcing its policies on “anti-semitic” content, threats, and tropes on the platform. Thus, Elon was required to make a public spectacle and reassure Israel that he stands with them and the “civilized world” against the primitive “anti-west” barbarians. Elon concluded his apology tour, kissed the ring (as he always does) and agreed “that Starlink would only operate in Israel and Gaza with the Israeli government’s approval.” So brave. Hamas asked Musk if he wanted to visit Gaza after Israel, but he declined the offer. It’s also worth noting that Twitter (or X) partnered with an Israeli firm, AU10TIX, to handle the identity verification process for Twitter Blue users.
From Gaza to Africa: How Zionist Tech Entrepreneurs Profit from Chaos and Calamity
One of the paths to the impending post-conflict “technocracy” in Gaza–as envisioned by the “Peace to Prosperity” crew–is through Silicon Valley’s efforts to train Palestinians to work as low-wage coders. Given Gaza’s high unemployment rate well before the conflict, along with other factors, the exploitation of Gazan workers is a well-documented occurrence. Polish entrepreneur and former Google employee, Iliana Montauk, is the director of Gaza’s first start-up incubator called Gaza Sky Geeks, backed by Google’s philanthropic arm and funded by figures like Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder who lobbied the Ethiopian government to adopt Bitcoin) and Marc Bennioff, CEO of Salesforce (which launched an impact investing alliance with Robin Hood). Gaza Sky Geeks was created by Mercy Corps, a humanitarian aid organization that partnered with Celo Foundation to advance “digital microwork” and drive financial inclusion (discussed in greater detail here).
Montauk decided to get involved in Gaza Sky Geeks after she discovered “a rich pool of female engineers who were struggling to find jobs in the region” and, as she noted elsewhere, Gazans’ economic insecurity and forced isolation presented “a world of opportunity [for] women’s leadership in the Gazan startup sector.” A few years after getting involved with Gaza Sky Geeks, Montauk created Manara, a social impact startup that explicitly refers to the Middle East and North Africa as the next “Eastern Europe, which used to export refugees and is now a destination for world-class tech talent.” Manara was funded by Paul Graham (founder of start-up accelerator, Y Combinator) and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder). Hoffman, a member of the so-called Paypal Mafia, had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. While Montauk may have the best of intentions, her backers are – in several cases – closely intertwined with the Israeli military and intelligence services seeking to “Build Back Better” in Gaza by taking advantage of the vulnerable and cultivating a high-skill but low-wage labor force. Unsurprisingly, the same network of Silicon Valley billionaires, as well as politically connected Israeli tech firms, are following the same model in other economically impoverished nations, particularly in Africa.
A 2019 Coindesk article highlighted the deepening ties between the Israeli crypto industry and the Israeli government, specifically, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal connections to Guy and Galia Ben-Artzi, co-founders of Bancor, a blockchain startup. An earlier article from The Times of Israel echoed the same point, noting that, according to Israel’s corporate registry, the company that operates Bancor is owned “by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s niece, Galia Ben-Artzi, among other shareholders.” In 2017, Tim Draper (venture capital guru invested in bitcoin and companies including SpaceX, Tesla, Skype, and Coinbase) partnered with Bancor and joined their advisory team. A year later, in 2018, Bancor launched a new blockchain service in Kenya to facilitate the creation of “community currencies” (I previously wrote about Bancor and community currencies here).
Bancor hired Will Ruddick (of Grassroots Economics) to oversee the “community inclusion currencies” project in Kenya (the tech hub in Kenya is called Silicon Savannah). In 2013, Will Ruddick was arrested by the Kenyan government for suspicion of forgery and links to the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), a separatist organization that advocates for the secession of Mombasa (Kenya’s second-largest city after Nairobi and a commercial hub of the coast). For a more detailed and concise look at the subject matter, check out Leo Sareceno’s article on community inclusion currencies and the use of digital twinning in social impact finance and catastrophe insurance securities.
In addition to Kenya’s Silicon Savannah, the Silicon Valley technocrats are well entrenched in Rwanda’s Innovation City in Kigali and Sheba Valley in Ethiopia. In the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia plays the same role that Israel plays in the Middle East (neighborhood watch). Similar to how Israel and the U.S. share raw intelligence with one another, facilitated by the NSA, Ethiopia has also played a vital role in U.S. signals surveillance. In fact, in 2002, the Ethiopian government collaborated with the NSA to launch the Deployed Signals Intelligence Operations Center known as Lion’s Pride. Furthermore, Ethiopia has used Cyberbit, Israeli spyware, to monitor citizens and journalists.
In the last months of 2020, Ethiopia was embroiled in a brutal civil war. In the midst of that conflict, developers behind Cardano and IOHK announced their plan to help Ethiopia rise from the wreckage by collaborating with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education to register the identities of five-million school children on the Cardano blockchain (detailed coverage on this topic by Alison McDowell here). It’s worth noting that in 2014, an AI company based out of Hong Kong, OpenCog Foundation (with funding from the Jeffrey Epstein IV Foundation) launched an AI and Robotics lab in Sheba Valley called iCog Labs (with Ben Goerzel as an advisor). The iCog Labs in Ethiopia is also partnered with Charles Hoskinson’s blockchain venture, Cardano. It makes one wonder if these “innovators” are drawn to nations in turmoil because they want to fix things or because poverty and corruption are the ideal conditions for entrepreneurs looking to capitalize off of vulnerable communities.
Another tech guru actively exploiting Africans is the current darling of the AI world, Sam Altman. In 2019, Altman launched the Worldcoin Initiative, an identity authentication project that collects highly sensitive biometric data in exchange for digital tokens (usually from desperate people living in economically insecure conditions). Kenya served as a major testing ground for the iris-scanning chrome contraption (or Orb) designed to resemble “a decapitated robot head.”
In Kenya, Worldcoin required “users to give their iris scans in exchange for a digital ID…as part of plans to create a new identity and financial network…[and] more than 350,000 Kenyans had signed up for Worldcoin…in exchange for free cryptocurrency tokens worth around 7,000 Kenyan shillings ($49).” Furthermore, an investigation conducted by MIT Technology Review revealed:
“wide gaps between Worldcoin’s public messaging, which focused on protecting privacy, and what users experienced. [They] found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, collected more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent.”
Eventually, the Kenyan Interior Ministry suspended the company’s activities–like authenticating human identities via Proof of Personhood protocols&ndash
