By Jamal Kanj
The challenge is whether the world will hold accountable not only the state dropping the bombs, but also the companies engineering the algorithms to deliver murder.
History is filled with examples of corporations fueling war machines and global colonization. IBM supplied technology used in Nazi death camps; shipping and trading companies played central roles in the transatlantic trafficking of Africans; and multinational firms helped bankroll South Africa’s apartheid regime.
The companies that once profited from South Africa’s pass laws today empower Israel’s biometric checkpoints. Silicon Valley giants are repeating that history by providing the digital tools and propaganda that enable and whitewash Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The collaboration between Israel and Silicon Valley goes far beyond hardware and algorithms, encompassing narrative control. According to Drop Site News, Google signed a six-month, $45 million contract with the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to promote government disinformation and downplay the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Signed in late June, the agreement made Google a “key entity” in Netanyahu’s PR strategy.
The PR campaign was launched in response to international outrage after Israel violated the early 2025 ceasefire on March 2 and blocked food, medicine, and fuel from entering Gaza. The Google contract was part of Israel’s digital disinformation effort, toward claiming “there is no hunger” in Gaza. In other words, while Palestinian babies were starving to death, Google was fattening its checkbook, serving as Netanyahu’s pernicious digital PR machine to obscure the crime.
In 2021, Microsoft signed a $133 million contract that made the Israeli military its second-largest defense customer after the United States, describing the Israeli army as a “top priority” client. The deal includes more than 600 separate Azure subscriptions linked to military units such as Mamram, its central tech hub, and Unit 8200, its elite cyber-intelligence wing.
According to the Associated Press, Microsoft’s support team fielded 130 direct requests from the military in the first ten months of the Gaza genocide. Its data centers outside Tel Aviv store more than 13.6 petabytes of data, or 350 times the size of the Library of Congress. At least nine Microsoft employees, including some ex-unit 8200 Israeli officers, coordinated Microsoft AI genocide with the Israeli army.
Microsoft centers supplied raw data for Israel’s AI kill lists. Since 2021, these facilities were used to deploy “Gospel” and “Lavender,” algorithms that ranked Palestinians by the likelihood of being militants. Lavender, for example, assigns scores from 0 to 100 based on criteria such as family history, friends, or intercepted phone calls and messages.
Known as “AI hallucination,” these systems often generate information that appears convincing but is, in fact, fabricated. “Hallucinating” AI models can extrapolate from incomplete or misleading inputs, such as intercepted phone data, mistranslated language, ambiguous signals, or distorted realities, and combine them with unscientific assumptions about family history to produce what appear to be credible “kill” targets.
Weaponizing AI
AI doesn’t make war cleaner. It is a resourceful utility to murder efficiently. Tech company workers have protested against this murderous process. In response, Microsoft fired the staff who organized a vigil for Palestinian refugees. One, Hossam Nasr, leading the No Azure for Apartheid campaign, said, “cloud and AI are the bombs and bullets of the 21st century.” The digital targeting has taken war to a new barbaric level, fusing US corporate power and a malevolent Israeli occupation.
Google is also deeply enmeshed in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint venture with Amazon to supply Israel’s government and military with cloud computing, artificial intelligence services, and data centers. This is not an abstract “infrastructure.” Cloud storage and AI have become the backbone of modern warfare, powering surveillance systems, analyzing targeting data, and sustaining Israel’s military operations, from the river to the sea.
As with Microsoft, when workers raised alarms and protested against the Nimbus contract, Google summoned the police and fired 28 of its staff, instead of engaging the employees. A company engineer described Google’s contract as a project to build a “sovereign cloud,” exclusively for the Israeli government, for use with no regard to international law.
Instead of investigating ways to ensure that AI products are not used to murder and starve children, AI companies have formalized the ethical violations. OpenAI, for instance, changed its policies to allow military use of its models. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a Zionist by all means, urged Silicon Valley to build the “drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield.”
Over a year ago, Col. Racheli Dembinsky, head of the army’s computing unit, stood before a giant screen displaying the logos of Israeli genocide partners: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services. She hailed the “very significant operational effectiveness” of this partnership in the Gaza genocide.
Big Tech, Mainstream Media Complicit
The challenge is whether the world will hold accountable not only the state dropping the bombs, but also the companies engineering the algorithms to deliver murder, and the PR machines that conceal it. Israel is not the only party guilty of genocide; the corporations reaping blood profit from synthesizing and enabling its war crimes are also guilty.
Big Tech does more than make war “efficient.” It creates the digital fog that enables mainstream media to wash massacres into sanitized narratives. Algorithms are weaponized not just on the battlefield, but across social media. In a clear example of this insidious subversion of the truth, META hired an ex-Israeli embassy staff member as “Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief,” Jordana Cutler, who spoke proudly before the Jewish National Fund of her role to silence pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli activities across META’s platforms.
META, owner of the major social media outlets Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, is utilized as one of Netanyahu’s new weapons, suppressing images of Israeli atrocities while amplifying Zionist disinformation. In doing so, Big Tech firms play a dual role in the architecture of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians: facilitating its execution on the ground, while whitewashing it in the media.
– Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
