ICE and the IDF: The Transnational Nexus of State Control

Palantir has deep ties to the Trump administration, coming from both its status as a government contractor and as a personal investment for Trump administration leadership. The data mining software company uses AI decision-making software to help power the state's surveillance apparatus, demonstrating how the surveillance state is held up not only by the state itself, but also by private functionaries that willingly serve as its architects. Since 2014, Palantir has contracted with various U.S. government entities and branches of the military. One of those projects is a case management system that allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to track and monitor people in its database more effectively, likely to enable fast-track deportations whenever possible. 

Another is more deadly – with Israel, it has developed an AI-based platform that makes decisions about which people to target for attacks. These life-or-death determinations are made through U.S.-provided data, including seemingly private chat logs between Palestinian-Americans and their relatives in Palestine. Palantir represents but one of the many links comprising the military-industrial surveillance connections between ICE and Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 

These links illustrate both the ideological and practical ties between the two bodies, as both serve as means to increase the militarization of policing via the weaponization of surveillance technology. Private and public entities alike join in this effort, forming the infrastructure that will target and surveil those whom the state wishes to target—bordering, marginalizing, and othering them.

Deadly Exchange, run by Jewish Voice for Peace, has chronicled the imperial nexus between the two bodies. ICE, which has the budget of a military itself, has a vested interest in the IDF, as the two are interlinked in ideology and function.  

U.S. and Israeli officials have made comparisons between their respective walls, Israeli companies provide the same radar and surveillance services used by Israel to the U.S., or law enforcement exchange programs between the U.S. police and Israeli police continue to share suppression tactics. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League have encouraged several exchanges wherein law enforcement officials, including those from ICE, have exchanged "best practices."

Moreover, ICE and the IDF have similar modalities—operating through the use of militarized checkpoints, constant surveillance, and sometimes arbitrary detentions and arrests—making the connection between the two entities exceedingly clear. Bolstered by private contractors, ICE and the IDF maintain ideological connections. They seek to punish those who oppose the imperial and ethnonationalistic tendencies that both ICE and the IDF espouse. 

In some instances, ICE has directly acted to support Israel's propaganda project, using a blacklist run by zionist organization Canary Mission in order to choose who to arrest. The enforcement actors involved are joined in their bordering mission, and in that they are seeking "social control profitability," capitalizing socio-economically on the marginalization of those deemed the other. 

It is, indeed, profitable to maintain the surveillance state.

For private actors, this comes in the form of lucrative contracts and acquisition deals. For the states involved, profit comes from the backs of the marginalized, as they are disciplined, scared into submission by ever-present militarized policing tactics. 

The development of the surveillance state has a history intertwined with settler colonialism. Policing itself developed as a colonial management tool. Police forces were deployed and their methods developed in colonies, including British Palestine, to maintain the colonial order and maintain European-imposed law and regulation. This was then transferred back into the "metropole," the imperial core, as the expansion of capital demanded a means to control inter-group and inter-class conflict while ensuring the functioning of the capitalist state. While the policing methods used in the metropole were differentiated from the more militarized methods used in the colonies, the experience of the metropolitan immigrant, especially one seen as a racialized other, hearkens back to the highly regimented, militarized, and disruptive policing used in the colonies. 

What we are witnessing, with the increased deployment of ICE, is a more explicit showing of this connection. The goal has always been the same: to "maintain a racialized socioeconomic order."

As sociologist Julian Go puts it, the history of policing is "a history of waves of militarization and their relative abatement, of imperial appropriation triggered by moments of heightened racialized fear…" The "entanglement of empire" with policing, especially immigration policing, is intimately linked to settler-colonial maintenance methods such as those used by the IDF. 

The everyday surveillance, the all-encompassing methods of suppression and control that order the lives of those subjected to policing, are similar. See, for example, the use of checkpoints and networks of surveillance everywhere from schools to places of worship, which make it impossible to engage in the most basic aspects of everyday life without fear. This state of "exception" from the typical mode of policing used in the majority population is the permanent reality for those in occupied territories. 

Capitalizing on this paradigm has been the norm for decades in the occupied territories. Now, this is being brought stateside. As well as Palantir, see, for example, how Israeli company Elbit has provided radar and surveillance capabilities at U.S. ports of entry or how Israeli company Paragon has provided spyware services for ICE. Additionally, for years, the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. has funded joint development programs with its Israeli counterpart for "threat detection" and drone technologies. Note the use of blacklists, informants, and surveillance technology deployed against student activists in the U.S., with those long used in Palestine and occupied territories. This is merely foreshadowing what is to come on a broader scale as the "security" technologies that matured in the occupied territories come to roost in the U.S. in a widespread crackdown on dissent and the other. 

To counter something as far-reaching and transnational as surveillance infrastructure, it takes a similarly intersectional movement.

In the tech space, organizers have taken note of the multidimensional ways in which technology is being deployed to quell dissent. This includes not only surveillance, but also digital censorship. Tech workers have also acted against their companies' complicity and active participation in Israeli apartheid, noting the role protesting complicit tech companies play in the BDS movement.

Those involved in these movements understand that struggles to maintain civil rights and basic human dignity are interconnected. The most extreme forms of rights violations conducted by Israeli forces against Palestinians are but a harbinger of what is to come elsewhere. It is important to remain steadfast in resistance, recognizing just how interrelated these struggles are.