On the evening of May 21, 2025, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot outside of Washington, D.C.'s Capital Jewish Museum. News outlets reported that the suspect shouted "Free, free Palestine" following the shooting, an alleged exclamation which prompted FBI Director Kash Patel and the Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar to call the attack an "act of terror" and "a horrific terrorist attack," respectively. Two days after the shooting, the part-Israeli-owned facial recognition firm Corsight AI seized the opportunity to discreetly advocate for the broader deployment of its AI-powered surveillance and behavioral analytics systems across U.S. cities, including D.C., "to help detect early indicators of violent intent." Corsight AI's North America sales director, Shay Poleg, stated that similar systems are already in use in other parts of the world. "This isn't hypothetical," he said. "It's already being done."
Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Corsight's Orwellian technology was developed in part by the former Israeli army colonel and West Bank apartheid wall architect, Dany Tirza. Tirza's company, Yozmot, Ltd., partnered with Corsight AI in 2022 to create a police body camera equipped with facial recognition technology. Transitioning from physical walls to virtual ones, Tirza created the technology needed to immediately identify an individual in a crowd—even if their face was covered—and match them to a photo in a database.
Since the genocidal escalation against Palestine, Corsight AI has provided its technology to Israel's military intelligence Unit 8200 to run an experimental facial recognition program on Palestinians throughout the Gaza Strip. The soldiers, armed with Corsight technology-embedded cameras, set up checkpoints along the major roads traveled by displaced Palestinians, scanning their faces without their knowledge or consent. Those whom the algorithm flags as having ties to Hamas are detained, interrogated, and tortured.
Despite the current inchoate character of Poleg's aspirations, they articulate what others such as Antony Lowenstein, Issa Amro, Sophia Goodfriend, and Yotam Feldman presciently argue: The technologies and tactics born of the Zionist settler-colonial occupation in Palestine are rapidly proliferating and weaving into the global fabric of domestic policing and border enforcement.
To confront this era of digitized captivity using the tools of abolitionist theories and praxis means recognizing that the surveillance industrial complex is no longer limited to overseeing physical walls, be they surrounding prisons or delineating borders. Today, our walls are fugitive; constantly shifting, slipping, and creeping through time and space.
The technologies and tactics born of the Zionist settler-colonial occupation in Palestine are rapidly proliferating and weaving into the global fabric of domestic policing and border enforcement.
The same "battle-tested" cameras, biometric and facial recognition tools, and predictive algorithms used to "protect" the dynamic, suffocating borders of the occupied Palestinian territory underpin the same surveillance structures whose raison d'être is to police protesters, national borders, and communities in the United States and around the world.
These centuries-long carceral continuums are crystallizing into a transnational security infrastructure that deliberately conflates righteous political dissent with terrorism and extremism, conjoining "war on terror" and "war on crime" narratives to co-produce a permanent state of exception.
Palestine as Surveillance Laboratory
Israel's digital surveillance regime over Palestinians has evolved into one of the most advanced and expansive in the world, fusing facial recognition technologies and biometric data collection into a panoptic apparatus and a global export strategy. Among the world's top 10 arms dealers, Israel markets its endless wars, occupation, and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the global war on terror, allowing it to play a central role in "providing training and know-how and marketing its 'extensive expertise' in fighting terrorism," as Professor Hatem Bazian writes.
The 77-year-long occupation serves as proof of concept, and Gaza as the apex of experimentation, for what Antony Lowenstein describes in his seminal book, The Palestine Laboratory, as "the ultimate ethnonationalist dream, keeping Palestinians indefinitely imprisoned."
The size and sophistication of the Zionist entity's surveillance technology apparatus is largely attributed to Unit 8200. Through this clandestine military surveillance agency, the state provides the top one percent of high school recruits with resources, a captive population, and routine wars to develop and test the most sophisticated high-tech weapons and surveillance tools in the absence of a moral code to oversee their use.
When veteran Unit 8200 staffers leave the military, they funnel into the country's private, booming surveillance industry, either founding or working high-level positions at the nation's top security start-ups. This maintains the vital ecosystem needed for developing military research ideas in the private sector.
Founded by the Unit 8200 veteran Haim Mer, Mer Security exemplifies this turnstile relationship. In 1999, under the "Mabat 2000" program, the company was awarded an Israeli police tender to install about 400 CCTV cameras throughout the one square kilometer of Jerusalem's Old City. The company's president acknowledged that its global success, now raking in approximately $168 million in annual revenue, stemmed from the Israeli police's use of its technologies.
As of 2016, "Mabat 2000" consists of more than 1,000 CCTV cameras, linked to the Israeli police Observation and Control Center, monitoring where Palestinian residents shop, pray, and live 24/7. As one Bab Hatta resident recounted, "Every move you make has to be calculated, as anything you do, no matter how irrelevant, can be filmed and used against you."
But Mer Group is not alone. The biometrics market is a booming industry, projected to surpass $80 billion globally by 2029. Prominent in this dystopic market is AnyVision, an Israeli tech start-up that changed its name to Oosto in late 2020, following international backlash regarding its facial recognition technology. Oosto developed two biometric identification systems. The first is a biometric identification tool installed at about 27 checkpoints throughout the occupied territory, controlling Palestinians' access from the West Bank into East Jerusalem. The second, as revealed in a 2019 Haaretz article, consists of a covert network of facial recognition cameras throughout Hebron and East Jerusalem, their locations undisclosed by either the company or the Israeli government, to reportedly "spot and monitor potential Palestinian assailants."
Israel's military-run biometric surveillance ecosystem also includes systems such as Blue Wolf, Red Wolf, and Wolf Pack, which all incentivize real-time identification and profiling to entrench this apartheid.
US-Israeli Surveillance Connections
In spring 2024, students at over 60 U.S. universities erected Palestine solidarity encampments on their campuses, with the collective demand to end the genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine. The encampments resulted in over 3,100 protesters' arrests, including students, staff members, and professors.
Notably, Columbia University's encampment was violently dismantled when then university president Minouche Shafik authorized the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to enter campus and arrest the student, staff, and alumni who occupied Hamilton Hall and renamed the building "Hind's Hall", paying homage to Hind Rajab, a six year old Palestinian girl killed by the 335 bullets shot into her family's car by the IOF. On April 30, 2024, Hind's Hall was forcibly cleared by over 600 NYPD officers in full riot gear.
At a press conference the next day, New York Mayor Eric Adams commended "New York's Finest" for protecting the "city from those who are attempting to do what is happening globally," including "outside agitators" who are "radicalizing children" into "dismantling security cameras." The framing of local protests as part of a global threat echoes the NYPD's own posture beyond its municipal jurisdiction. Through its International Liaison Program, the NYPD, resisting myopia, sends officers chasing its borders internationally to 16 different locations, including Tel Aviv, where a liaison embedded with the Israeli police force has been sending "hourly updates" to NYPD headquarters since October 7.
"Updates" aren't the only thing that has been exchanged between Israel and the U.S. Starting in 2004, the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an Israel lobby group, started sending U.S. police delegations to Israel, in hopes of providing these officers with "invaluable insights" into how Israel tackled "counterterrorism." Since the start of the program, more than one thousand police officers have visited Israel with the ADL and other pro-Israel groups to learn from Israeli police and military who enforce the illegal occupation with high-tech surveillance, cutting-edge weapons technologies, and a disproportionate use of force.
This includes Emory University's police department, which has participated in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program, and Wayne State University's chief of police, who traveled to Israel in 2019 to "share law enforcement strategies." As Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), the largest Jewish Palestine solidarity organization in the world, details in their Deadly Exchange campaign, aimed at ending these U.S.-Israel law enforcement exchange programs, such programs "expose U.S. law enforcement to the comprehensive monitoring and infiltration tactics and technologies in the Israeli arsenal, modeling the apparatus of a sweeping surveillance state."
Inevitably, this modeling materializes into reality. According to a 2024 Columbia Spectator article, campus police surveilled student protesters by gathering footage from across the 3,000 CCTV cameras installed around campus, used firms that "employ experienced surveillance teams equipped with advanced technology," and tracked student IDs when they were swiped at building entrances and mobile CUID readers. Similarly, the Yale Police Department (YPD), in collaboration with the New Haven FBI office and police department, "installed cameras on campus, tracked students' social media accounts and monitored students using aerial drones," according to Theia Chatelle.
However, this trend of universities collaborating with local police forces that train or use Israeli surveillance technologies predates the 2024 campus protests. Since 2021, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees has maintained a contract with Tel Aviv-based Cellebrite, a surveillance company that specializes in mobile device forensic tools that allow remote users to migrate data from one cellphone to another, bypassing passwords and encryptions.
The latest contract, renewed in November 2024, between the board and Cellebrite, exceeds $17,000 on a "digital forensic toolbox" and technology marketed to find internet history, downloads, locations, recent searches, and more, to aid law enforcement's criminal investigations. However, when it comes to surveillance technologies, the bulwark inevitably extends beyond investigating past criminal acts.
Cellebrite, currently used to harvest the phone data of thousands of Palestinians kidnapped and tortured in Gaza, has advertised that its tools can extract and analyze at least 181 Android and 148 iPhone apps. Such surveillance-driven carceral technology, birthed in the womb of one settler-colonial state and now being used on students in another, is a harbinger of broader patterns of domestic repression.
As of 2025, Cellebrite has sold its phone hacking technology to "almost every police department in the US," along with countless federal agencies, including the FBI, and, most recently, $54 million in "investigative tools" to ICE.
To "Rescue Our Nation's Capital"
On August 11, 2025, in an attempt to "liberate" the Nation's capital, President Trump announced the deployment of 800 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., temporarily placing the city's police department under federal control. He justified this unprecedented move with inflammatory rhetoric, claiming a state of emergency in the city that has been overtaken by "violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people," despite violent crime being at a 30-year low, according to the Justice Department.
Through the smoke screen of fearmongering and manufactured crisis, a modern militarized Gestapo has emerged, arresting more than 900 people in the first two weeks alone. Tasked with treating dissent as rebellion and homelessness as criminal, "public safety," like global counterterrorism, has now become the default pretext for imperial repression.
Taken in isolation, Trump's executive orders might not raise alarms beyond expected manifestations of right-wing authoritarianism. But in the context of the symbiotic feedback loop between Israel and the United States, a sinister pattern takes shape.
Two months before Trump announced the federal occupation of Washington, D.C., the Army Reserves quietly swore in top officials from Meta, Palantir, OpenAI, and Thinking Machines Lab as lieutenant colonels in a new military unit called Detachment 201. The unit, also known as the Executive Innovation Corps, is reportedly designed to integrate cutting-edge tech expertise into military strategy. The move, paraded as a pragmatic modernization effort, ominously echoes the ethos of Israel's Unit 8200. It signals a dangerous step towards the institutional embrace of private surveillance tech giants whose products have facilitated repression and genocide abroad, now embedded directly into the U.S. military.
From Palestine to the U.S., these carceral projects of surveillance and control are connected. The technologies violently developed against the backdrop of geographical and racial imaginaries, honed through Israel's spatial apartheid, and "battle-tested" on the captive Palestinian population, are exported and repurposed for use in U.S. cities, police departments, and college campuses. To understand and struggle against the current state of contemporary surveillance, as an abolitionist imperative, is to recognize that dismantling the prison is inseparable from disrupting the exchange and proliferation of the tools and mechanisms of a borderless, digitized captivity.