Inside Israel’s Bombing Campaign in Gaza Interview with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham on his investigations of the I.D.F.’s use of A.I.-backed targeting systems and the dire cost to Palestinian civilians. by Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, April 12 https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/inside-israels-bombing-campaign-in-gaza
Since the war began in Gaza, more than six months ago, the Israeli magazine +972 has published some of the most penetrating reporting on the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct. In November, +972, along with the Hebrew publication Local Call, found that the I.D.F. had expanded the number of “legitimate” military targets, leading to a huge increase in civilian casualties. (As of this writing, more than thirty-two thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been killed.) Then earlier this month, +972 and Local Call released a long feature called “Lavender: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza.” The story revealed how the Israeli military had used the program to identify suspected militants, which in practice meant that tens of thousands of Palestinians had their homes marked as legitimate targets for bombing, with minimal human oversight. . . . [IC] As a longtime critic of the Israeli military, how do you think that its decision-making about civilian lives has changed since October 7th? [YA] If you examine the military’s conduct in 2021 in Gaza, in the border protests that happened in 2018 and 2019, and in the 2014 war, there was always quite a disregard for Palestinian civilian life and very little accountability for crimes and alleged crimes that were committed by soldiers in Gaza. In 2014, more than five hundred Palestinian children were killed and the military said that it would investigate what happened. There were many cases opened, blaming soldiers and I.D.F. policies, and in the end just a single case resulted in indictment and it was about three soldiers who committed or assisted in acts of looting. This military is not holding itself accountable, obviously, which is why I think a lot of people are hoping that external courts, such as the I.C.C. and I.C.J., could hold the military accountable. But I would say that the main changes in this operation were the scope and how automated things became, and the automation is very much related to the scope. The military has this term called “human targets.” What it meant in the past was that these are particular individuals, who are senior-ranking commanders in Hamas or Islamic Jihad military wings, and that because of their military importance, the I.D.F. international-law departments made a decision that civilians can be killed alongside these people. So usually what this means is that they will be bombed inside their houses, killing not only them but often entire families in the process. And this, sources told me, used to be quite a small list because it’s quite a brutal way to kill somebody. You’re dropping a bomb and destroying the entire house that that person is in. . . . [IC[ So the decision was made at some higher level to put more people on these lists, but the only way to practically carry it out was the A.I.? [YA] Yeah. I would say that that’s an accurate description. It’s based on machine learning, which is a subset of artificial intelligence. That’s how these machines were trained. They literally relied on it to determine whether human beings get to live or die, to determine whether an individual could be marked for assassination. And yes, if you are going to decide that you want to mark more than thirty thousand people for assassination in their houses and you want to know in real time when those thirty thousand people enter their houses, there is no other way to do it other than using automation and A.I. Yes. . . . *No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel* DemocracyNow!, April 17, 2024 https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/17/no_tech_for_apartheid_google_israel Democracy Now! speaks with two of the Google employees who were arrested staging sit-ins on Tuesday at the company’s offices in New York City and in Sunnyvale, California, to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military. “Google execs basically chose to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide,” says Google software engineer Mohammad Khatami, who was arrested in New York. Google worker-organizer Ray Westrick, who was arrested occupying CEO Thomas Kurian’s office, says “more people are willing to organize and risk their jobs in order to take a stand against complicity in genocide.” We also speak with No Tech for Apartheid organizer and former Google worker Gabriel Schubiner, who calls on the tech industry to divest from Google and Amazon services. “Technology workers actually have a lot of power to shift this paradigm and to remove technology from this deep complicity with the Israeli occupation,” Schubiner says. . . . *Workers Stage Sit-Ins to Demand Google End Israeli Cloud Contract* "Just as people of conscience demanded institutions cut ties with apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, the time is now to rise up in support of Palestinian human rights," said Google employees in an open letter. by Julia Conley, Common Dreams, April 16, 2024 https://www.commondreams.org/news/google-protest-israel -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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