Genocidal Surveillant Assemblage in Palestine: A Socio-Legal Analysis
Author: Ozgun E. Topak
Israel, the occupying power in Palestine, has been deploying various systems of surveillance to gather communication, visual, biometric,ÌýgeospatialÌýand other forms of information on Palestinians’ lives. These systems include phone, internet and social media surveillance programs, spyware, facial recognition cameras, and drones. The gathered information is being stored and integrated into big data platforms that are harnessed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to create suspect profiles. Since October 2023, Israel has been deploying these integrated surveillance systems in its genocide campaign to enable the automated destruction of Palestinians as a group and the infrastructure necessary for their survival. Building on and contributing to the scholarship in critical surveillance studies and legal genocide studies, this paper advances the concept of Genocidal Surveillant Assemblage (GSA). While various surveillance practices, such as census records and identity cards, were used in past genocides, theyÌýoperatedÌýseparately and were limited in their technological capacities. The new Israeli GSA uses big data and AI platforms to combine diverse surveillance systems and to automate the genocide. The paper also emphasizes the genocidal intent behind the deployment of the GSA. The GSA quickly mobilized mass surveillance data which Israel has been collecting on Palestinians for decades to generate an endless list of suspects. When targeting suspects, GSA’s AI-targeting systems have deliberately enabled mass killings of civilians and destruction of civilian and life-sustaining infrastructures through unguided munitions. The GSA is both shaped by Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine and furthers it. As an amalgamated-transcending surveillance infrastructure, the GSA affects or delimits genocidal action and the parameters of mass destruction, thus presenting a dangerous precedent for twenty-first-century genocide contexts. Ìý