Algorithmic Death-World: Artificial Intelligence and the Case of Palestine

Abstract Since October 2023, residents of Gaza have been subjected to artificial intelligence (AI) target-generation systems by Israel. This article scrutinises the deployment of these technologies through an understanding of Israel’s settler-colonial project, racial-capitalist economy, and delineation of occupied Palestinian territories as carceral geographies. Drawing on the work of Andy Clarno, which demonstrates how Israel’s decreasing reliance on Palestinian labour made them inessential to exploitation, this article argues that Palestinians are valuable to Israel for another purpose: experimentation. For over fifty years, Palestinians have been rendered as test subjects for the development of surveillance and warfare technologies, in what Antony Lowenstein calls “the Palestine Laboratory.” AI introduces a dual paradigm where both Palestinian lives and deaths are turned into sites of data dispossession. This duality demands keeping Palestinians alive to generate constantly updating data for the lethal algorithmic systems that target them, while their deaths generate further data to refine and market those systems as “battle-tested.” The article describes this state as an algorithmic death-world, adapted from Achille Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics. This article concludes that as Israel exports its lethal AI technologies globally, it also exports a model of racialised disposability.