This article by Carter Moon originally appeared in his Substack, and is republished here with his permission. 

NAZA is a new documentary from the directing team behind the Oscar-winning film No Other Land. Its premise is chillingly simple: interviews with 25 members of the Israeli Defense Forces detail their war crimes in the systematic destruction of Gaza, which has been the basis of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. The term “NAZA” is the code word the IDF uses for expected civilian casualties from a given airstrike. For a single suspected member of Hamas, they are allowed to order strikes with a dozen, 60, even 500 civilian casualties. These predicted casualties are calculated via an advanced machine learning algorithm; in other words, cutting-edge AI tech is already the tip of the spear in the mechanized annihilation of a trapped civilian population.

These interviews are filmed in darkness on the rooftops of skyscrapers in Tel Aviv. The interview subjects’ faces and voices are obscured to mask their identities. On the one hand, this act feels like providing cover for these war criminals, but as the documentary unfolds, you realize the importance of getting these people on the record in real time as the genocide is occurring. These people are unambiguous in admitting that they know what they personally did constitutes war crimes. One man openly compares himself to the Nazis. Another elite commander plainly says that he knows that what they were carrying out was a genocide. This alone makes the film an essential historical document; no one will be able to claim innocence when history takes account of what was done here.

Subscribed

These war criminals sketch out how their computer interfaces reduce entire neighborhoods to simple squares with tabulation of estimated human beings living in each building. We see that what used to require people to make vast complex calculations to be able to target air strikes is now reduced to simple arithmetic, the decision over whether or not only 36 civilians will be killed or 300. Multiple people describe it as feeling like playing a video game, the work becoming so abstracted on the screen that any guilt about the human beings you’re wiping off the face of the Earth vanishes. They admit that on a certain level, the work is exhilarating. But there are also intelligence operatives who describe hacking the cell phones of the children of suspected Hamas fighters. They describe listening to the children’s screams after an airstrike.

Early in the film, we catch a glimpse of NVIDIA’s Tel Aviv headquarters in the background. NVIDIA is, of course, the backbone of the modern AI rush. Their advanced chip manufacturing has made them ludicrously wealthy by providing the raw computing power necessary to train AI models. Therefore, their chips are essential to Israel’s genocidal technological infrastructure. But NVIDIA is far from the only American company implicated in Israel’s atrocities. Last year, Microsoft was exposed for providing essential cloud infrastructure to the IDF. The UN Human Rights Council concluded that Palantir had “provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.” These are some of the largest companies in the US, integrated into our civil and military infrastructure. To believe that the technology used in the Palestinian genocide will remain contained to Gaza is a fantasy.

It is not just that the Biden administration sent billions of dollars in bombs to Israel. It is not just that both Biden and Trump’s administrations have provided diplomatic cover for Israel and protection from the International Criminal Court. America’s top technology firms are all deeply implicated in this genocide. When we talk about the dangers and harms of AI, it is essential that we center the violence machine learning is capable of in the hands of human operators. The existential fear of sentient AI becoming Skynet and killing us all is a science fiction fantasy, but the threat of AI systems turning every battlefield into Gaza is extremely real. The horrific strike on a school in Iran in March that killed 100 children was assisted by AI targeting.

We need to understand that all the tools of surveillance and weapons-targeting are rapidly coming into place in our own borders. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has been documenting LAPD’s vast surveillance infrastructure since 2011. Their report “Automating Banishment” documents how LAPD uses data-driven policing and predictive algorithms to target specific zones in LA. Many of the most egregious shootings committed by LAPD are committed in these areas. The parallels between LAPD’s use of surveillance data to kill targets and the IDF is no accident: The LAPD has been sending officers to train with the IDF since 2014. It’s essential to remember that LAPD will be under the direct command of Trump’s DHS, with all of these tools at their disposal, during the 2028 Olympics.

ICE and Border Patrol are similarly reliant on surveillance and targeting technologies that parallel the tools deployed by the IDF. ICE uses an app developed by Palantir called ELITE to determine the likelihood of a targeted immigrant being at a suspected location. The app gives a score out of 100 to determine the certainty that a person is where they’re supposed to be, making arrests infinitely easier. This is bone-chillingly similar to the predictive tools the IDF deploys in Gaza. And these surveillance tools are already not only being used to investigate and infiltrate organizations that resist ICE, particularly in cities like Minneapolis. The hacking of cell phones described in NAZA is mirrored in how the FBI is extracting data from people’s phones when they attend anti-ICE protests. The software the FBI uses is developed by an Israeli firm called Cellbrite. All the tools are in the hands of the Trump administration; if we continue down the path we’re on, it seems guaranteed that they’ll use them both abroad and on American citizens.

When Americans talk about the crimes of Israel, there’s a tendency to speak as though they are barbarians removed from ourselves, as though the fascistic evil that’s gripped that country is something distinct from us. The truth is that there are more Christian Zionists in the US than there are Jewish people in the entire world. Israel’s supremacist ideology is more of a terrifying mirror to our own white supremacy than it is an alien aberration. The fascism in Israel is the same fascism rapidly engulfing this country as well, and it is something that’s been building here for decades; our countries have been mutually reinforcing each other down this path throughout the 21st century. Anti-Muslim bigotry has been some of the most commonly accepted forms of hatred in the US for decades; our own bias against Muslims and Arabs allowed people in the US to rationalize Zionism’s violent oppression of the Palestinians. The total dehumanization of Palestinians is almost identical to the American right’s dehumanization of Somali-Americans or trans people. The way Benjamin Netenyahu goes on TV lying to the people of Israel is exactly how Trump lies to us. We are no better than the Israelis, we’re just not as far down the rungs of hell yet.

I do think an essential thing to remember is how much regular people are revolted by all of this. People have rapidly abandoned any positive views of Israel and support ending all military aid to that genocidal country, as we obviously should. People are also really coming to despise Flock cameras and the surveillance state. The sustained, continued resistance to polluting, community-destroying AI data centers is incredible. Regular people hate this stuff, even if they’re not necessarily drawing direct connections between the genocide they watch through their phones and the data center in their backyard.

The role the left needs to play now is educating people that AI machine learning exists to create horrific weapons of war. Any tertiary benefits in large language models being able to scan images more effectively for cancer or analyze data sets faster in climate research are not the real purpose of modern AI. These are first and foremost tools for making militaries far more lethal. When we talk about the myriad of other very real problems caused by AI—the massive overinvestment, the horrific carbon emissions, the theft of all human knowledge, the nonconsensual generation of sexual imagery—we need to be sure we’re also educating people that these are horrific weapons of war. These weapons are not sentient machine gods, they are tools for human beings to make the systemized destruction of human life as frictionless as playing a video game. NAZA is the perfect place to start showing people the truth.