Or “Israel Boycotts Itself”
This past Tuesday, our little town’s Selectboard voted to enact an “Acceptable Community Conduct Ordinance,” marking a definitive break from its self-declaration as a “Compassionate Community” seven years prior. Seven years to shift from humanizing people who have fallen on hard times (albeit with a very aspirational and toothless non-binding resolution) to codifying into law the disposal of excess human beings to the invisible margins, including an additional $1.4 million to pay a team of demi-cops to enforce it.
And we are unfortunately well-acquainted these days with the ease with which brute force can be justified in displacing and disappearing people by systematically defining them as less-than-human. It is the same logic that—during the same period of time as that Selectboard meeting—casts the detonation of booby-trapped personal communication devices as an historic security lapse for the organization who distributed the devices, rather than as an unprecedented act of terrorism on the part of the group that booby-trapped the devices, sent a message to induce the victim (or their child) to hold the device to their face, and then slammed down the digital plunger like Wile E. Coyote in the form of a genocidal apartheid state. (“Unprecedented” is really saying something for a military force that has been pioneering novel terrorist acts for at least 85 years.) These booby traps killed 42 people, at least 12 of them civilians, including two children, and grievously injured thousands, mostly hand and eye injuries.
As so often happens with groups held in thrall to their own technological prowess, Israel was apparently so obsessed with the answer to the question of whether it could, that it completely sidestepped the question of whether it should. To be clear, “should” in this case can be assumed to have no substantial moral component for a state that has amply demonstrated how empty its decisions are of any ethical consideration. However, for a nation whose tech industry comprises 20% of its GDP and 53% of its export market, sending the message that that same nation might choose to transform its civilian technological products into weapons of mass terror at any moment seems like a rather ill-advised economic decision. But perhaps this is exactly the result we should expect from an entity whose military personnel make up 15% of its tech workforce, many of whom are veterans of its notorious information security and surveillance units.
As gruesome as this particular event is, the “Start-up Nation” and its tech industry don’t have to rely on literally explosive technology products to weaponize this “disruptive”, “move fast and break things” ethos. Take, for instance, Eleos Health, an Israeli firm that makes a device that listens in on therapy sessions and sells an adjunct service that takes those recordings and uses proprietary AI to automatically generate clinical notes from the session. 35% of the firm’s workforce served in the Israeli military at the peak of reserve recruitment post-October 7th. Eleos’s Chief Operating Officer describes how his experience as a drone pilot informs how he envisions the provision of mental health care (I’m not making this up). To add further irony, Eleos is named after the Greek goddess of mercy and compassion. She is opposed to the goddess Anaideia, the goddess of ruthlessness, shamelessness, and unforgiveness. War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, Escalation is De-escalation, and Ruthlessness is Mercy: that about sums up the Israeli modus operandi, along with the aforementioned “just because you can means that you probably should, and with haste.”
Eleos manages to crystallize so much of what is wrong with this dystopian future-cum-present:
- devices made by an Israeli firm that could blow up the therapist’s couch if the client expresses anti-Zionist sympathies
- insertion of Zionist dehumanizing biases into the therapeutic process through an IDF-trained “large language model”
- technology that, even when implemented as advertised, will certainly result in uncompensated work speed-ups for the clinical staff
- technology that is likely to rocket us ever-faster toward ecological oblivion (in case you hadn’t heard, Three-Mile Island just reopened one of its decommissioned reactors to sell electricity to Microsoft for AI)
After last week’s Selectboard meeting, however, people who don’t usually follow such things sprang into action and blew up my phone (in the perhaps-now-outdated metaphorical sense) coordinating multi-pronged strategies to overturn this frankly fascist ordinance.
I can only hope that when we go public (in about a week) with the contract that a certain local community mental health agency signed with Eleos, people will similarly spring into action to see that it gets canceled.
These are of course small obstacles, barriers, dams thrown up into the stream of dystopian horrors rushing toward us, but we are many, and together we can move mountains.
