Israeli Health-Tech is Making Us Sick

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On Saturday, October 19th, I presented at the closing plenary of the Vermont Palestine Conference at the Old North End Community Center in Burlington on the No Surveillance in Healthcare campaign, outlining who Eleos is, and why we in Southern Vermont for Palestine feel it is an important and powerful campaign. This is (with some edits after the fact), the text of my presentation. A recording is available here.

Thank you Michelle for that introduction and the the organizers for giving me the opportunity to present at this conference.

To start, I want to get a sense of how many people have heard of the No Surveillance in Health Care campaign, or Eleos Health?

And how many of you have signed the petition calling on HCRS to drop its contract with Eleos?

I’ll give you the brief elevator speech about who and what Eleos Health is and then get into what we in Southern Vermont for Palestine have been doing in this campaign, and why we think this is an important and powerful campaign to be engaging in.

So, Eleos Health is an Israeli AI start-up that sells a device that listens in on therapy sessions and automatically generates clinical notes and analysis of the session based on what it hears.

It has deep ties to the Israeli military, to the Israeli government, and to Israeli finance. During the height of IOF reserve recruitment after the launch of Al-Aqsa Flood, a full 35% of Eleos staff served in the military, many of them in management and leadership. The CEO is commanding officer in the IOF in Unit 669. The Chief Operating Officer is a former drone pilot who publicly cites this experience as an inspiration for co-founding Eleos, and the management of his drone unit as a model for the provision of mental health care. Eleos’s Chief Technology Officer comes from the Matzov Unit, an information security unit of the IOF. Its Chief Information Security Officer is more cagey about his ties to the Israeli military, but in addition to his role at Eleos, he also sits on the board of Glilot Capital, an Israeli cybersecurity venture capital firm. People in this room may recognize Glilot as the name of the occupation military base that hosts Mossad and the infamous cyberwarfare Unit 8200. Even Eleos’s Chief Clinical Officer, the one person in leadership whose experience is directly relevant to mental health care, got IOF funding for her clinical research (I will leave it to your imagination why the IOF might be interested in research on eating disorders).

Eleos’s new VP of Finance comes straight from the Israeli government, where she served as deputy director of the budget department at the Ministry of Finance, in charge of the education, healthcare, welfare and social security budgets.

Speaking of funding and finance, like most tech start-ups, Eleos has relied upon angel investors and venture capital firms to stay afloat. During its seed and pre-seed rounds of funding, all of its funding came from Israeli or explicitly pro-Israel angel investors and venture capital firms. There is just one exception: an LGBTQ and quote-unquote “diversity”-oriented venture capital outfit, based right here in Burlington. I’m sure you’ll all want to look this up later, so I’ll tell you its name: “Gaingels”, which is a grotesquely clever portmanteau of “gay” and “angels” (as in “angel investors”), but spelled G-A-I-N, as in “capital gains”.

I’ll let all that sink in for a second.

So, that is Eleos Health in a nutshell…or a barf bag if you prefer. Attendants will be passing through the cabin to hand them out in the event of an emergency.


All of this is what inspired us to create a campaign around Eleos Health and its contract with HCRS, our designated community mental health agency in SE Vermont. We started out slowly and methodically throughout the summer, first by identifying our campaign goals, then identifying potential partners and allies, bringing some of them on to help with the rest of the planning process. We built out our messaging, and then finally mapped out the route of escalation we planned to take throughout the arc of the campaign.

For our first action, four of us attended a regular board meeting of HCRS, including myself representing Southern Vermont for Palestine, a client of HCRS, a clinician at HCRS, and another Southern Vermont for Palestine activist who delivered the prepared remarks of a psychiatric survivors advocate who was unable to attend. We put HCRS on notice and handed them a performance improvement plan: they had two weeks to consider a response, at which point we would be going public. We expressed the hope that we could announce them as an ally in the struggle to stop a genocide, but we were prepared to call out their inaction and complicity.

At that two week mark, on September 30th, we went public, starting with outreach for a petition campaign to build our base. Our social media push was relatively successful, but legacy media have so far refused to cover the campaign. HCRS nevertheless got the message, even without delivering the petitions, and sent a memo to all staff about the petition, basically doubling down on the contract. This gave us the opportunity to issue a response on the anniversary of October 7th.

We are less than three weeks into this campaign, so we have a long arc of escalation ahead of us, and we are committed to seeing this campaign through to victory.


I want to take a break from the mechanics of the campaign and talk a bit about why I think this campaign is important and powerful.

On a very practical level, for us in Vermont, especially in Southeast Vermont, there are not a lot places where we can really grasp the fabric that holds Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism together. Eleos and its contract with HCRS are a thread we can pull to start to unravel this fabric.

One of our campaign goals is, quote, “to bring Palestine liberation activists, labor, psychiatric survivors, abolitionists, privacy advocates, queer activists, and climate activists into collective and intersectional organizing and action”. It will take all of us to free Palestine, and a free Palestine will free us all.

To be more explicit, Eleos sits at the nexus of so many systems of oppression, and the uncontrolled growth of AI has the potential to act as a force multiplier for all of those systems. Its use in mental health care is only likely to exacerbate the growing entanglement of the mental health system with carceral systems. At the same time, it will actively enlist care workers in that entanglement while also contributing to the increased disciplining of labor, forcing uncompensated work speed-ups (the whole value proposition of Eleos is that it automates the note-taking process, reducing clinician administrative time and increasing the proportion of billable hours—a benefit that, in economic terms, accrues exclusively to the employer).

And of course, we’ve probably all heard about how AI is a massive energy sink, driving Google to basically give up on their stated climate goals and Microsoft to re-open Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to fuel their AI ventures. Eleos is fully implicated in this extractivist ecocide.

Israel is frequently referred to as a hub of innovation, and it has indeed demonstrated a remarkable capacity to develop and implement novel technologies of atrocity. The “barf” factor of Eleos gives people a healthy visceral suspicion of these magical talismans conjured up by the “move fast and break things” class of technologists. When they can blow up your phone whenever they feel like it, you’re less likely to go along with their plans to insinuate themselves into every intimate space of your life.

This campaign invites us to problematize and undermine the entire settler-colonialist enterprise, not just its ever-expanding settlement project. We are way past the point of troubling ourselves about whether the SodaStream boycott is still on because they moved their factory out of the “occupied territories” and into ‘48 Palestine, and this campaign gets the BDS movement out of these distracting debates.

Eleos is at once an engine, a beneficiary, and a pillar of ideological support for the apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonial state of Israel. For the past year, this quote-unquote “start-up nation” has been on very shaky ground, and it is our job to keep those quakes rolling, however much Zionists try to shore it up.

In short, Eleos embodies colonial ethics, colonial modes of production, colonial technologies, and this campaign aims to illustrate what it means to truly “decolonize”.

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